Driven

by Dean Murray

  "This is stupid. Feed off of Jeete or let me go get Jorge. I'm not letting you die because you don't want to be a parasite like the rest of your kind. Neither of them is worth the air they're breathing right now."

  Geoffrey pressed up against my side of the cage, but his eyes were too unfocused for me to be sure he could see me.

  "I'm not going to be able to stop you, Jasmin, not when the blood starvation sets in. Once that happens I'll feed on anyone I can get my hands on, but this rule is the only thing stopping me from diving headfirst into the kind of depravity that Imastious tried so hard to push me into. If you do that to me I'll never forgive you and I'll let Ben die."

  "I'm supposed to just stand here and let you die? Either way it sounds like Ben's a goner."

  "Like I said, we'd better hope that Sally's supplier is nearby."

  I watched the transformation come over Geoffrey a second later. I hadn't really believed him, not deep down, but he hadn't been joking. The guy I'd spent the last few days helping look for Melody wasn't looking out of his eyes now. The thing wearing his body had more in common with my beast than it did with me.

  Geoffrey threw himself at the cage with enough force that the cage rocked slightly back and forth. I wouldn't have said that he had enough body mass or enough room to make that happen, but he hit the bars a second time and for a second I thought he was really going to manage to tip it over.

  I put a hand on the top of the cage to help steady it as I pulled my phone back out. I started dialing Sally again, but I nearly dropped the phone when Geoffrey threw himself at me. The space between the bars wasn't wide enough for him to get his hands through, but he raked the outside of my arm hard enough to draw blood.

  "What do you want now?"

  "How long before you could have more blood here if you pulled out all of the stops? Can you be back here in an hour and a half?"

  Sally was on the road already, I could hear her signaling as she passed someone. "I've got to make it all the way down to Minneapolis, there's no way to make it that quickly. Maybe if I took a helicopter there and back, but even then I'm not sure it's possible."

  I could see the light in Geoffrey's eyes changing. I'd thought he was savage before, but that wasn't anything compared to what he was becoming before my eyes. There wasn't time to call anyone else, I knew what I was going to have to do.

  "Listen, Sally, please listen very carefully. When I'm done talking I need you to hang up and then call Chad and the rest. Geoffrey has already entered the final stages of blood starvation. They need to lock the doors so that no matter what happens he can't get up to them. I'm really sorry about nearly losing control earlier. I know it's a lot to ask, but if the worst comes to pass I hope that you'll help Geoffrey rescue his friend. It's the only chance that Ben has."

  I hung up before she could respond. I didn't want to know what her answer was going to be. If I heard her say no then I wasn't sure that I would able to force myself to go through with what I was about to do.

  Geoffrey had continued to savage my arm while I was talking to Sally. It felt like my arm was on fire, but that didn't matter, I hadn't lost enough blood to make any kind of difference and the wounds should heal enough to stop bleeding once I shifted.

  I reached up to the top of the cage with my free hand and pushed down the release. The door flew open with enough force to knock me across the room. I shifted in midflight, but I still hit the rock floor at a bad angle and with enough force that I was stunned for a split second. That was all that Geoffrey needed, he was on top of me before I could make it to my feet.

  He went for my neck, trying to tear out my throat, but I managed to get an arm up in his way and he latched onto that instead. The pain was intense, even with the muted pain sensors that were part and parcel of this form. Geoffrey wasn't just trying to feed, he was worrying at my arm the way that a dog works over a bone.

  It went against every instinct of self-preservation hardwired into my being, but I reached up with my left hand and grabbed the back of his head. He fought me the entire time, but I pressed his head down against my arm, forcing him to feed instead of just tearing the flesh of my arm.

  "Let me know when you've had enough, Geoffrey."

  He didn't respond, but after a minute or so I could feel myself starting to get dizzy from the blood loss. I was about to try and force him away when I felt the most incredible sense of peace settle over me.

