by Dana Cameron
There was another wolf tearing the throat out of the killer.
I shook my head again. A rush of emotion, confusion first and foremost. Then, fear and delight.
The wolf—bulkier and darker than me—worried the corpse a little, then stepped back, turned, and, with his hind legs, kicked disdainful dust over the body.
He raised his head to howl, and I felt drawn to do the same.
Before he could give voice to his victory, a silky voice said, “Thorben—control yourself!”
He froze. If a wolf can look annoyed, he did.
I turned from him and glanced into the shadows, where the woman was still unconscious. A form emerged. Not human—my quick eyes discerned scales and fangs, as well as a general lack of nose, and eyes that were too large and dark to be human.
I stiffened, recognizing their presence, their signature. They were the Fangborn from Venice. They’d come for what I’d stolen from them.
Chapter 19
I backed away from them as fast as I could and stood over my backpack, baring my fangs.
The other wolf responded by turning immediately back into a human. A completely naked male human, and I was eye to eye with his…I looked up.
“We’ve been looking for you,” he said in heavily accented English. “We need to talk.”
I stopped growling, but that was it.
The vampire coughed delicately. “It would be easier if you Changed back.”
I believed her. Besides, there was something else…
I closed my eyes and concentrated, tried to recall what Gerry had said in the Tiergarten. Nothing happened. I whimpered and tried again.
I didn’t want to be stuck this way, not when I still had—
Danny!
Maybe the panic forced it or maybe now that the killer—and I knew he had planned to kill the woman—was gone, I could focus on what mattered to me. I was suddenly human again, and scrambling to find my clothes.
“She’ll be OK.” The vampire looked up from the unconscious woman, who moaned and seemed to settle into sleep. “Don’t worry. You’re among Family.”
“Yeah, well, if you don’t mind, I can’t stay. I have to be down at the harbor. Like…” No watch, where was my phone? My panties? “Like, yesterday. What time is it?”
“It is nearly three thirty,” the vampire said with a glance at her watch.
“No, it can’t—I can’t stay here, I have to check, the boat might not have left—”
“There’s no boat at the wharf. No one should be going out this time of night in any case,” said the werewolf—had she called him Thorben? “We just did a sweep, looking for you, when we got the scent of…that.” He jerked his head at the bloody mess next to him.
I’d gathered my things, gotten dressed, and was tying my boots. I wished the naked guy would get dressed as well. “You don’t understand—I have to get to Delos.”
“No one is allowed there after three p.m., and not on Monday,” he said. “And technically, it’s Monday morning now.”
“Don’t be didactic, Ben,” the vampire said. She’d fanged down, and instead of black-and-green scales, she was a stunning blonde. “And yes, we do understand. You are Zoe Miller and you need to get to Delos to save your cousin.”
I wasn’t surprised; everyone seemed to know my name, but “Delos” had only come up in Berlin, during the fracas. I had to assume Claudia and Gerry had heard Dmitri, too. “You can’t stop me,” I said, picking up my backpack and shrugging it on.
“We want nothing more than to help you. We are bound to help you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Look—that thing you took? The disk? It’s called the Beacon. We’ve never seen it, but we know it’s ancient and it’s important to the Fangborn. Both of us, Thorben and me, have sworn to guard it, but when it was claimed, and we knew someday it would be, we also swore to help that person.”
“Uh-huh.”
I clutched my bag nervously. It was too much talk of “swearing” and “claiming” and it sounded like something out of Le Morte d’Arthur to me. Worse, it sounded exactly like what the disk had done in the Venice hotel room: claimed me. That made me even more nervous, and I already wasn’t sure I could trust them—
A cold shock settled in the pit of my stomach, and I looked at my watch. Their statement about the time had settled in. I’d missed the rendezvous. I’d missed my chance to save Danny.
Unless these guys weren’t lying…“You can get me to Delos? Immediately?”
“We can leave now. We need to talk first,” Thorben said.
“You need to put some trousers on first,” she snapped. “You have no shame.”
“Yes, please do,” I said.
“I understand the American being backward about nudity, but not you, Ariana. It’s warm out. It’s Greece.” He spread his hands, as if that explained everything.
“You don’t go shopping naked, do you, you great idiot?” She threw a pair of cargo shorts to him, which he pulled on, then a shirt. “You don’t go out in town naked, either! Any excuse, any excuse at all.” She turned to me. “Yes, an hour. We can get you there, but we need to talk first. About what you took in Venice. The Beacon.”
“I…I’m sorry. I can’t, I won’t give it to you. My cousin’s life is at stake.”
“I don’t want it, and I wish you’d never found it. It’s yours by…birthright is not the word. It’s yours, though. I’m just sorry for you.”
“What do you mean, sorry?”
“The Orleans Tapestry tells of…a curse? A prophecy. I can tell you while Thorben readies the boat.” She shook her head sadly. “You seem nice enough, and you did a good job tracking this evil one down. But I’ve read the Tapestry and I wouldn’t wish the Beacon and what it means on a dog.”
She meant what she was saying. I felt a pit open up where my stomach should be. “What do you mean?”
