by Dean Murray
For humans sleep deprivation is dangerous enough—it leads to mistakes, impaired driving, and in extreme cases death when the organs of the body started to give out. It's practically impossible for a shape shifter to get to the point where their body starts failing as a result of sleep deprivation. The danger for us is that we usually lose control of our beast long before that happens.
For the beast there was only one legitimate reason to go without sleep, being chased by a predator even more dangerous than us. The best-case scenario for a shape shifter who gets so tired that their beast wrestles away control from them, is for other shape shifters in the area to beat them into submission before their beast goes into some kind of killing spree.
I didn't have the benefit of other shape shifters around, so I was operating without a safety net. Given the strength of my feelings for Ben, I didn't think my beast, even in full-on kill-every-threat-in-sight mode, would hurt him, but it wasn't the kind of chance I should be taking. Not with Ben, not with anyone really, but not with him most of all.
My phone had been working only intermittently for the last few hours. I was pretty sure that meant that someone was looking for me and Alec's guys were having to kick me off of the grid while they shut down the trace attempts. It had made life extra difficult, if not as difficult as dealing with another squad of Coun'hij enforcers would have been.
Despite the difficulty, I'd managed to find a youth hostel on the outer edges of the Bronx, one that was close enough to reasonable parking for me to be able to get Ben out of the car with my normal 'my friend is too drunk to walk on his own' trick of throwing his arm around my shoulder and supporting his weight with my arm around his waist.
I managed to secure one of their few remaining open double rooms, which was a bigger stroke of luck than I'd realized. Apparently it was best to call ahead and reserve a room by phone. The only thing that saved me was that we weren't quite to the heavy tourist season because it was still so cold outside.
I put Ben in the black metal bunk that was mostly hidden by the door so that I'd be able to enter and exit the room without people in the hall seeing that he was just lying there as unresponsive as always, and then made him as comfortable as I could. Once a new IV had been run and he was as well off as I could make him, I locked the door and went out to grab something to eat.
I needed something that was as energy-dense as I could get it without just going straight sugar, so I jogged over to a fast food joint and ordered two meals to go. I was back in the room with Ben less than fifteen minutes after I'd left.
"You know, Ben, I think if I'd been living on sugar water for as long as you have been that just the smell of this food would wake me up."
I waved a golden fry underneath his nose, but got absolutely no response at all. If someone else had been around I would have pretended that I was just joking around, but the truth was that I would have done much more foolish things than that if it would have woken him up.
"Don't worry, Rachel will come through. She always has before. She's crazy now, like halfway out of her mind, but she does seem to know stuff that she shouldn't be able to know. Maybe I'm being stupid, maybe she's gone completely bonkers or she's just using me for some nefarious purpose of her own, but I don't think so. I think this Geoffrey guy really exists, and I think that she'll lead us to him sometime soon."
My beast was still edgy just due to the lack of sleep, but she'd calmed down a little once I started getting some food into my stomach. Getting too hungry was almost as bad an idea as going without sleep. None of us in Sanctuary had ever lost control and eaten something…or someone… we shouldn't have, but there were plenty of stories about people who had, and I was pretty sure that not all of them were urban legends.
Discussing Rachel got my beast worked back up, and for a moment it was all I could do to hold onto my shape as a wave of anger and otherworldly energy crashed through me.
"Wow, that was a close one. My beast has always been so protective of Rachel before now. It's always viewed her as being ours in a way that most people wouldn't understand. It's my fault though; my beast is just taking its cue from me."
Ben was still just lying there as silent and motionless as ever, but I could feel his attention, feel that he was listening to me. I knew it was selfish, knew that he'd run away precisely because I'd accidentally addicted him to my touch, but I couldn't help myself. I reached out and took his hand in mine.
"The truth is that I'm not really even pissed about how flakey Rachel has gotten lately. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan, but the thing that really has me so mad at her is the fact that she's calling me on my crap. While I was stuck in that factory, not sure whether or not I was going to make it back to you, she told me that the reason that you and I hadn't ever been able to make it is because we've never put each other first."
My voice started to break, but I cleared my throat and forced myself to go on. If this was part of the price of bringing Ben back to me then I would pay it.
"I've spent the last day or so telling myself that she was wrong, that I couldn't have done anything differently, but the truth is that she is right. I knew that you needed me. You were stuck there in the hospital, going through the worst withdrawal pains you'd ever experienced, and I wasn't there for you. I could have been, but I was scared. I know, right? Big bad Jasmin, scared. I'm not sure that anyone in the pack other than maybe Alec and Dominic would have even believed that was possible."
I'd spent weeks now with tears only a couple of heartbeats away. I'd mostly managed to keep them at bay, but they were even closer to the surface now and a single tear broke free of my right eye and trickled down my face.
"Actually, that's not fair. Rachel probably knew at the time—she just had too much else going on right then to come talk to me about it. It's crazy, but it's the truth, I was scared out of my mind. I was scared of Agony and the rest of the Coun'hij. I could have gone to you, but that would have been a calculated insult to Agony and doing that might have pushed Alec into withdrawing the protection of the pack."
