Driven

by Dean Murray

  Geoffrey arrived at the door, katana in hand, ready to fight, but the enforcers didn't particularly seem worried. There were three of them, and they'd all shifted to hybrid form and stood in a loose triangle a few feet away from the plane as Jasmin and the wolves slowly collapsed inwards.

  "Geoffrey, we need to break them up, as long as they hold together we're at a disadvantage because the wolves can't come at them from multiple directions."

  Jasmin's yell told him everything he needed to know. Geoffrey started worming tendrils into the mind of the closest hybrid, but he immediately ran into resistance from the man's beast which seemed stronger and more aggressive than Jorge's had been.

  One of the hybrids swore when he got his first sniff of Geoffrey. "Really? I never would have thought that even Stekensbridge would stoop to working with vampires."

  "Stekensbridge is dead, I killed him and Branson too. Actually I'm starting to feel a little jittery from not having killed anyone in the last twenty-four hours. It's a good thing you boys decided to take the bait and fly into town."

  Jasmin's voice didn't sound jittery, it sounded malevolent in a way that Geoffrey hadn't heard out of her before. He didn't have the advantage of being able to hear her heartbeat or smell her perspiring, and he was too occupied with the battle inside his hybrid's mind to send a tendril her direction, but he was pretty sure that she wasn't bluffing.

  "That's too bad about Stekensbridge and Branson, but it does make things easier. We were going to raze your little pack to the ground no matter what once you ambushed us, but the fact that you killed them and are working with a vampire means that I won't have to explain myself to Puppeteer or any of the others."

  Three of Geoffrey's probes were ripped away, stealing a little of the energy he knew he was going to need later, but he had two more probes that he'd done a better job of camouflaging and the hybrid's beast hadn't managed to find them yet. Geoffrey fed more power into those two, growing them and sinking tendrils into more and more of the hybrid's mind even as he sent more tendrils, these less cleverly disguised, to serve as a distraction.

  Jasmin darted forward, slashing at the hybrid closest to her, but the attack was mostly a feint designed to draw him out of position and he didn't take it. One corner of Geoffrey's mind realized that this could very easily become a standoff unless he or Jasmin were able to make something happen.

  The wolves were milling around in the near darkness, just outside of striking range of the hybrids, but Jasmin was right, none of them could go up against a hybrid by themselves. A bolder set of wolves might have still been able to create openings of their own, but not these.

  One of the hybrids laughed, no doubt having come to the same conclusion that they were three lions cornered by half a dozen kittens, and then suddenly the hybrids exploded into motion. It was obvious that these three particular enforcers had worked together before, they supported each other too well for their actions to be a coincidence.

  One of the hybrids managed a long, raking slash across the side of one of the Duluth wolves and when two other wolves tried to get in close enough to retaliate they found that the opening they thought they'd seen had evaporated almost instantly as the hybrid's companions had stepped into the gap.

  Jasmin took advantage of the shuffle as the hybrids repositioned to rip a chunk out of her opponent's arm, which caused her opponent to advance towards her in an effort to bring her to bay. Each movement by any of the hybrids required covering movements by the other two which tended to create tiny, transient openings which the wolves did their best to exploit, but they weren't being very successful.

  One of Geoffrey's probes expanded into a new section of his hybrid's mind and was shredded like it had just encountered a buzz saw. It took a second for him to realize that he'd just impinged onto the beast's home turf. The beast was going through the individual threads of Geoffrey's probe with remarkable speed, but there were a lot of threads.

  Having the threads ripped away so quickly caused Geoffrey a level of pain that was only a shade away from a migraine, but he forced himself to work through the pain and took advantage of the beast's preoccupation to seed half a dozen new, heavily-camouflaged mental tendrils into the hybrid's mind. Instead of trying to expand back into the same area that had just wakened the beast that was so busy tearing through his work, Geoffrey instead focused on increasing the number of threads in the safe area.

