Driven

by Dean Murray

  Sally and Chad were both scooting away from Jasmin like a pair of hermit crabs that had just lost their shells, but Jasmin didn't even bother watching them.

  "Give me an empire any day of the week. You should be grateful that I'm here. I don't have to follow the same rules as blind justice. I can weigh things that blind justice can't take into account and therefore my judgments can be better than what you'd get otherwise."

  There was something there that resonated with Geoffrey, but he wasn't sure which parts he believed. Regardless, it was a dangerous philosophy, one that would easily lead someone over the edge without them realizing just how far they'd gone until it was too late.

  "What if you're wrong, Jasmin? What if torturing Jeete is a mistake? You know that you're not perfect, you can still make mistakes."

  Some of the air seemed to go out of Jasmin. "Yes, I can make mistakes. Democracy has built this country into what it is, but a good king or queen could have done better, slightly better at least."

  "But wouldn't a bad monarch be a lot worse? Everyone in this pack is completely at your mercy."

  Jasmin nodded choppily. "Yes, my personal code of conduct is the only thing protecting them, the only thing keeping me from being even worse than the Coun'hij. They're stuck though now. The only way to get out from under my thumb would be to trade me for a different tyrant, that or rise up against me. They won't do that though, that's why they are submissives, because they aren't willing to take responsibility."

  The wounds that Jasmin had taken in the most recent round of fighting had already started healing, but they seemed to have washed her out. In the dim light the two of them were standing in she looked like an old woman who was covered with scars.

  "They'll risk life and limb if they are ordered to, but they won't do the same to guarantee their freedom. People like that aren't worthy of living in a democracy or a republic, or whatever it is that rules us outside of these walls. They have to have a ruler because they're too weak to rule themselves and too dangerous to be allowed to run around ungoverned."

  Geoffrey had stopped approaching Jasmin when she'd released Sally and Chad, but he almost went over to her now.

  "This isn't just about the Duluth wolves, is it?"

  "I don't know. It is at least a little bit about them. Jeete is a conscienceless killer, all of the Coun'hij enforcers are. He doesn't deserve any more mercy than he gave the people he killed."

  The temptation to send tendrils of thought over to Jasmin so that he could sample her thoughts was nearly overpowering, but Geoffrey forced himself not to do so. There was a chance he would get caught and he knew that Jasmin would never forgive that.

  "You said that the personal code of the king is the only thing that protects his people. How honorable is this Alec that you keep talking about?"

  Jasmin laughed, a bitter, mocking sound. "More honorable than me, hopefully honorable enough. A few months ago I would have told you that he'd make a terrible king, but he's better now that he has Adri."

  "Are you second-guessing your support of him?"

  Jasmin shook her head. "No, he's better than any of the alternatives. Even if he does a terrible job he'll still make life better for the average submissive wolf. I think he'll do okay though. Maybe I'm just realizing that there's less difference between a submissive like Jessica or Sally and me than I used to think. Now I'm the one sitting on the throne and having all of my decisions second-guessed. Even at my best I don't think I'm ready to rule over anyone else. I can hardly rule myself."

  "You're tired and injured. You've been through something like six fights in less than two weeks. You need some time to get your feet back under you."

  "What if you're wrong, what if I'm a terrible alpha, what if I'm completely wrong about Alec and he's a horrible king?"

  Geoffrey sighed. "I don't have many answers when it comes to this kind of thing, Jasmin. I'm about to torture Jeete and the fact that I feel bad about it isn't going to stop me. If you turn out to be a bad leader then I think you'll still be a good enough person to realize it. If that happens then just step down. Find a better leader and hand the pack over to it."

  "What if I get to the point where I like the power too much to let go of it?"

  "Then I'll hunt you down and kill you. It won't be the first time that I've executed someone for their sins."

  It was the kind of statement that was almost guaranteed to strike sparks off of her beast, but Jasmin didn't look mad, there wasn't any barely-perceptible surge of energy, she just looked relieved.

