Driven

by Dean Murray

  Driven

  by Dean Murray

  &

  Eldon Murphy

  Copyright 2013 by Dean Murray

  Also by Dean Murray:

  The Reflections Series

  Broken (free)

  Torn (free if you sign up for Dean's Mailing List)

  Splintered

  Intrusion

  Trapped

  Forsaken

  Riven

  The Greater Darkness (Writing as Eldon Murphy) (free)

  A Darkness Mirrored (Writing as Eldon Murphy)

  Driven

  Lost

  The Dark Reflections Series

  Bound

  Hunted

  Ambushed

  Shattered

  The Guadel Chronicles

  Frozen Prospects (free)

  Thawed Fortunes (free if you sign up for Dean's Mailing List)

  Brittle Bonds

  Shattered Ties

  Chapter 1

  Jasmin Bianchi

  I-40

  Santa Rosa, New Mexico

  I first realized that I was being followed somewhere outside of Albuquerque. I probably should have noticed the black SUV an hour before that, but I'd been paying too much attention to Ben and not enough attention to the other cars sharing the dusty freeway with me.

  Ash is the kind of treasure trove of information that only comes along once in a great while. I hadn't spent as much time with him as Dominic had, but I'd still managed to pick up an awful lot of information and tradecraft during the short time between when he'd joined the pack and when Alec had scattered us to the four corners of the country. That meant that I knew enough to realize I was being followed, but I hadn't learned enough from him to be able to lose a tail in an unfamiliar city.

  The SUV posed a bigger problem than I wanted to admit, but I ruthlessly forced myself to be rational about things. The tinted windows meant that there was no way to know how many people were inside. It could be as few as one or as many as seven or eight. I was betting on a lower number simply because shape shifters, especially the big hybrid bruisers favored by the Coun'hij, tended not to play very well with other people.

  If someone had really been stupid enough to pack seven of my kind inside of that vehicle, then all I needed to do was stay on the road for another hour or two and wait for the boredom of the chase to make them try and kill each other.

  The members of the Coun'hij were a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. The SUV wasn't going to be full, but while I could beat one other hybrid or two wolves, anything more than that was pretty much a guaranteed loss for me.

  I didn't want to have to backtrack because I didn't know how much longer Ben had. He'd been doing better since before the pack all split up, but he was once again getting weaker. The process was so slow that I could almost convince myself that I was imagining it, but it was happening.

  I sighed, partly in anger, partly in resignation, and then pulled my phone out and called the number I was hoping would still put me in contact with Alec. He picked up on the second ring and I started talking before he could get a word out.

  "I've got a problem. A black SUV has been tailing me for at least the last few miles. Heck, they could have been back there for hours for all I know."

  "Join the club. I've had more than a dozen other people report in during the last hour with the same problem."

  Alec sounded tired, but that wasn't too surprising. It had to be hard to run a war, especially when your troops consisted of a bunch of stubborn, erratic shape shifters.

  "That's it? There isn't any brilliant master plan for getting me out of this particular jam?"

  I almost said more than that, but I managed to get ahold of myself at the last second. My temper had been harder to control for a couple of weeks now, but ever since I'd manifested a hybrid form my beast had wanted to throw down against every single person I ran into.

  "If you want help you're not exactly going about asking for it the right way."

  Barely suppressed rage bubbled in the back of Alec's throat and it was all I could do to force myself not to respond in kind.

  "You're right, I'm…I'm sorry. Please can you help me out here?"

  Alec was silent for a second. I couldn't tell whether he was reinforcing the fact that he was the one holding all of the cards, or if it just took him that long to calm down to the point where he could respond without causing a reescalation of the situation.

  "Where are you right now?"

  "Half an hour west of Albuquerque."

  The silence stretched out to nearly a full minute before Alec finally responded.

  "If you've been driving for two or three hours then you don't have enough range to make it to anyone who could help."

  I silently counted to five in an effort to keep my cool, but it didn't help much. My tone might not have been quite as challenging, but my words were still pretty close to the line.

  "Seriously, there isn't anyone else from one of the coalition packs within a hundred miles of me?"

  "No, there are others that close to you, but they've all got tails of their own, Jas, and everyone is headed north in an effort to meet up with one or more other groups who have a chance of helping take out whoever is following them. You knew when you started down that direction that I was trying to keep our people out of there. The cats are already applying a lot of pressure to the remaining border packs."

  I wanted to yell or scream, but that wouldn't buy me anything. I'd known Alec as far back as I could remember; if he said that there wasn't anyone he could send to help then it was the truth.

  "How did this happen?"

  "I'm not honestly sure. I've got some of the best hackers in the country on my payroll right now, and contacts that will let me bring in half a dozen other guys if I'm willing to fork over the money required to keep them interested. They told me that their security on this one was bulletproof."

  "Define bulletproof."

