Hellbender (The Fangborn Series Book 3) (15 page)

As soon as I’d had the thought, he was there, in the archaeology lab. He had a chipped and tea-stained mug with a picture of Beethoven on the side and was happily nibbling a biscuit. The crumbs stuck to his cardigan indicated this might not be the first biscuit he’d had today, but there were ink stains on his fingers.

I guess he’d been busy at work.

“So . . . can you tell me about this?” I moved the scarab and chip to the workbench and tapped twice, splitting the “screen” on the surface into two parts. One showed the diagram of the scarab chip. Alongside it, on the other screen, I brought up a list of the artifacts I had already assumed into my form, their diagrams, and the powers that appeared or were enhanced after their addition. Nothing seemed to match this chip in any respect. Which was actually pretty exciting. Like baseball cards or other collectibles, you can find the common stuff pretty quickly and get a good range fast. But after a while, it gets harder and harder to find something you don’t already have.

“Far as I can tell, there’s no one-to-one correlation between my powers and the artifacts,” I said. “It’s like the artifacts are organized like those clear film map overlays that show the changing borders, or geographical details, or major cities depending on how many you put down. Or maybe like passes of an old-fashioned color printer. One pass lays down all of one color, next pass adds the next color, which also creates a third color, next pass adds more colors, and the definition of the picture becomes clearer, more resolved.”

He had been watching me intently, and reached out, touching the screen that had appeared in the workbench. He tried rearranging some patterns of artifacts and then looked up at me.

“Another analogy might be the arrangement and activation of certain genes,” he said. “It’s not really my game, biology, but it might be like a characteristic not depending on just one gene that’s switched on or off but requiring a certain combination of several switches, in the right order. More than one factor’s needed to make it work.”

I shrugged and nodded. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do you mind if I spend some time on this?” He nudged the chip gingerly, almost as if afraid. “This is certainly different from the Fangborn artifacts I studied . . . when I was alive . . . and the ones that have melded with you. It might give me some excellent insights, the way they came at the problem.”

I thought about it and slapped the work-surface screens. A big red seal appeared, glittering in the corner of the screen, with the words “Read Only” on every “page.” It didn’t interfere with the text but like a watermark, was just visible behind it.

“It would be a huge help to me, thanks,” I said. “For now, we’re going to keep this so you can look at these things, see if you find anything by arranging them differently, but I’m the only one who can make them happen. Activate them or add them . . . to me.”

“Fair enough.” Geoffrey had already gotten the hang of how to flick through the pages of artifacts. The light from the screens reflected on his face, coloring his gray beard. “You know how I died?”

“You’d said you’d been studying . . . the physics of Fangborn abilities?”

“Yeah. Bit o’ this, bit o’ that. Whether how the Change transformation the vampires and werewolves can do is a quantum entanglement of some kind, and whether the famed identification or prediction of evil the fanged ones claim can be derived from one single, huge algorithm. Spooky action at a distance, you know? But what I was working on at that precise moment I died was how some of these artifacts might have been created.” He stroked his beard, his eyes unfocused, thinking hard. “This might be a match made in heaven, Zoe, m’girl.”

I nodded. “If you can help me in any way, it would be a serious relief. Right now, what would help most is some kind of index, or a schematic, or a guide for the DIY newly enhanced Fangborn,” I said. “I don’t know if such a thing exists, but
maybe you can create a rough version? Anything that might lead me to a better understanding of how to use, make, or fake the artifacts I had, might mean, literally, the difference between life and death. And not just mine.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“So what about this thing?” I held up the scarab and chip.

“Not Fangborn, not entirely. It looks like something the Order pieced together, trying to make a Fangborn artifact work without . . . the right . . . components? Energy?” He looked confused. “We’re going to need a whole new vocabulary for this.”

I nodded. And we were going to have to get Lisa up to speed in a hurry if I had any hope of making progress here.

Then again . . . we had no time. Claudia and I were both certain that Dr. Tarkka was not out to hurt me. And then there were my own skills in mundane artifact analysis. This was too pretty to be used in torturing Fangborn. The gold curlicues of the circuits, the way the scarab had been set into the chip . . . It almost looked like jewelry, meant for a lady.

It was no riskier than the other artifacts I’d assimilated, I decided suddenly. “Okay, I’m going to plug it in.”

He was up for it. “Where do you reckon?”