  "That's actually a relief. I think you might even be able to do it too."

  "Hopefully it never comes to that."

  Jasmin looked away. "What about if Alec turns out to be worse than the Coun'hij?"

  "I actually have fewer worries there, at least where you are concerned. You've already proven that you're not the kind to just sit back and wring your hands and ask why this is happening to you. If Alec turns bad then you'll fight to overthrow him or at least check the worst of his excesses in some fashion or another."

  "You're not half bad, at least not for a vampire."

  "Thanks. You're not so bad either. Let's get this over with so we can go get Melody."

  Geoffrey turned back to the cage where Jeete had been quietly watching their exchange, but before he could get close enough to set down the grisly tools he'd gathered upstairs, Jeete snorted at the two of them.

  "You guys are too weak to stay in power. You're right about the submissives deserving whatever they get, but power is meant to be used."

  Jasmin looked like she was ready to yell at him, but Geoffrey got his words out first.

  "If you really believe that then you'll have no problem with what I'm about to do next. You're in my power and I'm going to exercise that power in ways that will hurt you."

  Geoffrey started with the wires and the batteries. The current sizzling through Jeete's body caused him to scream and beg for Geoffrey to stop, but it didn't seem to noticeably weaken Jeete's beast or his natural defenses around the section of his mind that contained his memories.

  After nearly an hour Geoffrey finally unclipped the wires from the batteries and picked up the knife that he'd been hoping not to have to use. Bleeding Jeete was even harder than Geoffrey had been worried it would be. The act of cutting the enforcer wasn't difficult, but seeing so much blood sent the hunger raging to new heights.

  The shape shifter's natural healing ability meant that Geoffrey had to make new cuts on a regular basis to continue bleeding Jeete out, but it also meant that he was able to compress the torture down into something that lasted only a couple more hours.

  With a human Geoffrey couldn't have opened up any wounds that would have bled too quickly because a human would have bled to death before the wounds closed on their own. With Jeete, Geoffrey made some fairly serious cuts to bleed him out most of the way and then once those had healed, Geoffrey proceeded more slowly.

  Geoffrey sent probes into Jeete's mind on a regular basis to check on their progress, but found that Jeete was weakening physically at a much faster rate than he was weakening mentally. Jasmin took the news better than Geoffrey had expected her to.

  "So what do we do? I'm not sure that you can bleed him out much more than you already have. He's already shaking, which probably means that he's nearly to the point of an involuntary shift, at which point you're probably going to have an even harder time bypassing his defenses."

  "I think you're right. The last time I scanned him it seemed as though his will had weakened nearly to the point of not being able to contain his beast."

  "What about if we starved him? Maybe that would weaken his beast."

  "I'm not sure. It might work, but I don't think we have that kind of time."

  Jasmin's frustration was obvious. "You're right, but what other choice do we have?"

  "I can just throw my entire strength at him now and hope that he's been weakened enough to get what we need out of him. I won't be able to see ever
ything, but I'll be able to see some things. There's a decent chance that I'll see where their base is."

  "And if you don't? What's the downside?"

  "I'm nearly at the end of my strength. If this attempt isn't successful then I'll have to rest for a day or two before I can try again. Also, I'm going to need to feed soon, almost certainly after doing what we're talking about. If I fail to feed then I'll lose control of myself and try to feed on whoever is closest."

  "Okay, I think we go ahead. It's no worse than starving him. If you fail we can still try again in a day or two. Even if it takes us a couple of tries and they realize he's been missing too long, we'll still know where they are. It means that they'll be waiting for us, or possibly that they might even relocate, but Alec can always send in more guys, and even if they relocate that will still give us a trail to follow."

  "And the other problem?"

  "Just go ahead and feed off of Jeete."

