Hellbender (The Fangborn Series Book 3) (4 page)

Rose was bleeding badly. Oracles don’t heal as quickly as shapeshifters and she could barely walk. I picked her up, slung her over my shoulder, and pelted back to the vehicles, the gravel crunching and shifting under my feet. I didn’t dare try to heal Rose myself—that was a vampire power, not one werewolves ordinarily had. But her siblings, who apparently knew their share of battle first aid, were ready and waiting. They got to work on her.

“That was quick,” Ivy said. “Told you I was a better fighter.”

“But I found the captured oracle,” Rose retorted. Then she grimaced as Ash began to clean the wound on her arm.

“And so that’s why you were the one to go,” he said, working steadily.

“You guys okay?” I asked.

Three nodded responses. I ran back to the gate. I decided to cut through the first building, hoping to find a way around the Order.

I’d vaguely been wondering why there were two Fangborn safe houses so close together, and now I knew. This wasn’t a house at all so much as it was a museum.

I entered a long hall, the interior walls of which had traditional paper screens I recognized from samurai films as shoji. The light in the room was low but far better than the rainy night outside. Along the walls on both sides were tables covered in arms and armor from all over the world. Filing cabinets and notebooks and other recording information, even a photography stand, were scattered about in a makeshift lab space.

The weapons all had one thing in common: They were bladed. One in particular spoke to me—a long, slightly curved Japanese sword of Tamahagane steel on a table at the center of the wall.

That’s what brought me here, I thought, these objects. Like the vision of the powerful Fangborn artifacts that had almost physically driven me to seek them out in Denmark and Turkey, these weapons had drawn me not only to this hall but away from the Battle of Boston. My oracle friend Vee Brooks had given my own power a boost, and my inexperienced attempt to stop time had supplied the energy while the artifacts provided the target, taking me away from where I was needed.

This time, however, there had been no visions, no terrible pain to make me desperate to find the artifacts. There had been . . . nothing. Were the artifacts now able to simply pull me to them, even from across the world?

A shout from outside woke me. The katana I’d been attracted to glowed violet, and I felt a hum through the air as I raced toward it. But something was badly wrong. My proximity sense flared a warning.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” A hateful drawl broke the silence.

I turned, growling before I saw him. Jacob Buell, his craggy face drawn with exhaustion, was limping and reaching for a pistol. His wavy hair was plastered flat, black with sweat and rain, and he still had burn marks on his hands and neck from where I’d hit him with an acid venom attack in Boston earlier this very strange day. Whereas I’d had the chance to shower, heal, and eat, I could see a long series of bruises and cuts ran up his face, and his head was hastily shaved and stitched, probably from where I’d bashed him into the floor before our sudden and instantaneous trip across the globe. If he still had a few burns on him, from the explosion he caused that destroyed the Museum of Salem, that was fine with me.

But there was not nearly enough damage. He was still upright.

“You can’t go anywhere without taking me with you, can you, stray?” He limped a few steps closer, his bad left leg still fucked up from a rough landing in the alley, the gun pointed at me. “Why did you send me here?”

As I lunged for him, I realized that before I fainted in the alley, I had teleported him here trying to defend myself. That was what had knocked me out. But that wasn’t uppermost on my mind.

Nothing else mattered, not the kidnapped Cousin, not the battle in Boston, not the rest of the world. Only Jacob Buell mattered. I wanted him to feel a little of the torture he’d put me through. I wanted him to know it was coming from me.

I landed on top of him as he pulled the trigger. I felt bullets slam into me and didn’t care. I’d pay for it later, gladly, so long as I killed him first. When my knees hit his shoulders, he went over backward; I knew that unless I tore out his heart, now, forever, I was going to get shot again, at close range to way too many organs.

I felt more blows to my gut and dying suddenly seemed all too likely. I still wasn’t healing fast enough and heard humming as a strange dizziness overtook me. It was as though I was losing control of my senses and my body. Why go for his heart, when his throat was right there?

Definitely dying
, I thought bleakly.
But not before I take him on this one last journey with me
—

I shook my head, trying to quell the buzzing. I finally managed to stop digging through his rib cage—it felt almost as though I wasn’t a werewolf at all, that I was a girl with a plastic ice cream spoon, trying to make a dent in Buell. With an effort, I raised my claw back, ready to tear his face off.

My hand brushed the table with the katana. The sword shifted slightly toward me and I grabbed it.

