Hellbender (The Fangborn Series Book 3) (5 page)

Quarrel ignored him.

“Okay,” I said, “so if you’d been in this situation, with a terrific threat to the Fangborn, you would have been expected to go to war with, what, humanity?”

“Yes, that is something like that word: humanity. And yes, we are told now that we would have been compelled to destroy those who threatened us.”

“Why? Why not try to find some way to live with the aggressors, those who threatened you? Why such a drastic response?”

Another pause, and an exchange of glances suggested a communication among the dragons I couldn’t read. “There is no other response from the Makers than, ‘It is what we are made to do.
’”

I went cold all the way to my marrow. “You’re made to destroy humanity?”

“The Makers use a word and you have one similar: We are made to be predators. Predators do not negotiate. Predators find their way to a place of dominance and maintain their place and order beneath them.”

I didn’t think I could get any colder, but I did. “Is that what the Makers intended for us, the Fangborn?”

“As necessary.”

“So, we’re meant to prey on humans? On those who threaten us?” That didn’t make sense, I thought. Everything I’d encountered in the Fangborn I’d met all across the world had some variation on the idea that Fangborn were meant to be benevolent, protectors. This was a giant step away from that. Somehow the message must have gotten garbled, as it was told in Fangborn folktales through the years. This couldn’t be right.

A tiny part of me said,
It has the ring of truth. You always worried there was something too convenient about these rationalizations and tales. And now you’re getting to the heart of it.

The dragons were silently communicating again, and this time I had the distinct impression that they were worried about something. The only time I’d seen Quarrel worried before was during the Battle of Boston, and shortly after that I found myself transported across the world, apparently stripped of my powers. “What? What is it?”

“The Makers have conferred. They have agreed that reviewing our history—”

“Our history?”

“Our history, going back tens of thousands of years, that our behavior does not conform with what they anticipated.” Quarrel did the dragon equivalent of gnawing on his lip.

“Okay. What does that mean?”

“They have determined that we are broken. They are considering what to do with us. This will take some time.”

Suddenly I was back in the courtyard of the house outside Kanazawa.

Little or no time had passed here. Somewhere in the distance, Rose screamed. There was so much anguish that it wasn’t something we heard in our ears but in our hearts and minds.

Okamura-san, Ken-san, and I ran down the path to the driveway and the Trips. Rose was bleeding still but standing with her knife—still clean—in her hand. Ivy was holding Ash’s head in her lap; a long hunting knife, smeared from killing work, was beside her. Ash’s chest wasn’t moving.

I had a flash of a vision.

An Order guard had come across the Trips and shot Ash in the back. Rose had rolled out of the way and Ivy in turn had cut the killer’s throat.

“Quarrel, Naserian! Can’t you do something?” I shouted. “Yuan?”

The dragons appeared out of nowhere. “It is beyond our skill, Hellbender,” Naserian said. Her voice was even rougher than Quarrel’s, like shifting old stones rather than oak, and heavily accented. If her scales were dark garnet, her eyes were bloodred. “Even we have no power to raise the dead.”

“Perhaps you?” Yuan suggested. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched and youthful, considering his girth. “With all your glorious energies, perhaps it is not beyond you.”

I tried and felt . . . something.

Not enough, not nearly enough to heal Ash, much less raise him from the dead, but it infused me with a joy that I couldn’t have imagined.

I wasn’t done. My powers were still there. They hadn’t been stripped away by the Makers. They’d seemed burned out of me because I’d overextended myself.

But that moment of exultation and realization was short-lived. I tried one more time, but it was like the solenoid clicking on a car’s ignition. The parts were there, but I needed a jump or a tune-up.

Rose stood bloody handed, staring silently at her brother. Ivy was shouting incomprehensible words perhaps only her siblings would have understood.

Without thinking, I ran over and grabbed their hands.

Why I thought they’d need me, I didn’t know. In the instant between me extending my hands and each of them taking one, I realized what I was trying to do. It was a wild-ass guess, but they held on to me like they were drowning, and briefly, oh so briefly, I saw Ash’s eyes flutter and felt his hand twitch in mine. And I knew I was right.

Ash’s life had left his body, but a charge like static on rippling silk went through me, following a fine scarlet line that connected him and his sisters. Rose slumped forward. The sensation passed, and as the other two came out of their brief confusion, I realized what had happened.

Something in me had acted as a conduit, funneling something of Ash into his siblings. What I’d felt reminded me of the sensation that accompanied the upload of a dead person’s mind—usually someone whose blood was literally or figuratively on my hands—into my mind-lab, but this was different. Cleaner, smoother. When I’d taken their hands before the fight, and seen their lives, it was a jumble. This was me taking some of those memories and weaving them together with what they knew, retracing and reinforcing their bonds of kinship and psychic ability.

I hoped they would forgive me this ill-conceived, clumsy, and fumbling invasion of their privacy. My hope was that this connection with their brother would fill in the gap his death left in them.

Appalled at what I’d just presumed, I began to apologize.

The sisters exchanged a look and then took my hands again, gently, insistently.

