Death Becomes Her

by Michael Anderle

  “Is it going to affect my weight?”

  No, the new substances are barely different in weight from the bone construction you have now. However, the structure will rearrange the molecules in a significantly stronger fashion.

  “How much stronger?”

  It ups your bones compression capabilities, which are already pretty good by a factor of seven, your tension abilities by a factor of twelve and your shear abilities which are normally a bone’s weakest by a factor of eighteen.

  “That could be handy, tell me what to push to make that happen.” Bethany Anne went through the menu as Tom instructed, the pod door opened again and she lay down. The pod door closed and the last thing she thought was that she’d forgotten to triple confirm he wouldn’t change the length of her legs.

  Brasov, Romania

  Nathan walked back to his hotel. He had stayed at the pub for another hour and a half. Eating another bowl of the soup and talking with Ivan. It was obvious he was related to Ecaterina, they smelled similar.

  He never gave any impression or admitted that he knew her, but it wasn’t a difficult discussion. Ivan’s English was superb with a fantastic accent Nathan would kill for. He was close enough to Nathan’s 6’ 4” toned physique that he could rent Ivan’s stuff. He was surprised to find out that he was negotiating with Ivan for Ecaterina’s help out in the mountains. Apparently, she was the best in a family known for their abilities out in the wild and had been all over the mountains in that area.

  Ivan drove himself a hard bargain to rent his, admittedly, high quality gear. But Nathan was absolutely screwed on the amount he was paying for Ecaterina’s help. He could only appreciate how Ivan had let slip who was taking him into the mountain at the very moment he mentioned the daily price, no partial days and Nathan’s mind went on a slight bend, wrapping his head around the very attractive bartender, not only enjoyed being out in the wilderness, but she was one of the best in the area. His inner animal really was excited about the possibilities and he just said ‘yes’ without doing any sort of conversion of the requested amount to American dollars.

  He thought he just paid her approximately six months’ worth of wages for two to three days out in the wild. He hadn’t been so obviously out-negotiated in, well, a few decades. Whilst his wallet was hurting, his heart was happy.

  He picked up that feeling of being watched as soon as he exited the pub. Surreptitiously he adjusted his gear and noticed a familiar scent of perfume on the wind. Well, he knew that he had one pegged. He didn’t look around to find her, as knowing he had clued in was enough for him right now. The question was whether this was just a quiet surveillance op or something else. Keeping his senses on alert, he walked back to the hotel.

  He arrived back at his room and once inside started pulling his gear from their holsters and pockets. He checked in with his teams back in the States. The people Frank provided, an additional eighty people over his existing forty, were able to substantially reduce the implementation time with all of his clients. They had caught one client who had just come under attack and it only took a few hours to win that fight. All of his clients were now under their new guardian project protection, so he figured they were going to be good for the next two quarters at a minimum. If he got extremely lucky, it could take as many as eight to twelve months before the hackers were able to find any holes that his own team hadn’t found and patched proactively.

  His other businesses were all relatively tiny and inconspicuous. None of his other efforts were beyond local except one. Restaurants here and there that he was a silent partner in, or a few installation and blue-collar businesses that his partners ran. He had a pretty involved real estate effort run through a couple of shell corporations that should hide his involvement unless one of the big state agencies took it upon themselves to get interested in him. Typically, the UnknownWorld wouldn’t get involved with the states beyond what they were doing there in America, However, the non-family vamps in South America and Africa were known to get closely connected to the more despotic dictators. Third world country politics didn’t typically bother the major world powers and if something curious was mentioned in their newspapers that seemed unbelievable, the powers that be couldn’t be persuaded to get involved when their constituents couldn’t locate the country on a map.

  He connected his security apps to the sensors he left behind and they confirmed no one had been in his room since he’d left to go to the pub.

  He considered whether it was safe to sleep in the room that night. So far, his watchers were being pretty circumspect and while he had talked with Ivan about going out into the wild, that wasn’t a strange request for someone like him. In fact, it probably would have been even more telling if he hadn’t tried to get out into the wild at some point. Doing it on his first day in town was just about the best cover he could have come up with.

  He knew that the bear was a Were, and he could sense the age and power just from the smell he left on the clothes. He had hopes that the Were hadn’t gone completely over to his alternate self for too long and would be able to give him any insights into the happenings around here.

  The rumors were that Michael was from here. Well, the Michael that everyone knew about, anyway. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Michael had brought his new choice for a child into this area but it did speak about it being remarkable. His child that lived on the nearby coast hadn’t been seen awake in three years, so he wasn’t involved in making this change.

  That just left Michael as the new sire, which meant he was starting a new family with a female as the lead. This was going to be a serious change to the family.