The long chamber’s shojis and exterior walls vanished in a bank of flame that was gone almost as soon as it appeared, leaving the beams and posts untouched. We now could see everyone in the courtyard, and they us. Each of the other weapons and pieces of armor on the tables was glowing pale green, brighter and brighter, until each burst into a ghostly flame. Even while I felt life’s blood leaving my body too fast, even while Jacob Buell was in my grasp, I could only stare.

The flames took on the distinct shapes of the pieces of armor themselves, and rose, sorting themselves out in anatomical order. The parts didn’t match—the Incan helmet of wood and copper had no business hovering above the Mycenaean Dendra plate armor—but they created a nearly humanoid form.

They hovered briefly, and I had no sooner wondered what I should do next when all of the weapons flew into the katana I held, each slamming into the next—curvy bladed Indonesian kris, an improvised fauchard made of a scythe, an assegai with a long, leaf-shaped blade—until they formed a giant two-handed broadsword of green and violet flame in my hand. Each blow was like it had been made by a supernatural adversary, and I struggled to hold the changing weapon.

Before, when I’d assimilated artifacts, I’d been at least in decent shape. Mostly. Now I was pretty sure I had even less power than before, and was on the ragged edge of exhaustion, physically, and . . . magically. I wasn’t sure I was going to survive this . . .

The green ghost of fiery, mismatched armor turned to me. The incandescence was blinding. I held up the flaming sword and braced for the inevitable. Pain and death.

I really hope this isn’t the guardian of this collection
,
I thought.
Because if it challenges me, I’m in big troub—

The buzzing increased, filling my head. A vision . . .

I moved toward the armored ghost, arms outstretched as if to embrace my own end . . .

No, not my end. There were craftsmen and technicians laboring over their wares. I needed to embrace the result of their skill, their ability to imbue the artifacts with power . . .

The ghostly artifacts winked out of existence and popped up less than a meter away from me. Somehow I managed to stand, found the strength to hold my arms out. I closed my eyes, not at all certain it was a good idea . . .

I felt the barrage of energy as the armor touched me, pressed itself onto every part of me, and . . . didn’t stop. The armor melted into me, and it felt as though the energy was racing around inside my body, weaving bone and blood together with something else. Maybe this was what it was like to be electrocuted, I thought raggedly, or to be on acid while someone stuck knitting needles into random sections of your brain. This was what other people imagined it was to turn into a werewolf—a curse of bone stretching and crunching, muscles straining beyond human endurance, and the systematic ripping away of your humanity. The dizziness of reaching through time and space through Pandora’s Box was a pony ride compared to this roller coaster. Just when I thought it could go on no longer, it found a way to get worse.

No, the ecstatic reward of the Change was the utter opposite of this.

But why were the artifacts still coming to me if I was depleted?

The armor had vanished, and I wondered if I was now burning with the pale green flame. I opened my eyes and saw the mystically born sword, still glowing violet in my hand. Then that slid out of my fist and up my arm and, like the armor, became a part of me.

I may have passed out, because I hardly noticed when it stopped, hardly noticed that I’d fallen down again. The only signal I had was that I could feel my heart racing so fast, it felt as if someone had set a drum machine for the bass drum at two hundred and forty beats per minute. When I registered the cool of the straw tatami floor under my cheek—how was it not burned?—I began to wonder if I’d become enmeshed with it, an integral part of the house. Then I felt my breath moving between my lips, which brought an unpleasant taste of rusty iron and bitter greens.

Buell struggled to his feet. Maybe it was some kind of “die in your boots” mentality, but he just stood there unsteadily, wobbling, not quite sure what to do with himself. His blank look told me he’d run out of mind to boggle. Outside, the battle was slowing down, as the Fangborn took the opportunity to disarm the Order soldiers who were staring at the spectacle of me melding with the hoard of arms and armor.

I was at least as beat up as Buell was, but I was still a werewolf and I was owed pain. I knew what to do, even though I could barely think with the images that were filling my brain, scenes of metalworking and leather curing and forges and workshops, showing me the Fangborn makers of these artifacts. Buell looked like a martial arts training dummy to me, and even if there were no magic on deck, I still had claws and fangs and a heart burning with the need for vengeance.

Slash across his chest—I’d finish what I began, tearing out his heart eventually. I wanted him to know that his death was here, in me. Another slash caught a corner of his eye and would have had all of it if he hadn’t fallen back. I managed to tear the end off his nose, and the blood spurting out muffled his screams, which were music to me. His bad leg gave and he fell; his arm and face burns were still angry and red.

It was time to end it, before I couldn’t. I needed time to acclimate to the rush of artifactual power, but all I required was just a second to kill him. One more slash to his throat and it would be done.

