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  "There still isn't much time, Jasmin. You need to climb back up onto the metal framework and use it to make a beeline back towards Ben. The exterior skin of the building is nothing more than sheet metal. Tear through that, let yourself down and then run back to the car as fast as you can. The werewolves are both inside of the building now looking for the one you just killed. If you go now you can make it back to Ben and drive away before they can catch you."

  I was already moving, climbing up past the werewolf, but this time I had plenty of breath left over to ask her questions.

  "Why did this have to happen, Rachel? Why didn't you just send me directly to wherever Geoffrey is?"

  "You're headed to New York next, Jasmin. Don't shatter any speed limits, but don't waste any time either."

  "Why did you set me up like this?"

  The pause lasted so long that I crossed over to the far end of the building before she finally responded. I was starting to think that she'd hung up on me, but then as I punched through the metal and threw myself towards the ground I heard her voice again.

  "I didn't have a choice, Jasmin. I always thought that more vision would equate to more options, but the truth is it's the opposite. That werewolf needed to die or the whole house of cards would have come crashing down. I had to at least try, I'm sorry."

  My legs hit the ground hard enough that I sank several inches into the topsoil, far enough that I would have had to really work to get myself free, but I simply cheated and shifted a split second after I landed.

  My wolf feet were skinnier than my hybrid feet had been. I easily slipped out of the deep holes I'd created in the ground and raced away through the darkness.

  Chapter 4

  Geoffrey

  Unknown location

  New York, New York

  There wasn't much light in the cage holding Geoffrey, but what little bit there was sent shooting arcs of pain through his head. It was hard to decide whether the pain was the result of a concussion or side effects from being drugged, but Geoffrey already knew that he had other, more important, things to worry about.

  The cage holding him was a known quantity. Geoffrey's superhuman strength wouldn't make any difference when pitted against the shining steel bars. Imastious bought them from a manufacturer who specialized in creating containment enclosures for big game, and once the door was closed and locked Geoffrey wasn't any more able to escape than a lion or a rhinoceros would have been.

  The room was vaguely familiar, almost as though Geoffrey had once spent a long time here in the past, but he got the feeling that he'd been on the other side of the bars previously. Something danced just below the level of his consciousness, less than a memory, more like a feeling with visual components if such a thing was actually possible.

  Geoffrey let his mind churn away in an attempt to force the impression into something more concrete, but after a couple of minutes he abandoned the effort and instead tried to get up.

  He'd been so motionless up until that point that for a second when he couldn't move he almost thought that Imastious' people had left him in restraints as well as having locked him in the cage. Geoffrey's head and neck seemed to more or less function, so he turned to the side far enough to confirm that he was resting on nothing more than an aluminum-framed cot.

  Reassured that there wasn't any way to restrain him against such a flimsy bed, Geoffrey tried once more to roll off of the cot and onto his feet. He wasn't restrained, but he was the weakest he could remember ever being. All of his effort barely sufficed to slide one foot off of the bed so that it could thump against the floor.

  Geoffrey rested for nearly a minute and then tried to force his other foot off of the cot. The effort was too much for him and a few seconds later his head collapsed back against the nylon of the cot. He was dizzy, much more so than the drugs or concussion could explain.

  Once the dizziness passed, Geoffrey craned his head around until he found the two full bags of blood that had been used to bleed him out. They were sitting on a small table safely on the other side of the bars where Geoffrey wouldn't be able to reach them. Imastious hadn't tortured him, at least not yet, but the older vampire had taken every other precaution to make sure that Geoffrey would face him in as weakened a state as possible.

  Geoffrey was still trying to figure out how Imastious had tracked him to Chicago, when the worn, white door opened and a tall, emaciated figure walked into the room.

  "I'm glad to see that you're awake, Geoffrey. Normally I would have just been able to pull what I needed out of your sleeping mind, but the combination of the drugs and the concussion made that impossible. Now that you're conscious again, let's get started."

