Hellbender (Fangborn Book 3)

by Dana Cameron

  The letter cleared up many of the mysteries the first two documents presented me. I came very close to trying out a little oracular push to see if I could get anything else—an idea of my father’s voice or personality or intent—from the document, but caught myself in time. I just couldn’t bring myself to try out my “extra” powers just yet.

  Dear Zoe,

  You don’t know me, and if you’re reading this, well . . . I’m sorry, is all I can say. This is not what I wanted for you or for us, but if my choices kept you safe, then that’s okay by me. I’m just a werewolf, working in the Family business. Nothing special about me, until you came along, and with you, a whole bunch of mysteries I hope I’ll get to solve one day.

  Your mother and I . . . that was complicated. I was drawn to her, right away, and she to me, but she had this odd shyness about her. She struck me as . . . different, and at first, I thought she was a Normal. Then I kept thinking she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter, because I loved her. After I caught a scent of her a few times while I was out on Family business, I began to wonder, and when she vanished . . . I didn’t know what to think.

  I began to look into the story about her past, the “orphans asylum,” and began to wonder if she hadn’t been a member of the Order, and then I began to wonder if she hadn’t once been a subject of theirs. I found her trail easily enough, but gave her the space to think herself hidden from me, until I could find out more.

  He’d known my mother was pregnant, I realized. He knew of me, knew my name, had seen me. He’d kept our secrets.

  Once I discovered she didn’t know what she was, that she truly believed she was a Normal human, I knew if she was so driven to hide from me and the Family, it would be dangerous for me to try to stop her. She had the knack of knowing when I got too close, so it took time to find exactly the right distance. That’s when I figured out some of the story of her past—and if I live to write the next version of this letter, I’ll have the proof I need and share it—and determined that she was an oracle, who had been subjected to some kind of tests by the government’s secret agency, the TRG, for Theodore Roundtree Group. Later, many of those left the TRG to join the Order of Nicomedia. The TRG’s goal was to conceal her Fangborn identity from her but keep her powers viable until they were needed. But I was there, Zoe, trying to watch you and trying to keep your life as little complicated as I could.

  Now I had a letter from my mother and my father, filling in some of the blanks of my history. I folded the print out of his and would keep it with the well-creased note she’d left in a cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two parents, two letters. Two communications from beyond the grave.

  I sucked up my courage to read the last page.

  Zoe, there’s this sword. I was charged with transporting it from London to the research facility in Japan. I felt something I couldn’t explain when I handled it and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to keep it and stare at it and study it all the days of my life. But I brought it where it would do our people the most good, and didn’t think about it after. I wanted you to have it. Zoe, if you have the chance, if you should find this, if you should ever see this letter, try and go to Kanazawa, in Japan. They told me the sword was two thousand years old, a mishmash of styles with some kind of medieval jewelry set into the end of it. It’s not mine to give you, but if I had one wish, besides meeting you, it’s that you have it. I feel certain you’ll see what I mean when, if, you ever have the chance. There’s just . . . something special about it.

  Wishing I’d had the chance to meet you, and knowing I would have loved you as soon as I did, Richard Klein.

  I looked over at the sword on the table, which had to be the one he described. While I certainly felt an affinity for it, it hadn’t joined the other artifacts in assimilating into me. Something was up with it. Someone had made a sheath for it, probably more to protect it than to use it, but it would do for the time being.

  “Do you mind if I take this?” I asked Ken-san. “I mean, I know this is part of a reference collection, and you don’t just take things from it, but if it’s at all possible . . .”

  Ken-san raised an eyebrow. I remembered the overturned tables, the blood-smeared floor mats, and the general destruction of the place left when the flurry of artifacts had abruptly raced for me. Then the sudden vaporization of the walls of the structure when the artifacts found me. “Whatever the collection once was, it is no longer. You might as well take the sword.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I know it’s an odd request, but—”

  “Zoe-san,” Ken-san said gently. “After what we saw yesterday—dragons dissolving men, all kinds of unearthly shit? If you wanted it, how exactly do you imagine we could keep it from you?”

  Chapter Five

  I tried the Skype number again and finally got hold of Gerry Steuben, who had acted as my mentor in a crash course in how to be a werewolf, when he and his sister Claudia Steuben, a vampire, had tracked me down. I didn’t recognize him for a second, because last time I’d seen Gerry, right before we went into battle, he wouldn’t look me in the eye. With my rapid gain of power and knowledge from the artifacts, I’d been challenging a lot of his core beliefs about the Fangborn and their purity of purpose. It was unlikely that I’d be doing anything different in the near future, but he did count as my oldest friend among the Family.

  But his face lit up when he saw it was me; that unconscious, unspoken friendliness was wonderful. He still looked haggard as he had before the battle, two days ago, but now there was some color in his cheeks, and he had shaved sometime recently. His brown hair hadn’t seen a comb in a day or so, though. While he still had to do laundry, there was a definite improvement in Gerry’s demeanor, a lift to his broad shoulders. Action agreed with him.

  “Holy shit, you are alive!” he said. “I had no idea what to make of the news. And you’re where?”

