Driven (26 page)

Jasmin
darted forward, slashing at the hybrid closest to her, but the attack
was mostly a feint designed to draw him out of position and he didn't
take it. One corner of Geoffrey's mind realized that this could very
easily become a standoff unless he or Jasmin were able to make
something happen.

The
wolves were milling around in the near darkness, just outside of
striking range of the hybrids, but Jasmin was right, none of them
could go up against a hybrid by themselves. A bolder set of wolves
might have still been able to create openings of their own, but not
these.

One
of the hybrids laughed, no doubt having come to the same conclusion
that they were three lions cornered by half a dozen kittens, and then
suddenly the hybrids exploded into motion. It was obvious that these
three particular enforcers had worked together before, they supported
each other too well for their actions to be a coincidence.

One
of the hybrids managed a long, raking slash across the side of one of
the Duluth wolves and when two other wolves tried to get in close
enough to retaliate they found that the opening they thought
they'd seen had evaporated almost instantly as the hybrid's
companions had stepped into the gap.

Jasmin
took advantage of the shuffle as the hybrids repositioned to rip a
chunk out of her opponent's arm, which caused her opponent to advance
towards her in an effort to bring her to bay. Each movement by any of
the hybrids required covering movements by the other two which tended
to create tiny, transient openings which the wolves did their best to
exploit, but they weren't being very successful.

One
of Geoffrey's probes expanded into a new section of his hybrid's mind
and was shredded like it had just encountered a buzz saw. It took a
second for him to realize that he'd just impinged onto the beast's
home turf. The beast was going through the individual threads of
Geoffrey's probe with remarkable speed, but there were a lot of
threads.

Having
the threads ripped away so quickly caused Geoffrey a level of pain
that was only a shade away from a migraine, but he forced himself to
work through the pain and took advantage of the beast's preoccupation
to seed half a dozen new, heavily-camouflaged mental tendrils into
the hybrid's mind. Instead of trying to expand back into the same
area that had just wakened the beast that was so busy tearing through
his work, Geoffrey instead focused on increasing the number of
threads in the safe area.

The
Duluth wolves were fully engaged now. The hybrids having attacked had
pushed the more numerous wolves into defending themselves, but for
all the motion and fury of the wolves' attack, they weren't actually
doing much damage to the hybrids.

Geoffrey
had been moving along with the flow of battle, keeping himself just
outside of range, but now that his penetration of the hybrid's mind
was nearly complete he moved in and slashed at his hybrid. Geoffrey
knew what his opponent was thinking as soon as the other man's
thoughts occurred, but it wasn't helping as much as it should have.

In
a normal fight most of what happened was nothing more than reflexive
movements, things that happened without conscious thought on the part
of either of the combatants. Even so, Geoffrey usually was able to
tap into enough of the ripples of thought to anticipate someone's
actions.

Defensive
actions were the hardest because they had the least amount of
conscious thought associated with them. Offensive attacks were
slightly easier because they tended to be more premeditated in
nature. Monitoring the thoughts of a hybrid mid-fight was unlike
anything Geoffrey had ever attempted before.

Everything
was reflexive. There wasn't any thought of
feint
or rudimentary strategy, even something as simple as switching up
tempo. The hybrid sprang at Geoffrey and he was forced back several
steps while beating away slashes from those steel-like claws.
Geoffrey was half convinced that his opponent was operating on
nothing more than instinct, and even that was too alien for Geoffrey
to get a good read on it.

Geoffrey
pushed even harder on the mental side of things. The threads he'd
planted in the hybrid's mind had grown into thick roots with an
interlocking set of tendrils that touched every aspect of the
enforcer's conscious mind. Geoffrey still couldn't access memory,
that was always the hardest thing to breach, but he'd opened up
everything else.

One
of the wolves got too close to Geoffrey's hybrid and he swatted her
aside. She hit the ground bloody and didn't get back up. There was
something there as the hybrid attacked that time, a surge of
something that was more than just reflex, a trail of thought that
originated from inside the section claimed by the enforcer's beast.

The
balance of the fight was tipping away from Jasmin and the Duluth
pack. It would still be a few more minutes before things ground to
their inevitable conclusion, but Geoffrey could feel the change,
could see where things were headed.

Another
wolf was ripped out of the air and limped away on three legs. There
wasn't any time left for half measures. Geoffrey pushed more energy
into his probes and sent more tendrils growing into the beast's
territory from every direction, hundreds, thousands of tendrils that
burrowed into the last remaining area of privacy, the last mental
redoubt.

It
was all there, all of the thoughts that Geoffrey had been looking for
but been unable to find. The hybrid's beast tore through Geoffrey's
probes trying to destroy them, but Geoffrey grew new ones, sprouted
them almost as quickly as the beast could rip them free.

The
thoughts that Geoffrey was tapping into were still subtly alien, but
he could see what he needed to see now. The man and the beast were
joined into something that was nearly one organism now that they were
in the middle of a fight, but that wasn't sufficient to stop Geoffrey
from anticipating the next few attacks before they even happened.

Geoffrey
ducked under a slash that had never really been meant to hit him, and
then brought his sword up and around in a spray of blood. As his
hybrid fell to the ground, Geoffrey stepped into the gap where he'd
been standing and cut the hybrid on the right across the leg with a
slash that would have taken the leg completely off of a human.

The
hybrid on the left drove Geoffrey back with a lightning-fast swipe of
his claws, but the remaining four uninjured wolves had piled on the
now-immobile hybrid and Jasmin was yelling for them to leave one of
the hybrids alive.

Less
than a minute later the last surviving hybrid shifted back to human
form. He hadn't liked it, but even he hadn't been able to think he
could survive against five-to-one odds. When faced with death or
surrender he'd picked surrender.