I'd grown up surrounded by Agony's handiwork. Reminders of the extent of his power had been carved into the flesh of all of the adults in my life. Donovan's limp, Andrew being confined to a wheelchair, even Addison had scars from the night when Agony had killed more than half of the pack.
"I had a good reason to be scared of Agony, but the truth was that I was most scared of you. I wanted to be with you so badly, but I was scared of what you'd say to me. You'd worked so hard trying to clean yourself up, and I'd just sucked you into a new addiction, one that was stronger than anything else you'd ever had to fight. I was afraid that you'd reject me like you had so many times before, only this time you'd be rejecting me despite the Ja'tell bond, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to survive that. I didn't want to know that you found me so repulsive that not even the flesh addiction could overcome your dislike of me."
That first tear had been joined by others, but I didn't wipe them away, didn't try to pretend that they weren't there. Ben deserved better than that. He deserved a girl who didn't suppress her feelings like some kind of emotionless cyborg. He deserved a real person, not some battered abuse survivor who barely functioned from day to day.
"I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry that I let you down. I've always let you down, but I'm going to do better now. There isn't any reason for you to believe me, I know that, but I'm going to prove it to you."
I fell asleep in my chair, still holding Ben's hand.
**
I woke in a state of high alert. My muscles were charged with energy and my beast was pacing back and forth at the edge of my mind. It took me a second to figure out what had caused me to wake from the sleep I so desperately needed.
It was quiet, far, far too quiet. I was used to the quiet of the manor house, but it had been built with shape shifters in mind. Even in the older parts of the house, the parts without any kind of modern sound proofing, it was still usually dead silent simply because everyone
's rooms were positioned so that there were empty rooms on either side of us.
The hostel hadn't been that quiet when I'd fallen asleep, but it was nearly as quiet as the manor house now. It was dark outside, but my phone said that it was only a little after midnight.
It was too early for everyone to be asleep, but the only sound I could hear was breathing from the two rooms that were closest to us. I was still trying to figure out what might be the cause of the sudden change when an incredible feeling of lassitude settled over me.
Suddenly I had no desire to get out of my chair, no inclination to deal with whatever danger lurked just outside of our room. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep. It was like alien tendrils of exhaustion had wrapped themselves around my mind and sucked away all of the energy that my brief rest had infused me with.
The human part of me wanted nothing so much as to give in, to follow the insistent demands that I drop back off, but my beast roared to life an instant before I would have closed my eyes again. She recognized the fact that the influence currently working on us was alien. It had bothered me, but it infuriated her.
My beast didn't particularly like the fact that she was subject to me. If I'd been a little less strong-willed, or if I hadn't been part of her in some indefinable way, she would have taken over control a long time ago. She suffered my rule, but she wasn't going to suffer the rule of anyone else, at least not without fighting, not without forcing them to prove that they were dominant to her.
The flare of otherworldly energy from my beast pushed, at least momentarily, the foreign presence out of my mind. I was out of my chair and headed towards the door before my conscious mind had finished the threat assessment that told me that my most likely adversary was a group of vampires.
I paused for the barest moment at the door. Even through the white-hot rage of my beast I knew that I didn't want to leave Ben here alone and undefended, but the only alternative would be to cower inside of our room and wait for them to come murder us.
Even if it had been a smart choice it still wouldn't have been the kind of thing that I could have forced myself to do. I stripped off my clothes in quick, smooth motions and then slipped outside, making sure that I heard the lock click shut behind me.
The narrow hall was lit by nothing more than safety lights as I ghosted down it, my ears questing for some clue as to where the vampires were. I could feel the alien presence lazily pushing against my mind, but the mental intrusion was still a blanket, undirected kind of thing. I knew that I'd be in trouble if the mentalist realized I was awake and coming for them. If he was strong enough to cover an area as big as the hostel and put everyone inside it to sleep then he was strong enough to read my mind in the middle of a fight. If the presence just outside of my mind started to really push it would be a sign that things were just about to go from bad to worse.
I was able to smell them after taking only a few steps forward. The air inside the hostel was too still to guarantee that I was able to scent all of the vampires involved, but it smelled like there were four different vampires in the building. It was sometimes hard to identify different vampires by scent though, the incredible stink of old, rotting blood is generally strong enough to overpower almost everything else about them.
I stepped around a corner and saw the first open door of the night. As I got closer my nose and a set of soft sucking sounds confirmed what I'd suspected. The vampires, at least two of them, were inside and already feeding.
If I was in luck the strongest vampire, the mentalist who had sent everyone into a deep slumber, would be in that room and I would be able to take him by surprise and kill him before he could bring the full wrath of his powers against me. I couldn't remember whether or not vampires were capable of sensing the energy bleed of a shift the way that the moonborn could, so I decided not to take any chances.
I went through the door at something that was very nearly a full run and shifted as I went, exploding into my hybrid shape with a surge of power that preceded me like an angry wave. It was too much, I was moving too fast as I shifted, and I stumbled as I went across the threshold.
