Driven

by Dean Murray

  They needed the location of the Coun'hij soon and this seemed like the only way to get what they needed.

  Ben started twitching and Geoffrey turned back to check on him. It didn't happen often, but sometimes Ben had to be physically restrained to make sure that he wouldn't pull his IV out. A few strands of thought reflexively slipped free of Geoffrey's skull, but he pulled them back before they could make contact with Ben.

  He wanted to help Ben and Jasmin out, but it was just too dangerous right now. More and more he was coming to believe that Jasmin was who she said she was, but that didn't necessarily mean that Ben was who she thought he was.

  There was no telling what kind of changes had been made to his mind. Even Rachel seemed to think that the kill switch that other vampire had implanted was nothing more than a construct designed to end Ben's life, but just because that was what they thought was going on didn't mean they were right.

  The more Geoffrey thought about it, the surer he became that there was more going on than just a simple kill switch. Any vampire who was strong enough to implant a kill switch was going to be skilled enough to make it work like intended and Venice hadn't ever told Geoffrey any stories about lethal kill switches that took more than a few hours to complete their work. Ben, on the other hand, had been stuck in this coma for weeks if Jasmin was to be believed.

  It was very much starting to look to Geoffrey like Ben was a metaphysical Trojan horse. If his suspicions were correct, then touching Ben's mind with his own would result in Geoffrey being sucked into a living trap that would slowly tear Geoffrey's mind free of his own physical body.

  It wouldn't be an easy death, but Geoffrey still fully intended on living up to his promise. If Jasmin and Rachel were able to take him to Melody and help him free her then he'd do whatever he could to help Ben. It might cost him his life, but once Melody was rescued that hardly mattered.

  The angle was all wrong, but Geoffrey was strong and Ben's illness had left him incredibly weak. Geoffrey gently took each of Ben's wrists in his hands and stopped Ben from thrashing around. The twitching never seemed to last very long and this time it was over almost as soon as Geoffrey touched the cool skin of Ben's arms.

  Once he was sure that Ben was calm again, Geoffrey released him and checked the IV bag hanging from the grab handle mounted above the passenger door. It was their last bag, and Jasmin had become increasingly distracted as her texts to someone named Donovan had gone unanswered. Apparently Donovan was her best chance at sourcing another supplier for everything needed to keep Ben's fragile body from shutting down completely.

  Twenty minutes earlier Rachel had texted an address, a name and a passphrase to Jasmin's phone. The address had led them to this medical supply store and presumably someone willing to bend the rules enough to get Jasmin everything she needed.

  It would be good to know that Ben wasn't in imminent danger of starving to death, and not just to eliminate a distraction that Jasmin didn't need as she prepared to fight multiple bouts to the death. Geoffrey would rest easier too knowing that Ben was taken care of, but medical supplies, especially black-market medical supplies, didn't come cheap, and Jasmin was already getting evasive about how much cash she had left.

  The cash that Geoffrey had saved up before his capture had all disappeared sometime before he'd woken up in his cage, so once Jasmin was out, they were all out. It was one more thing to worry about. Geoffrey supposed that they could always steal or con someone out of cash if things got bad enough. He didn't like the idea of preying on innocents like that, but he also wasn't going to let a few hundred dollars in gas money stop him from rescuing Melody.

  Geoffrey looked to his left once again, past the empty driver's seat, but while he could see through the windows of the medical supply store he couldn't see Jasmin or the clerk she'd been talking to. Geoffrey knew he was being paranoid, but he also knew that in their line of work that wasn't a bad thing. He was just about ready to send out mental probes when a knock on his window made him jump.

  A casual gesture confirmed the presence of the knife he'd pulled off of one of the dead guards back in the facility where Imastious had caged him. Reassured that he was as ready as he could be in case the situation became hostile, Geoffrey lowered his window a couple of inches.

  The young man standing next to the car looked like he was in his early twenties. He had a shaved head and skin that was as dark as any Geoffrey had ever seen, but there was something subtly different to his facial features that made it seem like he didn't fit in with any ethnic group Geoffrey could name.

  "Hey, man, can you help a guy out?"

  Geoffrey shook his head. "Sorry, I wish I could, but I'm tapped out myself. I got robbed a couple of days ago."

  The panhandler didn't look convinced. "You really think people are going to believe that when you're sitting in that kind of a ride?"

  Geoffrey looked at the luxurious leather interior of the Mercedes and then shrugged. "It's not my car, I'm just along for the ride. Besides, it doesn't really matter if you believe me. It's the truth."

  "Might be you could cough up a twenty if it meant that your friend's ride wasn't going to be wrecked."

  "Don't threaten me."

  "Why, what are you going to do? Kill me?"

  The words could have been nothing more than idle talk, but there was something about the way that they'd been said. Geoffrey's internal alarms all went off at once. Being stuck inside of a car was enough of a disadvantage when dealing with some punk kid, it was an unacceptable position to be in if he was up against someone who knew what they were doing, a real killer.

  Geoffrey grabbed the door handle, intending on opening the door hard enough to knock the panhandler off of his feet, but there was an odd, half-imagined flare of light like an arc welder and the car shook slightly. When Geoffrey pushed against the car door nothing happened, it was like pushing against solid stone.

