Driven

by Dean Murray

  "Why would I do that?"

  "Because Melody isn't dead, and I know where to find her. If you do exactly as I say then I'll tell you where she is. If you let Jasmin die then you'll never see Melody again."

  Geoffrey's throat had gone dry between one heartbeat and the next. It took real effort to force words past a tongue that didn't seem to work quite right anymore.

  "You're bluffing. The fact that you even know Melody's name just means that you're working for Imastious. He's the only one who has had a chance to skim off those memories. I should kill Jasmin right now just to spite you and him both."

  Jasmin bristled and raised her sword as though she was going to make him regret that particular threat, but something made her think better of that course of action.

  "I'm not working for Imastious, Geoffrey. In fact, I hate him almost as much as you do. The only difference is that you hate him for his past while I hate him for his future."

  "What does that even mean?"

  There was silence on the other end of the line for several seconds and then Rachel sighed. "It means that when the time comes I'm going to help you and Jasmin kill him, but I'm the one who decides when that happens, not you."

  "All I've heard so far is a lot of pretty words. You still haven't given me anything solid enough to make me think this is anything more than just an especially convoluted plot on Imastious' part."

  "It's true, when your worst enemy has raped your mind, stealing everything you know, it makes it hard for me to prove myself to you with anything you know, so I'm going to give you your proof in the form of something you don't know."

  Geoffrey opened his mouth to tell her she was an idiot, but she talked right over top of him.

  "Lucy. That's the name of the girl that Melody reminded you of, the name of the girl from your past life, from the time before you lost your memory."

  "That doesn't prove anything. I worked for Imastious before I lost my memories, he would have known that too."

  "You're not denying that the name is right though, are you? Even though you didn't know that fact before I said it? It feels right, doesn't it?"

  Geoffrey swallowed a couple of times. "Yes, it feels right."

  "Then it will also feel right when I tell you that Lucy was so important to you that you would have done everything possible to protect her. Imastious didn't know about her before you lost your memories."

  "How could you know that unless you were working for Imastious?"

  "The same way that I know where Melody is right now. I see things, Geoffrey. Things that you need to know even if you aren't ready for them yet."

  Geoffrey knew that he was going out of his way now to find reasons to believe Rachel. It was a dangerous thing to be doing, but he couldn't seem to stop himself. He turned to Jasmin. "You know Rachel? She's not a vampire?"

  Jasmin had her left arm tight against her side, trying very hard to stem the flow of blood from her side.

  "Yes, I know Rachel and no, she isn't a vampire."

  He turned back to the phone.

  "I believe her. She hates my kind too much to be knowingly working with a vampire, but you could be working for Imastious or another Elder and not even realize it."

  Rachel's laugh was like the first ray of sunlight cutting through the clouds after a storm. "Someday you're going to understand how funny that statement was. I'm not working for any vampire."

  "But you're working for someone."

  "A few days ago I would have said no, but now I'm not so sure."

  Something about the way she'd responded sent chills working their way up and down Geoffrey's spine, but she didn't give him a chance to say anything else.

  "We're out of time, Geoffrey. Hand me back to Jasmin and don't forget to check her phone for that address. She'll have a first aid kit at the hotel."

  "I haven't agreed to help you."

  "Maybe not, but you will, it's only a matter of time. You aren't going to be able to pass up a chance to see Melody again."

  Jasmin took the phone out of his hand and put it on speaker. "You should have just had him put it on speaker, Rach. I don't particularly like being within arm's reach of him."

  "It doesn't matter very much either way, Jasmin. You could hear both sides of the conversation no matter what he did, which you just revealed by taking the phone rather than waiting for him to give it to you."

  Jasmin swore. "I guess you're right. Sitting here doing nothing while I bleed to death must have made me testy."

  "Shift back to your hybrid form, Jasmin. You're going to need the extra strength to move that bookcase off of the door. While you're at it cut that storage thingy in half—you only need half of the drives to make it so they can't reconstruct the data—and then cut through the chain between Geoffrey's wrists, he's going to need both hands if he's going to get you and the storage device back to the hotel."

  "It's too late for all of that, Rach. I won't last another fifteen minutes. You should have told me that I wasn't going to survive this one."

  For the first time, Geoffrey could hear worry in Rachel's voice. "It's not too late! Change now. The shift will heal your side some more and give Geoffrey time to get you back to the hotel."

  "That doesn't always work, Rach, and you know it. One shift, yes, but two shifts doesn't necessarily heal any more than the one, sometime it makes things worse."

  "It's going to work, Jasmin. The question of whether or not you're going to survive boils down to this choice. If you shift you'll make it. If not you are going to die and Ben will die with you. If you die you'll just be proving that you're too weak to deserve him."

  Geoffrey would have said that Jasmin was too far gone for anything to get her to move. She'd grounded the tip of the sword and she was slumped back so that she was leaning against a desk and the wall behind it.

  She looked like she was only seconds away from collapsing, but Rachel's words had kindled some kind of fire inside of her. She looked up at Geoffrey and her eyes had changed somehow. They were harder and the gorgeous blue he remembered from a few seconds before had turned to the cold blue of glacier ice.