  Imastious had probes arrowing towards Geoffrey's mind even before he finished speaking and they burrowed into his skull with alarming quickness. Imastious had hundreds of years of practice behind his efforts, as compared to Geoffrey's few months of experiences, but Geoffrey had fought him to a standstill once before.

  Geoffrey hardened the outside layers of his mind at the same time that he used a blade of mental force to shear through the two probes that had penetrated the deepest. Imastious countered with a blow of force that sent tremors through Geoffrey's entire mind, but Geoffrey patched up the cracks almost as soon as they appeared and visualized a wave of fire rolling across the surface of his mind, burning the remaining probes to a crisp before Imastious could launch another attack.

  The first few exchanges of the fight happened in exquisite slow motion to Geoffrey, but they took less than a second of real time. For all of their speed and brutal simplicity, they served as a very pointed object lesson that Geoffrey was operating at much more of a disadvantage than the last time he and Imastious had faced off.

  The exhaustion would have been enough all by itself, but it wasn't the only burden he was operating under. Something, either the drugs or the blow to his head, was slowing his response time and making it feel as though he was fighting Imastious off from underneath a layer of water. The battle was taking place inside of Geoffrey's mind, thereby giving him a kind of home-court advantage, but Geoffrey couldn't escape the feeling that it wasn't going to be enough this time.

  Imastious sent a dozen new probes at him, but the hard, slick surface of Geoffrey's mind allowed them little if any purchase and all but one of them went skittering away. The last one, the one that didn't ricochet away, wormed into his mind faster than he would have believed possible, sprouting decaying roots that expanded like dark balloons.

  Geoffrey tried to cut the tendril of thought off at its base, but another hammer blow of force crashed into him just before he managed to launch his own attack. Geoffrey's aim still felt like it was true, but the thought-blade that struck Imastious' probe was dull and brittle. It bounced off of the rapidly thickening line between them without doing any apparent damage.

  Before Imastious could respond to the opening provided by Geoffrey's failed counterattack, Geoffrey launched a blow of force of his own, one that came from the center of his mind and pushed everything outwards. Geoffrey's thoughts rippled as the blow ripped its way up towards Imastious' beachhead, a three-dimensional mental wake like a submarine moving through water at impossible speeds.

  Geoffrey didn't just expect this effort to succeed, he knew it would, just as he knew that the strength of his conviction was part of what had transformed this blow into an irresistible force. Geoffrey tensed up in anticipation, but although his effort succeeded in uprooting the black weed of Imastious' probe, it nearly did so at the cost of Geoffrey's sanity.

  There was more to Imastious' tentacles than Geoffrey had realized. They didn't end cleanly as he'd thought, instead they expanded into millions of feathery lines that had burrowed more completely into his mind than anything he'd ever seen before.

  The force of Geoffrey's effort was too strong to be denied, but the act of ripping the roots out tore huge furrows inside of his own mind and left wounds that bled energy. Geoffrey tried to create a new shield over the top of
the damaged portions of his mind, but Imastious had already reacted and now there were a dozen probes exploiting the hole in his defenses, expanding out into portions of his mind in a violation that turned Geoffrey's stomach.

  The deeper Imastious' probes went into Geoffrey's mind the slower their progress became, but they were still progressing. Geoffrey needed a new kind of mental construct, something he could create and let loose without having to constantly monitor it.

  Nothing he'd ever done before quite fit the bill so he acted on instinct and what was left of the reflexes he'd developed before losing his memory. Geoffrey envisioned a swarm of mental insects, a silvery metallic horde that multiplied at an exponential rate. The swarm became a plague of biblical proportions in less than a heartbeat and then scurried upwards.

  Geoffrey's newest attack bit into Imastious' probes, devouring them from the bottom up. The deepest tendrils of Imastious' attack were consumed almost instantly, but the thicker roots closer to the surface of Geoffrey's mind proved more resistant, growing back nearly as quickly as they were being destroyed.