I shook my head—it didn’t matter. Pre-bracelet, I would have assumed it went behind my ear or I should eat it. Now, I knew, I could put it anywhere, so long as my intent was to internalize what powers it might have. I found a suddenly available square slot on my bracelet, exactly the right size for the chip. I slotted it in. It fit perfectly.

I’d had my healing powers on deck, just in case the thing was booby trapped, but so far, so good. No sparks, no smoke—or the metaphysical equivalent thereof. Also good.

I thought there would be pain—there had been a load of hurt other times, with just the straight-up Fangborn artifacts that I was pretty sure would end with my death. There was nothing here, a frisson, something barely noticeable, like clothing that doesn’t fit exactly right. But it was manageable. All I felt was a vague brushing of minds outside me, very indirect, very primitive. Nothing like my own proximity sense. These minds were far away. They didn’t feel like human minds, however, or Fangborn. They felt more like dragons, if anything.

I unslotted the chip and tossed it to Geoffrey.

“Nothing?” he asked.

“Not a lot. Maybe you can find something. I’ll catch you later.”

No further enlightened, I met up with Heck and Elizabeth Nichols, who said they wanted to record me giving a dry run of what was going on. Later, they’d review it and we’d add anything I’d left out for the official version.

I took a deep breath, tried not to squint too much, and looked into the camera, as silly and self-conscious as I felt doing it. I thought about how I was so very much the tail wagging the dog, all these important people acting on my say-so, and how I knew that I was responsible for so much happening right now. I tried not to sound too weary or uncertain as I started.

I took a deep breath. We were on the brink of I-Day. I was going to tell people in high places about the Fangborn, the Order, the Makers, the dragons, and just the thought of that was scary.

“Hi. I’m Zoe Miller and I’m a werewolf, one of the Fangborn. If you don’t know . . .”

Chapter Eleven

I didn’t get released from the taping until about ten that night. I ate ravenously, very glad the kitchens were used to Fangborn irregular hours and large servings. I heard a loud exclamation of “Oh, hey!” from the doorway and saw Danny and Vee, holding hands.

Danny, a Normal, was the one constant I’d had from childhood, and his friendship meant everything to me. When I’d last seen him at the Battle of Boston, he’d been badly injured, bleeding from a serious gut wound. I’d healed him remotely, hoping that it would work.

To see him now, you’d never know he’d ever had a scratch—even his glasses were intact. He was only a few inches taller than me, maybe five eight, and ten pounds lighter than me, too, and everything about his paleness and dark curling hair screamed “geek!” But in the past few months, Danny had come into himself even more than when he’d left school and found his niche in the tech world. Working with the Fangborn challenged his quick mind, and his talent with languages had proved invaluable with a global, polyglot Family.

They rushed over and Danny threw himself at me; Vee gave me a cautious hug.

“Sorry,” she said after a moment. “I’m just worried . . . Last time we met, you ended up in Japan by mistake.”

I nodded. “Not you. I mean, I think part of that was your extra energy, but mostly it was me just not knowing what I was doing. I’m going to proceed under the assumption that whatever happens, I’ll be able to find my way back again.” I held up my new backpack and my new resolution to have my stuff with me at all times.

She nodded. Danny grabbed my hand again.

“You . . . you . . . teleported! What did it feel like?” Danny could barely contain himself. “What did you see?”

“It hurt like I was in a full-body fryolator, and I didn’t see anything. If I can avoid doing it again, I most certainly will.”

Danny was crestfallen. “Well, that’s not very—”

“Dan, let’s get Zoe a drink,” Vee said impatiently, “and if she wants to talk, she can.”

“I love that idea so very hard right now,” I said, busing my tray. “Is there a place where a girl could get a very large vodka?”

There was a TV lounge nearby with no TV, and Vee hit someone up for a bottle. After my first large gulp, I stared with something like reverence at the tumbler I had. “Dear sweet baby Jesus, this is bliss. Hey, either of you run into Max yet? You know, the guy who looks like a Fellborn but is actually really decent?”

“Oh, yeah, I saw him when I was entering him into our system,” Danny said. “They’ve eased up on him. He’s wearing fatigues, cadging smokes, and I believe I saw him badgering Lisa Tarkka about maybe changing him back, if possible.”

“What’s your take on her?” I asked Vee.

“Enh. She seems competent. I can’t get a read on her, though. I was disappointed not to find you a Family member who could help. The ideal candidate would have been Geoffrey Osborne, who was totally brilliant and a bit crazy.”

When she said the name Geoffrey, I felt my heart stop.

Vee sipped her beer and continued. “But he died in an Order attack a few months ago. They raided his lab and took the materials he was working on, notes, everything.”

