Hellbender (Fangborn Book 3)

by Dana Cameron

  “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.”

  Quarrel ignored him.

  “Okay,” I said, “so if you’d been in this situation, with a terrific threat to the Fangborn, you would have been expected to go to war with, what, humanity?”

  “Yes, that is something like that word: humanity. And yes, we are told now that we would have been compelled to destroy those who threatened us.”

  “Why? Why not try to find some way to live with the aggressors, those who threatened you? Why such a drastic response?”

  Another pause, and an exchange of glances suggested a communication among the dragons I couldn’t read. “There is no other response from the Makers than, ‘It is what we are made to do.’”

  I went cold all the way to my marrow. “You’re made to destroy humanity?”

  “The Makers use a word and you have one similar: We are made to be predators. Predators do not negotiate. Predators find their way to a place of dominance and maintain their place and order beneath them.”

  I didn’t think I could get any colder, but I did. “Is that what the Makers intended for us, the Fangborn?”

  “As necessary.”

  “So, we’re meant to prey on humans? On those who threaten us?” That didn’t make sense, I thought. Everything I’d encountered in the Fangborn I’d met all across the world had some variation on the idea that Fangborn were meant to be benevolent, protectors. This was a giant step away from that. Somehow the message must have gotten garbled, as it was told in Fangborn folktales through the years. This couldn’t be right.

  A tiny part of me said, It has the ring of truth. You always worried there was something too convenient about these rationalizations and tales. And now you’re getting to the heart of it.

  The dragons were silently communicating again, and this time I had the distinct impression that they were worried about something. The only time I’d seen Quarrel worried before was during the Battle of Boston, and shortly after that I found myself transported across the world, apparently stripped of my powers. “What? What is it?”

  “The Makers have conferred. They have agreed that reviewing our history—”

  “Our history?”

  “Our history, going back tens of thousands of years, that our behavior does not conform with what they anticipated.” Quarrel did the dragon equivalent of gnawing on his lip.

  “Okay. What does that mean?”

  “They have determined that we are broken. They are considering what to do with us. This will take some time.”

  Suddenly I was back in the courtyard of the house outside Kanazawa.

  Little or no time had passed here. Somewhere in the distance, Rose screamed. There was so much anguish that it wasn’t something we heard in our ears but in our hearts and minds.

  Okamura-san, Ken-san, and I ran down the path to the driveway and the Trips. Rose was bleeding still but standing with her knife—still clean—in her hand. Ivy was holding Ash’s head in her lap; a long hunting knife, smeared from killing work, was beside her. Ash’s chest wasn’t moving.

  I had a flash of a vision.

  An Order guard had come across the Trips and shot Ash in the back. Rose had rolled out of the way and Ivy in turn had cut the killer’s throat.

  “Quarrel, Naserian! Can’t you do something?” I shouted. “Yuan?”

  The dragons appeared out of nowhere. “It is beyond our skill, Hellbender,” Naserian said. Her voice was even rougher than Quarrel’s, like shifting old stones rather than oak, and heavily accented. If her scales were dark garnet, her eyes were bloodred. “Even we have no power to raise the dead.”

  “Perhaps you?” Yuan suggested. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched and youthful, considering his girth. “With all your glorious energies, perhaps it is not beyond you.”

  I tried and felt . . . something.

  Not enough, not nearly enough to heal Ash, much less raise him from the dead, but it infused me with a joy that I couldn’t have imagined.

  I wasn’t done. My powers were still there. They hadn’t been stripped away by the Makers. They’d seemed burned out of me because I’d overextended myself.

  But that moment of exultation and realization was short-lived. I tried one more time, but it was like the solenoid clicking on a car’s ignition. The parts were there, but I needed a jump or a tune-up.

  Rose stood bloody handed, staring silently at her brother. Ivy was shouting incomprehensible words perhaps only her siblings would have understood.

  Without thinking, I ran over and grabbed their hands.

  Why I thought they’d need me, I didn�
�t know. In the instant between me extending my hands and each of them taking one, I realized what I was trying to do. It was a wild-ass guess, but they held on to me like they were drowning, and briefly, oh so briefly, I saw Ash’s eyes flutter and felt his hand twitch in mine. And I knew I was right.

  Ash’s life had left his body, but a charge like static on rippling silk went through me, following a fine scarlet line that connected him and his sisters. Rose slumped forward. The sensation passed, and as the other two came out of their brief confusion, I realized what had happened.

  Something in me had acted as a conduit, funneling something of Ash into his siblings. What I’d felt reminded me of the sensation that accompanied the upload of a dead person’s mind—usually someone whose blood was literally or figuratively on my hands—into my mind-lab, but this was different. Cleaner, smoother. When I’d taken their hands before the fight, and seen their lives, it was a jumble. This was me taking some of those memories and weaving them together with what they knew, retracing and reinforcing their bonds of kinship and psychic ability.

  I hoped they would forgive me this ill-conceived, clumsy, and fumbling invasion of their privacy. My hope was that this connection with their brother would fill in the gap his death left in them.

  Appalled at what I’d just presumed, I began to apologize.

  The sisters exchanged a look and then took my hands again, gently, insistently.

  I felt their grief, blinding and soul wrenching, as they guided me along that thread. I felt their fears, that if one perished, all three would, the gaping hole left behind spilling their wills and energies until those remaining siblings were husks. They knew this as well as each knew herself and the other. But now there was the faintest rose-colored line that bound up the rough edges of where Ash’s . . . soul . . . had been ripped from theirs. Fainter strands like weaving silk maintained a connection that, absent, would have torn the other two asunder as well.

  I fled their minds. The pain of loss doubled, tripled, was too awful, but I was left with the clear idea that I had made it possible for Ivy and Rose to survive.