by Dana Cameron
I could see Ariana sinking her fangs into the neck of the helicopter pilot, binding him to her will. I could taste her fears that Ben would not be in the right place at the right time, that her talent for persuasion and control wouldn’t be enough…
Somewhere at the edge of perception, I could feel Ben’s panic. Claudia and Gerry and Will were closer now, clearer. I could feel the fury boiling off Will and realized his target was Knight himself…
And Sean, somewhere under all that was Sean, scared and massively pissed off.
I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. I worried that I was going into shock; the lightning was encircling me and I couldn’t extricate myself. I wasn’t certain if I wanted to, despite the surfeit of information pouring in, threatening to blow the neurons out of my brain. It was the upload and download of the experience in Venice, but now there was too much information for me to digest.
“Not for you! That is never for you!”
Dmitri, his face a mask of rage and desperation, had skidded down the stony slope. He had a pistol in his hand, and not even the shock of seeing me as a wolf-woman slowed him down. He’d be here in forty-three seconds. I could “see” the engraving on the side of his pistol, could smell the lubricant used on the gun, smell the wound in his leg healing, taste the bitter coffee he’d drunk in haste this morning…
Too much.
I couldn’t have done anything if I’d wanted to. I was aware of what was going on around me—both sides readying for a final assault to claim the vessel.
But only distantly: the vessel was still in command.
::but not yet complete::
There was a piece missing. Something prompted me to take the disk from its place on the ledge of the stone wall. It was burning red-gold now, flashing, a beacon…
I knew what to do. I placed the gold disk on top of the vessel. The red-burning gold melted as if it was wax, sliding easily over the surface of the vessel, coating every part of it.
Two more shots rang out. “Clean-head” Zimmer had fired at Dmitri, who was now just twenty meters away from me and approaching fast. Someone from up the slope fired in return. Concern about the safety of Pandora’s Box had evaporated in a storm of gunfire.
I had no capacity to respond. I was outside, beyond. I was now…part of the process. I felt structures in my brain tearing and reforming beyond anything human or Fangborn—gods-cursed, gods-possessed, gods-reclaimed—
“Stop it!” Knight screamed. His voice was full of uncharacteristic panic. “Don’t hit the vessel!”
Claudia and Gerry fought their way through Knight’s men. A hole in the mob, and Will found his way to Knight…
The vessel was open now, and the light I’d seen on Delos now radiated from inside. The others saw it, too.
I reached in. Hesitation was no longer a part of my vocabulary. I was being driven. The vessel wanted me to reach in, and so I did.
Knight screamed, “Sean, stop her!”
Will tackled Knight.
Even though I couldn’t see Sean, I knew he was just ten feet away. I could taste the residue of the two inept vampires who’d worked on him, and a third, much more recently. And at Knight’s order, I could feel something…switch off…in his brain. Sean was missing. He was a shell, a robot driven by someone else’s commands.
No time for Sean.
No time for Dmitri, who was one step away from me, rage contorting his face, greed in his eyes.
No time for petty human wrangling and gunplay; bullets were still whizzing past, profaning the site. The smell of hellebore toxin grew greater.
It didn’t matter anymore. The Box had what it wanted.
As my hand passed through the neck of the vessel, the lightning ran up my arm and enveloped me. The lightning consumed and subsumed me. At the bottom of the vessel was…
…nothing. A vast emptiness.
The vast emptiness of space.
I could reach everything in the universe. Numbers filled my awareness, sequences that made no sense to me. Then faces of strangers, places I had never been, followed by texts in languages long dead or inhuman. The vessel was patient as it tried to communicate with me, my monkey brain, even enhanced, still too rigid for easy translation. Finally it settled on pictures.
Fir trees surrounding an ice-cold lake. The water was clear, but the bottom was slick and murky, dense brown with rotting vegetation.
A cave in a desert, empty for thousands of years. A scorpion scuttled across a stone.
The ruin of a wooden temple, the trees around it filled with ghosts.
The cornerstone of a stately home, bricks cracked and mortar disintegrating.
There were four other vessels out there in the world. I needed to find them.
All I had to do was reach out, through the Box, and—
An eternity since his last step, Dmitri was on me.
I had to respond to him, even as the vessel revealed itself to me. The distraction caused me to miss whole segments of information. There was a taste of my own impatience with Dmitri and his ceaseless, selfish violence, in the vessel.
I reached out to him instead of seeking the other vessels.
Billions of souls, past and present, and there was Dmitri Parshin’s grubby little being at my fingertips. I reached into him and touched…
Dmitri froze, wonder in his eyes.
The lightning around me flickered as the vessel slowed its revolutions and the fragmented figurine whirled past. The break in the figurine caused an imperfect circuit, and there was a sharp crack.
Then, excruciating pain.
Whatever had been dulling some of my senses, and expanding others, was gone.
The neck of the vessel had closed around my wrist. And was squeezing. Like a vise.
I screamed and howled. The Change, always just barely out of my control, now shifted wildly. I felt my molecules morphing uncontrollably among my forms. Fangs, fur, claws, and once, briefly, I swore I saw scales.
Time sped up and the real world—my present—was again at the fore of my consciousness.