  Nathan couldn’t realize how right he was going to be, not only regarding the families, but the whole UnknownWorld too. There were changes coming and similar to Michael’s requirement of following his strictures, a Weres choice would become swear allegiance, hide or die.

  Because, according to the rumors, vampires were dead and if Bethany Anne was dead, then death becomes her very well indeed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Carpathian Mountains, Romania

  Bethany Anne woke up to a splitting headache which went away pretty quickly.

  Sorry about that, I couldn’t gauge your pain levels until you woke up.

  “What the hell?” Bethany Anne was getting her bearings again, waking up in the pod for a second time.

  Well, we have a little problem with the organic computer. Your species is a little complicated to connect appropriately so I couldn’t debug your interface while you were asleep. I’ve engaged the core functions but we have to work on the other interfaces as time permits.

  “Why did I have such a horrible headache?” She reached over and turned the lock, opening the door and getting back out of the pod. Looking down, she noticed her legs looked just as long as before.

  OK, she thought, I might be a little vain here. She went over to the bench and started dressing.

  It seems that the organic computer and your synapses aren’t exactly compatible. I’ve had to create some intermediate filters to try to get you connected at all. Without your input, in this case your pain, I couldn’t figure out if I had done anything correctly or not.

  She finished dressing, grabbed her coat and started for the door. “So, anytime you can work on the interface to the computer, I am going to have to suffer?” She continued out to the hatch that led outside. She keyed in the sequence to activate the locks once she left.

  Stopping five foot out of the craft, she slowly turned around and now looked at an area she would swear didn’t have any craft there at all, it was if the craft took the area around it and created a virtual camouflage. “How did I just know how to set the security?”

  It would seem at least one of the connections related to ship functions is connected appropriately.

  Bethany could hear the surprise in Tom’s voice, much clearer now than ever before. “Tom, do you think this computer is facilitating our communication?” She went over to touch the shi
p, it was still there, but it was like touching a high definition screen where you wanted to reach into the forest, but your hand was stopped.

  That is a possibility. I don’t know of a recorded experiment trying to interface one of our organic computers with another species.

  Bethany Anne considered his response. She was thinking about the fact that she just volunteered to be the universe’s first guinea pig between a human, a Kurtherian, and a Kurtherian organic computer.

  Her normal response would have been to blow her top. She didn’t feel that at the moment. What she felt was analytical. Whilst not a normal sensation, she knew she was like this whenever she had been working on her cases for Martin before her fateful new assignment led to this situation. She considered the fact that she was still alive, mostly functioning with an unknown organic computer integrated in her mind with nothing negatively affecting her thinking. She hoped.

  She turned around, and started walking toward the cave in the cliff that would, eventually, take her back out to the other side and towards the town Michael was supposed to have visited before his mysterious disappearance.

  She figured her trip wouldn’t take too long as most of their time before was walking around in circles as Michael was trying to locate the right cave entrance.

  She found her way out the other side and noticed the light pollution from the south-east. She started heading in that direction. The lack of light didn’t stop her from seeing everything just fine, picking out little animal trails, Bethany Anne started down from the mountain.

  Seems like every time she was on this mountain, it was snowing.

  Brasov, Romania

  Before daybreak, Nathan swept all of his sensors and put them back into their cases. He grabbed two sets of clothes and left the rest of his gear in the room. He was careful to make sure he wasn’t taking any bugs along with himself and he used one of the compact, cheap bags to put it all in and slung it over his shoulder. He was meeting Ivan down in the hotel lobby to go and get his gear from a storage area he rented, then they would meet Ecaterina out of town, a little ways before backpacking into the mountains looking for tracks.

  Ivan met him downstairs, looking a little worse for wear. It was obvious he wasn’t a morning person.

  “Sorry, I don’t do too good before a liter of coffee, or noon. Both would be preferable.” He smiled and held out his hand to Nathan to shake.

  Taking the hand and shaking, Nathan adjusted his backpack and followed Ivan who was rapidly walked out of the hotel to a waiting vehicle that was running. Ivan sat in the front passenger seat, so Nathan took the back seat.

  As he got in, he noticed that Ecaterina was the driver. “Good morning!” Nathan was pleasantly surprised to see her in the car already. Sliding over, he closed the door and laid his bag on the seat.

  Ecaterina pulled off of the curve and started towards the storage unit where Ivan stored his gear.

  “Good morning to you too. We were never appropriately introduced, my name is Ecaterina Romanov and I know you have met my brother, Ivan.” She pulled the old Mercedes Benz through the early morning dawn.

  “Ivan was good. I have to admit that setting me up with him to do your negotiating was a trick I hadn’t run across before. Not sure about around here, but I wouldn’t have dismissed you out of hand if you had explained you could help me out on the mountain.”

