Driven (25 page)

We
put more loops around his upper arms and then we wired his hands
together behind him and put another loop around his waist. Once that
was done Jorge was as close to being harmless as I could make him
without putting him inside of a cage.

Putting
him inside of a cage would have actually been my first preference,
but I knew there wasn't any way I was going to make that happen. No
healthy, conscious hybrid would ever let themselves be locked up, but
by putting the wires around him I put him enough in my power that he
wouldn't have any choice but to do whatever I wanted, up to and
including voluntarily locking himself up.

I
actually felt sorry for him. If he transformed to a hybrid with those
wires on him he'd bleed to death in a matter of seconds as the wires
cut into his expanding flesh. If he transformed into a wolf he might
not die, it all depended on the relative size of his wolf neck as
compared to his human neck, but the wires around his wrists would
dislocate both of his front legs and leave him crippled even if the
wires around his neck didn't get him.

It
was nothing less than cruel. Jorge had been around long enough that
he should have a pretty good mastery of his beast, but even so all it
would take would be a momentary loss of control on his part, the
briefest instant where his beast took over and forced a
transformation, and he'd be dead.

Once
Jorge was neutralized we pulled his phone out of his front pocket and
rehearsed the call that I wanted him to make. He blustered and tried
to avoid agreeing to my demands, but he never really had a chance.
Between my ability to smell his lies and Geoffrey's ability telling
us exactly what Jorge was planning, it was easy to cut off all of his
avenues of escape, one by one.

It
took nearly an hour, but by the end of that time Jorge was a hollow
shell of a man. By the time we finished he'd lost the last of the
hope he'd held onto as he'd watched me kill his alpha and his best
friend. I felt dirtier for having done it, but I just kept telling
myself that this was the only way to rescue Melody and therefore the
only way to save Ben.

Even
before we'd started breaking Jorge I sent two of the other wolves off
with instructions to go pick up Ben. Before they left I promised them
that they'd suffer if anything happened to him, and extracted a
promise from them that they would do exactly as I'd asked them to in
this particular instance.

Under
normal circumstances that would have been plenty of reassurance, but
when it came to Ben I seemed to need more reassuring than normal.
Geoffrey's barely-perceptible nod indicating that they weren't
planning on making a run for it was heaven-sent. I'd hated vampires
for as long as I'd known of their existence, but it was incredibly
empowering to be working with one, especially such a powerful
mentalist.

I
called to check in with Sally and Jeff, a skinny twenty-year-old who
looked like he should be wearing glasses and a pocket protector, and
then Geoffrey, Jorge and I made the call to his contact on the
Coun'hij.

Jorge
spent the whole conversation sweating like a pig, but he didn't try
to pull anything on us. By the end of the five-minute call the
Coun'hij enforcer was convinced that the Duluth pack had captured me.
The guy wanted to talk to Branson to confirm the story, but Jorge was
very convincing when he said that Branson had been gravely injured in
the process of capturing me. Apparently I was a hybrid now and
positively huge, nearly as big as a werewolf.

I
could practically hear the eagerness dripping from the enforcer's
voice as he hung up. There was no doubt in my mind but that he
thought he'd just scored big by being the one who was going to turn
me over to Puppeteer and the rest. It even sounded like he was only
planning on bringing a couple of guys with him due to the fact that
the Coun'hij's people were spread out all over the country trying to
deal with the cats coming up from Mexico while at the same time
trying to hunt us rebels down.

Geoffrey
and I had everything we needed and all it had cost was one little
piece of my humanity.

Geoffrey
Stekensbridge House
Duluth, Minnesota

It
was obvious to Geoffrey that Jasmin was having second thoughts about
Ben being in Duluth now that the Coun'hij's men were on a plane
headed their direction. She'd put Ben up in a tiny hotel six miles
from the pack's headquarters, but that wasn't going to ensure Ben's
safety if the Coun'hij sent more men than expected.

Geoffrey
had taken Ben to the hotel himself, but if the Coun'hij wanted to
find Ben they could always just torture the information out of him.
Geoffrey had been tortured before, the only difference this time
would be that he wouldn't be up against anyone who could read his
mind. It should mean that he would take longer than normal to start
bleeding information, but it was still only a matter of time before
he broke.

There
had been quite a lot of debate about the best way to deal with the
Coun'hij's people once they arrived, but in the end there hadn't been
much in the way of viable options. If there'd been a way to get the
enforcers to Stekensbridge House then there would have been a few
different ways to ambush them, but Sally and the others had indicated
that the Duluth pack traditionally provided transport to and from the
city's small airport.

Geoffrey
hadn't been entirely surprised when Jasmin told him that there was no
way to get the pickup squad from the airport to Stekensbridge House.
Apparently shape shifters could smell nervousness as well as they
could smell lies.

