Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (18 page)

“Lost you there for a minute.” He glanced at me and made a face. “Hang on.”

He raised my wrist to his mouth, and I felt strong lips, a brush of his hair against my hand. Then the tiny impression of sharp teeth, laughably gentle, a kitten’s kiss, compared to being torn apart by the Fellborn’s unclean fangs.

A moment later, I was feeling better: the vampire’s anesthetic was taking the worst of the pain away. Toshi looked like he was going to gag, however, and spat. He wiped off his lips with a dampened shirt cuff. “That is the
nastiest
shit I’ve ever had in my mouth.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not on you. Those things are purely foul, eh? And do I taste hellebore?”

I sagged. “Probably, considering the way I feel. I don’t know how they stand it in their systems.”

“Well, the faster I get you healing, the better you can fight off that crap yourself.” He took a deep breath, almost as if he were about to dive into a deep pool, and half-Changed.

His straight nose shrank away to pinpoint nostrils, his pupils enlarged until there was no iris visible, and his skin went from alabaster to bluish scales. His severely modern haircut suited his scaleself and fangs.

Transformed, Toshi attempted a reassuring smile and bent over my wrist. He bit me again.

I’d never gotten use to watching a vampire healing someone, and it was worse watching his face become less and less human as he worked. I closed my eyes and tried to banish the thought of his skin rippling as he numbed my pain, sped my own natural healing, and neutralized the toxins.

It was several minutes before the bleeding stopped and I could open my eyes and sit up on my own. Toshi sat back, Changed back to human form, depleted and sickened. Even his snake-man form hadn’t been as much protection as it should have been against the poison.

“Zoe, we can’t stay here,” he said. “Do you think you can Change back and make it back to the hotel? We can’t afford to have you walking through Fatih as a wolf-woman.”

I nodded glumly. “Better to go before it gets light and busy.” I removed the shirt and bundled it into a plastic bag to dump on the way home. Toshi wrapped up my arm in Vee’s headscarf and wiped most of the rest of the blood from me. My tank top was dark enough that it wouldn’t show the blood as long as we stayed out of the light.

“I’m totally, unbelievably grateful, but how did you know to get here?” I asked.

“Me,” Vee said. “I got impatient. Nothing specific, but—”

Danny finished her sentence. “We’d just made it to the
building
when we heard that howl, so we knew it was bad.”

I nodded. “I sure am glad you did. Those things are hard to kill.”

“Good thing you’re harder. What were they?” Vee asked.

“Zombies?”

I shot Danny a hard look, but he wasn’t trying to be
funny
. It wasn’t a bad description of their mindlessness, their
ferocity
 … their hunger. They seemed to be tangled up with the
Order
, but where had they come from? Were they born? Were they made?

Wait—I’d been bitten. Was I going to turn into one of these things now? Were they really zombies?

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Toshi was squatting next to one of the dead things, trying not to touch it. “It looks … it looks a
little
like a werewolf.”

“It looks like a shaved bear. It doesn’t look anything like a werewolf,” Danny retorted, sticking up for me. “Maybe … exotic pets that someone was—”

“No. I’ve seen one before. Remember the last time we were in Turkey, Danny? I told you about that thing in Knight’s lockup?” I filled in the others. “I’ve seen a video, too, where a bunch of them tore a town apart. Think about what I looked like—those people never had a chance. The way they were acting toward me … they weren’t riled until they smelled me, but then they lost their shit. They elicited the Call to Change in me but it wasn’t like anything I’ve ever smelled before.”

“Yeah, that’s what I got. The taste was all wrong, but it reminded me of …” Toshi couldn’t bring himself to say it.

The others were lost, so I made myself say out loud, “
Fangborn
. Someone’s growing or making Fangborn. I’ve been calling them Fellborn, for lack of a better name.”

The others looked shocked, but I held up a hand to keep the questions at bay. “Not, you know, real ones. But someone has been doing experiments or something—”

And then it made sense to me, the vision I’d had on the site of the asylum. That’s what Porter and Knight had been discussing. “There’s a scientist named Thomas Porter; I suspect he was associated with the Order and Senator Knight. They were discussing research, a long time ago … er, in a vision I had. This is what they were talking about. At the place where my mother had been experimented on, so I kinda think they’re behind it.”

I filled them in on the fragments I’d heard and then frowned. “Two problems: One, Knight would never hold with ‘making’
Fangborn
, not with his views. And two, if what I saw happened in the forties, and Porter was in his fifties then—it’s unlikely he’d be alive now. Especially since he jumped out a window at Knight’s suggestion. I don’t think he would have survived.”