  “Yep. Alive. Kanazawa. I don’t know how. How are you? How are Danny and Will and Adam and Vee and Claudia—”

  He laughed. “Yes, alive, and all doing good! Thanks to you, is what I understand. Vee said that you slowed time enough for her to get the others out before Porter’s building blew up. Zoe, what in the blue blazes are you getting up to these days? Healing people from a distance, flying across the world on a broomstick?”

  I laughed back; it felt as strange as it felt good after so much sadness and anger. “I sure don’t know, Gerry, but we can hash that out when I see you in person,” I said. “And I’m hoping that will be soon. Did we . . . How many Family were killed? Were we able to contain the battle?”

  When I’d left Boston, the Fangborn were trying to drive the Order soldiers and Fellborn to an evacuated section of the waterfront. The Order’s goal had been to incite the Fellborn to wreak havoc and death on the city, making it look as though the Fangborn were responsible. The Family’s goal had been to contain them. Last I saw, there was a terrible battle on the streets of the waterfront. It was Quarrel’s arrival, churning through the sewers and destroying them, that had largely tipped the scales in our favor. You’ve never seen anything until you’ve seen a dragon peel the top off a step van and eat the men inside.

  “We lost about fifty Family, but not nearly as many as we could have,” Gerry said. “Normal losses were nil. Part of that was that our surprise attack worked out better than we’d hoped. And the initial news reports are muddled, which is good. What with the explosions in Salem and the destruction of the Museum of Salem just a few days ago, and then Porter’s building exploding, people were saying it was all part of a terrorist plot. For the moment, it’s being treated officially as a perfect storm: decrepit infrastructure being overwhelmed by a small earthquake and electrical problems caused by a movie shoot. We have a cousin in the office that licenses such things, so we have ‘retroactive paperwork’ put into place. But if that works, we’ll be on the road to maybe—maybe—being okay.”

  “Okay.” Ther
e wasn’t much else I could say; I had no way of doing anything about any of that. And even if I could, I was still half a world away. “What’s the bad?”

  Gerry was worried. “There’s two brands of bad. The first is that we’ve lost some close friends among the casualties, including Justine Nash.” Gerry cleared his throat and looked away briefly. “Justine has . . . had a family.”

  “How many kids?”

  “Three. It is . . . was so unusual.” Gerry took a deep breath, his eyes glassy. “I still refuse to believe that. I mean, first time the Fangborn population is growing in generations, and then we take a hit like Boston.”

  “I’m sorry.” I digested that. If we had close to three hundred Family members gathered in Boston, that was a loss of close to 20 percent of that number, a terrible blow for the Fangborn.

  “The good thing is we’ve been running scenarios on this for a while. Hang on a sec?” Gerry turned away to answer another text, and then a phone call. There was still a lot of mopping up going on. It had only been a couple of days since I’d actually been in Boston.

  “Sorry about that.” He picked up another phone, frowned at it, and slammed it facedown. “Like I said earlier, dealing a lot with containment. For now, via public channels, we’re holding, but that won’t last. There were news helicopters, and well, shit, anyone with a cell phone—and that is everyone, today—had their cameras out. And we had a dragon rampaging out there! Right now, people are upset by the lack of answers and what looks like a bureaucratic screwup; it’s flimsy, but at least they’re not talking about werewolves!”

  “And the other bad?”

  “There were an awful lot of people out there, Zoe. More than we’d hoped would be. And that leads me to the oddest thing. No one’s talking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we have some rough counts of how many civilian planes, helicopters, boats, and cars were anywhere nearby. Some we’ve been able to discount, and some we’ve had the vampire squads on, with good effect—they’ll believe the new story. But there are a lot of others, too many, and . . . there’s nothing out there on the rumor mills. No conspiracy-nut websites blowing up, no nothing.”

  I shook my head. “And this is bad because?”

  “It’s not the ones we can find. The vampires can handle them. It’s the ones we can’t find, Family and Normal, I’m worried about.”

  “Well . . . were they really there to begin with? What if they had to go away on business, right after, or go on vacation? Are you sure you had the right names and plates and numbers?”

  He nodded. “We were very careful, used the best software, were super careful about covering our hacks into social media sites. There were a higher number than usual occurrences of violent crimes associated with the folks we identified as possibly having seen too much in the area. Much higher, much more concentrated than ordinary. Some of them we think were the Order’s retreating troops. A few of them, twenty-five or so, got away and we’re tracking them. But that leaves still too many, and it’s slow going, trying to find out whether the police have taken them, arrested them, or finding out details about anything at the crime scenes.”

  “Hmmm.” I bit my lip, trying to come up with something and failing.

  Gerry also looked unconvinced. “There is the possibility of a clue. Some people were found to have seen the battle and were questioned by the vampires before they were given the forget-me venom. Nearly all of them refused to talk about what they’d seen, at first, which is in itself significant. Of those, some of them had a weird flavor, according to Claudia and the other vampires, and the same trend occurred elsewhere. Under much more active questioning and with the help of some truth venom, it turns out that these folks had been injected with something they were told was an antidote to side effects from the gas explosion causing all the damage and confusion.”

  “Wait, that doesn’t even make sense. Who was giving it to them?”