  Between one instant and the next she shifted forms, the slender, trim frame of a young woman exploding out into the massive monster that he'd first thought was a werewolf. Jasmin moved towards him with the kind of speed and power that had given the werewolves a special place in his nightmares, and for a second he thought she was going to kill him.

  It would have been in keeping with the angry hatred she'd displayed so far towards him, but the flashing claws parted the chains between his handcuffs instead of dismembering him and then she was moving past him, shouldering the heavy steel bookcase to one side. Jasmin turned back towards the storage device he'd packed all of the way from the surveillance room and then sheared through it like it was no more than butter.

  Jasmin looked back at him and even opened her mouth as though to say something else and only then did Geoffrey see the bright trail of blood that she was leaving behind. Rachel had been wrong, the bleeding had gotten worse rather than healing. Jasmin managed a single step toward him and then collapsed at his feet.

  Chapter 8

  Jasmin Bianchi

  Pinnacle Luxury Hotel

  Manhattan, New York

  I hadn't expected to regain consciousness, so when I opened my eyes all of the other smaller shocks faded away underneath the sheer astonishment at having survived. I was back in the hotel room with Ben, who looked like he had lost three more pounds that he couldn't afford to lose while I'd been asleep.

  My ha'bit had been cut away from my side and bore the expected white second-skin of gauze and tape. I gingerly pulled the tape up and probed the pink scar that was all that remained of the wound that had nearly killed me. A quick survey of the rest of my body indicated that everything else was healed as well so I tried to roll out of the huge bed I'd been sharing with Ben.

  I stood too quickly and nearly fell. I'd expected to be light-headed after losing so much blood
, but I was even less stable than I'd anticipated. I made a grab for the bed, but I was too far away and my legs didn't seem to want to work. I managed to get them to work for short bursts, but not at the same time. It wasn't pretty, but it was enough. I dropped down onto the thick cream carpet in a semi-controlled rush that was only slightly slowed by my erratically functioning legs.

  Once I was on the floor I wanted nothing so badly as to just close my eyes and stay there, but I forced myself up onto all fours and slowly made my way over to the closest chair. I was resting against it in an effort to gather enough strength to try and stand again when I heard movement outside the bedroom door. A second later Geoffrey opened the door.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Well, it looks like Rachel was right and you decided against killing me in my sleep, so I guess I've been worse."

  Geoffrey didn't respond for several seconds and I suddenly realized just how little his face gave away. He'd been less guarded right after I'd freed him, like the shock of no longer being a prisoner had caused him to lower some internal veil, but if so it was back up now.

  I took a moment to more fully examine him now that I wasn't moments away from bleeding out. Geoffrey was slender in the way that a marathoner was slender. He wasn't bulky, but there wasn't any wasted weight on him anywhere. He was only a little more than average height, maybe an inch under six feet, and he had piercing brown eyes and short, straight brunette hair. I got the feeling that his face could be wonderfully expressive under the right circumstances, but right now it was an expressionless mask.

  "You're probably hungry, Jasmin. I left a sports drink on the table for you. There is leftover Chinese takeout in the fridge, but the sports drink will get calories into your system as fast as possible. While you are finishing it I'll go get the leftovers warmed up."

  I'd forced myself to my feet as soon as I'd seen him, not because it had been the smart thing to do, but because some primitive instinct refused to let him see me like that. He'd already seen me as vulnerable as I could possibly get and hadn't acted on my weakness, but it still went against the grain to let him see just how little strength I had right now. It was always possible for him to change his mind when it came to working with me.

  There was no telling what combinations of factors would trigger an attack so I simply had to take care of as many as I could. Control what you can control and try not to worry too hard about everything else. I practically sounded like Alec now.

  The dizziness was back full force now that I was standing up, but my death grip on the table kept me from falling down and once he turned away from me I lowered myself down into the closest chair. I popped open the sports drink and took a sip. It was lukewarm and sweeter than I normally liked, but after that first taste I couldn't stop myself from sucking the whole thing down in seconds.

  He'd been right, I'd needed that even more than I'd realized. I sat there for a couple of seconds until the tiny microwave in the main room beeped and then levered myself back up onto my feet and made my unsteady way across the soft brown carpet to the bedroom door.

  "I would have brought it in to you."

  I shook my head as I gently pulled the bedroom door shut behind me. I still wasn't up to any kind of fight, but some combination of the sports drink or simply just being awake for a few more minutes was doing the trick and I could at least walk without falling over.

  "No, it's fine, I need to be up and about. Besides, I'd rather not disturb Ben any more than we have to. How long have I been out?"

  "About a day and a half. You're just about out of full IV bags. I used one for you when we first got back here and then have been hanging a new one for Ben every few hours."

  I sat down, picked up a fork and started in on the leftovers. We probably would have just sat there in silence for the next hour if my phone hadn't started ringing. I didn't recognize the number, but these days that usually meant it was Rachel calling.

  I answered it and then stuck it on speaker phone when she started talking.

  "I'm glad the two of you made it back to the hotel safely without any more problems, and that you're up and walking around now, Jasmin."

