by Dean Murray
I continued streaking towards the far end of the building until I heard them crash through what was left of the exterior walls and then I cut left as hard as I could, heading straight towards the undamaged part of the building.
It was another risky choice, but the concrete was slick enough that the werewolves would start catching up to me again unless I could get onto carpet. Two more bounds took me into the non-manufacturing section of the building.
I was in a long, straight, carpeted corridor and I stretched out into nearly a full sprint. I'd gained a much bigger lead on the werewolves than I'd ever had before, especially during those precious few seconds where they'd been running towards the outside edge of the building. Those few steps had taken them almost directly away from my current direction of travel, the direction I'd been planning on traveling ever since I'd made it into the building. Each of those steps had bought me a three-step lead and now I had a very real chance of making it back to Ben and the car with enough time to get in and drive away before the werewolves could catch us.
Everything now rode on whether or not I could correctly pick my route through the corridors and offices of this part of the building. The best option would be to turn left and head back directly the way I'd come because it would mean that I'd get the benefit of the carpet for the longest time possible while the werewolves would have to take the long way around the building.
Less appealing would be if I had to continue straight for some reason or other before finding a door or a window and then cutting left to head back towards Ben, but even that should still give me a fighting chance.
Turning right, or turning around and heading back towards the manufacturing area, would pretty much guarantee that I'd be run down and killed well out of sight of Ben and the car. I couldn't afford to let that happen.
The building was huge, and more than a dozen doorways flashed past me so quickly that I got only vague impressions of the rooms they opened up into. There were a lot of empty offices on the left, but the right side of the corridor seemed to contain nothing but a long series of storage rooms, packed to the ceiling with the kind of soft, sound-absorbing panels that I'd last seen when Alec had asked Donovan to have part of the manor renovated and modernized with better soundproofing than they'd had available when the house was built.
The panels here seemed to have encased me in a bubble of near silence. I could hear a single werewolf behind me. It had apparently come back through the exterior wall and started across the concrete again, but I couldn't hear anything from the other two werewolves which were apparently still racing around the outside of the building.
My nose was assaulted by something nasty up ahead as I approached an opening on the left side of the corridor that was more than twice as big as the doorways that I'd been flying past.
It was one of those split-second decisions that can make or break a violent confrontation. If I kept running straight then I'd be heading towards the outside wall and the windows that would provide me with an escape route, but every step I made in that direction was effort wasted in that it didn't get me any closer to Ben.
Taking the opening had the benefit of sending me in the direction I actually wanted to be running in, as well as turning towards the source of whatever was causing the stench, a stench that would go a long way towards masking my scent and making it harder for the werewolf behind me to continue to scent-track me.
It was that last point that decided things for me. I knew I was accepting a bigger risk in some ways by turning before the end of the corridor, but I also knew that it gave me a chance to get out of sight before my pursuer could see me. It might even give me a chance to lose it altogether, which meant it would be as good as out of the chase.
I darted to the left without slowing down in the slightest and lost traction for the barest of moments. My hips and legs swung around, doing their best to continue in the direction I'd been running despite the fact that my front half had changed directions.
I slammed into a stack of large barrels that had been invisible until I was almost to the corridor. Those barrels shouldn't have toppled like they did. They were full of some kind of heavy liquid, and only the fact that they'd been stacked with an unbelievably reckless abandon allowed the force of my collision with them to send the top several barrels crashing down, spilling the liquid as they went.
I'd been almost certain that my flight was going to end right then, either to a sprained appendage, or from being crushed by the barrels. All of my concentration was focused on staying upright, on outrunning the cascade of metal cylinders, and my efforts still almost weren't enough.
One of the barrels struck me a glancing blow as I bounced off of the far wall and then shot forward less than half a step ahead of the liquid that the barrels had just splashed everywhere. I was half a dozen steps further into the new corridor before I realized that the barrels had been at least part of the cause of the stench, and that what I was in wasn't actually a corridor.
My heart was already working as hard as it possibly could, but it stuttered in an attempt to go even faster as I took in the cavernous warren of rooms I'd just inadvertently chosen as the location of my final stand.
It was no use going back the other direction. Even in the poor lighting I could see the slick film that coated the water behind me. It was slick, and not just in a transitory way either—if I stepped into that it would slow me down for long painful minutes as well as making me stink so badly that the werewolves wouldn't need to see me in order to know when I exited the building.
I was out of other options, and even as I raced deeper into the maze of rooms I was looking for a place where I'd have a chance of taking out at least the closest werewolf. Nothing looked very promising.
From the outside I'd thought that this section of the building had escaped damage from the fire that had destroyed everything else. Now that I'd stopped running quite as fast and was taking the time to examine my surroundings, I was realizing how far off base I'd been. This part of the building had been damaged too, but the fire had mostly been confined to the roof and tops of the walls.
