Seven Kinds of Hell

by Dana Cameron

  I reached down to it, feeling warmth I knew was impossible emanating from stones that couldn’t be there. I pulled back before I could touch it, suddenly afraid.

  “Hey, guys!” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Anyone else seeing this, or am I about to fall over and drown in this hallucination of the sacred well?”

  Nothing. I couldn’t even hear wind or crickets, the noise from the far-off road.

  I turned back to the one stone, still beckoning to me. Sucking up all my courage, I reached down and pushed at it, thinking to dislodge it.

  The warmth confused my sense of touch; the “stone” felt like hard rubber, and I thought it must be a trick of my trembling clawed fingertips. I leaned over even farther, and I understood. My hand had passed through the surface entirely. I was sunk into the glowing stone up to my wrist.

  The warmth was all around my hand, and although I couldn’t see anything but the blurry shadow of my hand within, omigod, the stone. More, I felt something just beyond.

  I stretched, almost to the limits of safety. I didn’t see the modern protective grate, and the water below me was no longer murky green but a roiling red. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I fell in.

  My hand penetrated another centimeter, then—

  A sharp pain in my middle finger, as though I’d been bitten. I yelped, and the noise seemed to be drowned out by the thrumming all around me. I pulled back instinctively, but my wrist was seized by the stone, as though I was locked into colonial stocks. Stretched out over that pool of boiling…blood?

  “Shit, help! Somebody help me!”

  Still nothing from outside, and I could hardly hear my own scream over what was now the roar of a hurricane. The light of the pool was growing, and crazy red shadows played over the glowing white walls. I pulled until I thought my arm would come out of the socket. I threw back my head and howled, long and loud, for all I was worth.

  Still stuck.

  I was panicking now, wondering if the temple of ice and light was going to collapse into the growing scarlet tempest, my hallucination finally killing me. Desperate, I shoved myself toward the rock, figuring maybe I could force the whole rest of my body through the glowing wall of not-stone.

  The red was creeping up the walls now, like blood soaking into cracked glass. Veinlike patterns appeared.

  That couldn’t be good.

  Desperate scrabbling; my claws scraped something. I reached again, a muscle-tearing effort, and this time I grasped something small. Maybe a lever I could manipulate…

  The rock opened or the force field relented. I fell backward, hard, my head hitting the stone floor—now ordinary, dark, and hard. The stars I saw were all too familiar, friends from my tumble-down and fractious youth. Could werewolves get concussions—?

  As the brilliant icy blue and red light faded, I could just make out a figurine, so like the ones I’d had and lost in my hand.

  Screams and howls. I could hear the outside world again.

  The outside world sounded like a preview of hell.

  Every hair on my body stood up. I had the urge to Change fully, but I knew I needed to hang onto the figurine I’d wrested from the wall; it seemed important, a crowned female figure. I shoved the fourth key to Pandora’s Box into my bag, tightened the shoulder straps, and ran out to the fray.

  Chapter 27

  There were men, everywhere. Normals, heavily armed and armored, a blur—

  Scratch that.

  My proximity sense told me of nearly a dozen Fangborn and Normals. None of them were happy.

  I reached out and found Claudia and Gerry fighting other Fangborn. Fighting hard, letting blood. Somewhere else out there I could feel familiar others. I recognized the presence of Dmitri Parshin almost immediately, picked out the scent of his blood. I recognized the other Fangborn because of our common lineage, not because I knew them personally. Not only were the Fangborn and Normals attacking the Steubens, but they were attacking each other. Knight’s men and Parshin’s, converging, all after the fourth key.

  It was horrible, and I knew this was a glimpse of what the world might look like when the Fangborn were revealed, their powers feared and coveted by humankind.

  The thought was terrible and I hesitated. I didn’t know who these other Fangborn were. Maybe I was supposed to abide by some kind of rules, like Ben had said, some kind of cultural courtesy. Fangborn weren’t meant to fight each other, right? Or was it kill other Fangborn? Perhaps if I just hurt them, took them out of the game…

  I didn’t know who they were, only that they were attacking my Family. That was enough, I decided.