  Geoffrey cut in before I could respond. "You promised to tell me how to find Melody. Where is she?"

  I shook my head. "No way, you help Ben and then she'll tell you that."

  "What's wrong with him?"

  "Do you really expect me to believe that you didn't already ransack both of our minds?"

  The words jumped out of my mouth of their own accord. I knew I shouldn't be provoking him, but I couldn't help myself. A couple of seconds passed in silence before I realized that my beast was leaning against the bars of her metaphysical cage. She didn't like Geoffrey and that was bleeding into my feelings, reinforcing my own natural dislike of him.

  Geoffrey looked uncomfortable, not like someone caught in a lie exactly, but like someone who was doing something that they weren't sure was in their best interest. "Believe what you will, I haven't scanned either of you. Why don't you give me the benefit of the doubt and just explain what is going on since you're so desperate to have me help you."

  "I'm not desperate."

  "Fine, let's just sit here for the next few days then. I'm sure that Ben will get stronger rather than weaker while we wait."

  Rachel sighed. "Ben was working for a vampire here in New York a little while ago. Once he realized who he was working for he tried to get away but they locked him up. Jasmin and another of our friends broke in and got him out, but he freaked out as soon as they left and Jasmin had to knock him unconscious in order to get him away."

  "He never woke up after that, did he?"

  My mouth had gone dry. "No, he didn't. How did you know that?"

  "It's called a kill switch. The really powerful, really old mentalists implant them in their people as a way of stopping them from running away. Usually they aren't actual kill commands. Mostly they are designed to make it easy for their master to track them down, preprogrammed behaviors and ways of thinking that seem innocuous, but which lead them right back into captivity."

  "Usually?"

  "Sometimes the person in question is too valuable or dangerous to be permitted to fall into someone else's hands. In those cases they'll program the kill switch to literally kill them. Sometimes their hearts will stop working, other times they kill themselves for no apparent reason, but usually they just go to sleep and never wake back up."

  "Like what's happening to Ben."

  "Yeah, like what's happening to Ben."

  The room wobbled around me, but my grip on the table with my left hand kept me from falling out of my chair. I had to be strong, for Ben's sake if for no other reason.

  "Can it be reversed?"

  Geoffrey shrugged. It was an unconcerned gesture, but I got the feeling that he was trying to give off that impression.

  "Not by the person they are implanted in. Usually a full-on kill switch takes effect so quickly that there isn't any chance for anyone to intervene. It's not like there's a ton of really powerful mentalists running around, and sometimes a kill switch isn't really a kill switch, it's a trap designed to incapacitate or kill any vampire who tries to mess around inside of the victim's mind."

  "Can it be reversed?"

  I didn't have to try to put a hint of steel into my voice. All I needed to do was stop trying quite so hard to be civil to the bloodsucker sitting across from me. My voice going cold and distant was just the natural result of how I really felt about him.

  Geoffrey looked back at me and something behind his eyes told me he wasn't the kind of person I should be pushing right now. "I don't know. I've never seen it done, at least not that I remember, but there have been whispers, legends really, of people managing it."

  "Fine, then fix him. Once you're done Rachel will tell you where this Melody chick is and we can all go our separate ways."

  Geoffrey shook his head. "No, we do this my way or we don't do it at all. We go get Melody and then I'll go inside of B
en's mind and reverse the damage that was done to him."

  A white-hot torrent of anger broke free from my beast and it was all I could do to stop myself from transforming.

  "No, I don't trust you."

  "You don't have a choice."

  His response only fanned the fires inside of me even higher. I could tell that my eyes had changed already and I'd picked up the fine tremble that indicated that I was starting to lose my battle to retain this shape.

  "You'll never see Melody again."

  "Maybe, but I don't think so. It's possible that Melody is really still alive and that my inaction will result in her dying, but it's also possible that this is all just some kind of farce designed to convince me to dive into Ben's mind. I'm willing to bet on the fact that you care more about Ben, about the prospect of having to watch him die than I care about the slight possibility that you and Rachel aren't lying to me."

  "I'll kill you myself!"

  Geoffrey stepped back away from the table and I suddenly noticed the hilt of his sword. It had been mostly hidden by the trench coat he was wearing, or I would have seen it sooner. My beast wanted me to kill him now before he could stick that sword into us one night while we were sleeping. She wasn't convinced that he could help Ben, but even if he could, she believed in self-preservation above all else.

  Rachel's voice sliced through the rising tension like it was nothing more than a mirage. "Both of you sit back down. Killing each other won't accomplish anything for any of us."

  I looked down and realized she was right, somewhere along the way I'd stood, knocking my chair over.

  Truth be told, I was actually relieved that Rachel was stepping in to defuse the situation. I was pretty sure I could take Geoffrey under normal circumstances, but I was still weak and wobbly from my injuries. As things currently stood, he would probably cut me down without even working up a sweat.

  "I'm listening, Rach. What's your compromise?"

  There was another long pause before Rachel responded. "You're going to have to take this on faith, Jasmin. I've seen enough to know that Geoffrey isn't going to betray you. You're no less honorable than he is, but my vouching for you doesn't carry any weight with him."