I felt their grief, blinding and soul wrenching, as they guided me along that thread. I felt their fears, that if one perished, all three would, the gaping hole left behind spilling their wills and energies until those remaining siblings were husks. They knew this as well as each knew herself and the other. But now there was the faintest rose-colored line that bound up the rough edges of where Ash’s . . . soul . . . had been ripped from theirs. Fainter strands like weaving silk maintained a connection that, absent, would have torn the other two asunder as well.

I fled their minds. The pain of loss doubled, tripled, was too awful, but I was left with the clear idea that I had made it possible for Ivy and Rose to survive.

“Thank you,” they said in tandem, their voices harsh. “Thank you for Ash’s last, impossible gift.”

My throat closed. It could have been so much worse, I understood now. I thought about what it would be like to lose Danny, the closest thing I had to a brother, or Adam. Or Will. The hole in my guts that any of those losses would mean. The welter of emotions I felt so acutely was mingled with pleasure at finding my powers restored.

Everyone was a little stunned.

But there was work to do. I hauled myself unsteadily to my feet and turned to the captured Order soldiers. They’d seen the appearance of the dragons, their final removal of Jacob Buell from the face of the earth, and me channel Ash’s spirit into his sisters.

“We need answers about your assault on this place, how you knew to come here, where your headquarters are.” I pointed to the bubbling stain that had been Jacob Buell. “I suggest you talk. I think Quarrel and his friends are hungry after all that. And I’m not feeling very patient.”

The Order soldiers erupted in a chorus of breathless a
nd anxious voices, all competing to be heard. After a moment, I was forced to say, “One at a time, please!”

Finally, we sorted out translations and began to get information about the Order in Japan. The oracle they’d captured had died under torture, trying to resist giving his captors any more information about Family locations and movements in Kanazawa. This group had become bold with their information and acted on it immediately, with the knowledge that around the world, other branches of the Order of Nicomedia were launching its massive crusade to end the Fangborn.

The ride home was quietly traumatic. Ken-san administered sedative bites to both of the remaining Trips to ease their grief enough to rest. There was more mourning for the dead oracle, and the wounded needed tending. The dragons had vanished and everyone had questions.

I didn’t care. My brain and heart were full, but I’d reached the limits of even werewolf stamina and pushed beyond. Despite the crazy blast of healing that Quarrel, Naserian, and Yuan had given me and the rest of the Family, I was exhausted. I stopped only to take off my shoes and wash my face before I went to the room I’d been assigned, fell flat on my face, and went to sleep.

Later, I learned I’d slept for close to thirty-six hours straight.

When I woke, it took several worrying moments to remember where I was and to convince myself that I hadn’t vanished from where I thought I’d be again. Although Quarrel had reassured me that I was entirely healed and that I might use whatever powers I had, those powers still weren’t under control. If I could teleport before, it meant I could do that again. Without knowing how, I had no desire to find myself some place unintentionally. That meant my investigation of whatever the new artifacts might do would have to be postponed. I had to focus on what I had already and solve the riddles of my unpredictable power before something worse than teleportation happened to me or those around me.

I knew, after opening Pandora’s Box in Ephesus, that there were four more artifacts that contained huge power in the world. In searching for those four, I’d found there were even more than I’d anticipated, and when I found them, sometimes there was a contest with another Fangborn to acquire their power. Whoever was strongest “won,” but in every case, the more artifacts I found, the more other relics called to me.

There was no one-to-one connection between any of the artifacts and a single, specific power. It was as though I got a bit of a boost in several different abilities, or a hint of a new one. I did know that the more artifacts that I assumed, the more I was able to control and direct those new powers.

Each time I’d acquired a new piece, it had been added to the original bracelet on my wrist. Sometimes this was in the form of a new row of stones on my right arm, but recently, the small jeweled plates began appearing on my back, my ankles, my collarbone. More than that, a fine, almost invisible net of gold began to cover my limbs, dotted with tiny round diamonds. So while I still thought of those artifacts melded with me as “the bracelet,” it had become much larger and more complicated than that. I had to hope that those elements would return, as they seemed to have vanished on my sudden trip to Japan, and I had a suspicion I’d need all the power I could get in the days to come.

I ate without paying attention to the food I was shoveling into my mouth. Too much to think about, and more besides. Ivy and Rose had arranged to go home on the first available plane. I longed to go with them, but without papers, it was impossible, for the moment. The Fangborn who usually handled the fake passports and papers had been killed by the Order in the raid. I knew I had brought the Dicksons, by my actions, to this sad state, but so far, all they could do was thank me.

“There’s something there in us now,” Ivy said, her eyes red and swollen.

“That wasn’t before,” Rose said.

There was a brief, heartbreaking pause when they both instinctively waited for Ash to say his part, and then both rushed to fill the void.

“I hope it helps,” I said.

“Yes. If we decide to foretell again,” Ivy said.

“It won’t feel so . . . broken with just the two of us,” said Rose.

“Then take care, you guys.”

I hugged them before they left, and while Ken-san was working on finding me a way home, I took the dreaded bath.