by Dean Murray
Geoffrey placed one more construct inside of Keith's mind. He created a certainty inside of Keith that he could talk to Aly about anything. Once again there wasn't any guarantee when Geoffrey started the construct that it was what was required, but when he saw the way that it settled down over the very start of the damage, the way that it seemed to join core supporting threads of Keith's personality together, the fact that it seemed to have tiny tendrils already growing further into the damaged area, Geoffrey knew it would do what he wanted it to do.
Keith wasn't cured any more than a single session of therapy would have cured him, but the foundation had been built. If Keith talked to Aly, and if he could avoid any serious shocks to his life for a few months, then things should heal completely. Even after he healed he'd still be just as vulnerable to loss and damage as anyone else, but at least he'd have a chance at happiness.
Geoffrey created another construct, a fragile one that started fraying away as soon as he set it down, and then launched himself out of the protective bubble and into the full fury of Keith's conscious mind. The final construct did its job, creating a fissure of calm that ran all of the way out to the furthermost edge of Keith's mind.
Geoffrey expertly followed that fissure, racing along it at the mental equivalent of a sprint, but even so he barely made it all of the way free before the thoughts closed back together. Geoffrey came back to himself with a gasping breath that was unlike anything he'd ever before experienced.
"Are you okay?"
It took Geoffrey a few seconds to get his breathing under control enough to respond. "Yes, I think so."
Aly looked at him doubtfully. "Are you sure? I think you stopped breathing for a minute there."
Geoffrey had known that his strength was running out, but he hadn't realized that he'd pushed things that close to the edge of disaster. Even now he could feel that his mental strength was exhausted, that it was pulling against the reserves of physical strength that were keeping his heart beating and his lungs working.
"Did you save him?"
"I think so. I've done all I can, right now at least. Are you ready to make your payment?"
Aly was obviously scared, but she didn't let that stop her from nodding, and if the nod was the tiny movement a small animal might make when in the sights of a large predator, well, she could hardly be blamed.
"It's important that this remain a secret, Aly. That's part of the price I need from you."
"I'll never tell anyone."
Geoffrey felt the hallucinations dancing just outside the edge of his field of vision. He was running out of time. He reached over and gently took her by the wrist.
"I'm not human. I need to feed on your blood, but I promise not to take so much that you'll die."
Geoffrey didn't have any tendrils out probing her mind, but her emotions were so powerful that they seemed to pour into his mind of their own accord. She was relieved that he wasn't going to demand what she'd feared he wanted, but she was also terrified. There was no doubt inside of her but that he'd just told her the truth.
For the briefest of seconds she resisted the gentle pull of his hand, but it only took one look at Keith, who was already resting more peacefully than he'd been when they'd brought him into the room, for her to remember her promise.
"You really did everything you could for him?"
Geoffrey's nod seemed to reassure her, but she still needed something else.
"Is there anything else you can do to help? Not now, but later?"
"It's possible, but I can't stay here and it will take a few days for me to recover enough to do that again."
Aly thrust her wrist at him, suddenly eager for him to proceed.
"Take it, however much you need. I'll give you my cellphone number. You can call me whenever you're ready and we'll meet you anywhere in the country."
Geoffrey nodded hesitantly, not sure why he was agreeing to tangle his life up further with theirs, but unable to deny her obvious need, not when it was paired with such a willingness to pay whatever price was required.
Positioning his mouth carefully to avoid damaging any tendons or nerves, Geoffrey bit down on the pale skin of her arm and had to fight off a tremor of relief at the first taste of her blood. Geoffrey had fed dozens of times that he remembered and hundreds, maybe even thousands of times in the section of his life that had been stolen from him by his amnesia, but he couldn't remember any other feeding like this.
Her blood wasn't just sweet, it tingled with power and energy. Geoffrey could practically feel his reserves of energy filling back up in time with the slow pulse of her heart.
Ever since he'd left New York, Geoffrey had refused to give into the darker aspects of his nature. He hadn't killed anyone, but more importantly, he hadn't taken from anyone without giving something back in return.
Back in New York he'd traded money for blood, albeit with unwitting victims who had no idea what they were agreeing to. He no longer had any method of replenishing his funds, not with the way he was forced to constantly move from place to place, but he'd still found ways to provide value in return for what he took from his victims.
Many of the homeless people he'd encountered had been suffering from different kinds of psychosis and he'd cured them, or at least lessened their symptoms, before drinking from them. This however was different. Geoffrey always felt an odd sense of connection to those he was feeding from when doing so wasn't just a kind of predation, but this was something more than that.
Aly seemed to hum with energy and he established a link to her mind without even meaning to. Geoffrey had never experienced both sides of a feeding before, but that was what he was feeling in that moment.
He could feel her warm blood trickling down his throat, feel the strength pouring into his limbs and mind, feel the hallucinations and the blood hunger being chased back to a distant corner of his being, but at the same time he could feel the warmth of his mouth on her wrist. He could feel a tingle that masked the pain of his bite, feel the heat spreading up her arm and a sense of euphoria that was only partially dulled by the weakness slowly stealing through her body.