  “Zoe, get out of here!” Gerry yelled. His shirt was torn nearly off, and there was an ugly gash on his back. He slammed the head of his human attacker into a marble column.

  That was going to leave a stain…

  The blood glittering on the marble focused me, drove away my panic. There was blood everywhere, lighting the space almost like the scarlet light in the oracular well.

  The battle called and I was filled with energy and eagerness. I looked for where I could do the most good.

  There.

  A small group of men who were skulking up, trying to get a bead on Claudia. She was slashing out with claws and fangs as she fought a human I’d never seen before and an unfamiliar vampire—blood everywhere, human and Fangborn. In the moonlight, she looked even more inhuman than she had when she was healing Danny. She executed a violent ballet as she fended off the attacking vampire; his reddish scales gave him a devilish look. Venom flew through the air, smoke rising where it hit the ground. He kept her at a distance, distracting her, while the human darted in where he dared.

  The men sneaking up on her had oddly shaped guns, almost like toy water blasters. She might have known they were there, but couldn’t do anything about them.

  I had to stop them before they shot her. Didn’t want to find out what was in the Super Soakers by watching them fire on Claudia. I ran and leaped onto the men approaching her.

  Two went down with little noise, surprised by the wolf-girl descending as if from the sky. The two left were off balance. I scrabbled up and growled, lunged at the closest, knocking his toy gun aside.

  Two hits. Me hitting him in the jaw, him hitting the ground. Out for the count.

  I turned to the other, who was shaking his gun. Something must have busted when we all went down. I grabbed it from him and swung it like a bat, connecting upside his head.

  This was fun. I didn’t even have to kill them, I just had to whack them really hard. It was like playing video games with the cheat codes on—

  Something bit into my back—and it hurt. I reached for it. My claws knocked something out. Something pointy, attached to a wire, causing incredible, cramping pain—

  Taser? Some kind of—?

  I turned and threw up all over the ground. When I looked up, I saw that one of the men who’d been knocked down first had recovered. His finger was on the trigger, his other hand fiddling with a dial.

  The needle at the end of the wire was pumping out dark liquid. It glistened in the moonlight briefly before it leached into the ground.

  My eyes stopped focusing. I staggered back, vomited again. Pain cramped my muscles until I thought I would stop breathing.

  I fell. Somewhere beyond me, I heard Dmitri shouting hoarsely in Russian.

  No codes in Latin this time, but I still couldn’t understand him. He sounded desperate.

  As my head hit the ground, blurred shapes of men rushed around me. I couldn’t move now and felt my brain slow down, almost as if the blood had stopped in my veins. I was still alive, though, a distant part of me knew. I could hear Claudia screaming.

  My sense of smell went berserk, increasing to a level even beyond Fangborn capabilities. There was too much information to process and it overwhelmed me. Even the slightest movement made me retch. Even closing my eyes didn’t help as my nose tried to compensate even more. I no longer had any control over my prox
imity sense; I could see, with crystal clarity, people miles away going about their business. I didn’t dare scream at the influx of information and sensation. More noise, coming from inside me, would probably kill me.

  The last thing I was aware of was the distant feeling of something—me—being thrown into the back of a jeep. The truck hit an uneven spot, my head hit the floor, and all was glorious silence.

  I woke up unhappily, my head pounding and a taste in my mouth like things that had died at the bottom of a swamp a long time ago. I reached out, experimentally, and found to my profound relief that my senses were back in balance. Quiet seemed like true quiet, and the only person I was aware of was me. Smells were of must, dust, and my own unattractive self, but no more. There was nothing left in my stomach to throw up, which was nice, but I missed the illusion of doing something to alleviate the sickness I felt. I settled for trying to sit up.

  Mixed results. Being upright helped my head clear, but movement brought on one last spasm of cramping so awful I cried out.

  A door opened, letting in light that scalded my eyeballs. I was in a space about the size of a broom closet, just enough room for the cot I’d been on.