One, two, three shots. I went down, hard, my head spinning. I looked down. More blood poured from my abdomen. I didn’t dare look further, afraid of what I might see.

“Zoe!” Ken-san called out. He had dispatched the shooter. There was no more threat. Just me and Buell.

Remarkably, Buell was still trying to crawl away. Whatever synthesized healing ability he’d had from Porter was still working. I rolled over onto my stomach and felt my insides slosh in ways I knew they shouldn’t, but it was the only way I could move. I raised my hand, willing one last blast from it, one last bolt of power . . .
Just one more, please God, give me something to kill this monster . . .

Nothing but a blinding, crushing headache, the sutures of my skull grinding against each other, bony plate against bony plate, with my brain a pool of lava compressed inside.

I tried dragging myself after Buell and managed to get to my knees. That was as far as I got. I reached into my pocket, hoping I’d find something I could throw at him. Nothing.

I tried once more to blast him, screaming, feeling the rage at the futility of it all, the blinding pain of pushing past depletion. He was
right
there . . .

“Hellbender, I am here!”

The roaring outside and within my head would have flattened me if I hadn’t already been down. Quarrel, a vampire who’d grown so old he’d acquired the form of a dragon, had materialized in the courtyard as if out of nowhere. His sudden appearance and terrifying aspect had resulted in screams from the Order soldiers and more than a few from the Fangborn, to whom dragons were a thing of the distant past, if not myth. He raised himself up onto his great haunches, glittering black and silver in the rain, and spoke even louder, to make himself heard over the racket of his lesser kin and their enemies.

“Why do you assume that posture, Zoe Miller? It does not look like a fighting stance to me!”

Chapter Four

When Buell saw Quarrel, he did the only things possible. His jaw worked, he stared, and he dropped his empty gun, a dark stain spreading across his trousers. It is one thing to know, vaguely, that dragons exist and to understand something of their pedigree and powers. It is quite another to see one in real life: thirty feet long, a glittering bluish black, lizardlike body, with a red-gold belly; thick scales dotted with brighter jewels that looked similar to the ones I had on my body; foot-long teeth, and claws like polished daggers.

I was so happy to see Quarrel that I got to my feet. I nearly tore Buell’s guts out with a slashing kick before I fell back to the floor, totally spent with that effort.

Buell and I stared at each other with impotent hatred. He looked at me blearily across the tatami as if to ask, “What are you doing? Don’t you see this thing over here?”

Still, not quite dead. Whatever Porter had given him had been strong, and I was getting sick of it. There must be some way to counteract that. I must find out—

“Zoe Hellbender, why do you not finish with him? I have much news!”

I bet you do, dragon
, I thought,
and even some answers for me, but I think I’m dying over here.
“Not doing so good, Quarrel.”

I tried to push myself off the floor, but my arms were tingling like they’d been asleep, deprived of circulation, and I could barely feel them. Finally, I managed to sit up, my legs straight out in front of me. I heard shouts. I had to ignore those and Quarrel and get to killing Buell.

“It is no wonder I found you so easily! You are quite radiant with—” He used a word I didn’t understand. “If I had been here sooner, perhaps there might have been some for me.”

Reaching delicately through the standing members of the house, with no walls to impede his view or him, Quarrel nudged me with his snout, breathing small wisps of steam that added to the humidity. Being nudged by a dragon is a little like being nudged by a very dainty bus, even when you haven’t been in a fight for your life, mystically transported, and shot repeatedly. I smelled a familiar aroma, bitter herbs, and felt my insides move sickeningly again, the pain from the gunshots and blood loss dizzying, as I settled back onto the mats. Maybe Quarrel was concerned; more possibly he wanted to see if there was any loose power left he could grab.

Quarrel had been a friend and ally, but I could never forget that he had once, on a hillside in Turkey, threatened to eat me and take my power as his own. This proximity and my weakness was not a good combination, as far as I was concerned. At least if it was Quarrel who killed me, it wouldn’t be Buell.

“Oh, I understand. You have not—” He again used language I could not comprehend. He gave me a look of something like awe. “You are very weak.”

I understood that okay. “Yeah.”

“Pray, allow me.”

He stretched out his claw daintily through the standing members of the house. I thought he was going to put me out of my misery and seize what power he could from me. This would be my obituary, I thought, as I felt the point of a claw dig ever so slightly into my flesh:
Zoe Miller, briefly an archaeologist, a werewolf for an even shorter period, leaving a trail of dead friends and chaos behind her, died finally by being dispatched by an ambitious dragon, Quarrel . . .