“Ah.” A thought struck me. “Aren’t there other physicists we could ask? In the Family, I mean?”

She snorted. “Oh, sure, teaching high school, working for the gas company, whatever. Do you know how rare it is to get a theoretical physicist doing advanced work in a
Normal
population?” Vee shook her head. “It’s pretty unusual to begin with. We were lucky he was an oracle, because he didn’t feel the Call and couldn’t Change. He could focus on work. The Order didn’t care that he wasn’t a fighter, only that he was Fangborn.”

I told them about his presence in my lab. Their faces grew increasingly worried. “Weird shit, huh?”

“Uh, yeah.” Danny said, “Zoe, do me a favor? Don’t trust him too much. He might be some kind of Order construct.”

“A little elaborate for them, isn’t it?” I asked. “I mean, I’ll be careful, sure. But they’re crude. They’re still getting the Fellborn . . . right.”

“Please . . . don’t trust him too much,” Danny insisted.

“Okay.” I changed the subject. “You guys, do we have any idea how we work? The Fangborn I mean, sorry Danny. It’s just that we look an awful lot like magic, but . . . there’s never been any proof of anything like that revealed by any other physics or math, right?”

“Sweetie, we’ve been so busy fighting evil and trying to live our cover lives and, frankly, dying, that we know very, very little about the Change, how we heal, how the shifters can take three vastly different shapes,” Vee said. “Not to mention anything at all of what the oracles are able to do, some of the time, at least. Physics . . .
our
physics, generously speaking, is still taking the first baby steps along the road to finding out. But no, there’s no magic that we know of.” She looked thoughtful.

I had brought them up to speed about my experiences with the Makers when I felt his presence before I heard the familiar cadence of footsteps. As I looked up, Will MacFarlane appeared in the doorway.

“Zoe!” Will ran in and grabbed me. “God, it’s good to see you.”

I gave him a hug and a kiss. He returned the kiss a little too vehemently. I felt a kind of proprietary quality in it that bothered me.

“Come, sit down. I’m beat. How are you?”

“I’m fine, I’m . . . You fixed me up good. See?” He pulled up his shirt so I could see his very well developed six-pack, a little blur of hair on his chest. He might have been showing off, just a little. I might have enjoyed the view another time but was aware that he was working too hard to seem like everything was okay.

“Dan,” Vee said, shaking my cousin’s knee, “we should—”

At the same time, he said, “Vee, it’s getting late—”

They laughed, awkwardly. I didn’t blame them, I thought. There had been too many strange and strained occurrences lately between us.

“We’ll catch you tomorrow, okay? After the demonstration,” Danny said.

“Okay.” I hugged him, gave Vee a little wave, and then sat down after they left.

I brought Will up to date on my adventures and asked him about his. He interrupted me when I told him about my meeting with Dr. Tarkka.

“Zoe, Zoe—this isn’t a mission debrief. Let’s talk about us?”

“Yeah, but. It’s just I have these really major priorities at the moment and I’m jet-lagged. I’ve been in meetings of the weirdest sorts today. I have to do a demonstration tomorrow and I don’t even know where to begin thinking about that.”

Will was not pleased, but he was trying hard to be patient. Or at least sound patient. “Look. If we are all going to be in . . . let’s euphemistically call it ‘in trouble,’ then you should be with the person you’re supposed to be with. I think that would be a nice thing, if—”

“If the world’s going to end?”

He nodded. “I’m just saying.”

“I get that, and all I can tell you right now is, I don’t
know
. Maybe we could discuss it later, next week?” I had no idea of what would be happening next week, but between Carolina’s hostages, the Makers, and I-Day, next week felt like next year at the moment.

“The last time you said that, you disappeared to Japan.”

“Yeah, but
not
because I planned to!”

“My point exactly!” Will said; he thought I was getting him. “It might be worth the six hours or six minutes it would take. It would be nice, for all of us involved, to know where we stand.” “All” was said with reluctance and distaste, and I knew he was thinking of Adam.

“Will, this is complicated and we don’t have time—”

“You don’t have time for
me
, you mean. But you have time to meet
his
mother?”

I was so taken aback by that it took a minute to realize what he meant. “I met
Representative
Nichols. It was a . . . a . . . rescue, followed by a war council. Not a trip home to meet prospective in-laws, I promise you. It was
miles
away from the sort of situation you’re suggesting.”