  A goon in uniform with one of those hateful guns. “The senator will see you now.”

  Like I’d been cooling my heels in a reception room for the last…I had no idea how much time had passed. No phone, no backpack.

  There was no reason to stay here, and I didn’t want another blast of whatever toxin was in that weapon—had Claudia and Gerry mentioned black hellebore? I got up, a little wobbly, and followed him down a hallway.

  The corridor was like a hotel’s, but I suspected it wasn’t really. While I thought there might be people and Fangborn nearby, I couldn’t tell exactly. Either I was still suffering my cataclysmic hangover or something was blocking me.

  A guard outside a door at the end of the hallway stood back to let us in. Behind him was the anteroom I expected, and behind another guarded door was the senator.

  I felt the peculiar thrill you get when you see someone in person you’ve only ever seen on TV. And it was weird, how familiar Senator Knight seemed when I knew him only from the news: tall, thin, receding hair that was gray at the temples. His nose gave his face the hawkish look that had been caricatured in political cartoons for decades.

  The only thing that was different in person was his eyes. There was no camera on earth that could capture the depth of them, the intensity, the…age. He was supposedly in his sixties; I knew now he was closer to two hundred years old. Those eyes had seen a lot, and they could see far and deeply.

  He eventually looked up from the papers he was reading.

  I shivered and turned away after a minute. His gaze was harrowing, with all the intensity of a vampire’s understanding, and he made no attempt to conceal it.

  “Thank you for coming, Ms. Miller. Tomorrow I’d like you to find Pandora’s Box for me.”

  “Where are my friends? The Steubens. What—”

  He frowned; I was off-topic.

  “I’m sure they’ll be joining us shortly. Now then—”

  A rap on the door. Knight frowned again at this second interruption. His eyes unfocused. Then he blinked, refocused, and something like a smile crossed his lips. “Come in, Zimmer.”

  The door opened. The man I thought of as “Clean-head,” the man who’d tortured and killed Rupert Grayling in London and chased me across Paris, entered.

  I stood up; a gesture from Knight, and I had the undeniable urge to sit. I couldn’t get up, I couldn’t talk, but I could growl.

  The filth that was Zimmer filled my nostrils; I longed to attack, but couldn’t.

  Why wasn’t Knight reacting to him? Why didn’t Knight vault his desk and tear him limb from limb?

  Zimmer crossed the room with only a glance of disdain for me. I growled, louder this time.

  “Ms. Miller! Behave yourself. Mr. Zimmer is a valued colleague of mine.”

  Now I couldn’t even growl. Didn’t stop me hating, though.

  Zimmer whispered into Knight’s ear, so quietly I couldn’t hear.

  Knight nodded once, and Zimmer made as if to leave.

  “Wait.”

  Zimmer stopped, so abruptly a switch might have been thrown.

  “Show Ms. Miller you’re not such a bad sort. Sing for her. Something…cheery.”

  Zimmer turned, opened his mouth, and began to sing.

  “A more humane Mikado never/Did in Japan exist/To nobody second/I’m certainly reckoned/A true philanthropist.”

  I must still be unconscious, I thought dizzily. That killer is not singing The Mikado to me. What is going on here?

  “That’s fine. Thank you, Zimmer. You may go now.”

  Zimmer stopped singing instantly and, without so much as a glance at either of us, departed.

  “He’s been a true asset to me. But where were we?” Knight glanced at a pad—he had a fucking agenda for this meeting? “Yes. Pandora’s Box.”

  It took an effort to answer him. “I have no idea where it is.”

  “I think you do. And you have many reasons to want to find it. You do not want it in the hands of Dmitri Parshin, for example? I cannot imagine you’d allow such an unspeakable power in the hands of a Normal, and a foreign national at that. And there are others like Rupert Grayling out there, collectors who know of our artifacts but perhaps not of us. He certainly was not acting alone in his pursuit. It is imperative we find it first.”