  It was disheartening to see just how much stronger Imastious was, even inside the peripheries of Geoffrey's mind. It would have been enough to make Geoffrey give up but for the fact that his insect constructs seemed to be doing more than just attacking Imastious' constructs. They were somehow feeding off of Imastious' work. They weren't increasing in numbers, but they were healing the damaged portions of Geoffrey's mind with the sustenance that they'd stolen from Imastious.

  Under other circumstances it would have been better than a stalemate. Geoffrey could feel the jagged, brittle edge of his concussion fading away into something he could work with, but it was too little, too late.

  Imastious pushed harder, cracking open another section of Geoffrey's mind with another blow of force. This time the tendrils that Imastious inserted into Geoffrey's mind didn't grow roots. Instead they each fractured into dozens of angular constructs that scurried from place to place like spiders with nothing but a dark, nearly invisible, gossamer thread connecting them back to Imastious.

  Geoffrey had seen this attack before, but his exhausted reflexes were a heartbeat too slow in responding to it and a sticky spray of apathy coated everything inside his mind. The insects were still worrying away at the thick roots Imastious had put into his mind; they were hundreds of thousands of points of fire that were slowly trying to burn away the feelings of lassitude, but even they couldn't stand against the constructs that were now ranging freely through Geoffrey's mind, dousing his will to fight with every action they took.

  A few seconds were all it took before Geoffrey's defenses melted away with an odd mental pop and then Imastious was fully inside of his mind. Imastious was like an oil spill, slowly coating every part of Geoffrey's mind, and Geoffrey would have thrown up if not for the way that he'd been disconnected from his feelings.

  Imastious crept through the outer reaches of Geoffrey's mind, moving with a speed and surety that was one more piece of evidence as to how completely he overmatched Geoffrey. Once the exterior thoughts, feelings and memories had been catalogued, Imastious moved deeper.

  He was moving more slowly now, but that seemed to be at least partly because he was taking more care with his examination. Imastious dropped deeper and deeper until Geoffrey could feel him right outside the bubble of calm that was Geoffrey's inner psyche.

  Geoffrey was expecting Imastious to match his essence to the reflexive barrier that was all that separated Imastious from what had to be his goal, but instead Imastious started wandering back and forth across the metaphysical floor of Geoffrey's mind, his attention like an evil searchlight that illuminated the darkest corners.

  The search seemed to take hours, but eventually Imastious withdrew from Geoffrey's mind. Geoffrey opened his eyes and found that the shadows in the room hadn't lengthened appreciably. Only minutes had actually passed, but Geoffrey felt like he'd been running for hours.

  Imastious had collapsed against the bars of the cage, putting himself as close to Geoffrey as possible without actually entering the cage with him. That in and of itself might not have signified anything, but when Imastious looked up there was a trickle of blood running out of one of his nostrils.

  Geoffrey tried to search his memory for another instance where Imastious had been forced to exert so much energy and effort to break through anyone else's defenses, let alone Geoffrey's defenses. He couldn't be sure; the effects of the apathy constructs hadn't run their full course yet. His mind was simply too listless to be certain that he'd searched every memory, but he couldn't remember Imastious ever being pushed that hard.

  Imastious stood and looked at Geoffrey for several seconds.

  "You're an interesting puzzle, my child. You thought you could defeat me, but you forgot about the negative spaces. Only time will prove whether or not there is enough left there for my purposes, but it won't make any difference one way or another to you. You're far too dangerous to leave alive now any longer than absolutely necessary."

  Chapter 5

  Jasmin Bianchi

  Journey Youth Hostel

  New York City, New York

  I'd never run faster in my entire life than I did from that factory back to the car. Once I got back to the gas station I didn't even stop to pick up the scraps of clothes that had been left as a result of my transformation to wolf form.