“Well, I’m sure she liked you.” Will was so seldom peevish that it looked doubly ridiculous on him. I almost laughed, but I was mad, too.

“Apparently, I scared the shit out of her. The feeling was mutual, I can assure you. Have you seen her?”

“Tallish, plumpish, blondish, motherish? Yeah, I’ve seen her. On the news.”

“Well, motherish as in mother wolverine, maybe. She sees everyone as her responsibility and she takes it seriously. She’s tough and smart and suffers no fools, takes no crap.” I didn’t quite shudder, but I was intimidated by Representative Nichols in a personal way that even the Makers couldn’t match. She stood up to Senator Knight like she didn’t even care, and she went to the worst-case scenarios without batting an eye. She had a scary handle on all the angles of the situations, the situations that I was responsible for putting in front of her.

“I hate that I make you feel like this,” I said. “I hate that I don’t have the bandwidth to fix this right now. We both need a lot of time, and now is not exactly ideal. Can you wait? Just a little?”

“Not really.”

I shook my head sadly. “Okay. Then we’re done.”

“Wait—what?” His face was the picture of distress. “That’s not what I wanted!”

“Right, it’s not the answer you wanted, but it gives you certainty. You can have that much; I can do that for you.”

“Why are you doing this, Zoe?” The pain on his face made my heart contract.

“Doing what?”

And then I realized what he meant.

I’d changed. I’d become a different person. Will thought I was being petulant, giving him an ultimatum or something, and I’d been decisive and sincere, making a mature offer that hurt me to even think about.

“I’m not doing what you think, Will—aaahhh!” A blast of chaos in my head, confusion that didn’t feel Fangborn, didn’t feel human . . .

“What? We’re doing this again?”

“No—ah, shit.” I clutched my head. “It’s the ravens. I’m seeing through their eyes. Jason . . . the oracle is in some kind of trouble.”

As I ran into the kitchen area, Jason doubled over so hard, so fast, I thought he was going to knock himself out on his own knee. A second later, he slammed backward with equal violence. Jack and Jill were shrieking and flapping around him, darting, talons out at anyone who got too close.

Another Cousin I didn’t know had tears streaming down her face. When she saw me, she screamed. “Get a lid on it, Zoe! If you can’t use your powers properly, don’t!” She ran from the room.

I stood shocked, and Jason finally staggered up, groaning. The birds however did not settle, hovering over him protectively and, if I didn’t know better, squawking with concern. When Jason leaned back against the wall, Jack and Jill hopped on the floor near him. Then when he spoke to them, they returned to their perches, shrugging and shaking out their feathers nervously.

“Goddamn, Zoe,” he said with a hoarse voice. “What the fuck are you up to?”

“Me? Nothing.” I got him a glass of water and would have given it to him, but Jack swooped at me, cawing a warning. “Okay, okay. I won’t get too close.”

I set the glass on the floor and then got down on my knees and shoved it carefully toward Jason. His fingers brushed against it, almost knocking the glass over, and I got an even better idea of just how freaked out he and the ravens were. They shuffled a bit but stayed quiet—my posture was too submissive to suggest I was going to be any threat—and Jason drank deeply, sighing. His head tilted back against the wall and his face relaxed. This was the first time I’d seen him without his sunglasses on and his coat buttoned up. His red hair hung lankly, heavy with sweat, and his face struck me as surprisingly young. I slowly sat back on my heels, intensely aware that the two giant birds were eying me suspiciously.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Um, what happened?”

“I got this overwhelming urge to . . . do what you said.” He turned toward me. “And you said it wasn’t you?”

“No.” I had no idea what he was on about. “Even if I could do that, why would I want to?”

“Everyone knows about your crazy vampire powers and how they’re not quite normal. This was
beyond
a vampiric compulsion. It was . . . an order, something I felt from the depth of my being. It felt like . . . It felt the way that you fangs-and-fur folks describe the Call to Change. It felt like there was no way I’d want to ignore it, even if I could.”

“Whoa. Okay, well, I didn’t do it.” I thought a moment. “What did it say?”

“Say?”

“Was it a voice,
my
voice, commanding you?” I asked, desperate to know if I was somehow broadcasting unintentionally. “Was it a sudden urge to give me a pedicure? What
form
did this command take?”

Jason burst out laughing, which under the circumstances, was not as reassuring as it could have been. The ravens barked out harshly and flapped once or twice, and got more agitated as Jason worked to regain his composure.

“Knock it off, you guys,” he said at last.

That was better. He sounded more like himself. The birds settled, only partially reassured.