In fact, the faint starlight coming in through the gaping holes up above me was the only reason I was able to see anything at all. At first glance the walls seemed to be coated with the sound-absorbing panels I'd noticed earlier in the hall, but as I brushed up against one of the walls I realized that wasn't quite the case. The panels were exactly what I was expecting, but they were backed with something soft and flexible that made them give more than they would have otherwise.
I still sometimes had a hard time going directly from wolf to hybrid form. For whatever reason it was easier for me to shift to human form first, so I shifted to two legs as I walked ever deeper into the testing area.
It wasn't until I started referring to it that way inside of my own mind that I realized it was the perfect description of what I was inside. The factory had apparently manufactured soundproofing material and this had obviously been where they'd tested out new products. There was even a complicated metal framework in the ceiling with what looked like attachment points for microphones.
In some ways I'd just found the perfect place from which to launch an ambush of the werewolf that had been following me. The stench meant that it wouldn't be able to smell me waiting for it, and the panels robbed the sound from my steps before the vibrations had a chance to travel more than a foot or two through the air.
That was the difference between Alec and me though. I was capable of improvising on the fly, of using my rage and riding it to victories, but Alec could do that and more. He was a much better tactician than I was.
Alec would have already come up with a dozen different scenarios that offered at least a possibility of him being able to come out on top of what was following me, but all I could think about was just how fast and strong the last werewolf I'd faced had been.
I was tired and despite the anger bubbling up from my beast, I was scared, but I found a dark corner room that seemed
like it was going to be my best bet and prepared to shift again.
My heart nearly stopped when my phone started buzzing. I practically tore a hole in my ha'bit trying to get it out before it could vibrate a second time.
Jasmin, it's Rachel. Don't worry, it can't hear you or me right now. I'm calling you now, it's vitally important that you take my call.
Almost before I'd even had a chance to finish reading the message the screen lit up with an incoming call. I answered it out of little more than reflex. I hadn't had a chance to finish processing the implication of her words, but I couldn't bear to let a chance to talk to her slip through my fingers.
"Rach, now isn't a good time."
"I know, you've got three werewolves chasing you and you're cornered inside of a series of soundproof rooms."
"How can you possibly know that?"
"I know a lot these days, Jasmin. In fact I went to quite a lot of trouble getting you here at this exact instant. There were a lot of other ways this could have gone down; I had to work really hard to make sure that you had a chance to survive this."
Something about her words made bits and pieces of information click into place for me that I hadn't realized still needed to fit together.
"The only reason that I'm here is because of you, Rach. If I'd just gotten gas when you called last time, or if I'd taken a slightly different route, I wouldn't have ever run into these three monsters."
"You're right. Believe it or not, I had to go to a bit of effort to make sure that they were here too."
"Are you trying to get me killed?"
Rachel continued the conversation without missing a beat, almost like she didn't even hear my question.
"Are you ready to go get Geoffrey?"
"Yes, but I've already told you that, and you didn't seem to believe me then. I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do to convince you that I'm ready to do whatever it takes to save Ben."
"It's not me you have to convince, Jas, not really. It's you. Once you're really ready to do whatever it takes then you'll find him."
My beast was pushing against my control and my vocal cords started to thicken as she tried to force a change in response to Rachel's tone.
"If you don't stop screwing around, Rach, I swear that I'll…"
"You'll what, kill me?"
A tiny part of me wanted to respond in the affirmative, to yell my answer at her despite the danger it would represent, despite the fact that a werewolf was doubtlessly prowling through the testing lab even now.
"I don't know. Maybe. Ben doesn't have much time left. If something doesn't change soon he's not going to make it, and if you let him die when you could have stopped it from happening I'm not sure I'll be able to control my beast the next time we meet."
Rachel sighed. "Your beast understands what's at stake, Jasmin. You need to be willing to abandon everything else to save him or this isn't going to work out. Every time you and Ben start to get close one of you backs off because you're scared of what might happen, because you're not fully committed to the idea of the two of you. Somebody has to break the cycle, and it's going to have to be you."
It was like someone had draped a black cloth around my insides. Everything was suddenly dark and dying inside my core. Rachel had no right to be lecturing me about relationships. She was wasting my time after having led me into a trap. I was spending precious seconds talking to her that would have been better spent coming up with a plan on how to get out and back to Ben. Some of the emotions that defined me, Jasmin, as a separate entity from my beast shriveled up.
"I don't know why you care about Ben and me getting back together, Rach, but you just pushed me too far. If I get out of here then I want an address for Geoffrey without any more of this screwing around. If you cross me again I'm going to hunt you down and I'm going to kill you, but I won't do that until after I've killed your mom and Donovan and anyone else who means anything to you."
"I don't care about you and Ben, Jasmin. At least not like I used to. I still care, but I have a lot more to care about now than I did back in the day. I need you to reach your potential though, or things are going to go very badly."
