by Dana Cameron
Will dogged my steps, as did Adam, who had insisted to Representative Nichols that he be the one from her office to “observe.”
I was glad to have allies.
The main goal was to rescue the prisoners and raid the lab. After that, it was about locating and containing Carolina herself and any Order personnel.
We approached cautiously, and slowed when we saw too many cars, too many lights.
“There’s some kind of event tonight,” Senator Knight said. He was at the most casual I’d ever seen him, in a sports shirt, pressed khakis, and lace ups. “My informant did not tell me. This will complicate things.”
I did not think his informant was any longer in Edward Knight’s good graces, and suddenly I knew who it was. Zimmer—“Clean-head” as I’d once called him—had done dirty work for Knight; sometimes this involved beating me up. Old as the senator was, Zimmer’s evilness didn’t bother him.
It stank to me.
“We need a distraction,” I said. My gaze traveled to the large barn and the door covered with hateful trophies.
Passey shot me a look of pure joy. “We will set fire to it.”
I reached out to the barn and sensed many beating hearts in there. “Wait. I think the prisoners may be in there, so check for hidden rooms if you don’t see them at first. Remember, this is a rescue—and we’re rescuing the Normals, too.”
Passey frowned with distaste.
“Even if they’re not there, keep in touch,” I continued. “I need all the information we can get.”
He looked at Senator Knight, who nodded slightly. Passey nodded, gestured, and they took off with a troop of his werewolves.
To hell with them both. “Will, please go with him? I don’t trust either of them.”
“I’m not leaving you!” he said.
“I’ll go,” Adam volunteered.
“Thanks, be careful with Knight,” I warned. “Remember, he thinks you betrayed him.”
“That’s because I did. But we’re all on the same team now,” Adam said, with a pointed look at Will. Then he ran off, almost silently, through the woods.
Will and I joined the second team, who were beginning to close around the house, and waited. Any minute now our assault would begin.
“Zoe . . .” My earpiece crackled and the senator’s voice was strange. “There’s . . . a hide on the wall.”
“Yes, I saw the pictures.”
“No. This is new.”
I’d never heard him so strained. “Yes?”
“It’s a dragon hide.”
I took a moment to digest the enormity of that insult, the utter disrespect for the beast, the colossal affront to the dragons and the Makers.
It suddenly made sense, and when I realized what was going on, I felt myself swept away on a flood of anger. But that emotion was working for me, because it joined several thoughts together, making them whole in an instant: The scarab chip had been to reach out to unearthly minds. Dmitri’s words about going where the power was. Carolina’s ultimate goals.
That was her plan.
Shaking, I reached out psychically for the dragons. “I believe Carolina has killed a dragon and is intending to use its power to communicate with the Makers herself. Do you sense anything that might indicate where she is?”
Naserian answered. “Hellbender, I can taste his stolen jewels.”
“Can you guide me?”
“Yes, but it is a difficult trail, made by one who does not know fully what she’s doing.”
A rifle shot, followed by an alarm and shouts. We’d been discovered. The Order guards were firing back. I could smell the foulness of the Fellborn unleashed to find us; soon my Family would be drawn to their evil scent.
“Go, everyone, now!” I shouted. “Hit them now!” I shifted my focus to the dragon. “Naserian, take me now!”
“Hellbender, I obey!”
More shots. A light—I saw him.
Bald, scarred . . . Zimmer, the man whose footsteps had dogged mine through Europe, the senator’s spy in Carolina’s retreat, had now betrayed us all.
I raised my hand and got two blasts off, but Zimmer had moved as soon as he saw me in his scope.
He raised his rifle, pointed at me. Then swung it around.
He shot Will three times, center mass.
Naserian began to follow Carolina’s trail to the Makers, taking me along with her as I stared, horrified.
“No!”
I was drawn helplessly away from the fight, from Will dying, from the here and now, and on my way to find Carolina.
As soon as we had found ourselves in the metaverse Carolina was using, I shouted to Naserian. “Go, back, please! Get Will out of there! Heal him if you can! It’s his only chance!”
