Hi everyone, I just wanted to give you a sneak peek at chapter 2 of Shattered. We’re only six days away from it going live.

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Chapter 2

Adriana Paige
Marauder’s Gas Station
Central Wyoming

A month ago I would have said that the underground bunker where Taggart and I had both nearly died couldn’t ever feel like home, but Isaac and Dominic’s group had worked miracles in just the week that they’d been here.

The effects of our failed attempt at saving Agony were still coming home to roost in ways that I hadn’t anticipated when we first started talking about the best way to break him out.

If we’d killed all of Agony’s guards then Isaac and the rest could have snuck back to their normal territory and probably been fine. Instead, Brandon and a few others had made it away, which meant that Isaac and likely most of the rest of his people had been recognized. Dominic had kept a low enough profile that the Coun’hij probably didn’t know anything about her, but the rest of Isaac’s people were all known quantities. If they went back to the territory that they’d been calling home for the last few years then they wouldn’t survive the month.

The Coun’hij didn’t exactly have a reputation for being forgiving and after losing so many they would make killing everyone who had helped us their top priority. Even if the Coun’hij was too busy to slap us down, I was pretty sure that Brandon would take it upon himself to kill everyone who had seen him nearly defeated and he was more than capable of killing Isaac’s people off three or four at a time.

Alec, Carson and Agony had come very close to fighting him to a standstill, but two of them had been wielding massive swords at the time. Even Heath, the most deadly out of all of Isaac’s people, couldn’t hope to beat Brandon, so instead they’d all agreed to come back to the bunker that Taggart and I had commandeered from the vampires who had tried to kill us just days before.

The bunker itself was mostly just concrete and steel, but the interior had suffered some significant fire damage from the fight between Taggart and the vampire pyromancer that had been running the show before we’d arrived.

There hadn’t been time for Taggart and I to get the bunker cleaned up before we’d left, but Isaac’s people hadn’t complained. Instead they’d just set about cleaning up the wreckage with a determination that not even the last few vampire corpses had been able to quench.

I had a sneaking suspicion that Isaac was keeping everyone busy at least partially to keep them all from fighting, but I wasn’t going to complain about that, not when the results were so spectacular.

By now, anything that had been damaged by the fire had been pulled out and some of the gold that we’d found in the armory had been cashed in to replace most of the damaged fixtures. Now that his people had run out of other things to do, Isaac had started working them in shifts to excavate a large area that would eventually end up serving as a second, attached bunker.

It was the kind of massive undertaking that I wouldn’t have even known how to start, but Isaac acted like it was no big deal. One morning he came out of his tiny private room with several rolls of paper containing the beginnings of a plan that he’d no doubt spent days researching online.

Conventional wisdom would have said that construction on this scale was impossible without heavy machinery which would have revealed the existence of the bunker. Conventional wisdom hadn’t seen what even a single hybrid was capable of.

It was still relatively slow going, but once they had the camouflage netting in place to hide the dig site from any kind of overhead observation, it was amazing what a few hybrids could do. Their claws were harder and sharper than any tool we could have purchased and their enormous strength meant that they were easily able to move around gigantic loads of rock and dirt.

Taggart hadn’t been especially happy about the cash outlay involved or the frequent trips that were made into town the first few days of the project, but the results so far were nothing less than astonishing. Isaac had found a machine shop to build several custom wheelbarrows that were so large that no normal human could have hoped to move them around once they were full of dirt, but which were perfectly sized for use by hybrids.

Isaac and the other hybrids used their claws to break up the hard-packed dirt, and then they would move to another spot while the wolves shoveled the loose dirt and rock into the wheelbarrows. Once a wheelbarrow was full, one of the hybrids would take it out from under the netting and dump the dirt somewhere out of the way.

We mostly worked at night so that nobody would be able to see the hybrids moving around outside of the netting, and everyone turned out most nights unless they had some other duty that they’d been assigned. I’d taken a couple of shifts in the pit, but I wasn’t strong enough to keep up with the amount of dirt that the wolves were moving around, so mostly I ended up manning the gas station.