  “If there is such a thing as Pandora’s Box out there,” I said, “maybe it’s better off lost.” The idea of the Box in the hands of someone like Dmitri Parshin was terrifying.

  “Oh, my dear. The time for that kind of head-in-the-sand thinking is well past. There is another reason you might want to help me.” He picked up piece of paper, glanced at it, set it back. “His name is Sean Flax. He’s staying with me. He’s a suspect in a murder he didn’t commit, and I’m sure you’d prefer he be cleared.”

  Sean helped me concentrate. “How did you do that? Did you use vampire venom to convince someone Sean had attacked Professor Schulz?”

  Senator Knight frowned slightly. “No. I simply had someone paid off. Less obvious, at least in Italy.”

  I pushed harder, determined to get some answers. “But you were responsible for altering his mind?”

  “You never should have detected it, but yes. We tried several times, in Boston, in Berlin, but could only get him to follow you, never to force him to do something against his will.” He frowned again, more deeply. “How do you change the subject with me?”

  I felt a strengthening of his concentration. Not a subtle thing, like Claudia’s suggestions, but a powerful combination of charisma and vampiric will. It became a rhetorical question.

  “Tomorrow you will bring the Box to me,” he said. “I have all the keys and the Beacon; my horoscope, cast by the most powerful oracles in the world, says I am the one who will unveil the power of the Box and the power of the Fangborn. And it will happen tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t understand why I felt so…ordinary. Knight was treating this as if it was some kind of routine scheduling issue. I felt none of the anger I knew was appropriate. He was threatening me with Parshin, threatening Sean, behaving as if my abduction was part of a job interview, and essentially telling me he’d throw the world into chaos tomorrow. Business as usual.

  Two things occurred to me: Senator Knight believed this was business as usual. He was a powerful man and had a reputation for making daring decisions throughout his whole career. He was used to this kind of behavior.

  More than that, Senator Knight was a vampire. I realized it fully now. There’s no way someone who wasn’t Fangborn would have known. But he was pumping out something that made me calm, suggestible, and truthful.

  For the first time I understood how scary the combination of Normal power and Fangborn ability might be. How delicate the balance had been, until now. The fight over just the idea of Fangborn power in the shap
e of the figurines was bad enough; Identification would be a million times worse. It was not as simple as announcing “here we are.”

  And now he wanted Pandora’s Box and its ungodly powers?

  “Why me?” was all his compulsion would allow me to say.

  “You’ve been in possession of the elements relating to it for quite some time. You know something of the historical and—I hate to use the term—mythological background. And you are an archaeologist. That makes you entirely qualified.”

  “You can’t expect me to find something on command. Archaeology doesn’t conform to a deadline. Besides, you’re the one with a crew, with the information. With power.”

  “But we’ve had no luck finding the thing itself. You will, and you must. Time is running short. In order for me to fulfill the prophesy, I must open the Box tomorrow.”

  “But…it’s not a prophesy. Not the way you think. Oracles are right as often as they are wrong or just plain deranged. You should know better than me.”

  He gave me a look that mingled pity and disdain. Of course he knew these things. He was a corn-fed Fangborn, of an age so great as to make his power almost palpable to humans. “I’ve had the best minds studying this. My own life has been such that it is clear I’m the heir to this power. And you will bring it to me.”

  I struggled to speak, the least little resistance. “Or Sean goes to jail. Or worse.”

  Senator Knight shrugged. “I would prefer he didn’t. I don’t like to make threats, but I’m willing to follow through on them when I do. One unstable nobody, an accused murderer, in the face of the countless benefits this will bring my people? It’s acceptable. Very.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m your people, you know.”

  “You are, several times over.” He tented his fingers, as if giving due consideration to my point. “You are an American citizen, and I’ve served my country faithfully my entire, long life. You’re a member, albeit distantly, of my Fangborn Family. And I’m doing this for you as much as anyone else. I can bring peace to humanity. I can employ the Fangborn the way they’ve always been destined to serve. With this one move, I can make the world better.”