Bound (Dark Reflections Volume 1)

Chapter 11

Alec Graves
Rest Easy Hotel
Rio Rico, Arizona

James was back on his feet, but he was obviously not at one hundred percent. He was a little paler than normal and he moved with the slow care of someone who had discovered that it hurt if they moved too fast and pulled at still-healing wounds.

His wounds actually looked pretty good now, but obviously his injuries had taken a mental toll on him. He didn't look very happy to have to sit and wait with everyone else for Brandon to show up so that the briefing could start.

Actually, he wasn't the only one who looked unhappy. There was a different feeling to the room than there'd been at the last briefing and I was pretty sure that it had a lot to do with the fact that everyone here knew that Brandon had let Vincent take a shot at us. It was the kind of thing that sent a little thrill of satisfaction through me, but I sternly reminded myself not to let my success so far go to my head. It was always possible if I got to be enough of a problem that Brandon might just decide to have me eliminated despite the risks.

I took a deep breath and then pushed all of that to one side and let myself think about the last couple of days. I'd had a surprising amount of fun at the pool. It had been nice to just kick back and do nothing for hours at a time. Jasmin, Jess and I had laughed and joked until my face had hurt from smiling so much. Alison had even thawed out a little there by the end, which had been an added reward.

Lazy summer days by the pool. Given the amount of money behind the Graves name some people might have expected that I'd done little more than sit around like that so far in my life, but the truth was that Kaleb had kept me pretty busy almost as far back as I could remember. I'd always had at least a little time to do with as I'd wanted, but although there was a small pool back home, pack life had never really lent itself to lounging around at a pool so I'd always found other ways to spend my limited free time.

I wouldn't have expected being down here on the border to change any of that, but it had. Knowing that we could be sent into battle with only a few hours' notice had lent our downtime an odd kind of vividness that I'd never experienced previously.

It was probably true that I'd get restless if hours spent at the pool was the sole sum of my existence, but resting in the sun with three beautiful women close at hand, even if I couldn't quite see myself with any of them, had been the perfect way to spend the last few days.

James had come out to join us for a couple of hours yesterday and Juan had even swung by and spent an hour or so with us. It hadn't been planned, at least not that I'd been able to tell, and I hadn't expected such a short time together to make any kind of significant difference to our cohesion as a group, but it had. Instead of being spread out with Juan in one spot, Alison in another and the rest of us in a third, all six of us had chosen to stand together while we waited for the briefing to start.

My musings were interrupted by Brandon's arrival. He strode into the room like he owned it; he didn't seem to notice the new tension that was present in the room.

"Thank you all for coming today. I'd planned on simply briefing you all on the latest target that the Brain Box has identified for us, but I'm afraid that something else has come up."

Brandon pulled his remote out of a pocket and turned off the lights at the same time that he brought the projector online.

"Just this morning we got word of four deaths in a little town east of here called Hereford. The police and town officials are busy suppressing any mention of the murders because all four people were 'savaged by some kind of large, clawed beast.' The Brain Box has been trying for the last several hours to obtain photos of the wounds in question, but so far they've been spectacularly unsuccessful. Some of the hacks that they've been using lately to compromise target IT systems have been identified by the greater security community and new hotfixes are slowly making their way out to state and local government computer systems. We could be flying blind for several weeks until our intelligence assets manage to find new ways into the systems that we need access to."