Between the excavation project, keeping the gas station manned, and maintaining a twenty-four-hour watch, everyone was staying pretty busy. Normal humans probably would have mutinied under the same kind of workload, but the fact that the shape shifters needed so much less sleep meant that the schedule was almost perfect for Isaac’s people.

He kept them busy enough that nobody really had time to get into fights, but not so busy that people felt like they never got to unwind. The shape shifters slept in shifts, scattered among the various dormitories inside the bunker. There were fewer of us than the vampires Taggart had killed saving me, but shape shifters seemed to need more personal space than the average human.

Everyone had their own bed, but scheduling sleeping shifts like Isaac had done meant that the dormitories were never packed too full, which I was pretty sure went a long ways towards heading off the fights that otherwise would have broken out.

Moving out all of the dirt necessary to add such a large expansion onto the bunker was going to take weeks still, but even before then, Isaac figured that the shape shifters would be able to use the pit to spar and train during the daylight hours, which I was pretty sure would let the last of the residual tension in the group dissipate.

I looked at the big digital clock on the wall inside of the convenience store for what felt like the tenth time in the last five minutes, and then sighed in relief when I heard someone moving around in the back room. A couple of seconds later Dominic walked out into the main store area.

“Hi, Adri. Quiet shift?”

I nodded. “Yeah, just like always. The second guy who stopped by for gas pretty much cleaned us out of corn nuts though. I guess we should probably start trying to figure out how to restock the stuff we’re running low on. I think I saw some invoices or something in the back office, but I didn’t want to go in and start poking around now and then just have to start over tomorrow.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea. I’m not sure that I would have thought to look for invoices. Do you want me to start doing some kind of inventory of what we have right now?”

I shook my head. She was quite possibly the nicest person I’d ever met, but I didn’t want to take advantage of her kindness.

“You don’t need to do that, Dom. I really was planning on getting to it tomorrow—I wasn’t trying to guilt you into helping or anything, I just didn’t want you to worry about the fact that the shelves are starting to look a little bare.”

Dominic’s eyes went wide. “Oh, I didn’t think that, Adri. I just thought that since I’ll be here for the next six hours that it makes a lot of sense for me to get started, but I don’t want to deprive you of the chance to do it—it was your idea after all.”

Coming from someone else, a statement like that would have been dripping in sarcasm, but Dominic actually seemed to mean it.

“Is that really your idea of fun, Dom?”

She blushed a little as she looked away, but after a second she shrugged. “I guess that fun isn’t quite the right word. I would rather be curled up on my bed with a good book, but taking inventory of a gas station doesn’t sound too bad. It’s the kind of thing that I might have done if I’d grown up here. I used to dream of doing this kind of stuff, you know— having a part-time job, having friends I could count on not to turn on me the first chance that they got. Stocking the shelves and sitting behind a cash register is like realizing a little piece of my dream. It’s not all sunshine and roses, but it’s still better than a lot of things that I could be experiencing right now.”

I almost didn’t know how to respond, but I couldn’t just leave without saying something.

“I’m sorry, it sounds like you had it pretty rough back home. You must get tired of listening to people like me whine about how bad we have it.”

Dominic reached over and patted me on the shoulder. “I don’t resent the fact that you didn’t have to go through some of the things that I had to go through, Adri. By all indications you’ve had a pretty rough time lately yourself, but I don’t even resent the average American teenager. Once upon a time I felt differently, but then I realized that hating someone for being a product of their environment is a waste of time. Only a very few people ever manage to become more than what their environment dictates for them. It seems foolish to hate people for being people.

“Individuals like Gandhi or Mother Teresa are the wonderful exception rather than the rule. I decided that I would just take people as they were and stop expecting so much out of them. Really, the fact that so many kids our age can grow up without any worries more serious than who they are going to go to Prom with is a testament to just how civilized some parts of the world are.”

Maybe some people would have been offended by Dominic’s view on human capacity, but I knew full well that if I’d been left to my own devices I wouldn’t have worried about things like world peace. In a lot of ways I was still a product of my environment, it was just a very different environment now than what most people dealt with.