  The Duluth wolves were fully engaged now. The hybrids having attacked had pushed the more numerous wolves into defending themselves, but for all the motion and fury of the wolves' attack, they weren't actually doing much damage to the hybrids.

  Geoffrey had been moving along with the flow of battle, keeping himself just outside of range, but now that his penetration of the hybrid's mind was nearly complete he moved in and slashed at his hybrid. Geoffrey knew what his opponent was thinking as soon as the other man's thoughts occurred, but it wasn't helping as much as it should have.

  In a normal fight most of what happened was nothing more than reflexive movements, things that happened without conscious thought on the part of either of the combatants. Even so, Geoffrey usually was able to tap into enough of the ripples of thought to anticipate someone's actions.

  Defensive actions were the hardest because they had the least amount of conscious thought associated with them. Offensive attacks were slightly easier because they tended to be more premeditated in nature. Monitoring the thoughts of a hybrid mid-fight was unlike anything Geoffrey had ever attempted before.

  Everything was reflexive. There wasn't any thought of feint or rudimentary strategy, even something as simple as switching up tempo. The hybrid sprang at Geoffrey and he was forced back several steps while beating away slashes from those steel-like claws. Geoffrey was half convinced that his opponent was operating on nothing more than instinct, and even that was too alien for Geoffrey to get a good read on it.

  Geoffrey pushed even harder on the mental side of things. The threads he'd planted in the hybrid's mind had grown into thick roots with an interlocking set of tendrils that touched every aspect of the enforcer's conscious mind. Geoffrey still couldn't access memory, that was always the hardest thing to breach, but he'd opened up everything else.

  One of the wolves got too close to Geoffrey's hybrid and he swatted her aside. She hit the ground bloody and didn't get back up. There was something there as the hybrid attacked that time, a surge of something that was more than just reflex, a trail of thought that originated from inside the section claimed by the enforcer's beast.

  The balance of the fight was tipping away from Jasmin and the Duluth pack. It would still be a few more minutes before things ground to their inevitable conclusion, but Geoffrey could feel the change, could see where things were headed.

  Another wolf was ripped out of the air and limped away on three legs. There wasn't any time left for half measures. Geoffrey pushed more energy into his probes and sent more tendrils growing into the beast's territory from every direction, hundreds, thousands of tendrils that burrowed into the last remaining area of privacy, the last mental redoubt.

  It was all there, all of the thoughts that Geoffrey had been looking for but been unable to find. The hybrid's beast tore through Geoffrey's probes trying to destroy them, but Geoffrey grew new ones, sprouted them almost as quickly as the beast could rip them free.

  The thoughts that Geoffrey was tapping into were still subtly alien, but he could see what he needed to see now. The man and the beast were joined into something that was nearly one organism now that they were in the middle of a fight, but that wasn't sufficient to stop Geoffrey from anticipating the next few attacks before they even happened.

  Geoffrey ducked under a slash that had never really been meant to hit him, and then brought his sword up and around in a spray of blood. As his hybrid fell to the ground, Geoffrey stepped into the gap where he'd been standing and cut the hybrid on the right across the leg with a slash that would have taken the leg completely off of a huma
n.

  The hybrid on the left drove Geoffrey back with a lightning-fast swipe of his claws, but the remaining four uninjured wolves had piled on the now-immobile hybrid and Jasmin was yelling for them to leave one of the hybrids alive.

  Less than a minute later the last surviving hybrid shifted back to human form. He hadn't liked it, but even he hadn't been able to think he could survive against five-to-one odds. When faced with death or surrender he'd picked surrender.

  Once the fight was over, all of the blood painting the floor was nearly more than Geoffrey could take, but he closed his eyes and forced himself to think of other things. It wasn't appealing blood, warm, from the vein, it was little more than liquid garbage. Geoffrey promised himself that he would feed soon and then opened his eyes and went back to cleaning up.

