Hellbender

by Dana Cameron

  It was about that point that I saw a flash of black, red, and green: Quarrel, Naserian, and Yuan blasted through the streaks of light and color that ran along meta–Commonwealth Avenue. They were descending on the Castle.

  “Quarrel, what are you doing?” I screamed, still running. “You’ll be killed!”

  “I seek what you seek, Hellbender! If you may, I may!”

  There was a madness in his eyes that I’d only seen when he’d decided he would eat me, back in Turkey. I knew then that Quarrel and the other dragons were only on my side so long as I was stronger than they were. I was just another avenue to power for another organism.

  About thirty things went through my head at that moment . . .

  I felt a bit sad, thinking Quarrel was my enemy.

  No, it’s not that he was my enemy, just . . . not a friend the way I thought of a friend.

  Not so unlike Dmitri Parshin.

  Not so unlike myself. We were in a survival situation, and sometimes that involved being grabby, being needy, being scared.

  And I should have remembered at least a few of the stories about dragons being lustful for shiny objects and power . . .

  They are not human. They don’t have human values.

  Could I rescue Quarrel? Did I need to?

  Maybe he’d—

  Boom.

  The Makers tried to shut down whatever Quarrel and the other dragons were doing, which looked an awful lot to me like the smash and grab I’d considered. Being dragons, however, their attempt was on a far grander, much more psychotic scale. The assistants streamed to the Castle from all over the landscape, like ants over a dropped hot dog bun in the dirt.

  The dragons were tearing up the joint. If I’d been considering stealth, they were not. They were more like coke fiends who’d just found someone else’s stash, or hyperactive kids who’d been given the merest taste of sugar and then were let loose in Willy Wonka’s factory. “Rapacious” wasn’t the word, and I was now planning on replacing “bull in a china shop” with “dragon sees a new hoard.”

  Then I watched with horror as the Administrator’s people began to absorb each other, growing in size and aggression. The creature that resulted was lean and horned, red skinned and scaled and many headed, with a surplus of red, gold, and orange. I had the scary feeling the colors meant it was going to be big into fire and acid attacks.

  It was going to demolish Quarrel and the others. Their lust was going to get us all killed.

  I couldn’t let them do that. I had to try to protect them, even if what they were doing constituted an assault on the Makers and, quite probably, a challenge if not an assault on me.

  I felt the call of the artifacts, especially now that the dragons were trying to extricate them and the administrators were channeling their power into their überdragon. It was a firestorm of sound, a thousand trilling notes of outrage and color.

  It was like the fight with Toshi for the power of the mosaic, I realized. It was, if not a competition, then survival of the strongest, the greediest, the most strategic. I had to take them myself.

  As soon as I had the thought, I knew it would be bad. But too much depended on me keeping the dragons in check and keeping my fragile, tentative relationship with the Makers intact to second-guess myself. Yelling, “Quarrel, Naserian, Yuan, stop! I command you,” I braced myself.

  Not that I thought me yelling or commanding anything, especially a dragon in the heat of battle and out of its mind with jewel lust, was going to help, but I had to try.

  Deep breath. And . . .

  As soon as I actively entered the fray, it was as though ten thousand bullets slammed into me, in the form of energy and information. Somewhere through that, I knew I couldn’t possibly overwhelm the new guardian beast and three dragons who were battling each other. I didn’t want to if I could help it. And I worried what kind of spillover would affect the situation at home.

  I had to pick a side and neither choice seemed tenable. But despite his bad—no, dragon-like—behavior in starting this fracas, Quarrel was my friend. He’d come to my aid on several occasions, after all.

  “Quarrel, I demand you cease this!” I shouted, more in the hope of giving myself some courage for what I was about to do. I opened myself up to the artifacts that had attracted the dragons, hoping that I could find some that would enhance my vampiric abilities to persuade.

  Immediately, a number of things happened. Naserian, the oldest, began losing artifacts to me and turned in rage to attack.

  “Naserian! You pledged yourself to me! Stop!” But she was caught up in the frenzy.