“You became more than your environment, Dom. Taggart says that he doesn’t know of any other cats who’ve come up north and peacefully integrated themselves in with a pack.”

She was obviously in the grip of some kind of powerful emotion, but in the end she just shrugged. “I wanted to leave home for a very long time before I actually acted on the urge. Looking back now, I don’t feel proud of what I’ve done. I’m just glad that I managed to get out before I turned into someone else. It was a very close thing.”

“What stopped you from coming up here when you first realized that it was a chance at a better life?”

“There were a lot of things. The wolves actively seek out my kind and kill us wherever they find us. Traveling that far for a teenage girl all by herself is dangerous, even for someone like me.”

“You mean like kidnappers?”

“Yeah, sometimes. I’m faster and stronger than a normal human, but I’m not invincible, so a group of big, burly guys could still hurt me unless I was willing to transform and try to fight my way free of them.”

“So just decide from the start that you’ll change forms and tear the face off of anyone who gets between you and freedom. Problem solved.”

Normally I wasn’t really what you would call violent, but something about Dom brought out a protective instinct that I’d only felt a few times before. She was just so good and kind that I couldn’t bear the thought of anything bad happening to her. Anyone who was willing to hurt Dom deserved whatever happened to them, and that was the end of the story as far as I was concerned.

“I wish it was that easy, Adri. Here in the United States the Coun’hij enforces the restriction against shifting forms somewhere that could result in the humans finding out about us. Have you ever wondered how my people have managed to keep our existence a secret without having some kind of similar centralized authority?”

“Actually I hadn’t thought about it quite that way, but that is pretty mind-boggling. How has your existence stayed a secret so long?”

“There are legends among my people about a shadowy figure who comes for anyone who risks our secret getting out. He appears from nowhere and then kills us quietly and without warning. He’s our own personal boogeyman and he’s the one thing that every single jaguar seems to agree on.”

“Wait, you believe this guy really exists?”

“Yes, I believe because I’ve met him. He calls himself the Hunter, which is what we call him too.”

“You met him? And survived? How did that happen?”

“I’m not sure. For some reason he decided to let me live, but he warned me that if I ever shifted shapes in broad daylight like that again, he’d kill me without asking any questions. And then he threw a bag at my feet and walked away.”

“What was in the bag?”

“It was…it was terrible. Let’s just say that he wanted me to know exactly how many people he’d had to kill to silence the rumors that I’d started by changing where the humans could see me.”

It was obvious that what she had seen still haunted her. I tried to come up with something to pull her back from the memory of what she’d seen, but I came up totally blank.

“I’m so sorry, Dom.”

“It’s not your fault, Adri. I guess now you know. I didn’t go north because I was scared. I was scared of the rape gangs, scared of the other jaguars whose territory I would have to cross in order to get to the border, and I was scared of my father.”

“Your father?”

“Yes, he is a terrible man and he told me that if I ever left that he would hunt me down and make me pay. I managed to get away after I became more scared of what I was going to become than I was of dying, but I still wonder how much longer I have before he’ll find me again.”

“I’m sure that he’s lost your trail by now.”

“I hope so, but I’m not sure that’s possible. There were rumors that my father was one of the rare cats who could track someone even without a scent trail to follow.”

“How is that even possible?”

Dom smiled at my astonishment. “You walk inside of other people’s dreams and I change shapes into a giant jaguar. How is any of this possible? I don’t know how it works, but some of my kind are able to sense the direction they need to go in order to find someone that they’ve formed the right kind of link with.”

“But that would mean that you would never be safe. It wouldn’t matter where you went or what you did, you’d always have to worry that someday your father would show up and make good on his threats.”

“Yes, exactly that.”

“So is he able to track?”

Dominic looked up at me with soft eyes that were so full of fear that I couldn’t meet her gaze without feeling my heart constrict inside of my chest.

“I don’t know, not for sure, but something tells me that he can, that it’s only a matter of time before he comes for me. I’m sorry, Adri. I’m putting everyone here in danger, but I just can’t bear to go back out there by myself.”

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I hope everyone is enjoying chapter 2, and you are all as excited about Shattered going live as I am.

Dean