“Could he have been one of us—sorry, Dan.” Vee turned to him. “A Fangborn?”

I shook my head. “Definitely a human, though he resisted
Knight, which made me wonder. But if he’s been building
Fangborn
,
maybe he’s come up with a way to resist vampires, too. The emotion between him and Porter was very strong and antagonistic. There were more than scientific differences between them. Huge moral and ethical differences.”

Danny said, “This can wait, Zoe. We need to get going.”

“Yeah, but first …” I nodded at the disgusting corpses, even less appealing in death than they had been in life. “We gotta see if we can get a clue from these … guys.”

“What, like ‘Property of Acme Villain Studios?’” Vee wasn’t convinced. It was a filthy mess.

“If we don’t look, we won’t know,” I said.

I Changed to human form. When the zombies fell, they hadn’t Changed. That was reassuring, in a weird way, because then I knew they weren’t truly Fangborn, but some hideous approximation. Fangborn assumed their human form when they were killed, which helped avoid detection by Normals. It made sense: accumulating burials of werewolves and vampires would have been a dead giveaway, eventually, over the years.

It was harder than I thought, the wet blood making the twisted and torn clothing almost impossible to untangle. Nothing much in the pockets, and all the labels were from chain stores in the US and Europe. In fact, looking at the bodies all in a row, I realized that though the monsters weren’t in uniforms, they all wore exactly the same type of clothing: jeans or cargo pants, button-down shirt. All of different colors, but almost as if they’d been attempting to blend in. I had no doubt they’d all come from the same place o
f ori
gin.

“Nothing else here, Zoe.” Danny was looking gray about the gills, and I was sore and stiff and longed to be out of the damp. Walking might help, and it would relieve my sensitive nose of the smell of rotting blood, too.

I almost stood up, but something caught my eye. One of the buttons on a shirt was dangling by a thread. It was the same color as the rest of the buttons but didn’t reflect light quite the same way. If I hadn’t been trained to look for these tiny differences, I never would have noticed it, and even now I assumed it was filth that made it look different.

Sighing, I leaned over and brushed the button with my now-human thumb.

It wasn’t a button, though it was meant to look like one. It was a camera.

“Danny?” I held it up to him. He squinted, frowned, and
nodded
, holding up one finger.

I nodded to Vee, and we silently looked through the other bodies. Found one on each, the rest of them destroyed either by my fight with them, or in their tearing at each other while locked up … for who knew how long.

Danny made as if he was going to drop it, crush it under h
is hee
l.

“No.” I held out my hand, took it back from him.

“Zoe …”

“I don’t care.” I held it up to my face, and nodded. “Right. If this is still working, you probably know who I am already. Whatever you’re planning on doing with these … monsters … don’t. They’re an abomination, a disgusting mockery of what you seek to copy. If you don’t know who I am, it doesn’t matter. Because I’m coming to stop you. Now I know what your freak toys can do, and I know they can be stopped. I saw what happened to
Princeville
Township when they were wiped out. An entire town’s
population
—gone. You left no witnesses to those murders, but you did leave evidence. So when I get done with your unnatural freaks, I’ll come for you.”

I was handing the thing to Danny, thinking he might be able to find out more about the creatures and who sent them, when I heard a scratchy noise, coming from the “button.”

I turned my head to hear better. Tinny laughter, like a bad wax recording, reached my ears. A sharp electronic squeak, and it was abruptly cut off.

Danny’s mouth was set in a line of disapproval. He took the button back from me. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Yeah, probably. But I don’t care. Is there some way we can find out more about them?”

“What, here?” Danny snapped.

He was filthy and tired, and looked like he’d give anything to be safely in front of his computers in a climate-controlled room. “Well, you could … I don’t know. Look at it.”

He nodded wearily, raising his hand apologetically. “If I can get the battery out, I will. Otherwise, I’m not letting this thing follow us around.”

“That’s all I ask.” I licked my lips again. “Does anyone have any more water? I feel like I’ve been baked in a kiln.”

Shrugs and shaking heads all around. We’d all thought we’d be gone by now.

“Okay, screw it.” I went over to the spring, knelt down, and cupped my hands.

“Zoe, don’t,” Vee said, stepping forward.

“Stuff’s already in my system, Vee. I’m feeling faint; I need more water.”

