Her feelings for Rafe and her position in the pack confused her. Part of her desperately wanted to leave, to go back to the mountains and find a place to hole up and stay safe alone. The other part of her wanted nothing more than to be by Rafe’s side. If the pack had accepted her, she would have gladly taken on the role of alpha female to the best of her ability. Sadly, that was not what had happened.
Rafe disappeared out the door, leaving Cassie in the cramped, dark little room that hummed with the sound of computers. A moment later, he reappeared with a syringe full of clear liquid.
“Ready?”
“I guess.”
“Just try to relax.”
Cassie lowered the helmet over her head and held out her arm, making a tight fist with her hand. Her lips pressed together in a hard line. The whole thing was making her angrier by the minute. She wanted to throw the helmet on the floor and run away, but instead, she let him prick her with the syringe, shooting cold fluid into her vein.
She exhaled a long breath she’d been holding and relaxed into the uncomfortable chair. She felt the serum taking effect, and her head lulled to the side before she lost consciousness.
Her awareness cleared, and she found herself in the desert. A memory of the dream she’d just had flashed through her mind. At some level, she could feel her unconscious body jerking involuntarily.
She scanned the bleak horizon –– this desert seemed familiar. The same flora she hiked through every day populated this place. She stood in a saguaro grove, fresh fruit bursting from the tops of the tall cacti around her.
Her mood changed instantly. She’d come to enjoy her wild harvesting, and nothing made her happier than to see a group of saguaro bursting with abundant fruit. She smiled and looked up at the cactus she stood beside, shading her eyes with her hand.
She didn’t have a stick or a bucket –– no way to harvest the fruit. She looked around for something she could use to get it down. There were only rocks. She picked one up and threw it at the ripe, red fruit. She hit it, but the fruit flew and smashed on the ground with a splat.
She jogged over to it. It had been broken beyond repair, full of dirt and grit. She grimaced. Meredith would not be happy with that one. Then she remembered the levitation trick she’d done the day she met her mother.
She’d been on a training mission for Pyramid Corporation in the dome she’d lived in since the end of the war. During that mission, she’d realized she could see beyond the program and use it to her advantage. She’d been able to levitate up a pole and retrieve her clothing.
Cassie closed her eyes and reminded herself that The Program was not her third-dimensional reality. The rules were different there, like a dream. If the dreamer wakes up in the dream, anything is possible. Slowly, she could feel herself rise.
She lifted her arms out from her sides to stabilize herself. When she felt she’d risen to the height of the fruit, she slowly opened her eyes. Right in front of her, the saguaro fruit burst out from its hard casing, dripping with red juices.
She took the fruit and savored its sweet flavor as the juice rolled down her parched throat. She smiled and ate the fruit while she scanned the horizon from her new height. In the distance, she saw a strange rock formation and could see movement around the base.
Curiosity built, and before she realized it, she was floating toward the rock formation. As it drew nearer, she looked down and saw that she was actually floating. Cool! She gathered her strength and shot across the landscape at full speed, moving into a horizontal posture like Superman.
She laughed as the wind blew through her hair, and then twirled around like a twisting bullet shooting toward its target. Once she was within range, she slowed down.
The rock formation was a mesa that looked like the top of a heart shape. At the base, a herd of longhorn sheep scuttled around, eating the leaves of the silver green bushes.
Meat. That was all she could think. There had to be a hundred of these things grazing on the scraggy shrubs around the base of the mesa. Cassie looked around for other landmarks to let her know where these longhorns were located, but she couldn’t see anything.
She felt herself falling suddenly and was jolted back to waking awareness. She threw off the helmet, gulping air. She shook her head from side to side, trying to come back to reality.
“What happened? Are you all right?”
“No. That fucking sucked.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I came out too fast.” She groaned and put the helmet on the floor before standing up. She began pacing the room and shaking her hands. Her whole body felt amped up, as though she could hardly stay inside her own skin.
“What did you see?”
“Can’t you see inside?”
“I don’t have the gear here. I had to leave it behind.”
“Well. I was flying. Freaking flying. Do you get that?” She made another exasperated groaning noise, still panting.
“That’s amazing. Well done.” Rafe stood in a dark corner in the room while Cassie paced back and forth in the dim glow of a small halogen light and the computer screen. “Did you see anything useful?”
“I did, actually. I’m not sure how it will help, but I saw a huge herd of longhorn sheep. They were grazing by a heart-shaped mesa.” She stopped pacing and doubled over her knees, trying to calm down.
“Where?”
She stood back up and looked him in the eyes, frowning. “I don’t know. It could be anywhere.” She shrugged. There was nothing else she could do. She wasn’t going back into The Program with this crappy setup any time soon.
Chapter 36
Cassie watched Rafe stand at the end of the dining hall with all eyes on him. He assured the pack that even though the hunt earlier that morning had been a failure, he had new information about a herd of longhorn sheep that were not too far away.
Cassie rolled her eyes at this, knowing it was total BS. Those sheep were in Mexico for all he knew. When Rafe finished his speech, she grunted and went off to bed. Dinner had been the last of the pasta, a few pieces of jackrabbit, and saguaro syrup.
