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didn't know enough to save him. I could run an IV,
but I couldn't do anything to fix his breathing, which was steadily
getting worse.
    He
was still on the course of antibiotics that he'd been prescribed just
before everything had fallen apart back at the estate, so I knew the
cause wasn't bacterial. Honestly it probably didn't matter what the
cause was. Every time we got one symptom under control something else
flared up.
    It
was like his whole system was shutting down and there didn't seem to
be anything that anyone could do to save him. Unless you believed
Rachel, in which case somebody named Geoffrey had the key to a
complete recovery.
    I
was driving, so I'd only looked over at Ben for a second, but it had
been enough to confirm my suspicion that his IV bag was nearly empty.
It was actually not terrible timing, we were only a few miles away
from an exit, and the car was down below half a tank, so I figured I
should just kill two birds with one stone.
    Driving
fast is practically part of the job description for your average
shape shifter. Even in human form I had the kind of reaction time
that any professional racer would kill for. Despite Ash's statement
that it was a dangerous hole in my skillset, I'd never put in the
time required to develop the kind of driving reflexes that he and
Alec had. Even without their vaunted skills, I could usually do
twenty or thirty over the speed limit without putting myself or
anyone else on the road in any danger.
    With
the radar detector blinking its reassurance at me that there weren't
any cops in the area, there wasn't any reason for me not to push the
Mercedes up to triple digits, but I'd stopped driving so fast
sometime the day before. I didn't have an ultimate destination in
mind, so it didn't matter whether I did a hundred and twenty or if I
did thirty. Either way I was still headed nowhere.
    I
pulled off at a Chevron and reached into the backpack on the floor
behind Ben for another IV bag. I was starting to run low. It was too
late to text Alec and ask him to have someone arrange for me to get
some more, but I made a mental note to do so first thing in the
morning.
    Actually,
I wasn't even sure if what I had in the bag was a controlled
substance of some kind or another. Some things you had to be an
honest-to-goodness doctor to get, while other things could be
purchased from a medical supply company by anyone. For as long as I
could remember, first Donovan and then Alec had made such
considerations less than nothing. If we needed something, regardless
of the legalities involved, we had it.
    It
was incredible what money and influence could do for you, but in the
end it could only do so much. It could help protect the ones you
cared about, but some forces couldn't be bought off with
hundred-dollar bills, and once someone was gone there wasn't any
power wielded by Alec or anyone else that could bring them back.
    I
managed to get the new bag hung without disturbing Ben. One of the
nurses Alec had brought in to give Dominic and me some time off
hadn't been able to tell the difference. To her a person in a coma
was for all intents and purposes dead to the world. Maybe that was
how it worked for other people, but not for Ben. I could tell when he
was comfortable and when he wasn't.
    Sometimes
it was nothing more than the barest shadow of a crease on his
forehead, sometimes it was a subtle change in his breathing, other
times it was a weak almost-movement of an arm or leg. It was hard to
catch sometimes, but it was possible for anyone who cared enough to
learn.
    Needless
to say that particular nurse hadn't lasted long.
    Satisfied
that the new bag was properly secured to the handle above Ben's head,
I wadded the old bag up so I could throw it away while I was waiting
for the tank to fill. I didn't even get my car door open before my
phone rang.
    It
wasn't a number I recognized, but that didn't mean much these days.
Even with Alec's hackers running interference for us there were times
when you