  I was basking in the feeling for several seconds before I realized that the tranquility was coming from somewhere outside of me. There was only one explanation, it had to be something that Geoffrey was doing. I half-expected for my beast to fight the feeling, but she seemed more than happy to just observe without interfering.

  The peace deepened into something incredible, a two-way link with Geoffrey that was more intimate than anything else I'd ever before experienced. I couldn't read his thoughts or access his memories, but I could feel him, feel his nature and character and I knew he was experiencing the same thing.

  The connection between us felt simultaneously right and wrong. Right because I could feel his iron-hard determination, and taste his commitment to saving Melody, but wrong because for all of his good qualities I knew that he wasn't the one for me, not in the way that Ben was.

  It was the kind of unreserved honesty that I wasn't sure even best friends could share. It was exactly what I wanted with Ben, and it was something that I knew would destroy Geoffrey and me if it continued for long enough.

  I came back to myself enough to realize that I needed to get Geoffrey off of me or I was going to bleed to death, but while I was still trying to come up with a way to do that without hurting him, I realized that there wasn't any need. Sometime in the last few seconds Geoffrey had stopped thrashing about and trying to fight me. He was completely relaxed and when I pulled my arm away from him he didn't try to stop me.

  "That was a very dangerous thing you just did, Jasmin."

  I snorted as I shifted back to human form and applied direct pressure to my arm. "You didn't leave me with any other choices, at least not choices that I could live with. You needed blood and it had to be from a willing donor. I was the only donor around that you couldn't say that I forced to volunteer. Did you find where Puppeteer and the others are?"

  Geoffrey nodded. "I think so, but there are complications."

  Chapter 18

  Jasmin Bianchi

  Just outside of Fort Loudon State Park

  Tennessee

  I'd already been on the phone with Alec for five minutes and the conversation was getting progressively worse the longer it went on.

  "We aren't going to get another chance like this, Alec. We know where something like a fifth of the Coun'hij are and we can kill them all in one fell swoop. Mobilize your people and get out here before it's too late."

  "Jasmin, you don't know where they are, you think you know where they are. You said it yourself that this vampire…"

  "Geoffrey."

  Alec obviously didn't like the fact that I'd interrupted him. Our beasts hadn't had it out with each other since I'd manifested my third form. Intellectually I knew that he could just use his power to drop me to the ground at any point if I was to fight him, but my beast wasn't convinced. Despite the fact that his beast had to be giving him hell because I wasn't acting submissive enough, Alec managed to keep his wits about him.

  "Right, you said it yourself that Geoffrey only got bits and pieces of information out of your captive. You think you've found one of the Coun'hij bases, but for all you know he's misreading the information."

  "What if he isn't? We aren't going to get another chance like this, Alec. We need to just accept the risk and go for it."

  "I'm sorry, Jasmin, but it's just not safe. I'm still not sure how the Coun'hij is managing it, but they know way too much about everyone's movements. You seem to have fallen off of their radar, but most of my other people are under constant attacks. If I pull everyone together to come support you in some kind
of massive attack on the Coun'hij then Puppeteer and the rest will know that you're coming."

  "That's fine, let them come. Grab Grayson and you and bring half a dozen other hybrids and we'll clean them all out. It's not like we need an army, not when you and Grayson are practically armies all by yourself."

  Alec sounded tired. "I know you've got a lot riding on this, Jasmin. I don't know how all of the pieces fit together, but in hindsight it's obvious that the best way to heal whatever those vampires did to Ben is with another vampire."

  "Yeah, he's my ticket to healing Ben, but in order for that to happen we need to flush out Puppeteer."

  "Right, but if you flush out Puppeteer we could find ourselves going up against dozens of werewolves and you know as well as I do that the only reason we won our last confrontation against that many werewolves was because we had the Coun'hij enforcers in the mix too. I can short-circuit Puppeteer's control over the hybrids, but all that does is make them attack whoever happens to be closest to them. If it's just our people around then we're still pretty much screwed. They'd bury us."