  "We're not done talking yet."

  The expression on the other man's face hadn't changed and Geoffrey suddenly realized that it was the kind of expression that could take on almost any meaning the viewer wanted to see in it.

  "Who are you?"

  Geoffrey's question earned him a frown of disappointment. "That's the wrong question. You should be asking who you are, Geoffrey."

  "I already know who I am."

  "Do you? Do you really? Has the hunger started up again yet? Have you started looking at the boy behind you with an eye to how much blood he could spare yet?"

  "How do you know that? How do you know what I am?"

  The words were meant to serve simply as a distraction. Geoffrey had already extended his mental feelers. He got a single probe into the surface of the other man's mind and accessed a kaleidoscope of images in the split second before his probes were all sheared away by crackling whips of power.

  Geoffrey was still trying to process what he'd seen, it was little more than impressions of a bright light and beings that seemed made out of glowing crystal. The other man shook his head at him before Geoffrey could ask another question.

  "So you invade the minds of those around you? Don't you think that's wrong?"

  "I see nothing wrong with defending myself. There's obviously more to you than meets the eye and you're holding me inside of my friend's car against my will."

  "I suppose there is some validity to that argument, but you spend more time inside of people's minds than just when you're threatened. You've made it practically a way of life, haven't you?"

  "I won't be judged by you. You have no idea what I've been through."

  "That's the thing about principles, Geoffrey. They exist independent from our circumstances. When was the last time you fed?"

  There was something about the question that compelled Geoffrey to answer. "It was just before I was recaptured."

  "Tell me about it, did you kill whoever it was?"

  "No, it was a girl, her boyfriend was an addict and I told her that I'd cure him in return for her letting me feed on
her. I took just enough to beat back the hunger and then I released her."

  "How did that feel?"

  "It was amazing. It's been a long time since I've taken blood from someone without providing some kind of value in return, but that was the first time that someone gave blood to me voluntarily."

  "Was it? What about Melody?"

  "How do you know about Melody?"

  The man shook his head. "That's not for you to know right now. I find you worthy of life, but alas, you aren't the one who will be waking those who sleep."

  Geoffrey opened his mouth to ask what that meant, but at that second Jasmin's phone started ringing. Geoffrey looked towards the phone in an involuntary gesture and when he looked back out the window the man was gone.

  The car door opened without any problems, but getting out of the car and looking around didn't make any difference, there still wasn't any evidence of the panhandler. Geoffrey reached back inside of the car and picked up Jasmin's phone as he sent probes back out in an effort to try and locate the man.

  "Hello, Jasmin's phone."

  "Geoffrey, is that you? It's Rachel."

  "Yeah, it's me. What do you want?"

  "Are you okay? Is Jasmin okay?"

  Geoffrey stretched his probes out as far as he could. He could feel Jasmin and the clerk both, and a light brush against the surface of the clerk's mind seemed to indicate that Jasmin wasn't in any kind of danger, but there wasn't any sign of the man who'd imprisoned him inside of the car.

  "Yeah, we're all okay, Ben too."

  "What just happened?"

  "What do you mean? I thought you could see the future."

  "I can, just not all of it, you jerk. What just happened? One minute I could see all of you and then all of a sudden you were gone."

  "Interesting."

  Rachel tried to press for more information, but Geoffrey hung up on her. It appeared that there was more going on here than even Rachel knew about.

  Chapter 11

  Jasmin Bianchi

  Sleep Deep Hotel

  Duluth, Minnesota

  Things felt more than a little weird when I got back to the car. Geoffrey handed me my phone without saying anything, but when I checked the call history the only activity was an inbound call from Rachel.

  I stacked most of the supplies in the back seat next to Ben and then put the rest of everything in the trunk and climbed back into the car. Just before I turned the key in the ignition I got a text from Rachel's number.

  Find out what just happened with Geoffrey!

  I looked over at Geoffrey and he met my eyes with a stubbornness that dared me to ask him what had happened, but I decided that I didn't want to get into a pissing match with him inside such a tiny space while I was trying to drive. I promised myself that I would try and get it out of him later, but by the time we made it up to a small town in Minnesota called Marshall I was too tired to play conversational chicken with him.

  Paying for two hotel rooms used up the very last of my cash, but I wasn't going to spend the night in the same room as Geoffrey, not if I could avoid it. I told myself that I would deal with my lack of funds later, but I knew that was just a lie. I didn't have any way to replenish them, not without help from Alec, and he still hadn't returned my last call.

  Ben had a restless night. I heard him moving around in the darkness. Even after I strapped his arms down to the bed so he wouldn't pull out his IV, he still twitched and even occasionally moaned. I sat there listening to him for nearly an hour before I broke down and started crying.

  I didn't cry very often. Crying was a sign of weakness and I wasn't weak, at least that was what I'd been telling myself for years. It turned out that crying couldn't make me weak though because I was already weak. I'd been operating on borrowed time in almost every way for days now.