Always before, even with Melody, it had been hard to tear himself away from a blood donor. He'd loved Melody. He'd tried to tell himself at the time that it was some kind of obsession, that she would be better off without him, but even if that had all been true it hadn't changed the fact that he'd loved her. Even when he'd fed from her he hadn't been able to release her this easily.
Geoffrey pulled his mouth away from Aly's arm and then pulled a square of gauze from his pocket and taped it to her arm to stop the bleeding.
"Are you okay?"
She nodded wordlessly, almost seeming as though she were in shock. After nearly a minute she managed to speak again.
"Is it always like that?"
"No, that was a first for me."
"I could feel you inside of my mind. I could see some of what you did to try and help Keith. I wanted to believe so badly, but I couldn't quite bring myself to. Now I know though, I know that you are everything you said you were, that you did everything you said you'd do."
"If you didn't really believe me, then why did you agree to let me feed on you?"
Geoffrey already knew the answer, at least most of it, but the question tumbled out of his mouth regardless, not seeming to care that it was unasked for.
"I did it because there isn't anything I wouldn't give for Keith. I know that's probably not healthy, I know that I'm giving too much of myself to him, for him, but I can't help myself. It's just how I am."
"Do you wish things were different?"
"Are you asking me if I want you to fix me?"
"I'm not sure. I guess maybe that is what I'm asking. Do you wish things were different?"
Aly shook her head as she ripped a sheet of paper off of the tablet on the desk next to the bed and wrote a number on it.
"I don't want to be different. Maybe if you told me that there wasn't anything that could be done to
save Keith then I'd want to change, but things were so incredibly perfect for the two of us back when we first met. Back before he started using."
Geoffrey accepted the folded sheet of paper. "It's possible that he won't need any more help than what I've already given him. If you can get him to talk to you about who he lost then he might be able to recover. No matter what happens he won't be using for at least a little while, but with a little luck he'll recover enough that he won't stumble into some other kind of self-destructive behavior."
"I know; I really did see part of what you did to him. I…well, I guess I'm volunteering. If he needs more help then I want you to come help him, but even if he doesn't, I want to do my part."
"Your part for what?"
"My part to keep you alive so you can help other people. Most vampires aren't like you, are they?"
Something very much like terror started to grow inside of Geoffrey. It had happened once before with Melody. She'd been able to see inside of his mind at the same time that he'd been inside of hers. Having someone else inside of his mind didn't have to be a terrifying evil, but the fear operated as a reflexive thing that engaged and disengaged at a level of consciousness far below anything he had control over.
Imastious had scarred him too badly for things to be any other way. Maybe he'd get past that at some point, but it wasn't going to happen anytime soon.
"Did you see that too?"
Aly gave him a sad smile and the expression implied that his fears weren't unfounded. "No, not really. It was more along the lines of vague impressions. I could tell that you came from somewhere terrible though. Even if I hadn't seen that I'd still know that most vampires weren't like you. The world is too bad a place for things to be any other way. If there were hundreds of people like you running around helping people like Keith and me then the world wouldn't be as bad as it is."
Not trusting himself to speak, Geoffrey simply nodded and then left the room. He was almost back to his room before they struck. Exhaustion had made him grow careless or he would have had enough probes out to feel them coming.
Geoffrey rounded a corner in the dingy hallway leading to his room and was suddenly confronted by a slender, almost skeletal redheaded woman. Even before Geoffrey's reflexive probes skittered off of the blank wall of someone who was actively trying to make sure that their thoughts couldn't be read, he was backing away. It was an unplanned movement, triggered by something that knew she was wrong on levels that he couldn't consciously identify.
It would have been foolish to turn his back on her, but Geoffrey didn't need to turn around in order to make sure that he'd be able to retreat. He burned up some of the strength Aly had lent him as he sent out a network of fine thought-tendrils behind and to either side of him.
He brushed up against two more shielded minds, and then something struck him from behind with enough force to knock him to the ground.
Geoffrey didn't realize that the blow had been to his head until he noticed that he was surrounded by an inexplicable blackness. The voices he was hearing seemed to be coming from a long ways away.
"You're sure that's him?"
"Yeah, he's a little worn around the edges, but he matches the picture that Imastious sent over."
"Good, let's get out of here then."
A third voice chimed in with what sounded like a hint of mocking laughter dancing between the spaces in his words.
"Still scared that some big monster is going to tear your throat out?"
"Laugh all you want, ever since we arrived here I've felt like someone is watching us. Chicago is the only major city where Imastious doesn't have at least some kind of contact with the local power structure."
The woman sounded like she'd heard the same argument a dozen times already and was bored with it.
"It's fine. Either Imastious is telling us the truth and there isn't any kind of significant concentration of vampires here, or he's lying and we could run into some kind of hunter-killer squad at any moment. We're going to be careful either way, so it's not like it matters."
The scared guy muttered something under his breath before responding loud enough for the other two to hear. "Right, but the real question is what could cause this entire city to be vampire-free like that. We now know that there is such a thing as werewolves; who knows what else is out there hunting us."