  I was tired of talking and I could tell that Alec wasn't going to give me a straight answer, not without me forcing the issue. "What are you saying, Alec? Are you going to help me or not?"

  "I want to, but I can't justify running that kind of risk with the rest of my people. We haven't even addressed the fact that this might be a trap."

  "How could this possibly be a trap, Alec? Geoffrey ripped the information out of Jeete's mind. There isn't any way they could have anticipated that."

  "No, I agree, they didn't set out to make this a trap when they sent Jeete, but the Coun'hij has access to way better information than they should be able to pull together. They may already know that you have him and that Geoffrey has gotten ahold of their location. This could definitely be a trap."

  "So we're just supposed to sit here and do nothing with the single best piece of intelligence we've ever had?"

  "No, you're not going to just sit there, you and the others need to leave Duluth and come meet up with me. The Chicago pack has been through a meat grinder over the last little while, but I think I can convince Ulrich to shake loose four or five hybrids to escort you back here. Once you get back here, we'll put Geoffrey to work interrogating everyone we can get our hands on who has any kind of link to the Coun'hij. In a couple of months we'll know so much about their operations that we'll be able to launch a decisive blow, one that will end this fight overnight."

  "Ben doesn't have a few months, Alec. He's got a few days, a week maybe at the outside."

  "Geoffrey can fix Ben, that's why you freed him."

  "Yeah, but Geoffrey and I have a deal. He isn't going to help Ben until I've helped him find Puppeteer."

  The silence was more eloquent than anything Alec had said so far. I could tell that he wanted to tell me to force Geoffrey to help, but Alec wasn't stupid. There wasn't any way to guarantee that Geoffrey would do what we wanted, not when working under compulsion. Not only that, once we started trying to use force on Geoffrey he wouldn't be any use to us when it came to interrogating the people Alec was hoping to capture. Besides, it was wrong.

  "Look, Alec, if you're not going to help me then I need to go. I've got a lot of arrangements to make and this isn't putting me any closer to saving Ben."

  I hung up on him before he could respond and then looked over at Geoffrey and the others, all of who had been able to hear both sides of the conversation.

  "It looks like we're on our own. I'm open to ideas on how we proceed."

  Geoffrey gave me a long, serious look. "We've been inside of each other's minds, Jasmin. You know as well as I do that I'm not going to let Ben die. All you had to do was stall another couple of days and I wouldn't have had any choice but to see what I could do to reverse the damage to his mind."

  "Yeah, I know, but a deal is a deal. Besides, I can't imagine that the Coun'hij's prisoners have a very long life expectancy after they are captured. Melody may not have a few more days. This is our chance to save her; we may not get another one."

  None of the Duluth wolves, my wolves, seemed to have anything to volunteer, so I pointed to the map of the park that we'd purchased earlier in the day.

  "I still think that our best bet is to take this trail in. We can buy or rent a couple of Jeeps and it should get us around behind the section of the park where the Coun'hij have set up. The prevailing wind here is from west to east, so once we're on the east side we should be relatively safe from detection."

  Geoffrey nodded. "What do we do though once we are there?"

  "We'll work our way in close enough for you to start reading some thoughts and see what we come up with. I know, it's a terrible plan, but it's all I've got right now. Once we're there we should be able to find some weakness that we can take advantage of. If needs be, we'll kill them one at a time whenever they step out into the forest."

  "I don't have a better plan. You know that I'm onboard. It doesn't matter how long the odds are, I'm still committed to trying to free Melody."

  I smiled my thanks at Geoffrey and then turned to the rest of my people. "I could order you all to come help us, but I won't. This isn't your war, and I treated you poorly yesterday, for which I'm sorry. I would welcome your help, but I release you all to do as you please. Stay here or go to some other pack, it makes no difference to me, but before I leave I'll have a ritual promise, a beast-bound oath, that you won't go to our enemies for at least the next three weeks. I mean to have your silence for at least that long or our mission won't have any chance of success."