  I reached into my bag of tricks and found what I was looking for: the katana from the temple outside Kanazawa. Having gotten her attention, I threw it at Naserian, and it turned, instantly, into a collar. She was now under my control. It was possibly the extra power I’d gained from battling Naserian that kept me able to act and plan, because my perspective changed dramatically.

  I could now see through her eyes.

  “We must stop the others!”

  No time for subtlety. I saw Quarrel clobber Yuan, trying to steal the jewels the younger dragon had taken, so I replicated the collar and clapped it on Yuan’s neck with a snap of my fingers and a flicker of thought while he was distracted. The more I had power over them, the more the artifacts from their hides, only newly enmeshed, slammed into me. I was knocked to the ground. No matter—I was becoming very skilled at thinking and getting the stuffing knocked out of me at the same time.

  I gained another pair of eyes and another will subject to my own. I was starting to get dizzy, trying to keep the dragons under control, and I could feel blood streaming from my nose, my eyes, my ears. I diverted a small fraction of my power to maintaining me, and turned to Quarrel.

  The hydra was trying to pull him from the Castle, which by this time, had grown into a cavern full of treasure to my dragon-lent eyes. I realized that the Castle was whatever the perceiver believed it to be. Quarrel was stubbornly refusing to leave the pile of treasure he was sitting on, assimilating so many jewels that he was a blur of gold and rich color over his midnight blue-black. He turned, hissed, and slashed at the überdragon. At the same time, he dug himself into the pile of jewels, wallowing, as if increasing the contact with them would speed his assimilation of them. With the combined forces of Naserian and Yuan, I felt myself growing taller and becoming heavily armored. I summoned up a weapon and found myself with a giant iron-pronged mace. I bashed at the überdragon, more to fend it off than to damage it, I hoped. A bop on the nose to get its attention, no more. We were the interlopers, and my friends were the thieves.

  The hydra turned on me. Roaring, it clapped its clawed hands together. The resulting concussion knocked me over again. I skidded across the floor and rolled to my feet. I struck my mace on the floor in return. The hall reverberated and shook. A faint crack ran across the floor.

  “Quarrel, in the name of all that is holy, I bid you: ‘Knock it the fuck off!’ ” I turned and slammed my fist into Quarrel, just managing to get his attention. When he looked up, his amazement at what he saw slowed him down long enough and I collared him the same as I had the others. A faint line of spiderweb thinness and starlight brightness now ran between me and each of the dragons. Three sets of eyes and three sets of desires to tamp down. With Quarrel temporarily reined in, I now had three thin leashes in one hand, a miracle of shimmering fineness in comparison with the dull iron brutality of the mace in my other hand.

  The überdragon pulled up cobblestones and chunks of pavement to hurl at me. More dings in my new armored form. More bruises down to the bone and marrow, and the strain on me was staggering. For the first time, I could really see what my armor and jewels looked like. Sebastian Porter had described a kind of golden nimbus around me; I saw the fine netting of gold and tiny diamonds as a body-covering armor of scale, platinum white and dotted
with those same diamonds; it reminded me of circuits. The wrist and ankle pieces retained their many-hued jewel tones but now resembled greaves and gauntlets. I had a coif of chain around my neck and shoulders. It was so pretty, so ethereal and light, it gave me heart.

  “Look, I apologize for my friends!” I shouted, swinging at the überdragon. The mace barely made a dent and I’m sure the impact hurt me a hell of a lot worse. “They got a little overexcited.”

  I swung again, and this time, the hydra did me the courtesy of grunting, as if surprised. Two of its heads lunged at me, snapping. Its breath was like sulfur and ammonia, and I had no intention of getting close enough to those teeth, each at least a foot long, to identify the yellow substance dripping from them. Time to go.

  I raised a hand. All three dragons let loose with a volley of fire and venom at the hydra.

  The überdragon staggered back and reared up. I knew what was coming next would be a conflagration. “Guys, let’s get out of here before it fries us! Right the hell now!”

  I tugged on the “leashes” ever so lightly, and with our combined efforts, we wrested ourselves away from the Castle. The dragons, now freed of their temporary mania, did the heavy lifting and, with a wrench, returned us to the here and now.