I was off balance and in an unfamiliar room. It was a recipe for disaster, but I'd taken the two vampires inside of the room completely by surprise. They managed to get their mouths off of the girls that they'd been feeding on, and one of them even managed to get his sword halfway out of its sheath, but I killed them both within milliseconds of each other.
For several long, painful seconds I stared at the two girls the vampires had been feeding on. They were both white from blood loss, with their eyes rolled back up into their skulls. I wanted to save them, wanted to apply direct pressure on the holes in their wrists, but I forced myself to turn away.
They were as good as dead and I couldn't afford to stay in one place. The drowsy pressure behind my eyes hadn't gone away. There were other vampires in the hostel and if I didn't keep moving, didn't keep hunting, then I had no chance of surviving. The two girls had been dead the moment the vampires had walked into their room, it was just going to take a few more minutes for nature to run its course.
I didn't bother shifting back down to human form as I stepped out of the room. My choice was little more than habit. My hybrid shape was the most deadly form available to me and shifting back and forth between forms wouldn't make me any safer, it would just risk a debilitating set of muscle spasms in the middle of the fight.
It hadn't been by design, but the fact that I was still wearing my hulking hybrid body as I took my first step down the hall was the only thing that saved me when the mentalist realized something was wrong and brought his full strength to bear against me. Frozen daggers of ice stabbed into my temples as the vampire pried at my mind in an effort to find out who and where I was.
If I'd been in my human shape he would have succeeded, but in my hybrid shape my beast was closer to the surface of my mind. She had more leeway in this shape because a small but definite portion of my human reason was sublimated to her savage instincts. This was a new arena, one that she wasn't used to fighting in, but she was ready and willing to fight anywhere and at any time.
The shards of ice trying to pillage my memories melted away when faced with the heat of her anger. I could still feel the vampire's mental fingers trying to pierce my mind, peeling back the outer layers of my psyche, but my beast met every attack with biting, spitting defiance, and for now she seemed to be holding her own.
I took two more steps down the hall and a tremor of something very much like fear ran through me. The artificial exhaustion hadn't gone anywhere, I'd only thought I was facing the mentalist's full powers. I'd been wrong—he was still making sure that the other residents of the hostel wouldn't wake up and cause him and his companions any problems.
I heard hushed voices up ahead.
"…no, we haven't heard anything…a presence? Can't you be more specific than that? Peters isn't answering his phone? Bollocks, that means it's got to be nearby. We'll finish up here in a second and then go hunting."
This time there were three of them. I could hear them moving around inside of the suite just ahead of me. This one was designed to sleep four, and I already knew that all four of the kids who'd been sleeping there were dead or dying. The vampire wouldn't have been on the phone otherwise.
I crept forward, desperately hoping that vampire hearing was human dull. I made it almost all of the way to their door before the pacing steps moved towards me.
The first vampire came out of the door with a pair of long knives in his hands, but I grabbed him before he'd made it far enough into the hall to realize that I was right there next to him. My right hand grabbed hold of his wrist, controlling the closest weapon, and then I punched the claws on my left hand into his chest.
He was a big man, he probably weighed nearly two hundred and twenty pounds, but that was nothing to my massive hybrid muscles. I picked him up, using his body as a shield, and charged into the room.
A woman had been only a few feet behin
d him, but I hit her hard enough to knock her over and then threw the first vampire at the one who was just now returning his phone to his jacket pocket. The female tried to get back on her feet, tried to get her sword into play, but I stepped on her sword hand and then sank the talons on my other foot into her stomach.
A casual flick of my wrist across her throat ended the threat she represented and then I was fully inside of the room and facing my first prepared opponent, a vampire who was old enough that his telekinetic power had been sufficient to knock aside the body that I'd just thrown at him.
He had a sword out, a long, straight duelist's weapon, and he'd obviously had plenty of years in which to learn how to use it. He almost got me on the first pass despite my best efforts. I wasn't used to dealing with a stabbing weapon. Hybrid combat was all about slashing attacks, and this was something entirely different.
His weapon darted forward, aimed at my chest, but when I went to slap the blade away with my claws I instead found that my arm had been encased by some kind of invisible force. It was as though I had two hundred pounds of weight dragging at the appendage. I was strong enough still to move against that kind of force, but even a hybrid as big as me couldn't move that kind of weight and still be quick enough to block the lightning-fast strike of the vampire's sword.
I knew my original plan was futile, so I simply stepped to the side. His telekinetic gift pushed at me, trying to stop me from moving, but a mere force of a few hundred pounds wasn't enough to even slow my bulk by very much. I didn't move enough to avoid the strike completely, but I'd known that I wouldn't be able to, so I hadn't even tried.
His sword entered my chest three inches to the left of where my heart would have been if hybrids kept their hearts in the same place as humans did. It hurt with the dull almost-pain of a hybrid's nervous system, a nervous system designed to transmit information without allowing pain to stop us from doing what needed to be done. It hurt, but not enough to stop me from stepping into the blow and shoving the claws on the end of my left hand into his chest.
