Authors: Dean Murray
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.
For
humans sleep deprivation is dangerous enough—it leads to
mistakes, impaired driving, and in extreme cases death when the
organs of the body started to give out. It's practically impossible
for a shape shifter to get to the point where their body starts
failing as a result of sleep deprivation. The danger for us is that
we usually lose control of our beast long before that happens.
For
the beast there was only one legitimate reason to go without sleep,
being chased by a predator even more dangerous than us. The best-case
scenario for a shape shifter who gets so tired that their beast
wrestles away control from them, is for other shape shifters in the
area to beat them into submission before their beast goes into some
kind of killing spree.
I
didn't have the benefit of other shape shifters around, so I was
operating without a safety net. Given the strength of my feelings for
Ben, I didn't think my beast, even in full-on
kill-every-threat-in-sight mode, would hurt him, but it wasn't the
kind of chance I should be taking. Not with Ben, not with anyone
really, but not with him most of all.
My
phone had been working only intermittently for the last few hours. I
was pretty sure that meant that someone was looking for me and Alec's
guys were having to kick me off of the grid while they shut down the
trace attempts. It had made life extra difficult, if not as difficult
as dealing with another squad of Coun'hij enforcers would have been.
Despite
the difficulty, I'd managed to find a youth hostel on the outer edges
of the Bronx, one that was close enough to reasonable parking for me
to be able to get Ben out of the car with my normal 'my friend is too
drunk to walk on his own' trick of throwing his arm around my
shoulder and supporting his weight with my arm around his waist.
I
managed to secure one of their few remaining open double rooms, which
was a bigger stroke of luck than I'd realized. Apparently it was best
to call ahead and reserve a room by phone. The only thing that saved
me was that we weren't quite to the heavy tourist season because it
was still so cold outside.
I
put Ben in the black metal bunk that was mostly hidden by the door so
that I'd be able to enter and exit the room without people in the
hall seeing that he was just lying there as unresponsive as always,
and then made him as comfortable as I could. Once a new IV had been
run and he was as well off as I could make him, I locked the door and
went out to grab something to eat.
I
needed something that was as energy-dense as I could get it without
just going straight sugar, so I jogged over to a fast food joint and
ordered two meals to go. I was back in the room with Ben less than
fifteen minutes after I'd left.
"You
know, Ben, I think if I'd been living on sugar water for as long as
you have been that just the smell of this food would wake me up."
I
waved a golden fry underneath his nose, but got absolutely no
response at all. If someone else had been around I would have
pretended that I was just joking around, but the truth was that I
would have done much more foolish things than that if it would have
woken him up.
"Don't
worry, Rachel will come through. She always has before. She's crazy
now, like halfway out of her mind, but she does seem to know stuff
that she shouldn't be able to know. Maybe I'm being stupid, maybe
she's gone completely bonkers or she's just using me for some
nefarious purpose of her own, but I don't think so. I think this
Geoffrey guy really exists, and I think that she'll lead us to him
sometime soon."
My
beast was still edgy just due to the lack of sleep, but she'd calmed
down a little once I started getting some food into my stomach.
Getting too hungry was almost as bad an idea as going without sleep.
None of us in Sanctuary had ever lost control and eaten something…or
someone… we shouldn't have, but there were plenty of stories
about people who had, and I was pretty sure that not all of them were
urban legends.
Discussing
Rachel got my beast worked back up, and for a moment it was all I
could do to hold onto my shape as a wave of anger and otherworldly
energy crashed through me.
"Wow,
that was a close one. My beast has always been so protective of
Rachel before now. It's always viewed her as being
ours
in a way that most people wouldn't understand. It's my fault though;
my beast is just taking its cue from me."
Ben
was still just lying there as silent and motionless as ever, but I
could feel his attention, feel that he was listening to me. I knew it
was selfish, knew that he'd run away precisely because I'd
accidentally addicted him to my touch, but I couldn't help myself. I
reached out and took his hand in mine.