  Unfortunately, I was more or less conscious through the trip, and I wished I wasn’t. For one thing, salvos of hot plasma followed us through the rabbit hole and burned like sin. I had just enough mind to notice that we weren’t being followed by the hosts of the Castle when I was struck by something that felt like molten lead. It was as if I were melting and, worse than that, being drained, as if the very life were being sucked out of me. Much of my newly acquired armor fell away as I moved through the void, and I grew increasingly heavy and slow, my skin and muscles flaking off in black sheets as we moved. I was being reduced to nothing. I felt as though I was collapsing in on myself in an impossible origami, and when my bones started to fold against themselves, and my muscles leached away, I had no mouth left to scream, no eyes left to close against the consuming black.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I came to on the debris-strewn tarmac. The sun was directly overhead, and I was staring into it.

  The sky was dark blue; the sun was green.

  I was cold, and when I moved, I suddenly knew why. I was covered in the stuff the dragons had used to heal me before. I sat up, and the stuff resisted, as if I was covered in glue.

  When I was able to focus my eyes, I realized the only thing I could see were massive hills that eventually resolved themselves into the backs of three dragons.

  Quarrel, Naserian, and Yuan had arranged themselves around me, protecting me from the curious, angry, and worried VIPs. Only moments had passed since the Makers called on me, our escape slowed by the überdragon.

  One soldier had gotten too close and, stupidly thinking to threaten Naserian with a very large, very technical looking machine gun, was struggling, caged under the massive red claws of her left forelimb. Very carefully, she teased the gun away from him with the talons of her right. “Hellbender, what is your will with these men? They are starting to bore me with their insistent and comical aggression.” Ever since the gift of the vision, Naserian had found it easier to communicate with me.

  “It’s okay!” I shouted. I coughed, and spit out the goo. It tasted like grapefruit and lavender, without any sweetness whatsoever: bitter and dry, but not toxic, not awful. “Naserian, leave them be. The dragons are okay, guys. They’re, uh, healing me. Protecting me. It’s okay, really, everyone. Uh, stand down?”

  The dragons immediately obeyed me. Naserian shoved the soldier away with a little flick of her bloodred talons, and Quarrel, rather ruefully leaned over and opened his mouth, releasing another soldier. The man tumbled to the ground, covered in saliva and terrified, but otherwise unhurt.

  “We bow to your will, Hellbender,” Quarel said, working his mouth to get the flavor of uniform and fear-filled sweat from his tongue.

  Gradually, the crowd relaxed, and Adam Nichols forced his way through. He stopped just shy of Yuan, one of the few times I’d ever seen Adam daunted. Yuan glanced my way and I nodded. Adam picked his way to me, around and over dragon tails, with a bottle of water. I took it, and as I opened it, he raised his eyebrows with unasked questions. I closed my eyes briefly and took a deep breath, and shrugged.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You were gone for maybe three seconds,” he said, offering me his sleeve. I wiped my face off on it and squeezed his arm. “Where did you go? After you left, the red . . . dragon blinked out. Then you all just . . . were here again.”

  “Later,” I said. “Things got bad elsewhere, and I hope I was able to contain it. Just . . . I can’t talk about it here, but I’m okay, for the moment.”

  Reluctantly, he nodded, and offered me his arm.

  If the bath in Kanazawa was meant to be so hot as to sap the tension from your body, the fluids the dragons used to heal me were the opposite: chilly, bracing, tightening. If I’d been wounded, this stuff had cleaned me out and stitched me back together, almost seamlessly. I felt stiff, as if I’d been newly remolded and the joints hadn’t been broken in yet, but considering what had chased us away from the Castle . . .

  I stood. The dragons, moving unexpectedly quickly, wheeled around. Each extended their right forearm, one atop the others’. “We are grateful for your intervention, Hellbender. Were it not for you, we would be dead,” Yuan said.

  And so would I, I thought. I remained silent, waiting to see what their intention was.