  I was out of cash, I had a vampire sleeping less than a dozen feet away from me, and every time I pulled Ben out of the car I risked someone realizing that he wasn't just drunk and calling the cops on me. Alec's people had mostly managed to keep the Coun'hij off of my tail, but he wouldn't be able to stop the police from swarming all over me if they got involved.

  Nothing but sheer dumb luck and Rachel's behind-the-scenes machinations had kept me in one piece so far, and even they had only let me scrape by a couple of times. There wasn't any possible way for me to fight an entire pack one at a time and survive the experience. I'd come to the end of the road. I didn't want to die, but I couldn't see any other route that had even the slightest possibility of letting me save Ben.

  I cried myself to sleep and when I woke back up a few hours later things weren't any rosier, but I was once again ready to do what needed to be done. I pulled myself out of bed, checked on Ben, and then jumped in the shower.

  I was down to one change of clothes, the black boots that Geoffrey had looted for me, and a single pair of sneakers. Flash shifts were always hard on clothes, and the subsequent fight was usually pretty rough on the ha'bit we happened to be wearing at the time.

  I pulled out all three of my ha'bits, but none of them were in very good shape, so I bit the bullet and got out the black needle and thread that Donovan had packed in the bug-out bag he'd prepared for each member of the pack. I stitched up the worst of the tears on the ha'bit that had seen the least amount of use, and then hand-washed it and one set of clothes in the bathroom sink. I figured I had another couple of hours at least before Geoffrey would wake up. Unlike shape shifters, who only needed three or four hours of sleep each night, vampires seemed to need just as much sleep as normal humans.

  There wasn't anything I could do physically to prepare myself for the fight I knew was coming. There were some energy bars still left in the bug-out bag, enough for a modest breakfast for Geoffrey and me, but beyond that I was as strong or fast as I was going to get.

  There was however one thing I could do, and that was to prepare mentally. I was still just wearing a towel while I waited for my clothes to dry, so I didn't particularly feel like yoga. Besides, I'd never been into yoga enough to get into the mental and spiritual aspects of it anyways.

  Instead I knelt down on the floor next to my bed and focused on my breathing. My old instructor always said that the inside followed the outside and the outside followed the inside. I controlled my breathing, forced it to be calm and steady, and as the minutes slowly passed my mind and emotions did start to mirror my breathing.

  Even my beast became less restless and at one point my body, and even the world around me, dropped away. It wasn't enlightenment like the eastern disciplines preached, but it was something better than I'd ever experienced before and it left me feeling like a still pool. Emotions and thoughts were both distant, quiet things, but eventually I felt ready to be done. I opened my eyes feeling like a different person.

  I couldn't remember for sure when I'd started meditating, but it didn't really matter how long I'd been at it, it had taken as long as it needed to take and I was ready to do what needed done. My hair was mostly dry, which was perfect because that meant it hadn't 'set' yet. I still had a few minutes in which it would more or less do what I wanted it to, so I combed it out and then pulled it back so that it would be out of my face.

  My clothes weren't quite dry yet so I grabbed the hotel hair dryer and used it to dry everything out enough that I wouldn't freeze once I stepped outside. I was just about ready to leave my room when my phone rang.

  "Is that you, Rach?"

  "Yeah, how are you feeling, Jasmin?"

  For a second the words didn't have any meaning to me. Identifying my feelings required separating myself from them in some way that I'd never noticed. I would have rather continued walking around without having to put that kind of distance between them and me, but it was too late. Rachel had asked the question and something inside of me had been only too happy to tear me in two so that I could answer her.

  "I feel better. I meditated for a few minutes earlier and I'm okay. I'll do my best and just have to hope that will be good
enough."

  Rachel was silent for a few seconds while she processed what I'd just said. "You haven't meditated for a really long time, Jasmin."

  "I know. I guess things were just so bad that I had to do something."

  "I didn't expect that."

  For some reason that struck me as being funny. "I thought you saw everything that was important. I guess that means this wasn't important."

  Rachel cleared her throat. "I thought I saw everything that was important, but I didn't see this and it was important. You, Ben, Geoffrey, you all disappeared from my sight yesterday just before I called and talked to him. You only just barely became clear enough that I could really see you again."

  A few hours earlier that would have been enough to send me back into tears, but it was curiously unimportant to me now.

  "Is there still a course that you can send me down that results in Ben surviving all of this?"

  "Yes, I mean I think so. The original route forward is still there and it still seems to lead to Ben's survival, but it's different. I can't really explain it though, it's like trying to explain the color orange to a blind person. It's like the world just shifted, like it was just hit by a giant meteor and everything moved from the impact, only some things moved more than others and some of the pieces still haven't settled back down yet."

  "I guess just call and tell me if things change and there's no longer any point with going forward. In the meantime I've got a protein bar waiting for me."

  "Wait, Jas, I can help with that. I'm going to text you a bank and an account number. Send Geoffrey there and they'll let him withdraw pretty much any amount you guys need. You should at least have a good breakfast before you go into a fight like this."

  "Thanks, Rach, I appreciate that. Any words of advice before I face off with Branson and the others?"

  Rachel was silent for so long that I thought for a moment that she'd hung up on me again.