Her belly was full enough, but the wolves grumbled for more meat. Clark had fixed the lighting problem in the greenhouse, and there would be greens soon. Cassie could live quite happily on lettuce greens and wild harvested plants. She was learning more every day from a book Rafe had given her.
No one else was interested. She didn’t get it. They’d grown an extensive garden in Colorado, but as soon as the hunting dried up, it was as though they all got obsessed and thought of little else.
Whatever. Werewolf OCD was not her problem. She wouldn’t starve, and she knew it. What she did have to deal with was the rest of the pack whining about there not being enough jackrabbits to go around.
She brushed her teeth in the communal bathroom and went to the bunkroom to sleep. In the morning, she woke at four a.m. with the rest of the pack. She quickly pulled on her boots, strapped on her gun holster that carried her two Glocks, and slung her long knife holster around her waist.
On the way out of the shelter, she grabbed her backpack and water bottle and picked up her long pole and her bucket for harvesting. Her special harvest spot still had plenty of fruit. Once the saguaro season was over, prickly pear came into season. She’d already mapped out prickly pear stands around the shelter so she could find them easily when the time came.
Every day she grew more confident that she could survive in the desert. She had more skill in the wild than most of the wolves did. That realization gave her a sense of satisfaction.
A smile curved on her lips as she rode the elevator up to the ground level. Topside, the air was still cool and dark. A slight breeze blew through the sagebrush, bringing in the arid smell of the desert.
She set out immediately for the saguaro stand, ignoring the wolves prancing around behind her. They’d shifted into wolf form and scampered off in different directions. Maybe today they’d find something to hunt. She hoped so. She was getting
tired of their whining.
The walk to the stand felt as though it took less time each time she hiked it. She reached her gathering spot long before the sun came up and began harvesting the fruit right away.
Once she had her bucket about half full, she took a long drink of water and began the trek back. Getting stuck out in the desert with the sun coming up was not something she wanted to happen to her again.
When she was within about half a mile of the fallout shelter, she estimated the time to be about six a.m. There was a small rock outcropping that jutted up from the level ground. Even as the sun peeked out over the horizon, the air was still cool.
Cassie climbed up the small rise and set her bucket and pole beside her as she sat down cross-legged, looking out on the view below. A long expanse of silver-green shrubs covered the landscape. Far in the distance, she could see the glimmer of the sun reflecting off the SUVs parked near the shelter entrance.
She took a deep breath and relaxed her shoulders, ready to try something new. She was tired of everyone and everything having more control of her ability to get into the fourth dimension than she did. If it wasn’t the computer system and serum necessary to get into The Program, it was Circe’s magic, or the chaos of her dreams.
Today, she meant to take back control. She would access the fourth dimension without any aid but her own mind, and she had no idea how. Before the war, she’d been a little bit involved in things like yoga and meditation. She’d always been interested in her own internal world. Being only a young teenager, her experience with gaining control of her mind had been severely limited.
Nevertheless, the time was now. She would find a way inside herself and into the elevated dimension, which seemed to be the real battleground. She took several long, deep breaths and tried to clear her mind of all the pack drama, of her growing jealousy toward Nadine, and worries about the future.
Cassie closed her eyes and placed her hands on her knees, palms up. She focused her vision on the place behind her eyes at the center of her forehead. As she breathed, she allowed her body to relax with each breath. The space around her seemed to become fluid. She became aware of herself in context to everything that surrounded her, from the rock she sat on to the infinitesimal quantum particles that made up the atoms of the air she breathed.
Slowly, with each breath, the world she knew seemed to dissolve. She could feel it fading, even behind her eyes. The physical rules of the universe no longer applied. She had the most confident sense that she could shoot up into the sky and fly as she had in The Program yesterday.
When she opened her eyes, she was in the same landscape as she had been before. Somehow, everything had changed. It seemed to glimmer with life. The shrubs throbbed with vitality. Her own body seemed both immaterial and infinite.
Unlike the times before, she felt as if she were connected to everything around her. The tiny particles that made up the universe were spinning within her. She could feel the empty space between them. She could step between that space and travel to different worlds.
With that realization, she blinked her eyes and was suddenly hovering in the sky somewhere near the sea. The sky was bright cerulean over a long sandy beach. She smiled, feeling the cool ocean breeze blow on her and through her.
She moved through the air blinking forward within sight of a city skyline. She knew it was Los Angeles without even seeing it. It had not escaped the bombings. Skyscrapers were broken in half. Entire sections of the city lay in waste, melted, torn apart, with massive craters in sections of downtown.
She viewed it with detachment. It was fascinating how she could look out on the scene and not feel devastated. With her natural movement into the fourth dimension, it was as if her mind had moved there as well. She was elevated, changed, at least for now.
Cassie flew down the coast surveying the destruction until she moved inland between Los Angeles and San Diego. In the middle of what had once been a farm, she spotted a dome. The sun glinted off its glass surface. Even in her elevated state, disappointment sank in her stomach.
