by Dean Murray
It was a useful thing, but it was obvious to Geoffrey at least that they'd never understood quite how useful it actually was. The binding didn't just force them to comply with their promise, he was sure it also was what had caused Jeete's memories of the base to be moved into the memory space claimed by his beast. Jeete could still access those memories without problems, but anyone else who tried to get at them would have to fight off his beast to get what they were looking for.
The only logical answer for what Geoffrey had seen inside of Jeete's mind was that Puppeteer and the rest of the Coun'hij had sworn their enforcers to secrecy where some of the more sensitive areas of their operations were concerned. It helped explain how the Coun'hij had managed to keep their base secret for so long.
The true extent of their achievement hadn't become apparent to Jasmin until Geoffrey had explained that the Coun'hij didn't have just one base, they had several, possibly as many as five, although that was pure speculation on Jeete's part. Jasmin told Geoffrey that there was also a suspicion held by those on the outside that the Coun'hij was more fractured than it appeared, but nobody had realized that each of the major powers inside of the Coun'hij had their own base and by and large had their own people as well.
For the most part everything Geoffrey had learned, other than the actual location of the base, had been nothing more than colorful background, but the more he thought about it the more apparent it was to him that finding Puppeteer wasn't going to be as easy as they'd hoped. Jeete might have known for sure which Coun'hij member he was serving. In fact it was likely that he did know, but Geoffrey hadn't known enough to be looking for that particular piece of information.
"You know it's possible that this camp we're headed to isn't even one that works for Puppeteer directly."
Jasmin nodded without taking her eyes off of the road. "I know. I figured that out as soon as you told me that there was more than one camp, I just figured that once we got to the camp we could nab somebody who knew where to find Puppeteer and go from there."
"It's still possible that we could do that, but given the sheer depth of the care they've taken around the area of operational security it's not very likely that they have very many people moving back and forth between camps."
"Yeah, I know. Unfortunately we don't have any better options."
They made the rest of the drive in silence but for the occasional word of warning when Geoffrey saw an unexpected rock in their way, and soon enough they were all climbing out of the two vehicles. Jasmin pointed off towards the sound of moving water, but Geoffrey already had his tendrils out and he could feel minds out on the extreme edge of his sensory range.
"I can feel them, you're right, that's the direction we need to go."
"Is there anyone else around?"
Geoffrey shook his head. "I can't feel anyone, but my range isn't usually very big, less than half a mile inside of a city. Out here where there isn't so much in the way of background noise it's probably better, but I don't think it's much better than a mile, maybe a mile and a half."
Jasmin frowned at him. "I can smell them. They are at least a couple miles away from us right now, maybe three miles, it's hard to tell exact distances just from smell."
"I'd say that my range has increased, but vampires don't just undergo sudden surges of power growth like that. Our growth is so slow as to be imperceptible."
"And thank goodness for that. I shudder to think of what the world would be like if every hundred-year-old vampire was able to set me on fire from a mile away."
"I guess you're right there. Most of my kind aren't worth the blood they steal to keep themselves alive."
Jasmin's pack stripped out of their clothes and shifted with only a hint of the tingling rush that Geoffrey had come to associate with shape shifters. One second there was a cluster of pale, naked forms standing only a few feet away from him in the darkness, and a heartbeat later they'd all been replaced with wolves that were more than half again as big as any natural wolf ever grew.
Geoffrey looked over at Jasmin, but she hadn't transformed yet. She finished stuffing her clothes into the jeep, smoothed her ha'bit down over her thighs and then patted him on the shoulder.
"Don't worry, we're going to find her."
"You don't know that any more than I know it."
"I've known Rachel for a long time; she wouldn't send us off on a wild goose chase. There is still a chance for us to save Melody or Rachel would have told me otherwise."
Geoffrey managed a smile and then started towards the minds he could feel off to the west. Jasmin shifted and caught up with him in just two steps. They ranged through the forest, tall trees all around them and leaves and other detritus crunching under their feet. After a few seconds Jasmin let out a faint growl.
"I can smell them a little better in this form, not as well as when I'm a wolf, but they are definitely more than a mile and a half away."
Geoffrey didn't bother with a response other than to speed up his pace to something very nearly a jog. Jasmin snorted and then passed him, her huge hybrid legs eating up as much ground in one bound as he managed in three steps. Eight minutes later as Geoffrey was jumping over a fallen tree, Jasmin slowed down and held up a hand. She whispered to him, barely audible as he stopped next to her.
"We're close. Sally and the others aren't ranging as far afield as they were before and I can make out more in the way of individual scents now."
Geoffrey pointed up ahead. "You probably can't make it out since it's not living, but there is camouflage netting hung from the trees up there."
"You're right. It's hard to make out, but now that you've pointed it out I can see it. From here on out we'll follow you in. Don't burn yourself up trying to work from too far away, but don't get any closer than you have to. The wolves will all collapse back into a half-circle behind us. You're our eyes and ears out here, you've got to let us know when we're about to get into trouble, if someone circles around behind us we're all dead."