Instead it was like lightning coursing through me, enveloping me. Somehow it was different from the artifacts’ assault, controlled, like jumper cables being correctly applied, and oddly cooling. Then, way too cold; I felt myself go numb through and through. The big chill, the biggest . . .

Well, it was better than the bullets and fire and bruises
,
I thought sluggishly. My brain slowed and . . .

I gasped and sat bolt upright. I clutched at my stomach and felt my borrowed clothing soggy, heavy, and bright with fresh blood. Biting my lip, I probed further and then dared to lift up the hem of my shirt.

Wet, but not bleeding. I brushed at it. Nothing. No wounds, no blood, no bullet-churned guts spilling out . . .

I blinked, stared again, and then poked at the skin. Nope, all was well. Still no jewels, but . . .

I looked at Quarrel, who was eying Buell with an air of disgust. I made a noise of disbelief, and the dragon swung his head around to me. “Yes?”

Still incapable of speech, I raised my brows and spread out my hands to indicate, “Look, I’m alive!”

“Yes. Well, you know I was what you call ‘vampire,’ one of the healing warriors, before I grew into this form over the millennia. My skills have always been prodigious in that sphere.”

“I’ll say,” I croaked.

“You were very weak, still adjusting to the assimilation of those . . . tools.
I merely helped by employing”—he used unfamiliar language—“and by healing your body.” The dragon cocked its head with concern. “You should eat. It’s not good for one so young to go so long without food. Especially when there are many events unfolding.”

I nodded dumbly. I could not agree more. “Thank you. Uh, for healing me.”

“I am surprised you did not think to use that . . . foreign thing you have . . . on him.” Quarrel’s voice dripped with distaste.

I looked beside me and found a short sword, the one artifact that had not been transformed to the energy that was now a part of me. About three feet long, and iron; the blade looked sharp, but . . . primitive. Pre-Roman Celtic? The blade did not match the intricate red enameling that made me think of Anglo-Saxon art, or the later medieval reliquary that was set into its pommel. “I didn’t even know it was there.”

“You should pay more attention,” Quarrel said tartly. “And now, Hellbender, do you wish to capture or kill that piece of refuse?”

Buell had information. As I watched him blubbering weakly, bloody bubbles popping at his ruined nose and mouth, his eye a ghoulish mess of jelly, I thought of how he tortured me, and still, I almost bade Quarrel hold. Then I remembered what he’d done to Toshi Yamazaki-Campbell’s fiancé Sergio and Cousin Alexandra and the words were out of my mouth before I knew it.

“I’m done with him.”

“Excellent! Stand well back!” he called. “Naserian, Yuan! Attend me, if you please!”

With that, two other dragons appeared out of nowhere. Naserian was dark garnet red and twice the size of Quarrel; Yuan was young-grass green and smaller than Quarrel, though quite a bit thicker around the middle. The remaining Fangborn were slack-jawed with awe. The members of the Order had fallen on their faces, covering their heads against the sight.

Even when you knew that dragons existed, it was pretty shocking to see one. Never mind three.

Quarrel reached through and snagged Buell on one claw. He dragged him outside to the gravel courtyard, leaving a glistening red smear on the straw mats.

“Prepare yourselves, my very young Cousins!” he cried out in our minds. “Your ears are ridiculously fragile!”

The dragons bellowed and thundered. Their bodies shuddered under the effort, jeweled plates sparkling in the moonlight, and the dragons dug their claws into the ground to brace themselves. The noise penetrated our covered ears and seemed capable of liquefying our brains.

Jets of pale blue liquid shot from their dagger-filled mouths as if from fire hoses and hit Buell with a terrible impact.

Buell screamed as the force of the blast pushed him along the gravel a short distance. I smelled burning flesh, a barbecue gone badly wrong.

Two more short blasts and steam rose in larger and larger clouds. The venom began to eat through his head and hands. Flesh burned back, peeling and cracking black as it did. Muscle and bone exposed, and the last thing he saw, before his eyes evaporated, was me holding the short sword I’d taken across my shoulders.

What had been Buell collapsed on itself. The dragons raked through the still-burning parts, better to finish the job. Soon, all that was left was a puddle on the broken ground and tiles. I thought about my earlier wish—to nuke him and salt the earth—and decided this would do nicely.

“It will cease being corrosive in an hour or so,” Quarrel said with some pride. “And there will be no trace of him. He has effectively returned to the earth, though she would not wish his stain upon her. But I didn’t summon Naserian and Yuan merely to deal with one so small. Now we must go.”

