Driven Read online

  Sometimes it was nothing more than the barest shadow of a crease on his forehead, sometimes it was a subtle change in his breathing, other times it was a weak almost-movement of an arm or leg. It was hard to catch sometimes, but it was possible for anyone who cared enough to learn.

  Needless to say that particular nurse hadn't lasted long.

  Satisfied that the new bag was properly secured to the handle above Ben's head, I wadded the old bag up so I could throw it away while I was waiting for the tank to fill. I didn't even get my car door open before my phone rang.

  It wasn't a number I recognized, but that didn't mean much these days. Even with Alec's hackers running interference for us there were times when you had to ditch a sim card and replace it with a burner card so that you could throw someone off of your trail.

  "Who is this?"

  I tried to keep the exhaustion and borderline hostility out of my voice. I hadn't slept since the attack down in New Mexico. It was dangerous and I was going to have to stop and rest soon, but I hadn't been able to shake the feeling that I had a target painted on my back.

  Apparently I did a worse job disguising my state than I thought because the voice that responded to me sounded like its owner was only a heartbeat away from breaking into hysterical laughter.

  "You really should have taken a nap earlier, Jasmin."

  "Rachel! Where have you been and why haven't you called before now to tell me what's going on?"

  "I've been going where I was needed, Jasmin. I thought you, of all people, would understand that."

  "Ben needs you. Hell, I need you."

  "Yes, I'm afraid you're right about that, but you're not ready yet."

  I fought down a wave of anger, but it was hard. My beast spent more time in the driver's seat than I would have admitted to any of my friends. It was like I was thirteen again all over and trying to adjust to having an alien presence inside of my head, a violent presence that I wasn't completely sure I could control.

  Things had been bad enough after Chicago, when Alec had killed Agony. There wasn't any reason that my beast should have gotten more difficult to control at that particular point, but she had. I'd struggled with my temper almost as soon as we flew back home, but it had gotten twenty times worse since I'd manifested my hybrid form. I liked Rachel, most of the time at least, and once upon a time my beast had taken a pretty laid-back view of her too. Right now my beast was pissed. She didn't like anyone telling her what she was or wasn't ready to deal with, but it was even worse coming from someone my beast viewed as being weaker than us.

  I knew that there was more to being strong than just who could hit the hardest, but my beast didn't think like that. I told myself for the thousandth time that I controlled us, not her. If I hadn't learned anything else from my dad, I'd learned that you had to maintain control.

  He'd been the perfect example of what happened when you let the beast run unchecked. Donovan said that my father hadn't ever really recovered from what happened when Agony tore through the pack the first time.

  The way that Donovan said it always made me feel like he was trying to cut my dad slack, like he was trying to make excuses for him. The truth was I knew there wasn't any kind of justification for what my dad had become.

  He'd lost a lot when the pack was shattered. My mother, his wife, had been killed by some anonymous Coun'hij enforcer that night. He'd lost nearly everything he cared about when she bled out on the rocks, but so had everyone else. Some people had lost even more. James' mom had lost a spouse, Andrew had lost his wife and been crippled to the point where he was confined to a wheelchair. Neither of them had turned into a child-abusing monster.

  I knew I had my own set of problems, but I wasn't my father and I forced my beast back into the darkest corner of my mind where she would have a harder time influencing my thoughts and feelings. From the outside all I did was take a couple of deep breaths, but that didn't do justice to the sheer amount of effort involved. It was like dragging an elephant through a field with nothing more than my fingernails and sheer willpower to see the job done.

  There wasn't any way that Rachel could have known what I was doing. Once I spoke she'd be able to hear the difference in my voice, but she didn't wait for that before speaking herself.

  "Good, Jasmin. You're going to need more of that control if you're going to be able to save Ben."

  "I thought you said I needed my rage."

  "I did, and you do, but you're past that now. Your rage helped you get where you are today, but now it's just going to get in the way unless you manage to control it."

  "Fine, I'll work on my temper. Now please just tell me where I can find this Geoffrey guy."

  "I have an address for you, Jasmin, but you're not going to like what happens next."

  "Yeah, I know. You've said that already. Just give me the address. If Geoffrey can save Ben then it doesn't matter what happens to me."

  Relief made my limbs weak as Rachel finally complied and rattled off an address. It was some tiny city in Nebraska that I'd never heard of before, which meant that my instinct to come here had paid off. I wasn't very far from the help that Ben needed.

  "Thanks, Rach. I'll fill the car back up and then I'll head straight there."

  "No! Don't wait to fill up the car. Go now, put the address into the GPS on your phone and drive as fast as you can."

  "That's stupid, Rach. I'm below half a tank already. Five minutes isn't going to make a difference."

  "That's where you're wrong. Five minutes will make all of the difference in the world. Do it my way or you're going to be sorry. You're going to need more help from me than just this address before all is said and done."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Geoffrey isn't just sitting there waiting to talk to you, he's a captive and you're going to need my guidance to get him out."