As soon as the water touched my mouth, it was as though an electric shock ripped through my system. My head jerked up and to the left. I saw a little shelf, half submerged, and knew that’s where the vessel or fragment had been, now removed and replaced with the trap full of the zombie mutants. Broken images, like a channel that isn’t completely tuned in, forced their way into my consciousness. Instinctively, I reached out toward the little shelf, cut or worn into the rock, and brushed it with my fingers.
That seemed to strengthen the signal, and I had an image of men in Hazmat suits with every kind of equipment filling the room, taking the artifact I’d been called to. It was so covered up, immediately, I couldn’t tell what I should be looking for, but there was a visceral … impression left on the water.

Two other things broke the surface of the static. One was a man stripping off his head covering and saying something about “
Boston
.” A second one removed his mask, and I recognized his face. Jacob Buell. The black eye I’d given him was nowhere to be seen; what had happened here had occurred before I met him.

I gasped, fell back, and the connection was broken. The others raced toward me, but I scrambled back to the spring and stuck my hands in again. Gone, all gone. Whatever connection had been made had been severed, or all the energy that had been left for me to gather this data had been expended.

I’d failed.

We found our way back to Danny’s. No one said anything the entire trip. We agreed we’d go straight to bed and make plans and phone calls in the morning. The others needed to know about the Fellborn; maybe they’d believe Danny or Toshi, if not me.

Although I couldn’t help but mourn the loss of an artifact to the Order, I had gotten a clue in the spring. I had a date for something ominous happening on October 7; I had a terrible suspicion that it was a scaled-up version of what had happened in Princeville Township. Given Dr. Porter’s feelings about the Fangborn, it was either to rid the city of its Fangborn population or create a catastrophe and discredit the Fangborn.

Now I knew it would happen in Boston, a city I loved dearly.

I had to count it as progress, but none of it felt like winning.

Chapter Thirteen

Dispirited by my failure, I’d gone to sleep and immediately found myself in my mind-lab.
I was searching through the computer files to see if I could find anything on the Fellborn, when I began to wonder about the supposed infallibility of the Fangborn. Despite my best efforts, I could find nothing.

“Hey, Sean?”

“Yeah, Zo?” He was at the sink, washing out beakers, setting them out to dry.

“You got anything squirreled away that mentions the history of the
Fangborn
? Anything to do with them ever messing up?”

Sean ignored me, as he did when I asked him something he didn’t know or maybe wasn’t ready to tell me.

“I mean, that’s a lot of ethical baggage to rationalize,” I mused, as if to myself. “The so-called instinct to track evil. Knowing if there is truly no way they can be wrong … that would help with finding out how to fight the Fellborn, you know?”

He looked up and seemed about to speak, when he shrugged and went back to his washing. “I’m about to make tea,” he said, igniting a burner and then setting a filled flask on it. “You want any?”

“Maybe later. All that violence,” I said, thinking about the encouragement Sean had given me to kill Adam, to kill Toshi. Certainly some of his advice had saved my life, and I was grateful to Sean. But the other stuff … was it me finding an excuse for myself? Was it something about Sean? “It’s worrying, sometimes, you know?”

He shrugged again, then adjusted the flame. “Dunno. Probably some kind evolutionary adaptation, right?”

I held my breath, certain he was going to say more—

A fire alarm went off, a blaring Klaxon that nearly sent me out of my seat.

I didn’t know we had a fire alarm, and I looked around for a way to turn it off. I didn’t see any smoke. “What the hell is that? Is that the burner?”

“No, it’s not in here!” Sean yelled through cupped hands over the noise. He turned off the burner and the gas, just in case. “Something outside. Go
, n
ow!”

I nodded and woke myself up. I found myself in a tangle of sheets in Danny’s guest room. Toshi was sharing Danny’s room, and Vee was on the convertible couch in the office, outside the g
uest room
.

Near total silence: no shouting, certainly no alarms. A murmur of traffic outside the window.

Trouble …

I pulled on my clothes and checked the bathroom. Under the covers, Vee was snoring gently on the couch.

I looked out the peephole, the windows. Nothing. But the trouble was outside, I knew.

I knocked gently on Danny’s door. I was about to try again, a little louder, when Danny opened it, looking equally awake.

“Zoe, what is it?”

“Everything okay over here?”

“Uh … yeah. I’m … we’re fine. What’s up?”

“Spidey sense is tingling. Something’s going down.”

“Not over here.” He looked behind him. “All quiet here.”

“Nothing in my room. But Vee’s snoring away in the office.”

He glanced at me. “Well, sorry. It happens.”

Danny was lying to me.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, Zoe.” He looked away, too casually. “Maybe it was only a bad dream?”