  They had the captive they needed, now it was just a question of whether Geoffrey could break him in time.

  Chapter 16

  Geoffrey

  Stekensbridge House

  Duluth, Minnesota

  The final butcher's bill was worse than Geoffrey had hoped, but better than it had almost been. Geoffrey ran through a list of Jasmin's wolves as he walked down the hall. It wasn't strictly something he should have been thinking about right then, but it had the benefit of distracting him from what he was about to do.

  Jeff's right leg had been shattered in more places than Geoffrey even cared to think about, and he'd lost an incredible amount of blood, but he should make a full recovery given enough time. Sally and most of the other wolves had made it through the fight more or less okay, but the last wolf, the one Geoffrey had seen go down in a spray of blood, was in fact dead.

  Geoffrey hadn't been sure what to expect out of Sally and the others, but what he got was a kind of tired acceptance of their friend's death. None of them liked it. They felt like they'd been dragged into a war that had nothing to do with them, but they also weren't ready to stand up to Jasmin and tell her what they were really thinking.

  It turned out that restraining a hybrid was more challenging than Geoffrey had realized. They'd restrained Jorge just fine, but only by putting him in a position where he could die at any time. They couldn't let the enforcer die, at least not until after they'd gotten the information they needed out of him, so just tying him up with wire wasn't a suitable option.

  After being restrained by Imastious so many times, Geoffrey was practically an expert when it came to tying people up, but he didn't know very much about hybrids other than the fact that they were insanely strong and that shifting would cause them to get much bigger. Jasmin, on the other hand, knew quite a bit about hybrid anatomy and abilities, but not very much about tying people up.

  It took a little while, during which time the enforcer, Jeete, was tied up with wire just like had been done to Jorge, but eventually the pair of them hit on a solution. The Duluth wolves rounded up two of the cages used to restrain wolves or hybrids who'd been injured too badly to control their shape, or who'd otherwise displeased their alpha. Geoffrey had thought that the cage Imastious used on him had been heavy-duty, but it had nothing on the monstrosities that Sally and the other two wolves scared up for them.

  The bars were thicker than Geoffrey's arms and the spaces between the bars were only about two inches wide. The whole thing was made out of hardened metal and not only was it small enough that a hybrid wouldn't have very much room to move around inside of it, the key surfaces were all angled so that from inside of the cage you couldn't get leverage on anything.

  The steel bars were marked up from the claws of the hybrids who'd spent time in them, but apparently even hybrid claws couldn't shear through that much metal, at least not without the room required to build up some serious inertia.

  Geoffrey, Jasmin and the others put Jorge and Jeete in separate cages and then put human-style restraints around Jeete's wrists and ankles. Jasmin was fairly certain that the restraints would simply tear if Jeete shifted, but just to make sure, she had bolted them to the wall using a section of metal that was too strong for a human to break, but which a hybrid should be able to tear away from the stone without too much trouble.

  By adjusting the distance between the cage and the wall, they were able to make sure that the restraints were too tight to fall off while Jeete was in human form, but once he shifted and the bolts tore through the scrap metal holding them to the rock wall, then the restraints should loosen and fall off rather than cutting his hands and feet off.

  Once they had both hybrids satisfactorily restrained, Geoffrey took a pair of pliers and removed the loops of wire around each of their necks, wrists, waist, ankles and arms. Jasmin came back from retrieving Ben about the time that the vampire had started hunting around the house for the things he would need to break Jeete. By the time Geoffrey headed back down to the basement, Jasmin had gotten Ben comfortable in the master bedroom and caught back up with Geoffrey.

  "Have you done this kind of thing before?"

  "Not that I remember, but based on some of the things that I've been told it's likely. The toughest part is figuring out how far you can push someone without killing them. That's the part that gets most humans in trouble when they start out."

  Jasmin worked her mouth a couple of times like she was trying to get words out but unable to make her voice function.