  "How do you know all of this, Rach?"

  "It's hard to explain, I just know it. Now go. Seconds matter right now."

  **

  I took off like a bat out of hell. I wasn't just driving aimlessly like I had been before. I had a destination and I positively shattered the speed limit. It was especially dangerous to drive this fast in the dark. Any set of headlights, no matter how good, couldn't let you see as far ahead as you could during the day. At slower speeds that was less of an issue because it took you longer to cover the ground that you could see. At a hundred and twenty it was a very real problem. I had my brights on, and even in this form my vision was quite a bit better than a human's, but it was still taking a risk.

  I told myself that Rachel would have known if I was headed towards an accident, and I just poured on more speed. I'd thought that I had my anger under control, but as the miles rolled away underneath my tires I felt it growing again. Rachel had no right to be toying with me. It was ridiculous to expect me to go into everything blind like this.

  By the time an hour had passed, my rage had grown to the point where it was all I could do to stop from ripping the steering wheel free from the dashboard. I wasn't actually sure that I was strong enough to do that now, but it had already creaked alarmingly a couple of times over the last few minutes, so I was doing my absolute best to stop from stressing it even more.

  The computer on the dash started warning me that the tank was nearly empty when we were still more than forty miles away from the address Rachel had given me. The computer was predicting that my tank would be bone dry within the next twenty miles. I couldn't change the laws of physics, there was no way for me to make it there without stopping for gas, but the anger bubbling just beneath the surface had a lot to do with my choice to stop when I did.

  I pulled off at a tiny gas station in the middle of nowhere and did a double take when I realized that there wasn't a credit card reader at the pump. I'd switched over to prepaid credit cards, the closest thing there was to the equivalent of a burner phone, when it became important to remain anonymous, but it looked like I was going to have to dip into the store of cash Al
ec had given me when I'd left.

  I pushed the button that put me in touch with the attendant in the tiny store a few dozen feet away, and then waited for a couple of seconds.

  "Yeah, what can I do for you?"

  "I need some gas."

  "How much? We've got a cash-first policy for anything over forty bucks."

  "Forty should be fine."

  I was pretty sure that it would take more than that to fill the car up completely, but I didn't want to make two trips into the store, one to pay and another to pick up any change. The clerk made a noncommittal kind of grunt, but a few seconds later the pump lit up and asked me to select a fuel grade.

  While I was waiting for the tank to fill up I looked at Ben through the window. He looked cold, and I made a mental note to try and remember to turn the thermostat up. Ever since I'd gained my hybrid form I'd been running hotter than normal, but Ben didn't have the same kind of metaphysical space heater.

  The pump shut off promptly at forty dollars' worth of gas. I racked the nozzle and then started towards the store at a quick jog, locking the doors to the Mercedes with my key fob.

  The clerk had a TV on. It looked like one of those extreme reality shows, but it must have been pretty enthralling because he barely looked up as I handed him two twenties. As I turned and walked out of the store I realized that three guys had appeared at the edge of the area lit by the large overhead lights that surrounded the pumps.

  Most girls would have been nervous at the sight of three rough-looking guys this late at night, but I wasn't most girls. Even in this form I was more than able to defend myself from guys much stronger and dangerous than these guys looked to be. My biggest worry was that they'd slow me down and put me even further behind Rachel's schedule. At least that was all I was worried about until I saw the way that the lights were flickering.

  Flickering lights weren't a sign of trouble in and of themselves, but the lights inside of the store hadn't flickered at the same time as the outside lights. There was only one thing that could cause those kinds of selective power problems. Werewolves.

  If there'd been any doubt left in my mind of what I was up against, it would have vanished when I saw the expression on the closest guy's face. There was a kind of savage craziness to it that I'd heard described more than once by others who'd run into werewolves before the animals had shifted out of their human forms.

  My options were so few as to practically be non-existent. They were between me and the car, which meant that I couldn't get to Ben without going through them. I couldn't fight them. One werewolf would outclass me all by itself, three would mow me down so quickly I wouldn't even know what hit me.

  I could run—in wolf form I should be faster than them—but if I did that there was still a risk that one of them would stay and hurt Ben. If I was going to run then I needed to make sure that they would all follow me.

  I slipped my key fob and money clip into one of the two tiny pockets in my ha'bit and then confirmed that my phone was safely tucked away in the other pocket before taking a couple of steps towards them, angling away from the shop so that I'd be out of the clerk's field of vision if he happened to look up from his show.

  Werewolves would kill a human if there wasn't a better target around, but they would almost always bypass humans if there was a vampire or a shape shifter in the area. Nobody was quite sure how werewolves were able to pick shape shifters out of a crowd of humans, but their ability to do so was uncanny.

  Their ability to find vampires was less mysterious. They probably did it the same way we did—scent tracking the characteristic old-blood smell that vampires all seemed to have coming out of their pores. The smell was strong enough that we shape shifters never had any problem identifying a vampire, and it only made sense that werewolves had similarly sensitive noses.