“Where?”

“To continue your inspection with the Makers.” I had just enough time to wonder about the timing, why they would show up at exactly the wrong moment, when we were in the void I associated with the Makers.

I’d first experienced that cosmic nothingness when I opened Pandora’s Box and was flooded with images and ideas too big to comprehend. Several occasions since then, I’d only felt the void.

The thing that was different this time was that I could see the dragons. It was less empty and, therefore, less terrible.

I tried holding my hands out in front of me; I could see them, too. My foot was paler, more translucent, than the rest of me, and I could see stars through it. I wondered whether my head was visible, too. I didn’t have a mirror to check.

Interesting.

After a moment—which could have been a year long, in that place—I saw Quarrel go rigid. The other dragons did as well.

I was about to ask what was going on, when they turned to me expectantly.

“Zoe?” Quarrel prompted.

“Yeah?”

“The Makers await your response.”

“What did they say?” I craned to look around me. “Where are they?”

“They are eager to hear from you. Can you not perceive them? With any of your senses?”

I felt a kind of shiver, but that was probably adrenaline. I shook my head and then remembered to speak. “Nope.”

The dragons conferred among themselves. Quarrel leaned toward me. “Naserian suggests you do not have your full eyes yet. The Makers can hear you, but because your voice is still strange to them, I shall communicate between you.”

“Okay. Um, what did they ask?”

“They want to know how your war to subjugate the population goes.”

“What? What war, what . . . population are you talking about?” I began shaking as if I was in one of those nightmares where I’d forgotten all the lines to the play I was about to do.

“You were preparing to invoke the powers of war. They want to know how you fare and why you took on this task.” Quarrel was also surprised. “I am also curious to know what war you will commence.”

The idea that I was going to war, that I was trying to subjugate anyone, just about knocked me on my ass. “Wha . . . huh . . . no, that’s not what I’m doing at all! I mean, fighting yes. Subjugating, no.” I thought about it a bit more, tried to gather my thoughts.

“Tell them,” I said, trembling, “we are fighting to stay alive and safe, against enemies who wish us dead or in cages. I’m fighting for my kind, for survival.”

There was a long pause, from my point of view, before Yuan responded this time, his voice piping and reedy compared to Quarrel’s, which was deep and dark as old oak. “They express curiosity and concern, Hellbender. If you are so attacked, why do you consider anything but eradication and subjugation? It is your purpose.”

“Say what?”

“It is your purpose,” Yuan piped up. “They say it is why the—you say ‘Fangborn’—were created. To be the predators who rule a world. The Makers do not understand . . .” He—she?—paused a moment. “I think you would say, they do not understand your . . . ‘half measures.’ This is all very surprising to me.”

It was surprising to me, too. “Half measures?”

“You have it in you to destroy the less-evolved humans. If you are threatened, you have no choice. They want to know why don’t you?”

There was more conferring among the dragons.

I held up my hands. “Whoa, whoa! This is crazy talk! So crazy, I don’t know where to begin. I don’t have that kind of power. I don’t even have everything I started out with today. And why the scorched-earth policy? That’s just for starters. I’ll come up with other questions once my head stops spinning.”

Quarrel was silent for a while, perhaps still in communication with the Makers. I did not expect his next response.

“Huh. I never imagined that was the case,” he said.

“What? What’s the case?”

“Zoe, we’ve never discussed these objectives, these plans, our purposes with the Makers before. When we exceeded our natural lifespans and were not killed in the pursuit of evil, we withdrew from the world of man for ages. We’ve been so retiring, so inactive in the world, that . . . this talk of ‘subjugation’ never came up. But you, with your similar adornments, the tools, are still a part of the affairs of men. I believe this is why you’ve attracted the Makers’ attention and the reason for these confusing statements and questions on both sides.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What purpose? What . . . affairs of men?”

“Age has made us sluggish, and most of our powers were acquired after we withdrew from the world, by our musings and communication with the Makers. So . . .” If it was possible for a dragon to sound sheepish, Quarrel did. “What we were meant to become, what the Makers intended for us, never came up. At least for us, and—” Quarrel glanced at the others, who went blank for a moment, and then seemed to agree. “And for those others of our kind, we are aware of. This is . . .” He paused again. “This is not the first time this matter has arisen, but the latest in a very long time.”

“When was the last time?”

There was another conference. “Long before any of us. Perhaps when those intrusive Latin types began overrunning their bounds.”

“Hey, I was married to one of ‘those intrusive Latin types,’
 ”
Yuan protested. “Some time after the glory of the empire, however.”