Geoffrey patted Jasmin on the arm reassuringly in a conscious mimicry of her gesture from a few minutes earlier and then started towards the closest mind, a bright flare of thought only a hundred yards away.
Their timing seemed to have been perfect. Shape shifters needed so little in the way of sleep that it would have been impossible to ever catch all of them slumbering at the same time, but more than half of them seemed to be abed, either sleeping or headed that direction.
Geoffrey tested the mind before him, weaving some threads of thought into it and tasting the vibrancy of the images and feelings he was then able to access. It had become second nature now to camouflage his probes and once again he was able to sneak past the beast that otherwise would have shredded the gossamer threads that connected him to the hybrid.
They were still too far away, but Geoffrey had expected that. What he hadn't expected was how much easier the contact was to sustain than it should have been. The evidence was starting to pile up in support of Jasmin's assertion that his abilities had strengthened dramatically sometime over the last couple of days. If that was indeed the case then he was going to be able to get a lot more out of the enforcers than he'd expected to be able to.
Geoffrey severed contact with the hybrid and then started moving forward again. His progress was painfully slow, but that was what was required for him to move with the same kind of silence that seemed so natural to Jasmin and the others. It took him another fifteen minutes to move twenty more yards, at which point he decided that he'd gotten as close as he could without risking exposure.
Geoffrey knelt down behind a fallen tree that he figured would serve to conceal him from anyone in either of the two closest houses, and then reached out with his mind again. There were three minds close enough for him to work with. He picked the one who was in the deepest sleep, and started subtly manipulating the fabric of the dream around him.
It wasn't something he'd done before, but he knew he wasn't going to get much information out of the hybrid's drea
ms otherwise—they were nothing more than a long series of bloody fights, none of which meant anything to Geoffrey.
Geoffrey inserted one of the hybrids from Duluth into the dream. Not Jeete, but the one Jorge had called, the one who seemed to have been in charge of the trio. The emotions that came flooding through the link were revealing.
This hybrid, Brad, and Jeete's companion, Stan, were rivals. Brad tried to push Stan out of his dream, but it wasn't a conscious decision, he didn't realize that the dream Stan was an artificial construct, he just preferred a world in which Stan wasn't around to cause him problems.
"We've been ordered to report to the boss."
The words were easy, Geoffrey's Stan construct spoke them easily because Geoffrey remembered what Stan had sounded like from the phone conversation with Jorge. Mannerisms were more difficult. Geoffrey hadn't ever observed Stan outside of combat. There wasn't anything to do but let his construct stand at ease and hope that Brad didn't notice the absence of Stan's usual mannerisms.
"Why did he call you instead of calling me himself?"
Geoffrey made Stan shrug. "I don't know. He sounded rushed though, like maybe he had a lot to do before he left. I can always head over there by myself and tell him that you want a personal invitation once I get there."
"Go to hell."
Brad stood up from the chair where he'd been sitting and opened his door. Geoffrey, positioned just behind Stan's eyes, followed Brad outside just in time to see Brad drop down to all fours and race off as a wolf.
Geoffrey had never run as a wolf, it was all he could do to keep up and he knew the movements of Stan's body weren't right. Luckily Brad didn't look back at him, and Geoffrey was still able to pay enough attention to their surroundings that he was confident of being able to retrace his steps later.
The 'boss' apparently didn't live in a house, he lived in a cave located more than five miles northeast of the town, but it wasn't just any cave. As Brad led him into the darkness and around a corner, Geoffrey nearly stumbled at the sight of not one, but two massive werewolves standing guard before a heavy metal door that had been set into the rock of the cave.
The urge to pull out of Brad's mind was intense. Geoffrey knew that Puppeteer was nearby and knew the route to his hideout, but it wasn't enough. Jasmin had said that none of Alec's people had any idea what Puppeteer looked like and Geoffrey finally had a chance to see the man who was one of the main lynchpins behind the Coun'hij.
Geoffrey forced himself to stay inside of Brad's dream, following now in human shape so that the two of them could open the doors set at intervals into the system of caves that Puppeteer had made his home. Passing within two or three feet of the massive werewolves posted throughout the cave was terrifying, even inside of a dream.
It took several minutes to make it to a lavishly furnished study where Puppeteer waited for them. Geoffrey reminded himself that individuals tended to dream in a kind of stylized shorthand. The face looking up at him from behind the massive oak desk was probably not a perfect match for Puppeteer's actual face, but it would be close.
Geoffrey studied Puppeteer as he stood and walked towards the two of them. Puppeteer was an old man. He looked like he was in his nineties, which probably meant that he was more than three hundred years old. He was small, so short and slender that it was hard to believe that he was capable of wielding the terrible power that Jasmin had attributed to him.
As Puppeteer opened his mouth to give whatever orders Brad was about to subconsciously put into his mouth, Jasmin started shaking Geoffrey.
"You need to disengage, something's happening."
Chapter 20
Jasmin Bianchi
Fort Loudon State Park
Tennessee
I had to shake Geoffrey three times, whispering into his ear each time, before he finally opened his eyes.
