Driven by Dean Murray

impressions of the rooms they opened up
into. There were a lot of empty offices on the left, but the right
side of the corridor seemed to contain nothing but a long series of
storage rooms, packed to the ceiling with the kind of soft,
sound-absorbing panels that I'd last seen when Alec had asked Donovan
to have part of the manor renovated and modernized with better
soundproofing than they'd had available when the house was built.
    The
panels here seemed to have encased me in a bubble of near silence. I
could hear a single werewolf behind me. It had apparently come back
through the exterior wall and started across the concrete again, but
I couldn't hear anything from the other two werewolves which were
apparently still racing around the outside of the building.
    My
nose was assaulted by something nasty up ahead as I approached an
opening on the left side of the corridor that was more than twice as
big as the doorways that I'd been flying past.
    It
was one of those split-second decisions that can make or break a
violent confrontation. If I kept running straight then I'd be heading
towards the outside wall and the windows that would provide me with
an escape route, but every step I made in that direction was effort
wasted in that it didn't get me any closer to Ben.
    Taking
the opening had the benefit of sending me in the direction I actually
wanted to be running in, as well as turning towards the source of
whatever was causing the stench, a stench that would go a long way
towards masking my scent and making it harder for the werewolf behind
me to continue to scent-track me.
    It
was that last point that decided things for me. I knew I was
accepting a bigger risk in some ways by turning before the end of the
corridor, but I also knew that it gave me a chance to get out of
sight before my pursuer could see me. It might even give me a chance
to lose it altogether, which meant it would be as good as out of the
chase.
    I
darted to the left without slowing down in the slightest and lost
traction for the barest of moments. My hips and legs swung around,
doing their best to continue in the direction I'd been running
despite the fact that my front half had changed directions.
    I
slammed into a stack of large barrels that had been invisible until I
was almost to the corridor. Those barrels shouldn't have toppled like
they did. They were full of some kind of heavy liquid, and only the
fact that they'd been stacked with an unbelievably reckless abandon
allowed the force of my collision with them to send the top several
barrels crashing down, spilling the liquid as they went.
    I'd
been almost certain that my flight was going to end right then,
either to a sprained appendage, or from being crushed by the barrels.
All of my concentration was focused on staying upright, on outrunning
the cascade of metal cylinders, and my efforts still almost weren't
enough.
    One
of the barrels struck me a glancing blow as I bounced off of the far
wall and then shot forward less than half a step ahead of the liquid
that the barrels had just splashed everywhere. I was half a dozen
steps further into the new corridor before I realized that the
barrels had been at least part of the cause of the stench, and that
what I was in wasn't actually a corridor.
    My
heart was already working as hard as it possibly could, but it
stuttered in an attempt to go even faster as I took in the cavernous
warren of rooms I'd just inadvertently chosen as the location of my
final stand.
    It
was no use going back the other direction. Even in the poor lighting
I could see the slick film that coated the water behind me. It was
slick, and not just in a transitory way either—if I stepped
into that it would slow me down for long painful minutes as well as
making me stink so badly that the werewolves wouldn't need to see me
in order to know when I exited the building.
    I
was out of other options, and even as I raced deeper into the maze of
rooms I was looking for a place where I'd have a