  Silence reigned supreme for several seconds as the uninjured wolves looked around as though trying to read each other's thoughts. It was Sally that finally stepped forward and spoke for the group.

  "You're not safe to be around right now, Jasmin. As long as Ben is at risk it's obvious that there isn't anything that you won't do. Torture, murder, anything."

  It wasn't something I could argue with. "You're right. We both know it would be futile for me to lie to you and try to pretend otherwise, but even if that were possible I still wouldn't try to deceive you there. Ben has to live or everything I've done so far is for naught."

  "I don't appreciate being manhandled, choked and thrown into a wall, but the truth is that it's no worse than Branson or Jorge used to do to me. I'm not eager to trade one worthless alpha for another, but you're the first to have apologized afterward for mistreating me. Right now you're not better than Stekensbridge or the Coun'hij, but you have the potential to be better if we can save Ben for you. I'll come with you. It's a small chance, but it's one I'm willing to risk my life on in the hope of a better life down the road for me and any children I might have."

  One by one the other wolves nodded their agreement, and it was all I could do to keep from tearing up. It took me a couple of seconds to get myself back under control, but then I cleared my throat and pointed at Geoffrey.

  "You're the money man, so if you could please see to getting us a transport it would be much appreciated. I'd like to start off first thing tomorrow morning, so we'll have to move pretty quickly to make all of the arrangements that need squared away before we can leave."

  My phone cut me off. I half expected it to be Alec with one more argument why I shouldn't be doing this, but it wasn't his number, in fact it wasn't any number that I recognized.

  "Yeah?"

  "Jasmin, it's me, Rachel."

  "Calling to tell me that we've got the wrong spot?"

  "No, at least I don't think that you do. I know that you aren't planning on leaving until tomorrow morning, but it's important for you to go now, as soon as you can tonight."

  "Why, what do you see?"

  "That's the problem. I can see you guys going out into the mountains, but once you get there you disappear. Something is interfering with my ability to see you past a certain point tomorrow morning. If you leave now I can see what happens for at least part of the time you're there hunting for Puppeteer."


  "So you don't have any idea whether or not we're going to win?"

  "None at all. If you leave within the next couple of hours then things go pretty well up until you're shrouded from me, but no matter what happens I can't see you come out of the other side. It's like you and all of the Coun'hij just cease to exist and the world goes on without you."

  "So we're going to die then."

  "No, I saw this happen once before. There's someone out there who can defeat my ability, he's going to be there with the Coun'hij tomorrow. Once he's gone then the future will snap back into place and you'll all reappear, but until then I'm as blind as you are."

  Chapter 19

  Geoffrey

  Fort Loudon State Park

  Tennessee

  Jasmin was driving the lead jeep with Geoffrey in the passenger side next to her. He'd tried to convince her to ride in the back and get some rest. She'd lost a lot of blood and he'd figured that it wouldn't hurt and might very well help for her to take it easy for at least the duration of the drive, but she'd refused to let anyone else drive.

  Instead, the little caravan was slowly making its way down the bones of a trail that even back when it had been well-used hadn't been meant to be driven by jeeps in the dark. For all that the vehicles were only moving at something barely faster than Geoffrey could have run, it was faster than most people would have believed possible given that they were driving at night with no lights on.

  Vampires had incredible night vision, which combined with the shape shifter's ability to see living things outlined in light meant that Jasmin was able to see trees and fallen logs from quite a ways off and Geoffrey was able to pick out rocks and other inanimate objects and warn her away from them.

  The group had been driving for more than two hours and had settled into a well-oiled routine which required only minimal amounts of talking and which left Geoffrey plenty of time for thought. Since her people had all agreed to come along on the attack against the Coun'hij, Jasmin hadn't ended up needing to swear any of her people to silence, but Geoffrey had asked her about the ritual promise anyway and been astonished to learn that it was possible for shape shifters to bind their beasts to honor a given promise.