Ariana—that was her name—said, “My Cousin Steuben called us because we were closest to Delos. To think we missed you by a block!” She shook her head. “I understand you don’t know much about being Fangborn, but I’m going to tell you things most Fangborn don’t know. There are some of us who are chosen for duties beyond what we Fangborn take upon ourselves—”
“You mean like the TRG?” I said. “I know about that.”
“The TRG—?” She cocked her head.
It made a nice change to know something someone else didn’t. “Never mind. It’s an American thing. Government, possibly top secret. Forget I said anything.”
Ariana shrugged and pursed her lips, a European gesture of dismissal. “There are some artifacts of Fangborn history, very rare, very precious, and very…odd. Most of which we don’t know the meaning of. Ben and I were charged with guarding the clay pot suspended between the roofs, which contained the Beacon. Some of us are chosen to defend certain objects, certain places that are mentioned in the fragments of our histories. In those histories, we have the stories of our people the Fangborn from—well, from the time writing was invented. There are also records of predictions, of things to come. From our oracles.”
“And the oracles mentioned me?”
“No. But the Orleans Tapestry mentioned that someone would come for the Beacon, and that whoever that was would need our assistance. So for hundreds of years, someone has been living in Venice, waiting for someone to come. Most recently, Ben and me. Ben, he always treated our position as an honor post—he doesn’t believe in the more mystical elements mentioned in the histories.” “Tell me about the Tapestry.”
“The Orleans Tapestry is five hundred years old,” Ariana said. “Sewn into the back is an even older piece of fabric, and on this, in gold thread, is stitched a prophecy in Latin. The text itself is even older, probably from about 1000 AD, so I assume the Beacon has been hidden in Venice at least that long. Someone was working to preserve this prophecy through time—you can see the errors made by later translators and needlewomen, but they worked very hard to save the words, thou
gh the Tapestry itself was largely destroyed in a fire.”
“But some part of it was saved?”
“Yes. The fragment remaining refers to someone stealing the Beacon, unchaining the Fangborn, and revealing too much to the world.”
“What does that mean? Oracles were supposed to talk in riddles, weren’t they?”
“We don’t know what it means. Some say it will mean the time of Identification, when we reveal ourselves to humans. Some say it will be when humans are ruled by us. Some say it will be the release of the Fangborn from their obligation to humanity.”
“Um, doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”
Another Italian shrug. “I’ve never met an oracle yet who was either specific or optimistic, but you can’t be sure. As you said, oracles speak in riddles. We can only assume it indicates some change, a massive upheaval.”
I wasn’t sure how that was better.
“When they say ‘unchaining the Fangborn and revealing too much to the world,’ that’s always reminded me of the Prometheus myth, or perhaps Pandora.”
“What did you just say?”
“Pandora—you know, the one who opened the box and brought ruin to the world?” Ariana frowned and reached into her pocket; her phone was vibrating.
“Yeah, I know—” And I wished I didn’t.
“Ah, Thorben—Ben is ready. We should make our way to the boat.” She nodded and replaced her phone. “We do know one thing now.”
“What’s that?” Certainty, in any form, was welcome.
“You’re the one who’ll bring this change.”
I was still digesting the notion of me bringing ruin to the world when I received a text from Dmitri.
“I generously assume you are on your way. Remember the video. You have until noon.”
I shut off my phone. No point in giving myself away now. I was eager not to think of Dmitri’s threats, Danny’s face.
“How did your English get so good?” I asked Ariana as we hurried to the wharf.
“I attended university in California. Business school.”
“B-school?” I bit my tongue before I could exclaim, But you’re a vampire! “Um, why not…law or, I don’t know…medicine?”
“Vampires need marketing, too.” She shrugged. “At some point we Fangborn are going to reveal ourselves to the world. It might happen sooner, it might happen later, but when the Identification Day comes, I’m going to be ready. I’m working on a game.”
“Game?”
“I happen to think the easiest way for an outsider group to emerge and be accepted into the mainstream is through popular culture. Zeitgeist. I’m working on an RPG to soften the ground for us identifying ourselves to Normals. There’s a sociologist and a psychologist I’m working with, too.”
I thought about it; my skills might not be so useless to the Fangborn after all. “Any other Fangborn who are archaeologists?”
“Two, now. One is in Asia and the other is in New York, but he’s close to three hundred. That’s very old, even for us.”
“Two in the whole world?”
“There were more, in the nineteenth century, when science of the past was, well, more respectable, and a good cover for us to travel and research. Frankly, the slowness of communication made it easier for us to hide in plain sight, and our numbers were finally increasing after the Great Reaping in the eighteenth century.”
Oh, of course. The Great Reaping. What?
She continued. “Then, the world wars took a toll. Always the case with wars.” Ariana shook her head. “Unfortunately, humans are just getting more and more efficient at them.”
“Oh.”
After we boarded and cast off, it was too loud to talk, and if Ariana had answers to my questions, neither of us wanted to shout them. I could see the first glimmers of dawn in the east.
Once we were on the northern tip of the island, Ben had to cut speed. We pulled up on a small beach. The sea was as rough as it had been yesterday, but not as bad as I was expecting.