Pandora’s Box exploded. Its metallic shards hit the ground, scattered like beads of mercury, and melted away.
Sean tackled Dmitri, who raised his pistol.
I fell to my knees, too human now. Shining red all over the wrist that had been bitten by Pandora’s Box.
Dmitri’s pistol fired into the air.
Another shot from downslope. This one connected.
Clean-head had shot Sean.
Sean screamed. Blood was everydamnwhere.
As the last of the fragments melted away, a voice inside my head whispered,
::what do you need?::
Nearly blinded with pain and unable to concentrate, I gasped. “I…just give me a minute.”
Instantly my bitten hand jerked up. I felt a pulse like a shock wave spread out from around me.
Everyone around me—human and Fangborn, friend and foe—fell to the ground.
I stared. I could see something like veins and bone exposed three inches above the bend of my wrist. I was surprised my hand was still attached.
The pain receded, my eyes focused. It wasn’t bone I saw on my wrist. There were stones, a bracelet of some kind. Alive, now part of me.
I heard the heartbeats of those around me, and knew they were still alive.
I understood.
Interpreting my blurted request literally, Pandora’s Box had given me a minute.
I stumbled to Sean’s side. His heart had slowed, but there was too much blood on the ground. When my minute was up, time would snap back into place and he’d bleed to death.
I pulled Dmitri off him, yanked the gun from his hand, and threw it as far away as I could. I tore off Dmitri’s shirt, then dragged Sean behind the wall for cover.
I could smell it; the bullet had broken bone and shredded his lungs. Sean was dying.
Desperately I tried to summon the voice that had given me that minute—maybe it could help. “Make me a vampire! Help me sav
e Sean!”
But there was nothing. Less than nothing, because now I was the only one conscious within one hundred meters.
I tried to stanch Sean’s flowing blood with Dmitri’s shirt, but too much had already been lost. I stared at the blood on my hand, watching it shimmer in the light before the cells died.
A minute isn’t a very long time when you’re alone and your friend is dying and you can’t do anything about it. It is a very long time to anticipate his death.
There was nothing I could do.
At the edge of my consciousness, I felt others start to stir around me.
Sean’s fingers grazed my elbow, but then fell away.
“Sean!”
His eyes were open. He was ashen, his torso sodden with bright blood.
“You were…a wolf?” He was Sean again, the vampiric compulsion broken.
“It’s OK—” If only I’d been thinking when I’d been asked what I needed. If only he’d been shot when I could have reached out, repaired him.
“Zoe. I’m sorry—”
Tears burned my eyes. “Sean, don’t! We’ll find Claudia or Ariana, they’ll fix you—”
He coughed, an awful sound. He reached up to my face, brushed my lips with his bloody fingers.
The blood burned like a brand; my wrist throbbed. I glanced down. The panels of red gemstone shifted, revealing a fractured blue stone.
Sean’s grip tightened on my hand. “Zoe, I’m scared.”
“I’m right here. I’m right here, Sean.” It was so very little, when I’d had such power just a moment before. My tears mingled with his blood. “I’ll get you help! Just hang on!”
He was dead.
Too much.
I Changed. I howled. The thorny brown hills echoed with my grief.
A clatter of rocks. Dmitri was there, and he only had eyes for me. Maybe my shiny new bracelet.
Didn’t matter. He had set me on this road and as good as killed Sean. If Clean-head hadn’t missed Dmitri…
Good, evil, or indifferent, he’d earned whatever I had in me to dole out.
I was on him, seizing his shoulder. We went down.
I struggled to get a better grip, never letting go of the meaty flesh of his upper arm. My jaw ached from hanging on, but there was no way I would let go. He screamed, and I felt the warmth of his familiar blood rushing from his shoulder over me.
He twisted and turned. I held on, but again lost my claw-hold on his torso. Shouts behind me, and a shot; I felt a massive blow as a bullet punched its way through my shoulder. The smell of hellebore toxin was in the air, and I grew dizzy at the smell of it.
I whimpered but held on. I felt my body refuse to move as I wished. Even when I felt…nothing, even when I could not see his unshaved chin, even when I could no longer smell his clothing, detergent, deodorant, blood, I held on.
A roar from overhead, and a hot wind washed over me. That’s when I left the whole mess behind.
Chapter 30
I was still a wolf when I woke up. Terrified, I tried to Change back, but could feel nothing but fear. My limbs were like a puddle of warm oatmeal to the extent that I could feel them at all. The thing I’d feared all my life had finally happened: I’d let the Beast out and would never regain my human form. I’d be a wolf forever…
Bright lights and voices, none of which made any sense. I closed my eyes, trying to recall what had happened, where I might be. There was no sense to be had.
So I went back to sleep.
I woke later, the taste of my earlier panic still in my mouth. I still couldn’t move, but I worked harder this time at focus and calm. Maybe if I could just chill out, I’d slide back into my human form.
My eyes focused on figures in front of me. A picture. Letters. Too woozy to make sense of the words, written in large block capitals, I studied the photographs.
Will and Danny, Claudia and Gerry, smiling and making exaggerated gestures of happiness. A red cross with a circle around it. An American flag.
