Hellbender (The Fangborn Series Book 3) (16 page)

“So now what’s so funny?”

“You. I guess I don’t have to worry about you, despite what just happened,” he said. “If you were really interested in world domination, you wouldn’t have thought ‘obey me’ translated to ‘give me a pedicure.’ ”

I stood, getting pissed off. “You really, really need to tell me what’s going on, and how you got from ‘obey’ to ‘world domination,’ and why you’d think I’d want it.”

He opened his mouth to speak, and then a look of alarm spread across his face. “That’s gonna have to wait. We need to get you out of here.”

“What? Where? Why?”

“Up.” Jason snapped his fingers, and Jack and Jill flew to his shoulders settling in protectively. “Someone’s screaming pretty loud in a lot of heads—you saw, I wasn’t the only oracle to get the message.” He put the glasses back on and turned toward me. Both birds swiveled their heads along with him. It was eerie, being regarded times three.

“How many others?”

“Dunno yet, but from the shape of it,
all
of the oracles.”

I was about to protest when I heard shouts down the hall.

“What are you doing, bitch!”

“Oh my God, Frances drove off the road! I felt her die!”

There were more screams. Will grabbed me.

“C’mon, Zoe. We need to get you some place safe.”

A young boy, probably not even old enough to have finished Fangborn Academy, stopped in the hall when he saw me and went on one knee. “What do you require, Hellbender?”

I ran.

Claudia Steuben found us later; Jason, Will, and I had holed up in an empty conference room and I’d responded to her anxious text. She looked haggard, and I kept forgetting that just because I was having adventures didn’t mean my friends weren’t also overwhelmed with current events. We were only days out from the Boston battle, only days, maybe hours away from I-Day.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Confused.”

Claudia’s professional demeanor as a psychiatrist was still reassuring to me. “For good reason. It seems you’ve been reaching a wide audience, Zoe.”

“It’s not me. I swear.” I started pacing. “Did everyone hear the same thing?”

“Yes. Every oracle sensed or heard ‘Hellbender.’ Which was interesting, because while no one really knows you by that name, they all had an image of you in their heads.”

I swallowed. “Okay, I’m pretty sure it was the Makers.” I explained what I thought I knew about them. “The uh, head one? I don’t really know his name, but think of him as the Administrator. He said he’d give me some help, because he wants me to be their . . . uh, contact person, for . . . sorting everyone out.”

“Sorting?”

“Well, he thinks things are a little chaotic here and wants me to make it less so.” I told her about the meeting and how Fangborn were supposed to be the ones running the show. “It’s just that we didn’t turn out the way they usually expect, and the dragons are powerful but old and sleepy. And rather than us killing bad guys, we should be . . . ruling.”

Claudia looked at me quizzically. I nodded, my eyes wide: It was exactly as bad and big as I was saying.

“Claudia, it was only months ago I found out I was a werewolf. Then Pandora’s Box gave me the bracelet, and that led to finding other artifacts that are playing havoc with me, turning me into an armored monster. Suddenly I’m dealing with things—the Makers, dragons—that most Fangborn don’t know about! I am talking to politicians! About I-Day! I mean, WTF?”

“Zoe—”

“We’ve, you’ve, been hiding from Normals for millennia and I’m a complete
noob
and now . . . I’m the one who’s going to start outing our entire Family? I am
not
far enough up the food chain of command for
any
of this!”

“Okay, we need to tell Heck and the others. We’re going to have to get this information out fast.”

Claudia put out her hand. I nodded, took it, and got up. “I can add it to the formal statement I’m working on with the congresswoman and Senator Knight.”

“I think you ought to. And, Zoe, you might want to brace yourself for what we run into out there.” She nodded to the rest of the living quarters.

“They’re angry, huh? I don’t blame them.” If I’d heard voices blaring in my head all of a sudden, I’d be pissed off, too. Actually, it reminded me of the dragons and their sudden appearances, which had been incredibly disruptive.

“Some are. Some think it was some kind of hoax, maybe set up by the Order. Some think you’re showing off, pulling a stunt.” She hesitated.

“Yeah? Go ahead. It gets worse, so tell me.” I closed my eyes against the news like I was about to be hit.

“Yes. Some of the Family think they’ve just had a religious experience, with you at the focus of it.”

My eyes opened as my shoulders slumped. “Ah, shit.”

Claudia and I discussed some radical solutions to my sudden PR problem, but really, until we knew what had happened and how bad the fallout was, we had to just wait and see.

You can only get so much done pacing in a twenty-by-twenty room. I hadn’t left my room after the broadcast to the oracles—which I had to assume was the Administrator’s work.

The night was eaten up by putting together a basic fact sheet on what I knew—little as it was—about the Makers and the Administrator. I held a faint hope that someone else would be able to take that store of knowledge—observations and guesses, really—and find us a way to work with it.

So now, the Powers That Be—Senator Knight, Representative Nichols, Heck, and a few others—wanted some kind of proof about the Makers.

