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what sounded like a hint of mocking
laughter dancing between the spaces in his words.
    "Still
scared that some big monster is going to tear your throat out?"
    "Laugh
all you want, ever since we arrived here I've felt like someone is
watching us. Chicago is the only major city where Imastious doesn't
have at least some kind of contact with the local power structure."
    The
woman sounded like she'd heard the same argument a dozen times
already and was bored with it.
    "It's
fine. Either Imastious is telling us the truth and there isn't any
kind of significant concentration of vampires here, or he's lying and
we could run into some kind of hunter-killer squad at any moment.
We're going to be careful either way, so it's not like it matters."
    The
scared guy muttered something under his breath before responding loud
enough for the other two to hear. "Right, but the real question
is what could cause this entire city to be vampire-free like that. We
now know that there is such a thing as werewolves; who knows what
else is out there hunting us."
    As
the darkness reached up to fully claim Geoffrey, the despair that had
been threatening to consume him for days finally enveloped him. He
was Imastious' prisoner once again.
     
     

Chapter 3
    Jasmin Bianchi
McCleary Gas and Grub
Great Bend, Kansas
    I
ended up in Kansas less out of some kind of grand plan and more
because it was hard to get much more centrally located. That and
because I needed to keep moving. I'd sent Alec a text once I made it
back to the car and got myself bandaged up. There hadn't been a
response, not that I'd particularly expected one. If I'd been further
north he probably would have tried to get me to go up and help out
one of the other groups that were being tailed, but I wasn't so he
didn't.
    At
the time I'd been relieved that he wasn't trying to sidetrack me into
doing him a favor, but now I wasn't so sure. I was out here driving
around with no backup, just Ben and I, on nothing more than faith in
Rachel and an unhealthy measure of rapidly-diminishing hope.
    Right
before she'd disappeared she'd found me and told me that I needed to
find someone named Geoffrey. Rachel had been acting weird lately, and
she'd been at her weirdest that night, but it had been a convincing
performance, convincing enough at least to get me out here.
    I
looked over at Ben and frowned at what I saw. His health had been
steadily declining for weeks, ever since I'd rescued him from the
vampires who had been holding him captive. Alec had paid for some of
the best doctors in the state to take a look at him, but nobody had
been able to explain his coma.
    That
was why Rachel had only needed to provide me with the barest glimmer
of hope to convince me this idiocy was actually a good idea. When
there aren't any other options, it's amazing what a person will do to
try and save someone they love.
    Ben
had actually been doing pretty well right before we'd left. It had
gone against everything I knew about his condition, but it had been
an undeniable fact. He'd spent nearly two hours disconnected from the
machinery responsible for monitoring his condition, two hours without
an IV drip, two hours of smoke and terror where none of us had been
sure we'd survive. That should have caused his condition to
deteriorate sharply, but instead he'd seemed almost to the point of
waking back up on his own.
    He'd
started swallowing on his own. I'd actually been able to feed him
some broth in the RV right before I'd said goodbye to Alec and the
others. I'd kept him on an IV drip since then, initially more just to
be on the safe side than for any other reason, but over the last
couple of days he'd started getting worse again.
    Now
I kept him on an IV because there wasn't any other way to ensure that
he got enough calories in to keep him from starving to death.
    Despite
dozens of hours spent poring over every scrap of medical information
I'd been able to find on anything that might be related to Ben's
condition, I still