Message received, guys. You’re OK. I’m in the hospital. Theoretically I’m safe.
I didn’t feel much reassured, glad as I was that everyone was alive.
Alive. Maybe not OK.
I dozed again.
When I woke the next time, I sensed company in the room before I opened my eyes. My nose twitched, I whined.
I felt a reassuring hand on my muzzle and pried my eyes open to see who it was.
Gerry.
“Hey, it’s OK. You’re going to be all right.”
Claudia came in, knelt by the bed so she was eye level with me. “Zoe, we’ve given you something, a drug, to keep you in wolf form, OK? There were complications because of the hellebore and…other things. If you Change back now, you won’t heal properly. This will be faster, trust me. You’ll be human again soon, I promise.”
A weight rolled off me, and I felt I could breathe again. I woofed, a small, gruff noise.
“You were in bad shape skinself, too. This will at least get you better stabilized. When you’re stronger, when you’ve healed, we can work on the human hurts.”
My eyes closed halfway. I understood.
“Will’s OK, too.” She glanced up at her brother, a bemused look on her face. “He’s sleeping now, but he’s been here until we made him get something to eat.”
“Get some sleep now, kiddo.” Gerry patted the top of my head gently, about the only part of me that didn’t feel like it was bandaged. “Maybe when you wake up, we can get you back to skinself.”
Skinself. Wolfself. A little part of me, detached from the principal matters of restoring flesh and bone, noted that Gerry talked about it as just another part of me.
Nice to think that when I woke up, I might be whole, for the first time in my life.
The next time I woke up, I was ravenous. And I was human. There was a tray nearby, full of brown, limp hospital food. This seemed to have a certain tang that went beyond “institutional” and hinted at “military-industrial complex.”
I’d never eaten anything so delicious. I licked the plate, craned around for more. I found a buzzer and pushed the button. If it wasn’t a buzzer, and it gave me a dose of painkillers instead, I’d be just as happy.
Will came in. With another tray of food.
I looked like seven kinds of hell, I felt like eight kinds of hell, but I would have sung if I could.
Will knew. Will was alive. It was OK now.
It might have been the drugs or the relief, but I was floating.
He set the tray down in front of me, and the smell caught my nose. I ate the second tray, enjoying every bite.
He sat on the edge of the bed, watching me, amused. “I thought I’d lost you. Again.”
“Nope,” I said around a mouthful of…what? Chocolate pudding? Gravy? I didn’t care, but I did put down my spork. Tears sprang to my eyes. “Oh, Will! Sean! I couldn’t do anything—!”
Will looked away. “He never should have been there in the first place. Do you have any idea why he came with you?”
I remembered Sean’s admission, back in Venice. “Uh, he was under a vampiric compulsion.” I tried a weak smile, feeling like a jerk as I lied to Will, but determined to protect Sean. “It was the only time I’ve ever seen him do anything he was told.”
Will nodded but didn’t smile. “I’m so mad at him, I can’t think straight.” He turned away so I couldn’t see him while he wiped his eyes. “Sean didn’t always do the right thing, but he was my friend and now he’s gone? How does that happen, Zoe?”
I had no answers; I held his hand. Finally Will grabbed a napkin off my tray and blew his nose. “But I’m even more angry at Knight; whatever Sean’s mistakes, there’s no way he should have used him like that. It’s disgusting, and it’s against everything every Fangborn I ever worked with stood for. To take Sean and just…subvert his autonomy like that.”
Will shook his head.
“What happened?” I said. “How did you find me?”
�
��Danny did it. Danny figured out the symbol on the disk marked Ephesus and the location of the Box. He figured Knight would go there, if it meant what we thought.”
I couldn’t help smiling. Of course Danny had figured it out.
“Once we had the location, we regrouped, and then all we had to do was follow the heavily armed men.” Will took the now empty tray and set it aside. “I wasn’t sure we were going to get there in time.”
“And how did we get out?”
“It was Ariana who hijacked the helicopter Dmitri had—no one knows where he is, by the way, or if he’s alive or dead. Ariana sneaked into the helicopter as a snake, then Changed to skinself.” He coughed. “I’m sure the pilot was stunned to find a naked Italian hottie wrapped around him, telling him he should take us all out of there.”
I smiled, until I remembered my next question. “Knight?”
“The Fangborn shook off…whatever that was you unleashed…a lot faster than the humans. Knight was long gone—his age and strength allowed him to bounce back much quicker than the rest of us. I’m embarrassed to say Gerry had to haul me up the hill in a fireman’s carry. Then we dragged you to the copter. But none of us went looking for Knight—our goal was to get you out of there. No one else has seen Knight, either; the news had some little bit about him being treated for exhaustion.” He shook his head. “You can imagine the Fangborn families who know about him are going crazy.”
I nodded. Not good, but it could have been so much worse. “Where’s Danny?”
“Danny is well, he was here, and he’ll be back again soon. He’s in DC, filling out his forms and getting his clearance. He’s as happy as a pig in a puddle with the pile of ancient documents we’ve given him. He’s been working with Claudia and a few of the other Fangborn.”