  “That’s the thing. Some said they were police officers, some said ambulance medics, some said it was the army, and some said it was the CDC.”

  “And I can assume it wasn’t any of those.”

  Gerry shot me a look. “Uh, no. They most certainly do not have that kind of technology. We are the only Men in Black around here. Until now.” He shook his head. “What I think we’re seeing is that there was someone else on the ground, who knew about the battle, who is keeping a lid on the information, keeping the actual news channels shut down. And we really need to find out what they want. Especially if they’re getting more victims for the Order to use in their Fellborn experiments.”

  I thought about that. The Order used Fangborn and their Normal allies to try and reproduce the various healing and fighting abilities of werewolves and vampires. So far, the Fellborn Mark Twos represented their “best” success. But the Order didn’t have the pull to keep everything quiet. “Who could it be?”

  “We don’t know, but it’s got to be someone with juice. A lot of power, a lot of resources. We haven’t ruled out other national entities yet.”

  “Who has that kind of technology and that kind of force on the ground? Inside the US?”

  Gerry looked tired and grim. “That’s what we’d like to know. There are too many Family members missing, out of touch, unaccounted for. I don’t like it.”

  “You know,” I said, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was copying our tactics. No chance it is Fangborn, is it, behind these things? Like some kind of I-Day evangelists?”

  Some factions within the Family were more than ready to Identify themselves to the Normal population, and I suspected that if any of them were going to act, it would be now.

  Gerry shook his head. “Too amateurish. They wouldn’t bother leaving a trail; they’d just go to the nearest television station and blurt it out. But I suspect the senator is keeping a lid on them.”

  Senator Knight was a vampire and one of the major proponents of Identification. He’d caused me a world of heartache and physical pain, and was massively pissed off at me for having opened Pandora’s Box when he felt he was supposed to. At the moment, we were fighting the Order on the same side. Barely.

  I thought a minute. “Were there any traces of evil, where the crime scenes were?” True evil has its own putrid scent, which is impossible for most Fangborn to resist tracking. Some very old Fangborn were not so affected, and I’d recently been able to ignore the call to track evil down if I had to.

  “In most of the cases,” he said, “it was the killer who was evil, not the victim.”

  Ah, jeez. “Okay, so someone’s doing their best to cover their tracks in a remarkably Fangborn-like fashion, changing memories, making witnesses disappear.”

  Though when we did it, it was on the side of good, there was no permanent damage, and if we killed, it was because someone was irredeemably evil. I wasn’t thrilled about that, but what Gerry described was a whole lot less selective.

  Gerry ran a hand through his hair. “It’s possible the Order is working with someone, but we’ve got other problems. Right now, we’re working on I-Day, how to keep folks from panicking and turning Identification into a nine-eleven scenario with everyone going mental with conflicting stories.”

  “If you can do that, I’ll be impressed.”

  “Well, we’re deciding right now. I-Day is on us, Zoe.”

  I digested that. And that reminded me to ask something else that I’d been worried about. “Hey, Gerry? Is everything okay there? I mean, not the battle, but have there been any . . . I dunno. Weird temporal shifts? No flying giant shrimp? Hitler’s descendants aren’t the rulers of Europe?”

  Gerry stared into the camera, frowning. “Zoe? You okay?”

  “Yeah, I just worried that . . . I might have done something, when I was trying to freeze time. Screwed up the time–space continuum, something like that.”

  “Not as
far as I know,” he said, still doubting my sanity. “But then . . . would I even recognize it if you had?”

  Another uncomfortable question. “Beats me. Okay, well, thanks. Is it okay to call again? Maybe when I get a plan for finding my way home?”

  “Oh, right—hey, we’re going to have to smuggle you in, aren’t we?”

  “Well, yeah, but don’t worry about it. I think we have it solved on this end.”

  “Good. We’re stretched as thin as we can be here. But sure, call. If you get through, I can give you an update. But right now . . .” Gerry gave me a weary grin. “Keeping in contact with you is the least of our worries.”

  “I hear ya. But Gerry, damn. It’s good to see you. Please give everyone my best, okay? Tell them I’m coming home soon.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  He was asking if I wanted to send a message to Will or Adam. Will, my first love, who betrayed me to the TRG believing I’d turned evil, and Adam, my recent ally and . . . confidant. Both Normals, both extraordinary people.

  I colored. “Just . . . give everyone my love, okay?”

  He paused and gave me a look that asked, “Isn’t that why you’re caught in that little triangle right now?” But instead he said, “Will do.”

  “Thanks, Gerry.”

  I hit the off button and closed the program.

  Ken-san had contacted a Cousin with a spare US passport and had it doctored up appropriately. “It’s rough,” he said, “but with a vampire’s assistance convincing the airport officials, it should get you out of the country.”

  “Thank you. And I’m so sorry for all the trouble I’ve brought you.”

  “Zoe, trouble was already here,” he said simply. “The attack would have happened without you or Buell, perhaps with a different, even worse outcome.”

  I wasn’t so sure.

  “Before you go, would you please join Okamura-san in her room? She’d like . . .” He smiled. “She’d like a word.”