“No … You need me to … do any laundry for you tomorrow?” It was a code we’d occasionally used to get out of sticky social jams. The equivalent of asking a possible kidnap victim if he wanted you to feed his fictional dog, Fluffy.

“No, I’m good.” He gave me another odd look. “Really.”

“Okay.”
I gave him his odd look back. “Sorry I bothered you.”

“Good night.”

He closed the door softly behind me. The feeling of danger had not diminished. If anything, it had gotten stronger. I reached out with the proximity sense.

The balcony. Back in my room.

Frowning, I slunk back into my room through the office. Vee was still snoring, only louder now.

I’ll only wake her if I need help,
I thought. No sense waking up everyone because I couldn’t figure out what was bugging me …

Bedroom. A shadow on the French window—not much, but enough to let me know someone was out there.

Someone I knew. Waiting for me.

I had to make the most of surprise. It was the hardest thing in the world to crawl back into bed and pretend to sleep, but I did it. Sweat was pouring down, and the sheets stuck to me. Finally, I kicked them off—it was in character and easier to avoid getting tangled at the moment of action. I slowed my breathing.

My heart was racing even as I forced myself to appear relaxed.

The faintest click of the latch, barely perceptible even to Fangborn ears. It took another Fangborn to be that quiet.

A pause, then the door opened, ever so slightly, so slowly. A familiar scent wafted in with a humid breeze.

Danger, danger, danger …

I swallowed. I might have evaded the others before, because they hadn’t been looking for me, hadn’t known where I would be. This attack had been considered and planned.

Now we’d see what I could do with my amped-up skills.

At the first soft step into the room, I rolled to my feet and threw myself forward, Changing.

Claudia Steuben was dressed for business. Long, dark brown hair tied up and slicked back, she was in a black tee and leggings that only exaggerated the fine curves of her body. She, too, was half-Changed, her face reptilian, her skin violet scales, and her hair and nails purple-black. She came out swinging. And spitting—an acid burn began to spread on my arm. That pissed me off, and before I could think about it, I opened my mouth to scream. Muscles I didn’t know I had began to work in my mouth and throat. I felt a jet of … something … shoot out from behind my fangs. Tasted bitterness, like quinine, but it quickly evaporated on my tongue, replaced by an orange-peel flavor.

Claudia screamed, her clawed hand slapping at the tough scales on her arm. A faint blackish smoke was rising up from where my venom hit her.

That stopped us both. But only for an instant.

She threw herself at me, all stealth cast aside, all control gone. Her face was a mask of anger.

I’d never seen this side of Claudia before, at least not aimed at me. I backed up a few steps, but she followed intently.

She was a much better fighter than I was—she’d been training all her life—but my speed was keeping me equal with her. I parried a couple of hard combinations but ate a follow-up kick to my side. Felt my ribs give, an ache in my abdomen.

If I could now spit venom, maybe I had other tricks, too. I concentrated hard on what I wanted and then grabbed her arm and bit. Instinctively, I worked another fine set of muscles and was pleased to see a look of surprise cross Claudia’s face. She shook her head; I’d been trying to knock her out but had only slowed
her dow
n.

“Claudia, stop it! Stop fighting!” I focused on that and that slowed her down even more.

At that point, her scream had also worked for me. Toshi, Vee, and Danny filled the doorway, unsure of what to do.

Apparently, my interaction with the Viking ship and the
mosaic
had tweaked some of the vampire skills I seemed to possess.

She returned to her skinself, and so did I. Claudia mumbled, “How can you do that?”

The others were as eager to know the answer as she was.

I would have given a lot to know, myself. “I didn’t know I could, until now. The bracelet … seems to be amping up whatever vampire powers I used to have when I’m in danger.”

Claudia could speak more clearly now. “Zoe, what have you become!”

“I don’t know. Maybe if everyone would stop assaulting me every five minutes, we could all find out.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Claudia said, her teeth
gritted
. “I
wanted
to attack you, in spite of the fact that I know you’re not … what the TRG has been saying.” She frowned. “Or maybe you are.”

“Okay,” I said. No use letting her get herself tied up in a
theoretical
monologue. “We’re going to keep talking until we sort this out. What did the TRG tell you?”

“What they told everyone. That you’d taken off, that the pressure was too much.”

I nodded. “I think this was about two weeks before I actually escaped. They’d been drugging me, planning more tests for the bracelet,” I said. “After they’d told me that you’d all been sent on other missions. But
I
didn’t believe
them
.” I couldn’t keep the emphasis out of my statement that I’d been the only one to keep the faith.