  “Is, how you say, not a problem. I run into Americans who make assumptions about barmaid too many times not to figure out a solution. Is only practical way. I do the same for Ivan when he has females to deal with as he can’t seem to think his way past pretty smile and dimples. Dimples cost him very much every time.” She glanced over at her brother who seemed to be a little redder in the face than the cold warranted.

  “It’s true,” he replied. “I would be the knight in shining armor to every ‘pretty, dimpled face’ that came my way if it wasn’t for Ecaterina. Fortunately, she has shown me how to be nice without being foolish. It is always easier to give back the money than to get it after the job.”

  They turned into a narrow alley that opened up to a small building with a padlock on the door. Ivan got out of the car, telling them to wait a minute and unlocked the padlock from a set that had to have more than twenty keys on it. He swung open the door and there were different bags, all hanging from the walls with boxes on the floor. He grabbed a couple of hiking backpack rigs from the wall and started filling the bags with contents from around the small room. Ivan was quickly filling both rigs up.

  Ecaterina spoke from the front, “Don’t worry, Ivan knows what we need for a three-day hike. He will make sure there is no extra weight, but will have a couple of extra supplies if we get caught up in a storm.”

  Nathan, paying attention to Ivan’s efforts, barely caught what she said. “No, I’m not worried. It was obvious from our conversation he knew what I needed as much as I did. In fact, a little more since he knows the conditions on the mountain better than I do.” Personally, Nathan knew he could always switch to his other form and make it out of the mountains if he had to. However, that would mean either Ecaterina was dead, she would know more than she should, or something bad was happening and he needed to draw the threats away. Like a certain really large, really powerful bear.

  Finishing his packing, Ivan grabbed both harnesses and carried them to the back of the Mercedes and opened the trunk and put them in. He locked the storage room and got back in the car.

  “Gott Verdammt, it is cold out here.” Ivan blew on his hands.

  Nathan, always warmer than humans, was only slightly bugged by the weather so far. He knew up in the mountains it would become more uncomfortable but it would take a lot to truly make him miserable.

  After three hours, Ivan dropped Ecaterina and Nathan off at a place close to a trail she knew. Nathan grabbed his rig and followed Ecaterina up the main trail. He realized it probably would become cold enough to be uncomfortable to him pretty soon. What had Ivan said? Oh yeah, ‘Gott Verdammt!’

  —

  Ecaterina watched as Nathan pulled his backpack on. Two things became immediately obvious, he was incredibly strong, lifting an eighty pound pack with one arm and he had worn this type of backpack before. He grabbed the straps and buckled them without even looking, obviously from a lot of previous experience.

  He didn’t look too inconvenienced with the snow and cold. While she wasn’t too bad off, she had grown up around it all of her life. She waited until he was finished and took off up a common trail in this area.

  Ecaterina had enquired as to what he wanted to see, and he wanted to go where the big bear tracks had been seen last. She let him know that it would be illegal for him to shoot anything and he mentioned he didn’t have anything big enough with him that he trusted not to just piss off a bear.

  She carried her own rifle that she had retrieved out of the trunk earlier. While it had a pretty large bore, she had no desire to be shooting at a large bear. It might, with a lucky shot, stop a bear but she wasn’t too comfortable with trying it out. However, for most of the other animals on the mountain it had plenty of stopping power and she was a very good shot.

  Ecaterina smiled to herself, it wasn’t like she wasn’t paid well enough for this trip to not get the other rifle that had been on her wish list. Ivan had played Nathan well enough that even if nothing else came of this trip, she was set until early next year. She walked ahead of him, he might as well enjoy the view, such as it was under her gear. Follow the cheese, little mousy, she thought to herself.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Carpathian Mountains, Romania

  There was a lake about three miles away. Bethany Anne was coming down from the cave.

  She had spent a little time making sure that she could find the entrance again. She built a couple of cairns that would help her in the future and piled them in not so obvious places. Tom mentioned that he wouldn’t forget and would be able to recall any images she needed. She used the trip to update Tom with all of the inf
ormation she remembered from the conversations with Michael and Carl. He failed to inform her he could get into her memories just fine. He considered she would be a little sensitive on sharing some of her information.

  She had found a grove of trees a good thirty minutes down from the opening. There were some saplings and she figured if she were to break enough of them it would make a significantly obvious focal point in the future. So, taking her time and starting at the smallest she tested her ability to punch, kick and strike trees until it was obvious that it was Bethany Anne twelve, trees zero. Even the four-inch thick tree went down. The bone upgrades were apparently well worth it. For the amount of force necessary to shatter the tree, her human bones would have been shattered as well.

  She hadn’t been back out in the real world for a significant time. It was snowing when she came in and snowing when she came out. So, somewhere between seven and ten months was a guess. Based on Tom’s calculations, it was closer to seven but until she talked with someone she wasn’t going to commit.