  I had my Mercedes in gear and moving within a couple of seconds of getting to it, and I didn't drop below eighty until I was almost a hundred miles away from there. The gas station clerk probably thought I'd lost my mind, but that was okay. As long as he hadn't seen the werewolves or me running by on four legs, I didn't care what he thought.

  The trip from Kansas to New York took another day and a half. I slept for an hour in the car somewhere outside of Columbus, Ohio. I didn't want to stop, and not just because I was worried about making whatever schedule Rachel had in mind.

  I'd been ambushed twice since leaving Sanctuary and the rest of the pack. I'd always known that the outside world was dangerous, but that kind of thing wasn't all that relevant when you had someone like Brandon trying to kill you closer to home.

  Back in the day I'd actually looked forward to the few trips Alec sent me on to help mind his business interests. Back then a trip away from home had meant getting away from danger. Sure, there'd been the possibility, even then, of running into a couple of vampires, but vampires are so easy to pick out by their scents that I'd been pretty sure I'd be able to avoid getting caught by any of them.

  Alec's business interests had been carefully selected to make sure that they were well outside the territory of any of the other shape shifter packs, which meant that my biggest worries had always been the dispossessed, shape shifters who didn't belong to a specific pack, and the werewolves.

  Back then Puppeteer had been doing a better job of keeping the werewolves in line and the dispossessed mostly wouldn't have messed with me once they knew that I was part of the Sanctuary pack. Don't get me wrong, some of the dispossessed are super dangerous, but even the really dangerous hybrids among the dispossessed know better than to screw around with an entire pack, even a pack as small as ours had been.

  Ulrich Bishop had been very careful up until recently to keep the Chicago pack from getting involved in politics, but he and the rest of the pack leaders took an especially dim view of rogue hybrids eliminating entire packs. It had happened a few times in the past, but even the Coun'hij understood that the rank-and-file wolves needed at least the illusion of security, so they'd usually helped put down anyone really dangerous who killed outside of the formalized bounds of the challenge law that dispossessed hybrids could use to take over a pack.

  Besides, anyone that dangerous didn't usually stay dispossessed for very long. If there was any way possible to work someone like that into the structure of a pack and keep the pack even remotely healthy, someone like Ulrich would snatch them up before too long. If it wasn't possible for someone to function
as part of a pack then the Coun'hij usually found a way to use them, or barring that to turn them into a weapon that could be pointed where they would do the most damage possible before being brought down.

  For a while suicide squads sent after targets south of the border had been all the rage. After a decade or two of that the dispossessed had figured out that causing too much disruption just got the person creating the stir assigned to a suicide squad. Things had died down quite a bit after that. Now the dispossessed mostly just posed a threat to each other unless you were part of a pack that was vulnerable to a hostile takeover of some kind or another.

  There were other threats of course, but most of them were so rare that even we shape shifters half believe they are nothing more than legends. I'd enjoyed the freedom of being safe, enjoyed the liberty of being able to walk down the street and not worry that someone was going to try to kill me.

  That had all changed now. With the Coun'hij actively trying to kill us and Puppeteer having unleashed dozens, possibly even hundreds, of werewolves to run loose in an effort to intimidate the unaligned packs, I was in constant danger. When you threw in the fact that Alec had opened up something like a third of the southern border with a corresponding increase in the number of jaguar shape shifters flooding across the border from Mexico, it was starting to feel pretty astonishing that I'd survived even this long.

  I'd stopped in Columbus and slept for an hour, but I'd stopped during broad daylight and I'd parked right outside the busiest section of town I'd been able to find. I really should have slept for longer than that. Shape shifters don't need as much sleep as normal humans, but the sleep we do need is correspondingly more important.

  I'd been riding the ragged edge of safe for a couple of days now. That hour-long nap had bought me a few more hours, enough time to make it the rest of the way to New York City, but I was running a much bigger risk than I wanted to admit to myself by waiting this long to sleep.