“Well, I didn’t believe them, either.” She managed to shrug, and I knew she was rapidly regaining control of herself.

I tilted my head. “Oh, yeah. Because you always used to greet me by spitting venom?”

“I didn’t believe them because (a) I know you, and (b) I kn
ow m
e.”

“Claudia—”

“No, I’m trying to explain.” She took a deep breath, frowned, and made a faint gesture of groping for the right words. “I obviously had my own opinion of you, as a psychiatrist, as well as a human being—Fangborn.”

I gave her a sour look. “Great, thanks. I thought we were friends.”

“No, it’s just a habit. I try to keep my professional assessments to myself in personal relationships, but asking me to stop parsing everyone I meet would, I suspect, be like asking you to stop looking at the ground and searching for pottery.”

She had a point.

Claudia continued. “So what I was told didn’t match what I’d already assessed. Yes, I believe you have trust issues, but the Zoe I knew after our time on the gulet and after Ephesus was not the same Zoe I first met in Cambridge. You’d built bonds, and I knew you would have tried to say something if you thought you had to run. To me, to Will, to Danny, to Gerry. Someone. You would have at least tried this time.”

I blew out my cheeks; at last, a little credit for me. “Thank you.”

“But I found myself questioning that, and I didn’t have a good
reason why I should. That’s when I tested my own blood. I found trac
es of a chemical compound that didn’t normally exist in my
system
. I analyzed that and discovered it very crudely mimics the same
chemicals
we’ve been able to identify in vampire ‘forget-me juice.’”

Toshi’s jaw dropped. “They’ve been able to isolate that? Use it on
Fangborn
?”

Claudia nodded. “I’d heard whispers that they were close to identifying it, but not that they’d made so much progress. I can only assume that the TRG is preparing for I-Day, one way or th
e othe
r.”

“What do you mean?”

“Either the TRG will try to keep the Normal population unaware of our existence if someone starts the Identification, or they can make people think it’s always been this way—Fangborn living with humans. The TRG is crumbling, is split into factions, some for Senator Knight, some against.”

“Adam Nichols said Knight’s after the Order,” I said. “But his thug Zimmer almost took a chunk out of me yesterday.”

“Sounds right, if he’s sending this—wait. You’ve been talking with Adam Nichols? Wasn’t he the one who—?”

“Yes, he stole the artifacts from me in Venice, but then he helped me escape Knight. And then he helped me get away from the TRG. We’re … we’ve gotten close.”

At this point, Danny gasped. “Zoe, seriously?”

“Danny, now is not the time.”

“Okay … well, if you trust him this far …” Claudia struggled to keep her composure. “In any case, Knight must feel he can focus on the Order, then.”

“Hey, anyone notice that he’s evil? Zimmer, I mean. It’s coming
off him in waves and Knight doesn’t even notice? Doesn’t kill him?”

“I’m not sure why,” Claudia said slowly. “It’s something that’s been observed in very old Fangborn, a kind of sluggishness to hear the Call, or a resistance to it. There aren’t many of them, so it’s hard to say why it happens.”

“Okay, but nothing about Knight says ‘sluggish’ to me. Why did
you
attack me, Claudia? Forgive me, but that seems to contradict everything you’ve been saying about believing me.”

“Well, I might not have believed that you had run off, but the truth is, Zoe, I’m reading you as evil. It’s not exactly right, but
I thoug
ht I had my ideas about you straight, then I got close and everything in me said ‘attack.’” She shook her head. “I still have the urge; it’s the combination of my own questions and your … apparently new talent for suggesting that’s holding me back.”

I digested this with difficulty. “Well, if Danny was able to … reprogram himself, why are you having such a hard time?”

“It’s not the synthetic venom. That’s not perfect, and yes, I was able to think around it, until I actually encountered you.”

“I think it’s the bracelet.”

She nodded. “Me, too.”

I got up the courage to ask the question that had been haunting me. “So … it’s making me evil?”

“I don’t know.
Are
you evil, Zoe?”

She was taking the piss; I was on the brink of angry tears. “Claudia, we don’t have time for jokes—!”

“No, I’m entirely serious,” she said. “Do you have new
impulses
to hurt or kill? Do you find yourself being intentionally cruel?”

“What? No, of course not,” I said immediately. Then all my doubts came rushing back. “Okay, I admit, I’m having some strange thoughts and … urges. But I’m not acting on them; I’m catching them before I do.”