Authors: Dean Murray
"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.
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."
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.