  Geoffrey forced himself not to give into the anger spidering across his mind. Jasmin was still equating him with all of the others of his kind, but he'd never actually told her that he'd stopped feeding on the unwilling.

  "I won't feed on him. I only feed on the willing, or at least those I can adequately compensate in return for their blood."

  There was a new respect for him in Jasmin's eyes. "That must make things difficult."

  "It does, the last time I fed I wasn't sure that I was going to find an appropriate donor in time."

  "What about bagged blood?"

  "That's an acceptable alternative if it can be found, but it's getting harder and harder to get hold of bagged blood these days."

  "Don't worry about that, every pack has whole blood stocks. We can't exactly make a run to the hospital if something goes wrong, so there are always at least one or two people who can transfuse blood and a stock of supplies on hand so that they can do their job." Jasmin already had her phone out. "Hey, Sally, go round up two or three bags of whole blood and bring them back down here."

  As she slipped her phone back into her front pocket, Jasmin gave Geoffrey a sad smile. "She won't like me for the foreseeable future, but she'll do it. You can start whenever you're ready."

  Geoffrey took a couple of deep, calming breaths and then closed his eyes and knelt down next to Jeete's cage. The enforcer had passed out from the blood loss and torture more than half an hour previously, so the initial infiltration was relatively easy.

  The surface thoughts came first, pouring into Geoffrey's mind like a torrent of images and feelings that were alien but still incredibly compelling. Geoffrey's fingers had been curled inwards and he'd been flexing them for almost two full seconds before he realized that it wasn't him chasing Jasmin through the woods trying to tear her to ribbons, it was merely Jeete's dream, an overpoweringly vivid dream.

  The realization allowed Geoffrey to pull back mentally enough to stop from losing himself inside of Jeete's psyche. This was something new, something stronger than Geoffrey had ever felt while linked mentally with someone. It was nearly enough to cause him to abandon the search, but he pushed on.

  Geoffrey didn't want to lose himself inside of someone else's mind, but the stakes this time were simply too high for him to give up.

  The mental probes cored down through the conscious mind like a taproot, minimizing the amount of contact between Geoffrey's mind and his victim's dream. All too soon the leading edge of Geoffrey's probes bumped up against the hard barrier that separated the conscious, present mind from accessible memories.

  It was like cutting through solid rock, but Geoffrey forced tendrils of thought into the wall before him, digging and coring with diamond-hard tips. The shield that Jeete's mind had thrown up wasn't a uniform structure and before too long Geoffrey started finding softer spots, flaws in the barrier that he was able to exploit.

  With each new fissure he created Geoffrey shoved his probes a little further inside and then he fed power in the hair-thin threads so that they grew, creating ever-larger holes. A few seconds passed, but it seemed like hours before Geoffrey felt the first of his probes slide through the barrier and touch the goldmine of memories on the other side.

  Geoffrey was expecting for things to get easier once Jeete's natural defenses had been breached, which they did, but it still felt like he was swimming against a vast current. The first tendril was followed by others until Geoffrey had half a dozen taproots sunk deep into the short-term memory that he expected would hold the location he and Jasmin needed.

  The taproots spread out, branching thousands of times as Geoffrey tried to access as much as possible before his strength gave out. It was like bathing in a sewage pond. He'd known that Jeete was an unsavory character, but he hadn't realized just how much liberty the Coun'hij allowed its enforcers. As long as the hybrids who made up the Coun'hij's shock troops showed up when called and killed whomever the Coun'hij needed killed, nothing was denied them.

  Nearly unlimited funds was only the start of the perks for someone like Jeete and those perks didn't end short of murder. Geoffrey saw a string of killings that Jeete had been involved in or covered up and was nearly ill at just how docile the humans in that part of the country had become, but try as he might he couldn't get ahold of the location.

  He got images, but nothing cohesive, no name, nothing that would allow him to find the town where Jeete had lived for the last forty years. It was inexplicable. Geoffrey had been hoping for success, but he'd been expecting to fail in his efforts to breach the barrier if he was going to fail at all.