Once
the fight was over, all of the blood painting the floor was nearly
more than Geoffrey could take, but he closed his eyes and forced
himself to think of other things. It wasn't appealing blood, warm,
from the vein, it was little more than liquid garbage. Geoffrey
promised himself that he would feed soon and then opened his eyes and
went back to cleaning up.

They
had the captive they needed, now it was just a question of whether
Geoffrey could break him in time.

Geoffrey
Stekensbridge House
Duluth, Minnesota

The
final butcher's bill was worse than Geoffrey had hoped, but better
than it had almost been. Geoffrey ran through a list of Jasmin's
wolves as he walked down the hall. It wasn't strictly something he
should have been thinking about right then, but it had the benefit of
distracting him from what he was about to do.

Jeff's
right leg had been shattered in more places than Geoffrey even cared
to think about, and he'd lost an incredible amount of blood, but he
should make a full recovery given enough time. Sally and most of the
other wolves had made it through the fight more or less okay, but the
last wolf, the one Geoffrey had seen go down in a spray of blood, was
in fact dead.

Geoffrey
hadn't been sure what to expect out of Sally and the others, but what
he got was a kind of tired acceptance of their friend's death. None
of them liked it. They felt like they'd been dragged into a war that
had nothing to do with them, but they also weren't ready to stand up
to Jasmin and tell her what they were really thinking.

It
turned out that restraining a hybrid was more challenging than
Geoffrey had realized. They'd restrained Jorge just fine, but only by
putting him in a position where he could die at any time. They
couldn't let the enforcer die, at least not until after they'd gotten
the information they needed out of him, so just tying him up with
wire wasn't a suitable option.

After
being restrained by Imastious so many times, Geoffrey was practically
an expert when it came to tying people up, but he didn't know very
much about hybrids other than the fact that they were insanely strong
and that shifting would cause them to get much bigger. Jasmin, on the
other hand, knew quite a bit about hybrid anatomy and abilities, but
not very much about tying people up.

It
took a little while, during which time the enforcer, Jeete, was tied
up with wire just like had been done to Jorge, but eventually the
pair of them hit on a solution. The Duluth wolves rounded up two of
the cages used to restrain wolves or hybrids who'd been injured too
badly to control their shape, or who'd otherwise displeased their
alpha. Geoffrey had thought that the cage Imastious used on him had
been heavy-duty, but it had nothing on the monstrosities that Sally
and the other two wolves scared up for them.

The
bars were thicker than Geoffrey's arms and the spaces between the
bars were only about two inches wide. The whole thing was made out of
hardened metal and not only was it small enough that a hybrid
wouldn't have very much room to move around inside of it, the key
surfaces were all angled so that from inside of the cage you couldn't
get leverage on anything.

The
steel bars were marked up from the claws of the hybrids who'd spent
time in them, but apparently even hybrid claws couldn't shear through
that much metal, at least not without the room required to build up
some serious inertia.

Geoffrey,
Jasmin and the others put Jorge and Jeete in separate cages and then
put human-style restraints around Jeete's wrists and ankles. Jasmin
was fairly certain that the restraints would simply tear if Jeete
shifted, but just to make sure, she had bolted them to the wall using
a section of metal that was too strong for a human to break, but
which a hybrid should be able to tear away from the stone without too
much trouble.

By
adjusting the distance between the cage and the wall, they were able
to make sure that the restraints were too tight to fall off while
Jeete was in human form, but once he shifted and the bolts tore
through the scrap metal holding them to the rock wall, then the
restraints should loosen and fall off rather than cutting his hands
and feet off.

Once
they had both hybrids satisfactorily restrained, Geoffrey took a pair
of pliers and removed the loops of wire around each of their necks,
wrists, waist, ankles and arms. Jasmin came back from retrieving Ben
about the time that the vampire had started hunting around the house
for the things he would need to break Jeete. By the time Geoffrey
headed back down to the basement, Jasmin had gotten Ben comfortable
in the master bedroom and caught back up with Geoffrey.

"Have
you done this kind of thing before?"

"Not
that I remember, but based on some of the things that I've been told
it's likely. The toughest part is figuring out how far you can push
someone without killing them. That's the part that gets most humans
in trouble when they start out."

Jasmin
worked her mouth a couple of times like she was trying to get words
out but unable to make her voice function.

"Don't
worry, I shouldn't have to push him nearly as close to the edge of
death as you would. I just have to lower his natural resistance to my
mental probes to the point where I can get in and find the
information we're after. The fact that he's a shape shifter and
naturally tougher than a human should only give me a bigger margin of
error."

"That's
true, but you're also going to have to watch out. If he gets too
close to death he'll more than likely shift despite his best efforts
and I suspect that you'll have a harder time ransacking his mind once
he shifts."

"I
guess it's a good thing that we aren't restraining him with wires
then."

Jasmin
looked away from Geoffrey for several seconds and then cleared her
throat. "Does it bother you? I mean what you're about to do?"

Geoffrey
shook his head. "No. I'm ready to play my part. Does it bother
you?"

"Not
in the slightest."

Jasmin
stepped around him and pushed open the door to the rock room where
Jeete was being kept. Geoffrey followed her inside. He'd lied,
apparently well enough that Jasmin couldn't tell, but he was fairly
sure that she hadn't.

He
was still planning on upholding his word, but he'd started to see the
glimmer of a possibility that he'd have to put Jasmin down before
that day came. They would do what they had to do in order to save the
ones that they loved, but that didn't mean that either he or Jasmin
were going to be safe enough to run free once that was done.

Geoffrey
had already seen too much of what happened when someone stopped
viewing other people as anything other than objects. Imastious had
already done plenty of evil. Geoffrey wouldn't be part of turning
Jasmin into something like that, not without trying to clean up after
himself at least.