As the darkness reached up to fully claim Geoffrey, the despair that had been threatening to consume him for days finally enveloped him. He was Imastious' prisoner once again.
Chapter 3
Jasmin Bianchi
McCleary Gas and Grub
Great Bend, Kansas
I ended up in Kansas less out of some kind of grand plan and more because it was hard to get much more centrally located. That and because I needed to keep moving. I'd sent Alec a text once I made it back to the car and got myself bandaged up. There hadn't been a response, not that I'd particularly expected one. If I'd been further north he probably would have tried to get me to go up and help out one of the other groups that were being tailed, but I wasn't so he didn't.
At the time I'd been relieved that he wasn't trying to sidetrack me into doing him a favor, but now I wasn't so sure. I was out here driving around with no backup, just Ben and I, on nothing more than faith in Rachel and an unhealthy measure of rapidly-diminishing hope.
Right before she'd disappeared she'd found me and told me that I needed to find someone named Geoffrey. Rachel had been acting weird lately, and she'd been at her weirdest that night, but it had been a convincing performance, convincing enough at least to get me out here.
I looked over at Ben and frowned at what I saw. His health had been steadily declining for weeks, ever since I'd rescued him from the vampires who had been holding him captive. Alec had paid for some of the best doctors in the state to take a look at him, but nobody had been able to explain his coma.
That was why Rachel had only needed to provide me with the barest glimmer of hope to convince me this idiocy was actually a good idea. When there aren't any other options, it's amazing what a person will do to try and save someone they love.
Ben had actually been doing pretty well right before we'd left. It had gone against everything I knew about his condition, but it had been an undeniable fact. He'd spent nearly two hours disconnected from the machinery responsible for monitoring his condition, two hours without an IV drip, two hours of smoke and terror where none of us had been sure we'd survive. That should have caused his condition to deteriorate sharply, but instead he'd seemed almost to the point of waking back up on his own.
He'd started swallowing on his own. I'd actually been able to feed him some broth in the RV right before I'd said goodbye to Alec and the others. I'd kept him on an IV drip since then, initially more just to be on the safe side than for any other reason, but over the last couple of days he'd started getting worse again.
Now I kept him on an IV because there wasn't any other way to ensure that he got enough calories in to keep him from starving to death.
Despite dozens of hours spent poring over every scrap of medical information I'd been able to find on anything that might be related to Ben's condition, I still didn't know enough to save him. I could run an IV, but I couldn't do anything to fix his breathing, which was steadily getting worse.
He was still on the course of antibiotics that he'd been prescribed just before everything had fallen apart back at the estate, so I knew the cause wasn't bacterial. Honestly it probably didn't matter what the cause was. Every time we got one symptom under control something else flared up.
It was like his whole system was shutting down and there didn't seem to be anything that anyone could do to save him. Unless you believed Rachel, in which case somebody named Geoffrey had the key to a complete recovery.
I was driving, so I'd only looked over at Ben for a second, but it had been enough to confirm my suspicion that his IV bag was nearly empty. It was actually not terrible timing, we were only a few miles away from an exit, and
the car was down below half a tank, so I figured I should just kill two birds with one stone.
Driving fast is practically part of the job description for your average shape shifter. Even in human form I had the kind of reaction time that any professional racer would kill for. Despite Ash's statement that it was a dangerous hole in my skillset, I'd never put in the time required to develop the kind of driving reflexes that he and Alec had. Even without their vaunted skills, I could usually do twenty or thirty over the speed limit without putting myself or anyone else on the road in any danger.
With the radar detector blinking its reassurance at me that there weren't any cops in the area, there wasn't any reason for me not to push the Mercedes up to triple digits, but I'd stopped driving so fast sometime the day before. I didn't have an ultimate destination in mind, so it didn't matter whether I did a hundred and twenty or if I did thirty. Either way I was still headed nowhere.
I pulled off at a Chevron and reached into the backpack on the floor behind Ben for another IV bag. I was starting to run low. It was too late to text Alec and ask him to have someone arrange for me to get some more, but I made a mental note to do so first thing in the morning.
Actually, I wasn't even sure if what I had in the bag was a controlled substance of some kind or another. Some things you had to be an honest-to-goodness doctor to get, while other things could be purchased from a medical supply company by anyone. For as long as I could remember, first Donovan and then Alec had made such considerations less than nothing. If we needed something, regardless of the legalities involved, we had it.
It was incredible what money and influence could do for you, but in the end it could only do so much. It could help protect the ones you cared about, but some forces couldn't be bought off with hundred-dollar bills, and once someone was gone there wasn't any power wielded by Alec or anyone else that could bring them back.
I managed to get the new bag hung without disturbing Ben. One of the nurses Alec had brought in to give Dominic and me some time off hadn't been able to tell the difference. To her a person in a coma was for all intents and purposes dead to the world. Maybe that was how it worked for other people, but not for Ben. I could tell when he was comfortable and when he wasn't.