  He'd never expected to successfully breach the barrier and then be unable to find the location of the Coun'hij base. Something small, something hidden like the location of Jeete's first kill would have been harder to ferret out, but not the address of his home—that should have been easy simply by virtue of the fact that it formed a continuous narrative inside of Jeete's mind.

  With something like that, Geoffrey didn't need to form any kind of comprehensive picture of what he was accessing, he just needed to stumble into one of the many places where Jeete thought about home in enough detail to include an actual location or address.

  Geoffrey felt his strength bleeding away and knew that he only had a few more seconds in which to find the base's location. There were only two routes open to him. He could either expand back into longer-term memory, or he could push into the section of memory that was claimed by Jeete's beast.

  There wasn't time to second-guess his decision or make a tentative, half-hearted effort, so Geoffrey inserted his tendrils into the beast's domain, branching them out to access as many memories as possible in the time he had left. It was like trying to drink acid from a fire hose.

  The beast, which had been quiet, almost listless even, up until that point tore into Geoffrey's probes with a fury that he'd never seen before. Three of the probes were sheared away in short order and the loss of each sent Geoffrey reeling away so badly that it was all he could do to process the flow of information coming from the remaining tendrils.

  The destruction of Geoffrey's last probe dumped him back into his own mind with enough force that for several seconds his body stopped breathing. Geoffrey fought the terror that threatened to overwhelm his mind, desperately trying to force his lungs to draw air in without any success.

  When the first gasp of air finally streamed into his body he had only a scant two or three heartbeats before a new survival imperative roared to the top of his consciousness.

  "I need the blood, right now, where is it?"

  "Sally just called back down. They only had a small supply and they used it all on Jeff after the fight with the Coun'hij."

  Chapter 17

  Jasmin Bianchi

  Stekensbridge House

  Duluth, Minnesota

  Geoffrey looked at me with eyes full of the kind of mind-numbing terror that I hadn't been sure he was even capable of feeling. He was shaking and sometime in the last few minutes he'd gone so pale that I could clearly see the blood vessels underneat
h his skin. I'd never realized that there were so many of them so close to the surface of the body.

  "You've got to restrain me. I'm fighting with all I have, but there just isn't time."

  Between one heartbeat and the next Geoffrey's sword materialized in his hand. I thought for a second that he'd lost it already, that he was about to attack me, but he just spun in place as though looking for salvation that he knew wasn't there.

  "Wait, Geoffrey, I'll send Sally for some more blood. They've got a supplier, multiple suppliers actually."

  "Not one that can have the blood here in the next five minutes."

  Geoffrey hurried over to Jeete's cage, opened the door, and then his sword licked out multiple times, severing each of the restraints that were holding the enforcer inside of the cage. He pulled Jeete out of the cage and then grabbed the roll of wire that we'd used earlier to restrain both of our rogue hybrids with.

  "What are you doing, Geoffrey?"

  "Help me by wrapping a loop around his neck while I do his arms. We don't have much time. You can restrain him with the wire until you decide whether or not to kill him, but the wire won't work on me. You're going to have to stick me inside of the cage."

  I was desperately searching for another option as I cut a length of wire and then looped it around Jeete's neck. I'd known that Geoffrey's worries about blood starvation were serious, but I hadn't ever even considered the possibility that the Duluth pack might not have spare blood on hand.

  Geoffrey tightened the wire he'd tied around Jeete's wrists, and then threw himself into the cage, pulling the door shut behind him.

  "This is crazy, Geoffrey. You'll be able to keep things together until we can get more blood."

  "I'm afraid not. I'm already hallucinating. I did the wrists by feel, but you'd probably better double-check them. At this point I only have a few more minutes at the most before I lose control. From there I've got less than an hour or two before the blood starvation is fatal. Hopefully Sally's blood supplier is faster than I suspect they are."