"The
truth is that I'm not really even pissed about how flakey Rachel has
gotten lately. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan, but the thing that
really has me so mad at her is the fact that she's calling me on my
crap. While I was stuck in that factory, not sure whether or not I
was going to make it back to you, she told me that the reason that
you and I hadn't ever been able to make it is because we've never put
each other first."
My
voice started to break, but I cleared my throat and forced myself to
go on. If this was part of the price of bringing Ben back to me then
I would pay it.
"I've
spent the last day or so telling myself that she was wrong, that I
couldn't have done anything differently, but the truth is that she is
right. I knew that you needed me. You were stuck there in the
hospital, going through the worst withdrawal pains you'd ever
experienced, and I wasn't there for you. I could have been, but I was
scared. I know, right? Big bad Jasmin, scared. I'm not sure that
anyone in the pack other than maybe Alec and Dominic would have even
believed that was possible."
I'd
spent weeks now with tears only a couple of heartbeats away. I'd
mostly managed to keep them at bay, but they were even closer to the
surface now and a single tear broke free of my right eye and trickled
down my face.
"Actually,
that's not fair. Rachel probably knew at the time—she just had
too much else going on right then to come talk to me about it. It's
crazy, but it's the truth, I was scared out of my mind. I was scared
of Agony and the rest of the Coun'hij. I could have gone to you, but
that would have been a calculated insult to Agony and doing that
might have pushed Alec into withdrawing the protection of the pack."
I'd
grown up surrounded by Agony's handiwork. Reminders of the extent of
his power had been carved into the flesh of all of the adults in my
life. Donovan's limp, Andrew being confined to a wheelchair, even
Addison had scars from the night when Agony had killed more than half
of the pack.
"I
had a good reason to be scared of Agony, but the truth was that I was
most scared of you. I wanted to be with you so badly, but I was
scared of what you'd say to me. You'd worked so hard trying to clean
yourself up, and I'd just sucked you into a new addiction, one that
was stronger than anything else you'd ever had to fight. I was afraid
that you'd reject me like you had so many times before, only this
time you'd be rejecting me despite the Ja'tell bond, and I wasn't
sure I'd be able to survive that. I didn't want to know that you
found me so repulsive that not even the flesh addiction could
overcome your dislike of me."
That
first tear had been joined by others, but I didn't wipe them away,
didn't try to pretend that they weren't there. Ben deserved better
than that. He deserved a girl who didn't suppress her feelings like
some kind of emotionless cyborg. He deserved a real person, not some
battered abuse survivor who barely functioned from day to day.
"I
just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry that I let you down. I've
always let you down, but I'm going to do better now. There isn't any
reason for you to believe me, I know that, but I'm going to prove it
to you."
I
fell asleep in my chair, still holding Ben's hand.
**
I
woke in a state of high alert. My muscles were charged with energy
and my beast was pacing back and forth at the edge of my mind. It
took me a second to figure out what had caused me to wake from the
sleep I so desperately needed.
It
was quiet, far, far too quiet. I was used to the quiet of the manor
house, but it had been built with shape shifters in mind. Even in the
older parts of the house, the parts without any kind of modern sound
proofing, it was still usually dead silent simply because everyone's
rooms were positioned so that there were empty rooms on either side
of us.
The
hostel hadn't been that quiet when I'd fallen asleep, but it was
nearly as quiet as the manor house now. It was dark outside, but my
phone said that it was only a little after midnight.
It
was too early for everyone to be asleep, but the only sound I could
hear was breathing from the two rooms that were closest to us. I was
still trying to figure out what might be the cause of the sudden
change when an incredible feeling of lassitude settled over me.
Suddenly
I had no desire to get out of my chair, no inclination to deal with
whatever danger lurked just outside of our room. All I wanted to do
was go back to sleep. It was like alien tendrils of exhaustion had
wrapped themselves around my mind and sucked away all of the energy
that my brief rest had infused me with.