"What's going on?"
"There's a new smell. It's hard to describe, but it's the kind of scent we sometimes find associated with really old werewolves."
"No surprise there, I was able to confirm that Puppeteer is the one in charge of this particular camp. He's probably got at least a few dozen werewolves roaming around here. I know where we can find him though."
My hopes soared. This was the chance that we needed. There was no guarantee that Melody was in the same place as Puppeteer, but if we could break into his house and capture him then Geoffrey could invade his mind and find out where she was.
"Let's go, you lead the way."
"It's no use. He lives inside a series of natural caves and he had werewolves stationed inside, at least six that I saw in the dream. We'll never manage to fight our way in, not without more people, and even then it would be a difficult battle. There isn't enough room inside there to surround them."
I could taste the edge of despair to his words, but we'd come too far to give up now. I knew that even if he'd momentarily forgotten it.
"Come on, we need to at least go check it out. Maybe those are the ones that we smell coming this direction. Maybe he sent them here and his lair is undefended."
I could see that Geoffrey wasn't convinced, but he started moving, which was all the victory that I needed just then. We started back working our way to the northeast, skirting around the edge of the town.
We'd been walking through the forest for no more than five minutes before the faint lights inside of the houses started flickering. A few seconds after that the screaming started.
It took me several seconds before my mind was able to make sense of what I was seeing. Werewolves had materialized as if by magic out of the darkness, but they weren't hunting us like I'd expected them to, they were attacking the enforcers who were just now stumbling out of their houses and shifting into their hybrid forms.
There were only forty or fifty houses, and some of them had to contain the humans who acted as servants to Puppeteer and the others, but that still left dozens of hostile hybrids that we were going to have to deal with at some point once Puppeteer got his werewolves back under control. We were outnumbered and outgunned and the smart thing would have been to fall back to the vehicles, but I couldn't bear the thought of leaving now.
We weren't likely to get another chance at Puppeteer, and even if we did try to get away, there wasn't a very good chance that we'd actually be able to outrun the werewolves. Geoffrey certainly couldn't stay ahead of them, and even once we made it back to the jeeps the odds would be against us. The trail we'd driven in on was simply too rough to allow for the kind of speed one would need to outrun a werewolf.
It was hard to tell whether Geoffrey followed the same train of thought and understood the sheer hopelessness of our situation, or if he just couldn't bring himself to abandon Melody again, but he continued to lead us around the town, ignoring the fighting taking place in some places less than a dozen yards away from us.
We were trying to balance the need for speed against the imperative of not being seen, but less than five minutes after the attack started the first hybrid stumbled into us. He was disoriented and obviously still in shock; he never even had a chance.
Geoffrey's sword took him against the outside edge of his left leg a split second before two of the wolves latched on to his arms. He was already falling by the time I hit him, and once he was on the ground with a wolf pulling on each arm it took only a single swipe to the throat for me to execute him.
I was thinking how impressed I was at the way that Geoffrey and my pack were working together as I stood back up, but before I could tell them that, a whisper of sound brought me spinning around in an attempt to fend off the attack that none of us saw coming. The werewolf hit me hard enough that I was picked up and thrown into a nearby tree.
An intense pain ripped through my shoulder, but I didn't even realize that the werewolf had its fangs buried into my flesh because I was too busy trying to stop the claws that were only a split second away from disemboweling me. I was big, bigger than any hybrid I'd ever seen or heard about, but this wasn't one of
the younger, weaker werewolves; it took all of my strength, two hands against its one, to keep the werewolf's left hand from ripping me open.
I sank both sets of talons into the werewolf's left leg, savaging the appendage, but I knew it wasn't going to be enough. I didn't have the leverage to break free of its jaws which meant that I couldn't get away from its free hand which I knew would be coming to end my life within the next second or two.
I could hear Geoffrey and the others frantically repositioning to try and save me, but there wasn't time, we'd been too focused on the hybrid that we'd just killed; the werewolf had taken us completely by surprise. Something whistled through the air the way you only get when something very thin is forced to move very quickly, and I tensed up for the impact that would be the last thing I would ever feel.
The whistle ended in a meaty thunk and then the werewolf's blow landed but rather than the bitter tips of its claws I was battered by a blunt object. My back was soaked in the werewolf's blood, but I could feel it pulling its stump back for another strike.
Geoffrey had bought me a couple more seconds, but the werewolf's left hand was still inching towards my throat, and there were still ways that it could kill me with what was left of its right arm. The fangs in my shoulder were still grinding away in an attempt to get to something vital, but then all of a sudden Sally and Omar were there. They'd circled around the tree and they threw themselves at the werewolf, jaws fastening around the arm both of my hands were wrapped around.
The extra weight was more than enough to tip the balance and as the werewolf's hand finally started pulling back away from me, I released it with my left hand and raked my claws along the side of its neck. As the werewolf dropped away, dead or dying, I turned around to find that the other wolves from my pack were desperately trying to keep a second werewolf occupied.