“Proof? More than what the oracles just heard?” I asked. “Well, if I can get Quarrel to show up, maybe he can tell you more. All I know is that the dragons seem to think the Makers made the Fangborn, and from what I can tell, they’re vastly powerful.”

“It would help. This is all a little . . .” Heck trailed off, shaking his head.

“Yeah.”

“Could they be allies?” Edward Knight asked. “So far they’re not offering war? You are still in the early stages of understanding each other, is that true?”

“Yes. But the fact that they can manipulate the most powerful creatures on earth is worrying to me,” I said.

I caught Representative Nichols glance and felt fear a mile deep.
She’s wondering, “Will we have to destroy the Fangborn to protect us from the Makers?”
I thought. I answered out loud. “Let me continue to talk with them. So far there’s been no impact on I-Day. The Administrator is only doing what he said. I can ask him to tone it down.”

Even I didn’t sound convincing to myself, I thought, as we adjourned.

The last thing I did before I went to sleep was hit the lab.

“Geoffrey?” I took my chair by the computer, the familiar smell of cardboard, dirt, and linoleum filling my nose.

“Yeah, Zoe?” He didn’t look up from the screen on the center workbench. He was still engaged in looking at the artifacts and analyzing them.

“I need to blow something up.”

That got his attention. Dr. Osborne’s head snapped up, his eyes locking on mine. He reached for his tea and found it, unerringly. “Oh yes?”

“I need to do it on command.”

“It seems you are already capable of that.”

“No, it’s always been . . . in self-defense,” I said. “Or in a state of high emotion. And it was never . . . against an inanimate object, a target. I need the ability to be available to me, all the time. Any ideas how I can do that?” I nodded to the screen. “Any way to make it permanent?”

“Do you want a detonation or a deflagration?”

When I said nothing, he asked, “Do you know what an explosion is?”

“Um, let’s say I don’t know anything apart from the boom.”

“Right.” He clapped his hands together, getting into lecturing mode. “An explosion is a rapid increase in volume and release of energy in an extreme manner.” His eyes lit up with the words
extreme manner
. “What it looks like you’re doing when you blast something is moving energy from one place and transferring it rapidly to another. Where it doesn’t belong.”

“Okay. I need powerful and I need showy this time. Does that help?” There was a buzzing in my ears and a kind of static rolling before my eyes. I was really tired . . .

He nodded. “Sure, got it. So what you seem to be doing now . . .” He gestured to the screens, which brought up a configuration of artifacts I’d never seen before. “This is like software. You want to make it hardware. A permanent and integral part of the machine, always on deck, right?”

I didn’t like the word “machine,” but let him go with the analogy. He was excited, on a roll, and started pacing.

“I think a lot of these materials you picked up in Japan? Much like the sort of thing I was investigating. My current hypothesis is that many of these artifacts have the switches, if you will, to allow you to create your own artifacts. Particularly ones related to defense and offense.”

“I can do that now.” The buzzing and static and sparks were worse now, and they were starting to scare me because they looked like letters and numbers. I swatted in front of my eyes, in case they were actually in the air of the lab.

“But now you can do that permanently, with these new artifacts.” He went to the bench, typed rapidly, and in the air between us, a schematic appeared with the parts list. I saw the Owo lidded bowl, which had been in the Museum of Salem. There were a few more additions, including the katana and other weapons from Kanazawa, and one of the figurines from Pandora’s Box.

The gnat-like letters and numbers resolved themselves into focused legibility, and I understood they were the storage numbers of the artifacts I’d need to do this. Nifty. I apparently no longer required blood to create something.

I said, “Registration numbers and schematic on-screen only.” Much better; the air cleared as the registration numbers fled to the screen alongside Geoffrey’s schematic.

“What I need you to do now is imagine something that will do what you want it to do. An embodiment of your idea of what makes an explosion.”

I was trying to think of something along the lines of Wile E. Coyote’s dynamite and detonator plunger, but what appeared ended up looking like a blaster, the sort of thing you’d see in a 1940s space opera. Big, bulbous, and mean looking, it nonetheless had the pleasing color and curved lines of a Jeff Koons sculpture.

The artifact numbers settled brightly on the schematic between Geoffrey and me. They began to slot into equations that meant nothing to me but had set Geoffrey cackling.

No longer was I in the artifact-harboring game. It now seemed that I was in the artifact-creating game. I was reminded of something Quarrel had said, that the dragons, while largely inactive, were able to accumulate the tools, as they called them, by pondering the jewels they already had and through conversation with the Makers. Apparently, that’s what I was doing.

Sure enough, a band of stones in red and dark yellow, hexagonal in shape, had settled into my bracelet. I held it up to admire it. Not bad for my first try.

“Thanks, Doc,” I said. I’d done all I could. I’d be able to rest now, maybe—no, certainly. I felt a terrible fatigue come over me.

“Whoa, what is that?” I sat down in a hurry.