  "They were supposed to have all of the satellites taken care of. They've got the actual feeds redirected to their servers and are sending back a ghost feed that is mostly all the right data, but with select parts of the map blurred out and replaced with footage from hours ago."

  I wasn't any kind of hacker myself, but I'd spent enough time in conversations with Alec, Ash and others to have at least a passing understanding of some of the high-level stuff the black hats did.

  "How is that even possible, Alec?"

  "My guys are tracking everyone's cell phones and making sure that any attempts to locate our people returns bogus location data. There wasn't any other way to keep in contact with everyone, burner phones wouldn't work with this many people in the mix. It would be more than a full-time job for three people to keep track of who was using what number and then you'd still have a central point of failure that the Coun'hij might be able to capture."

  "So your guys are using the location data from the cell towers to erase our cars from the satellite maps?"

  "Yeah, only they aren't sure it's working now. I called two of the ringleaders when I started getting reports that people were being followed and they tore their methodology apart and found some possible holes."

  "Someone could take the ghost feed and analyze it for those moving discrepancies."

  "In theory, but that would take a huge amount of computing power and an incredible amount of access to the systems of the various intelligence agencies. There are a couple of holes in their control of the phone companies too. I won't bother trying to explain them though because it gets into the kind of stuff that nobody is sure is possible. That means that there's no way to prove whether or not we've actually been counter-hacked."

  "That's bad news, Alec. I mean bad news even beyond the fact that I'm about to go up against an unknown num
ber of Coun'hij bruisers."

  "I know. Honestly I'm hoping that we were hacked, because if we weren't, then it means that the Coun'hij have recruited or found another weapon—one capable of keeping eyes on us in some other way."

  I could feel a headache starting to build. "Right, and that's worse because we won't know how to counter that. Even assuming that it can be countered."

  Alec's response was more certain than I could have managed in his shoes. "Everything can be countered."

  "Only if you know what you're really up against. How bad do you think my odds are?"

  This time I could tell he was trying to balance the truth against the need to keep me from losing hope.

  "You've got a chance. Nobody has actually engaged yet, so I don't know how many people everyone else is up against, but the Coun'hij only has so many people working for them. They can't have each and every vehicle full; they just don't have that many bodies."

  "That's something at least. I guess it's time to roll the dice."

  **

  It was dark by the time I stopped, and my car was running on little more than fumes by then. I found a tiny town that wasn't much more than a gas station and a couple of houses, and then pulled off behind a massive red barn that had seen better days. It wasn't much, but it would screen me so that nobody on the road would be able to see me, and the darkness should take care of any other prying eyes.

  I glanced over at Ben as the car rolled to a stop. He looked so small in the passenger seat like that. His IV bag had run dry an hour or so before and I hadn't been able to stop and hang a new one for him because of our pursuers.

  It was one more reason to hate the Coun'hij, but things were past the point where a little extra injustice made much of a difference. I was fighting for survival and an extra smidgen or two of anger wasn't going to change the odds one way or the other.

  His red hair had gotten longer than normal. I should have asked Rachel to help me give him a haircut before everything fell apart back at the manor. I brushed a stray strand back behind his ear so that it would be off of his face and then opened my door. There wasn't time to just wait around, not if I wanted to avoid being trapped inside of my car.

  The Coun'hij SUV was approaching slowly. Whoever was driving was overconfident, which meant that I was outnumbered. I stepped well away from my car in case they decided to try to run me over, and then waited.

  I could feel possible courses of action stretching out before me in an almost infinite set of paths, but I didn't let myself get too focused on any one of them. There might be an almost unimaginable number of different ways to get there, but there were only two possible outcomes to this fight and getting too attached to a specific route of attack would just increase the chances that I wouldn't be walking away from this particular fight.

  If James had been driving that SUV, he would have come in fast and we would have bailed out of the car at a run as soon as it dropped down to thirty miles per hour. If Jess had been driving, she would have stopped soon enough to leave plenty of room between her and the target. Luckily the recruiting standards for the Coun'hij enforcement group had gotten lax enough that the actual driver didn't do either of those things.

  As the SUV rolled to a slow stop less than twenty feet away from me I reached out to my beast and she responded with the white-hot rage that only a threat to someone we considered to be ours could spark.

  The change from human form to hybrid took only a tiny fraction of a second, but it was still new enough for me that it hurt in ways nobody who wasn't a shape shifter could ever understand. Having your muscles tear free of your bones and then reattach themselves somewhere else is an incredibly painful experience, but that was just the start.

  For a heartbeat pain was the whole sum of my existence, and then scraps of my clothes were fluttering through the air, falling in a circle around me like some pagan symbol designed to trap a beast whose only resemblance to humanity was the fact that it had two arms and two legs.

  My hybrid form was more than seven feet of muscled fur and each of my fingers was tipped with a seven-inch semi-retractable claw capable of scratching steel. If there'd been any humans around to observe what I'd become they would have run away screaming, at least they would have done so if I'd held still long enough for them to get a good look at me.