  Whatever mechanism they used kicked into high gear as I took yet another step towards them. All three werewolves looked at me simultaneously with an expression that told me they knew exactly what I was.

  They all sprang towards me at the same time, but I'd been waiting for that to happen and I shifted and tore off across the fields in a blaze of speed that only my wolf form could muster. I couldn't risk looking back at them, not when I was in full flight, but didn't need to. I could hear that all three of them were chasing me.

  I could hear them, breathing hard, their footsteps getting heavier as they shifted into the huge, hybrid-like forms that made them so deadly. I was faster than they were, but not by much. Werewolves were the single deadliest predator in existence, and it was more than just their phenomenal size and strength that allowed them to occupy the apex spot. They had an energy and endurance that was unnatural, even in comparison to a hybrid.

  The only way for shape shifters to defeat werewolves was to fight them on our terms. If we outnumbered them and could bring the fight to a quick conclusion then we could bring them down, but everything about this encounter was stacked against me. I was the one outnumbered and my only hope of survival was to stretch the run out long enough to put a significant distance between us.

  Their supernatural endurance was going to make that an extremely tough challenge. It had been done before, if not by me, but there was only a very tiny window in which it could work. I was going to have to run in a long arc, far enough to create the kind of lead I needed, but not so long as to let exhaustion set in and rob me of the precious inches and feet I was currently building into the cushion that was my only chance.

  I'd been running for less than a minute before I realized that the ground was working against me. We were traversing fallow fields and the partially frozen dirt was soft enough that it robbed my feet of some of the energy of each lunge. If the werewolves had been likewise slowed then it would have been a non-issue, but their talons seemed to be digging deep enough into the ground that they were catching ahold of something harder and the earth wasn't robbing their movements of energy in the same fashion.

  My beast knew we were in trouble. I'd half expected her to be urging me on to greater speed, but she remembered our last encounter with a werewolf and she knew just how close we'd come to beating it by ourselves. I was big, even for a hybrid, and I was stronger than any of the other hybrids who'd been following Alec.

  I still came up short against the mountain of muscle and claws that was a werewolf, but with some more experience and with intelligence up against savage cunning I knew I'd eventually be able to give at least the smaller werewolves a run for their money.

  Unfortunately the operative word was eventually. As things stood right now, turning and fighting like my beast wanted to do would be a quick kind of suicide. The only good thing about fighting off my beast's urges was the fact that it gave me something to do other than just panic.

  By the time I'd bound my beast back down to my will, I had a plan. I needed terrain that favored me, which meant something that would slow the werewolves down, speed me up, let me lose them, or provide me with some kind of respite.

  A forest, one with thick underbrush, would have been the best option, but the empty farmland didn't offer any natural phenomenon that would suit. As far as the eye could see was nothing but the faint light of tiny plant life. The only trees, brightly-glowing behemoths that otherwise would have served admirably, were miles away and they were nothing more than a single line meant to serve as a windbreak.

  Instead I turned towards the large black area to my left. From this far away it was hard to be sure what I was headed towards. I thought I could see the black bars of bare structural steel, but I'd have to get closer before I'd know for sure.

  Things were as desperate as they were going to get. By the time I got close enough to find out what I was up against, I'd be too tired to try for an alternate destination, but the decision was surprisingly easy despite that. I simply didn't have any other options.

  Three more heart-pounding, exhausting minutes passed with the werewolves losing ground on me far too slowly for comfort before I was able to see the p
artial ruins of some kind of factory. It was the last thing I would have expected to see out here.

  Structural steel, large girders designed to defeat the forces of gravity and corrosion, could serve as a kind of artificial forest to slow down my pursuers, but that kind of density wasn't what you'd usually find in most building designs.

  It looked like the factory had caught fire at some point and the owners must have taken the insurance money and cashed out, that or maybe the insurance payout hadn't been enough to rebuild. Either way, the lack of artificial lighting indicated that they'd left the undamaged section of the building just as vacant as the smoke-stained sections that had ultimately brought the factory to its knees.

  I didn't particularly want to get caught inside the hallways and offices of an unfamiliar building, not when I was being followed by three times my own number of pursuers, so I angled to the right, darting into the blackened ruins.

  I was in luck. The wreckage contained dozens of machines that had been ruined in the fire, too big and heavy to justify moving out, and they were more than substantial enough to stop the headlong flight of werewolves which each weighed the better part of half a ton.

  I slipped between two of the largest machines, vast monsters that were set less than four feet apart from each other and which the werewolves would have to detour around. It bought me a few seconds, long enough to cross halfway across the manufacturing area.

  I waited until I could hear the werewolves' talons scraping across the concrete floor and then dodged through another bank of machinery. I'd never slowed down, but I knew I hadn't bought myself enough of a lead.

  I turned to the right and the werewolves took the bait. All three of them sounded like they were headed straight for the open ground, correctly thinking that they would make better time there than trying to navigate through the densely-packed rows of machinery.