"For Alec?"
"For everyone."
There was another pause and then Rachel seemed to remember that I was only heartbeats away from a fight that I couldn't win.
"Stuff your phone back in your ha'bit, but leave me on speaker."
I slipped my phone back into the little pocket that had been designed for it. Rachel resumed talking as soon as it was in place.
"Okay, now shift into hybrid form and start climbing up the wall."
"That's the dumbest idea possible, Rachel. The walls are tall, but they aren't tall enough to keep me out of the reach of a werewolf. I'll be a sitting duck up there."
"Just do it. Think of it as part of the price of saving Ben."
I forced out an affirmative response and shifted in a hot flare of power. Climbing the wall was harder than I expected it to be. My claws sank through the wall panels and the soft backing behind them, but they just tore through all of that like so much tissue paper. There was no way that anything that fragile was going to support my weight.
I struggled to find something with more substance inside of the wall. I tore off a huge chunk of the wall covering, but the metal studs underneath weren't much better. I needed a bearing wall, not one of the fragile walls that were used to partition off interior sections of commercial buildings.
"The wall on your right, and hurry!"
I turned and ripped another section of panels away and was rewarded with a structural steel girder that ran at an angle from the floor all of the way to the ceiling.
"You could have just told me that to start out with."
The words came out with a kind of breathless anger that was all I could manage while hauling my massive hybrid body up towards the ceiling.
"It wouldn't have worked. There's nearly enough room for you to be able to slip through what's left of the metal framework there. It's rusted, just give the inside corner a good tug and it will bend out of the way."
Rachel's voice came out of the cell phone in a staccato rush, but I hardly noticed. My attention was focused on getting up above the ceiling, and Rachel was only important in as much as she could help get me out of there alive.
She was right; the heavy metal was rusted through so badly that it warped without much effort at all on my part. As I scrambled up through the hole I'd made and onto the heavy metal framework that formed the ceiling, I noticed just how thick the insulation was. The mounting points for the microphones hung down more than a foot below the actual framework, a silent testament to just how much insulation was required to muffle whatever sounds they'd tested with.
"Run towards the center of the room! Now!"
For once my beast didn't protest Rachel giving me an order. Instead she threw all of her energy into the effort of complying with what we'd been told to do. It took me only two steps to cross the room I'd just been inside of and another two were all that were required to put me almost directly in the center of the long corridor that ran through the center of the testing area.
I saw Rachel's error partway between my third and fourth steps. The rust that had allowed me to bypass the microphone framework was endemic through the whole system. Sheer chance had allowed me to step on some of the few crosspieces that were still sound enough to bear my weight, but the chains that supported the framework weren't up to the same standard.
I felt the two chains on my left give out at the same time, and reflexively looked down to confirm that the ground beneath me was clear of obstacles. It wasn't, instead I saw the werewolf that had been pursuing me. A section of the soundproofing material had fallen away at some point in the past, leaving a hole that let me see my enemy, a hole that allowed sound free passage down to the werewolf.
The werewolf must have heard me running across the framework. It was the only explanation for why it had stopped right there, but my mind examine
d that theory with only a fraction of my processing power.
The end of the framework I was on hurtled towards the ground, pivoting on the two chains on the other end like a pendulum. I would have jumped free, but there wasn't anything to push against, and I suddenly knew for certain that I wasn't going to survive Rachel's supposed help. The last thing I saw before the movement of the framework carried the werewolf out of my sight was it turning to meet me, arms outstretched, wicked claws ready to rend my body.
I was still trying to push off of the framework when the werewolf's claws pierced the soundproofing material. Werewolf claws were harder than steel and sharper than a razor blade, there was no possible way that they could fail to tear through even my massive hybrid body like I was nothing more than a rotting apple.
Only somehow they missed.
I was so sure that I was going to die that I didn't realize the werewolf had missed me until after the framework had completed its descent and swung back and forth like some kind of child's toy. I'd ridden it down, talons on one crosspiece and my left hand curled around another, but that wasn't the astonishing thing. Even the fact that the werewolf had missed me paled in comparison to the fact that those same claws which had come within inches of killing me were now dangling lifelessly to either side of me.
The mounting points for the microphones had pierced the werewolf in half a dozen spots, and apparently half a ton of metal with several hundred pounds of hybrid thrown into the mix for good measure had been sufficient to drive those metal spikes deeply enough in that they'd struck something vital.
"Do you trust me again, Jasmin?"
"I…I guess so. You really knew that was what was going to happen?"
There was a long pause as she considered my question.
"Would you believe me if I said yes?"
"I'm not sure. It was hard enough to believe that Kristin could see a few hours into the future, and what she sees is so limited that half the time it's not much use anyways. What you just did here is godlike."
For a second I thought she was going to actually answer my question.