  "Don't worry, I shouldn't have to push him nearly as close to the edge of death as you would. I just have to lower his natural resistance to my mental probes to the point where I can get in and find the information we're after. The fact that he's a shape shifter and naturally tougher than a human should only give me a bigger margin of error."

  "That's true, but you're also going to have to watch out. If he gets too close to death he'll more than likely shift despite his best efforts and I suspect that you'll have a harder time ransacking his mind once he shifts."

  "I guess it's a good thing that we aren't restraining him with wires then."

  Jasmin looked away from Geoffrey for several seconds and then cleared her throat. "Does it bother you? I mean what you're about to do?"

  Geoffrey shook his head. "No. I'm ready to play my part. Does it bother you?"

  "Not in the slightest."

  Jasmin stepped around him and pushed open the door to the rock room where Jeete was being kept. Geoffrey followed her inside. He'd lied, apparently well enough that Jasmin couldn't tell, but he was fairly sure that she hadn't.

  He was still planning on upholding his word, but he'd started to see the glimmer of a possibility that he'd have to put Jasmin down before that day came. They would do what they had to do in order to save the ones that they loved, but that didn't mean that either he or Jasmin were going to be safe enough to run free once that was done.

  Geoffrey had already seen too much of what happened when someone stopped viewing other people as anything other than objects. Imastious had already done plenty of evil. Geoffrey wouldn't be part of turning Jasmin into something like that, not without trying to clean up after himself at least.

  Sally and two of the other wolves had been left down with the cage to make sure that Jeete didn't try anything. Jasmin didn't seem to think anything could go wrong, but she also wasn't going to take any chances with Jeete, not when they weren't likely to get another chance to capture one of the Coun'hij.

  "You can all go; Geoffrey and I will take things from here."

  Sally looked at the knives, batteries and wire in Geoffrey's arms and then licked her lips. "What are you going to do with him?"

  "We need to know where the Coun'hij is. Once we know where their base is located then we can bring Alec and Grayson in and kill all of them in just a matter of minutes. In order to get that information out of him we're going to have to hurt him enough to bring down his natural resistances to Geoffrey's gift."

  "You're going to torture him?"

  "Yes, I won't argue with you if you want to call it that. You can leave now."

  Sally shook her head. "That's not right. Jeete deserves better than t
hat. Any person would deserve better than that. I'm not going to just stand by and let you do something like that."

  "You don't have to stand by, just leave. I've already told you that."

  The other two wolves had stopped moving. They hadn't stepped up to offer overt support to Sally, but it was obvious that they weren't any more comfortable than Sally with what Jasmin was going to do.

  "No."

  Jasmin moved so quickly that Geoffrey didn't even realize that she'd stepped closer to Sally until after she had her fist around the shorter girl's neck and was dangling her several inches off of the ground. "This isn't a democracy and you should thank your lucky stars that it isn't."

  One of the other wolves, Chad based on the name that Geoffrey plucked out of his mind, stepped forward and crouched slightly almost as though preparing to spring at Jasmin. "Democracy is the highest form of government. You're nothing more than a tyrant."

  Jasmin grabbed Chad, also by the throat and slammed both of her captives against the wall hard enough that their teeth clicked together from the force of the impact. She glared back at the third wolf with an intensity that made him take a step backwards.

  "You're right, I'm a tyrant, but you're giving way too much credit to a democracy. The only way for a democracy to survive is to value the rights of the individual. Democracy runs based off of blind justice. Democracy values everyone's rights, but in the process it sometimes treats the murderer better than the victim."

  Geoffrey stepped slowly towards Jasmin. "Jasmin, they can't breathe, you need to let them go."

  For a second it looked like she was going to ignore him, but then she threw both of the shape shifters to the ground in disgust.

  "You can keep your damn democracy. You may have not noticed yet, but it's already turning into something only a bare step up from mob rule out there. Your precious democracy is already violating human rights, it's just the rights of the minority that are being violated and the unwashed masses are fine with that."