She flew forward to get a better look. With a flash, her body and mind raced. She was inside the dome watching the activity. Several young women held babies—obviously hybrids—in their arms. The women’s eyes seemed glassy. Their minds even more far gone than the young people in Denver.
A three-dimensional grid seemed to download into her brain. She saw the entire energy system of the dome. She knew exactly what parts were electricity, water, and security. She even had a feeling how the mind control protocols worked.
Numbers flitted before her eyes, and she saw a map of a trigger –– a bomb, a bullet, some kind of small projectile triggered a chain reaction of events that would ultimately lead to the dome’s loss of power.
Cassie absorbed the information at amazing speed. She knew exactly what she was being shown –– a way to free the captives. She sucked a deep breath and was back on the hillside, looking at the SUVs in the distance.
She had to tell Rafe. They had to create a party to liberate that dome. Today. She grabbed her saguaro fruit harvest and her pole and jogged down the rocky hillside to flat land. She kept up her pace as she moved toward the shelter, not paying attention to her surroundings.
Chapter 37
Out of nowhere, a hand flew out from the bushes and grabbed her arm. She dropped her bucket and pole as she was whirled around to face a naked man she had never seen before. A dozen nude people surrounded her, looking sun baked and angry. They had the same body decorations as the cougar shifters from the Colorado mountains. She grimaced. Freaking cougars.
“This is our territory, human,” one of them said, shaking her by the forearm. He took a deep sniff of her hair and glared at her with bright blue eyes. His skin was a mass of sun-darkened freckles, and his long red hair hung in braids and dreadlocks down his back. “She has the mark of the alpha wolf on her,” he said, a smile curving on his lips.
“Let me go.” She yanked her arm away and was able to break free by moving at exactly the right angle. She ducked out of the circle and drew her guns, pointing them at the cougars.
“Put those down, little girl. You might get yourself hurt.”
“Ha. You might get yourself hurt, idiot.”
He shifted into cougar form and lunged at her. She sidestepped him and whirled out of his path, shooting a warning shot into the air. “You already made me drop my saguaro fruit. Don’t piss me off any more. It might not be good for your health.”
The rest of the pride shifted and began circling her, growling and whining, baring their teeth. She pssted at them like annoying cats, making herself giggle nervously inside. She aimed her gun between the leader’s eyes.
“I have you in my sights, so, go the hell away, or die. Your choice,” she said with a slight quiver in her voice. He crouched ready to lunge again. She didn’t want to kill him, so she aimed at his front leg and waited for him to move toward her. In the split second he was in the air, she shot, hitting him in the foreleg.
She cringed and immediately started running in the confusion. The cougars had shifted back to human form to check on their fallen leader. Cassie sprinted toward the elevator. She’d never be able to outrun a cougar. She could hear at least one of them not far behind. She looked over her shoulder and spun in mid-step to shoot right in front of its paws. She didn’t want to hurt any more of them. They were asshats, but she guessed they had their reasons.
She continued running, glancing over her shoulder as she went. The cougar who had given chase had backed off. They disappeared into the shrubs, nowhere to be seen. She made it to the elevator in record time, cranking the lever to bring her below ground. The thing went agonizingly slow, but she didn’t see any cougars as she inched her way below ground.
When she made it to the dining room, the hunters were gloating over a half dozen small kills. The rest of the pack fawned over them as though they were rock stars. Cassie rolled her eyes, even though she was panting so hard her chest heaved.
>
Rafe noticed her and came to ask her what was wrong. She waved her hand and started walking toward the terminal room where they could be alone.
“Cougars…” she panted, when they were out of earshot of the others.
“Here?”
“I think they meant to kidnap me… They said this was their… territory. Shit, I’m out of shape, I really need more cardio.”
“Where?”
She finally caught her breath and put her hands on her hips. Sweat dripped from her temples. “About a hundred yards out. I had to shoot one to get away; otherwise, I’d be toast. I think it was their leader.”
“A sunburned red head?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s the one who took the boar. Apparently, they’ve decided to expand ‘their territory. ’”
“Is this going to mean shifter on shifter violence?”
“We have to defend what is ours. This is getting out of hand. Plus, they put hands on my mate. This can’t stand.”
“I handled it.”
“I plan to handle it more,” he said, turning his back to leave.
“There’s something else.”
He turned back to face her. “What?”
“I got into the fourth dimension alone.”
“Really? How?”
“I just meditated until I got there. It was simple, really.” She shrugged. “The important part is what I saw. This is what we should be focused on. I saw a dome in Los Angeles and exactly how its power structure works. I also saw how to disable it. Think of it, Rafe. We could liberate a dome. We could go now. Today. We could be moving forward in this war, save our world from those sick-ass alien vampires. Tell the pack. Pack up our food and fuel and lets go.”
“While that is extremely impressive, Cassie, and I agree with you for the most part, we can’t do that now. We just got to our new base. The pack needs to feel like it has a territory, a home. We can’t move again already.”
“Come on! These people are adults. It isn’t like they’re a bunch of kids who can’t change schools or something. Please, Rafe. We need to do this. There were girls in there who already have hybrid babies.”