  “As Naserian has already pledged herself to you and your cause, so do we all now, for all time, obey none but you,” Quarrel said. “We will grow or diminish with you, Zoe Hellbender, and our fortunes will be yours.”

  It sounded graceful and formulaic . . . and just a little dangerous. “Totally not necessary, Quarrel. I was . . . happy to help.”

  Quarrel shot me a dangerous look. I’d screwed up. “You refuse our fealty?”

  I thought quickly: “Fealty” was an oath of allegiance, a very big deal. This was no polite thank-you. It was much more important than that to the dragons. “Forgive me. My mind is still filled with our battle. I would never dishonor you that way.” A quick glance gave me another clue. I was fully healed; the dragons were not. They’d suffered burns from the plasma blast and had lost many of the jewels from their hides. Yuan seemed to be favoring one hind leg, and Naserian had a large gash, black with blood, down one side of her belly. One of Quarrel’s eyes was closed and his claws were bleeding.

  They’d expended all their healing powers on saving me. “Not after you’ve sacrificed so much to prove yourselves. Thank you, I accept your offer of fealty.”

  The dragons looked satisfied at this, and everyone breathed a little easier. “We will withdraw, then, to repair our hurts and consider our way from here.”

  “Okay—”

  The second syllable was barely out of my mouth when the three vanished. I stumbled, and Adam put his arm around me. Then I thanked him, nodded, and carefully withdrew my hand. These important people needed to see me strong.

  “So, how was that?” I asked Senator Knight, who’d pushed his way forward.

  “Did you know that the target was not blocks and sandbags?” he asked. “That it had, at its core, a decommissioned tank, which had been filled with concrete?”

  I looked where the target had been; nothing was there now. I suspected the booms had also been destroyed and that I was now responsible for a sizable environmental cleanup and mitigation fee. “I had no idea.”

  “Can you do that every time? Because if you can, you’ve just become a brand new sort of weapon, one that can walk in, looking just like a young woman, and cause massive destruction.” He didn’t seem to think that both of us could do that before all of this counted. “I think we need to discuss things in more private surroundings, don’t you?”


  “I do.”

  On the plane back to Boston, I had a quiet conversation with Senator Knight and Representative Nichols. Adam offered to stay with me, but even if he was only there as his mother’s aide, it would have been too hard for me. I would have liked that, but now wasn’t the time.

  “Okay, so you’ve seen what I can do,” I said. “What the Makers have promised me will boost whatever power I have by a significant factor. I’m not saying that to scare you, though it should—it scares the bejesus out of me. I’m telling you so that you’ll understand how much power they have, and that it would not be a good idea to interrupt or otherwise interfere with my communication with them. Are we clear?”

  Senator Knight stood there, trying not to show how shocked he’d been by the morning’s events. While there was an audience, he’d held it together. Now . . . he was feeling the impact of all the ramifications of what he’d seen. “Crystal clear.”

  “I’m going to need some things.”

  “We can get you whatever you need.” Suddenly that list of radical solutions I discussed with Claudia after the incident with the oracles didn’t seem so radical.

  “First off, I’m going to need an island. I have a short list of those that will serve.” It was a dangerously short list. Every one of the entries had the things I needed, and each was state or federal property. No messing with private landowners for me; we had to move fast. There was a tiny bit of me that enjoyed watching Knight’s eyebrows go up. I let myself enjoy the satisfaction for as long as his eyes weren’t on me. It was almost as good as a bubble bath for my spirits.

  “Very well, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “There’s more.”

  I handed him another list, one he’d find more familiar, I thought. It was the supplies for a moderately well-appointed Fangborn stronghold. My Family had gotten very good at creating hidey-holes that were well supplied over the years, and I was going to need some of that know-how and efficiency right away.

  It had struck me that in all the fairy tales that might have revealed something of the Fangborn presence through history, in so many of the myths, the legends, there was always a stronghold. Dracula’s castle loomed large in my mind as an example, or the dragon’s lair, or a deep, dark dungeon. Who knew? Maybe even the troll who lived under the bridge and menaced the Billy Goats Gruff was Fangborn, colored with menace to protect him from the Normals and distract from his real purpose.