“Here’s the plan,” Ben said. “I’m going to let you off here. They’ll be looking for you to come to the main harbor. You’ll have to go south and west, across the island, to your meeting. The most obvious place is the museum plaza. I’ll see if the western landing is clear. If so, we’ll come around and see if we can’t thin Dmitri’s herd a little.”
“And what do I do?” I hadn’t told them everything; that I didn’t have what Dmitri wanted. And I might have skipped over the part where I’d be willing to trade him the golden disk they’d been guarding for Danny.
“Try not to get killed,” Ben suggested.
Ariana glared at him. “Just try and get Danny back. If it looks like things are…going to go badly, get feral on Parshin’s ass.”
I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. It helped.
“Seriously, you can do it. You did on Mykonos. You’ve done it at home. Take him out, save your cousin, and we’ll go back to our place. Ben will cook—he’s quite good—and after the falafel mishap, he almost always wears clothing when he’s in the kitchen.”
She made it seem easy. She made it seem…finite. I was finally coming to the end of this. It was a relief, thinking that.
Ariana continued, “Keep your eyes open, and get ready to take advantage, if you can.”
They took off, and I began to trot down across the island. Not too fast; I needed to give Ariana and Ben time to make their landing.
It was dark still, but sunrise was in about an hour. I was surprised at how well I could see in the dark, even skinself. The more I thought about it, the more I could recognize times when I thought I’d been unusually lucky, or maybe physically gifted. Now I knew it wasn’t because I was special.
It’s because I am a werewolf.
Although it was really the first time I’d said it as a matter of fact, it didn’t quite make sense. But I was tired and scared and drained, and it made me giggle. I thought of Danny and picked up my speed.
Over the next rise, and I slipped; gravel and cobbles rolled out of the way, and if I’d fallen, I would have pitched into the excavations of a house and eaten colored mosaic, busted a tooth, busted a bone.
But I didn’t, because I caught myself. Actually, I saw the peril before I had to catch myself, and averted it. I had talents, I had abilities…
…because I am a werewolf.
That gave me an idea. I didn’t want to give Dmitri the golden disk without making sure Danny was still alive; I had no idea how long Danny’s beating might have continued. I came up to the edge of the largest complex, the gymnasium complex, if I remembered yesterday’s lecture correctly. I found a piece of uncovered ground by the base of a pillar and pulled out my trowel. I buried the disk and covered over the area with loose gravel and weeds. Then I pulled out my notebook, checked my watch, and made the roughest of sketches. An uneven rectangle, about fifteen minutes’ walk from where I’d been set down on the coast, within sight of two intact doorways. They weren’t going anywhere soon.
This was the most familiar thing I’d done in a while. I stuck my trowel into the back of my belt, dusted myself off, and continued.
The museum was in the middle of the top third of the island. I was approaching from the northeast; the landing where Ben and Ariana were going to land was to the west. It didn’t take me long to get there, and as I did, the sun was just starting to peek over the horizon. The last hundred meters seemed to take the longest; I was desperate to get there on time but reluctant to face Dmitri without the figurines. I actually stopped, but by this time I was so close I could see three men outside the museum. They saw me, spoke into radios, and gestured to me.
Dmitri was close.
I trudged up the path, almost paved with fragments of marble and rock, sherds among the poppies. There were wildflowers everywhere, and they were vivid red, yellow, purple, and blue against the radiant marble and dun stone as the sun rose.
Not a bad place for a confrontation.
With the sun risi
ng, the place glowed almost white off the water; the reflections and refractions must have added to the liquid quality of the light. And even though I didn’t have full control over my powers, I knew, somehow, in this place I could summon the Beast easily.
If anything had happened to Danny, I would go feral on Dmitri’s ass. I could do that.
Because I am a werewolf.
As I approached, the men closed in. One pointed to the coffee shop I’d checked out yesterday. I went in.
There was no one else; the goons stayed outside.
I might be able to get Danny out, I reasoned, but could I outrun bullets, even in wolf form?
Probably not.
I’d just have to run interference and make sure Danny got to Ariana and Ben.
All but one of the tables were set up for the night’s mopping, with the chairs on top. I’d done enough mopping myself to know the process. One was not, and there were chairs around it.
I sat down, facing the doorway.
Dmitri was here.
Chapter 20
Dmitri Alexandrovich Parshin was here and he looked like hell, even worse in the light of day than in the video call yesterday. Adam Nichols and his gang had hurt him back in Berlin. One eye was blackened and nearly closed; what I could see of the white was actually red with burst blood vessels. There was a serious case of road rash down that side of his face, and one arm was bandaged.
Good. Adam Nichols had taken a chunk off him.
“You are late.”
“I was delayed—I had to steal a boat. I’m here now.”
“I saw no boat in the harbor.” He snapped his fingers and one of his men approached. Dmitri said something to him in another language—Russian, it sounded like—and he left.
“I’m not real good at navigating. Actually, I’ve never driven a boat before. I just aimed for Delos and tried not to hit any rocks.”
“You would have passed Antonio Cavalli’s excavations from the main landing, a man of great learning. No matter, you are here.”
