Free Driven by Dean Murray Page B

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.