  I didn't hold still though, instead I bounded forward, the rocky ground blurring from the speed of my passage, and put my left fist through the driver-side window. There was a rush of power as the driver tried to transform, but even if he'd had time that wouldn't have saved him. There wasn't room for a hybrid inside of the SUV, and shifting to a wolf would have just resulted in him being trapped on his back against his seat.

  My claws wrapped around his throat, severing arteries and veins in the split second before the momentum of my charge slammed my left arm into the unyielding metal of the car and spun me around so that my right hand shattered the last window on my side of the car. I missed the guy in the back seat by less than an inch.

  He was still moving with human slowness, but killing the driver had taken me just long enough that he'd managed to throw himself to the other side of the vehicle. Now that the windows were shattered I could smell the occupants of the car. There had been three of them, but I'd accounted for the driver already, which meant that I still had a chance of surviving the fight as long as neither of the other two were hybrids.

  The two surviving attackers bailed out of the other side of the SUV in a graceless approximation of what they should have done a few dozen feet further back. The vehicle was between us, but it only took me an instant to release the driver, who was now hanging partway out of the car despite his seatbelt, and lunge around the back of the SUV.

  I'd had my hybrid form for mere hours rather than months or years, but the massive muscles and long arms already felt right in a way that I couldn't explain. I was fast, faster in some ways even than when I'd been a wolf, but the two guys I was chasing had both shifted to wolf form and they'd split up so that I couldn't go after one of them without giving the other one an uncontested shot at my back.

  I feinted at one of them, more to keep them off balance than for any other reason, while I tried to decide what to do. I'd gotten a sense of their power when they'd both shifted. They'd felt weaker than I'd expected them to be, but that wasn't a guarantee that they were just wolves.

  A whisper of sound was the only warning I got. One of the wolves had seen through my abbreviated lunge and had decided he had an opening. He threw himself at me with the kind of speed that had to be seen to be believed, but what I lacked in experience fighting as a hybrid I made up for by the fact that I'd spent thousands of hours trying to figure out different ways for wolves to take a hybrid down. It hadn't been an abstract exercise for me either, it had been a matter of life and death, and I'd put everything I'd had into becoming the best killer I could given the constraints of my frailer wolf body.

  Coming at me from the side like that meant that the first wolf, the one lunging at me, only had a couple of decent targets, and I could feel that he was coming too high to be aiming at my legs or arms. I ducked forward, something most hybrids wouldn't have done because it meant that there was a chance that the wolf would be able to still latch on my back where I wouldn't be able to reach him. I knew it was a risk, but I stepped forward anyway because it was the only option that let me also spin to the left so that I could deal with the second wolf.

  The second wolf had assumed that I'd be in a slightly different spot than where I actually ended up and it was easy to sink my claws into his side as I ripped him out of the air. I'd overbalanced slightly to get him though and had to put both hands on the ground to keep from falling over.

  The action of catching myself drove my claws further into the second wolf who yelped weakly before going limp. I tried to spin back around to intercept the first wolf, talons digging deeply into the red soil beneath me, but he was just too fast. I managed to throw his aim off slightly, but he still go
t his teeth into my shoulder.

  He couldn't reposition for a better hold and I couldn't reach him, but I could feel his teeth grinding together, searching desperately for a vein that would allow him to bleed me out. We weren't quite at a standoff, but neither of us had particularly good options open to us.

  I threw myself back into his SUV, trying unsuccessfully to crush him, but he managed to reposition his body enough that most of the force of my blow missed him. I staggered away from the vehicle, my motion accompanied by a squeal of protest from the metal that was partly a result of the impact and partly from the way my claws had ripped and bent the metal.

  In my normal shape I never could have hoped to bend a piece of steel like that, but my hybrid body was strong enough to do it without evidencing any overt signs of effort. It was a small advantage, but it was enough to allow me to bend a section of metal up and out so that it formed a ragged spear pointing away from the SUV.

  It was another risky move, but I knew exactly how hard it was to see anything once you had the kind of death grip on someone that my opponent was currently maintaining. I threw myself into the side of the barn, snapping thick boards like they were toothpicks, but that wasn't any more successful at scraping the wolf off of me and a wave of weakness washed through me as blood loss started to make itself known.

  I almost lost my balance as I came back out of the barn, which wasn't a good sign considering the lethal mess I'd just made of the SUV. Hybrids are tough, but I still wasn't sure how far I could push this body before I'd become too weak to continue fighting.

  I stumbled back toward the SUV, but at the last second I realized that I didn't need to blindly throw myself backwards on the spear. Instead I simply got close to the side of the vehicle and then spun around so that the spear passed only inches from my back.

  The wolf never even saw the attack coming, but even if he had there wouldn't have been much he could have done to avoid the shard of metal that impaled him through his ribs. He let go of my shoulder with a yelp of pain, but I couldn't think poorly of him for that. I'd already started pulling away from the SUV—if he hadn't let go he would have been torn in half.