Jasmin
seemed to think there was a chance she or Geoffrey either one would
have been able to avoid making the enforcers suspicious, but for the
fact that they would smell that Geoffrey was a vampire and Jasmin was
the one that they were there to carry away.

No,
they were all in agreement that the attack would have to take place
at the airport. Every member of the pack knew the code required to
enter into the section of the airport where the pack's private plane
was parked, so getting past the tall fence was no problem.

Once
inside Geoffrey walked casually towards the small control tower.
Before he'd even crossed half of the distance Jorge's phone vibrated
with an incoming text.

It
does look like Hangar Thirteen is the best bet, direct the plane
there.

Geoffrey
nodded to himself. Jasmin's text had hardly been a surprise, but it
was nice to know that the Duluth wolves had been right in their
assessment of the best place for the attack to take place.

The
rest of the trip to the control tower passed without problem and then
Geoffrey was standing in front of a heavy steel door. He briefly
considered checking to see if it was locked, but he walked over to an
especially deep shadow and sat down instead.

He
was better off doing his work from outside of the building. The
distance would make things difficult, but it would also eliminate the
very real risk otherwise that he'd run into one of the air traffic
controllers. If that happened he'd almost certainly be forced to kill
someone. Even at his best he wasn't capable of destroying someone's
memories and it would be far better for all concerned if he were able
to avoid leaving any evidence that anything unusual was happening.

Geoffrey
reached out with feather-light strands of thought, insinuating
himself into the two minds currently situated only a couple dozen
yards away from him. It was only a moment's work to determine which
of the two was currently in charge of the arrivals, and then Geoffrey
began to work himself deeper and deeper into the man's psyche.

Ten
minutes before the arrival time that Jorge's contact had given them,
the phone in Geoffrey's pocket lit back up. This time the text was
from that same contact.

Still
on schedule, make sure that you have your people there waiting for
us.

A
cold smile worked its way onto Geoffrey's face as his traffic
controller, the one that he'd burrowed so deeply into, began working
through the final approach exchange with the pilot of the Coun'hij's
plane.

Hangar
Thirteen. That's right, you want to direct them to Hangar Thirteen
once they've landed.

It
was a simple mantra, but Geoffrey repeated it over and over with the
conviction of a recent convert praying. It took only a minute or so
before the suggestion started to take root, but Geoffrey continued to
keep the pressure up on his controller.

Geoffrey
waited until the plane had touched down and he 'heard' the arrival
controller direct the pilot to Hangar Thirteen and then the vampire
stood and started back towards the spot where Jasmin and the others
were waiting for him.

The
plane had to taxi across half the distance of the airport to make it
to Hangar Thirteen, so Geoffrey was able to make it there a minute or
so before the large doors started sliding back out of the way of the
incoming plane.

Jasmin
met him at the small door he used to enter.

"Everything
is a go. The wolves are all here and positioned out of sight. We'll
wait for the plane to power down and the doors to close and then
Sally will cut the power and the entire structure will be plunged
into darkness."

Geoffrey
nodded. "Thereby making sure that we don't have to worry about
the pilot seeing something he's not supposed to. That works."

"Will
you be able to see well enough to fight?"

"Probably,
but even if I can't, it won't be the end of the world. I'll still be
able to sense them."

Jasmin
looked surprised. "I never realized that was even possible for
you."

Geoffrey
hoped that his shrug was sufficiently noncommittal that she wouldn't
be able to smell the lie on him. In theory it should be possible, but
he'd never tried it before and wasn't actually sure if he would be
able to fully compensate for the disorientation that was an inherent
part of trying to see out of someone else's eyes at the same time
that he saw out of his own.

A
second or two passed in which Jasmin seemed to be waiting for him to
expound, but then she just shrugged. "Just be careful. This all
is pretty much pointless if you're not around to heal Ben afterwards.
We need to take at least one of these guys alive, so our best bet is
to kill one quickly and then we can overwhelm whoever is left with
enough numbers to make capture possible."

Geoffrey
took up station behind a pile of tires. Jasmin disappeared behind a
large tool chest, and then there was nothing left but the wait. A few
minutes later the plane, a shiny Gulfstream, taxied into the hangar
and the large doors behind it began closing.

It
looked for a second as though the plan might come apart completely.
Geoffrey could hear the enforcers exiting the plane and not only were
the lights still on, the doors hadn't finished closing.

"Do
you hear that?"

"Yeah,
heartbeats."

Geoffrey
knew that the wolves would be able to hear the enforcers even better
than he could, so he wasn't surprised when the lights died
immediately after that. The hangar was dark, but not completely dark.
Between the running lights from the plane and the five-foot gap in
the main doors there was sufficient light for Geoffrey and he started
off towards the open door at a full sprint.

Now
that the main breaker had been thrown the doors had stopped moving
and Geoffrey knew that everyone else had doors they were covering. It
would be up to him to make sure that the enforcers didn't get out
that way.

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.