Naserian nodded, a strange thing to see a dragon do. “But how will you get back if I leave, Hellbender?”
“I have a lot to do before I can even think of leaving. Go, please!”
With Naserian gone, I found myself in a train tunnel that felt generically like New York, London, or Paris. That confused me, because I’d believed I’d find myself at the Boston University Castle, which was Carolina’s goal. Then I realized that she was far from adept in her acquisitions, that she had stolen the life and knowledge of a dragon, but her use of it was imperfect. Her transition wouldn’t be automatic because of how she cobbled together the means to get here.
I glanced in the train that was just pulling out. Carolina wasn’t on it. It was a subway train, not an Amtrak train, so it wouldn’t be a long journey to the Makers. I wouldn’t have much time to stop her.
Carolina appeared on the platform a moment after that train departed, and cursed, looking around in bewilderment. I had a moment to observe her and remarked the rank of chips that had been mated with fragments of Fangborn artifacts, like the scarab hybrid Lisa Tarkka had given me, along her arm. The scar from the surgery was still stitched, red, and angry. When she saw me, she turned purple with fury and threw a bolt of energy at me.
It was ragged, unfocused, and fell short, scorching a wide swath of the platform. Even as the thought crossed my mind, I was across the platform and had Changed. Before she could move, I jumped, spun, and kicked her in the gut.
“You can’t do this, Carolina,” I shouted.
“I am doing it! I’m taking the future in my hands!”
I grabbed at the chips, hoping I could snag one from her, but she was very quick, almost Fangborn quick, and I knew she’d taken the Order’s best speed and strength synthetics. She snarled at me and lashed out, but I jumped away.
“The Makers!” I shouted. “They’re talking only with me! They don’t like . . . disorder.”
“But I don’t talk to lackeys,” she said.
I aimed a blast at her, but she dodged that, mostly. There was a whoosh of exhaled air as she leaned forward clutching herself, sparks flying and blood flowing. I’d already used up a lot of that energy on Zimmer, but no mind. I followed up with a two-fisted hammer blow to the back of her neck and then ran to the wall. I pulled out the fire hose and spun the crank, blasting her full strength with it, trying to wash her off the platform.
A train was coming.
Somehow she managed to withstand the stream and force her way toward me. The hose suddenly turned on me, like a living thing, and the force hit me full, though I kept my balance. I don’t know how, but the fire hose twined around my ankles. Carolina appeared behind me and shoved me toward the train tracks.
I flailed, grabbed her hand, and pulled her into the ditch with me.
I could feel the train bearing down, the rumbling devastating; I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think. I had to find a way to stop her long enough to get away.
I could see the lights of the train behind Carolina. I could see my fear reflected in her cracked glasses. She was going to keep me busy, long enough to shove me into it, and scram out of there before she was hit.
Her strength was scary and unexpected. It was clear that she had as many of the enh
ancements as Porter and Buell did. It was too much like fighting Porter—ahhh.
She had enjoyed the fruits of his research but lacked one thing he had.
Bingo.
Porter’s gold signet ring.
I had the ring, and now I knew what it was for. Porter had created something to keep only for himself, an object that could remove the synthetic powers he’d given to his colleagues if he decided to.
The ring was Porter’s version of Fangborn shedding.
I pulled it out of thin air and slipped it on my finger. It was laughably too big, but it made a dandy knuckle-duster. I ate a couple of punches, which hurt like hell, but I needed my hands free. I grabbed Carolina by her expensive haircut with my left hand and slammed my fist, and the ring, into her forehead.
“We’re done here,” I said.
Time froze, literally, for the both of us. I didn’t feel anything but the sweat on her forehead stinging my cracked knuckles. When I tried to pull my hand away, to try and get away or drag her up to the platform, I couldn’t. And then shit got glowy.
I realized that the rising fog before my eyes wasn’t because I was about to pass out, but that there was a reddish mist accumulating around the pair of us. I closed my eyes, just a second, to make sure; then, when I opened them again, I could see that the mist was coalescing into tendrils.
Tentacles, really. They were moving, waving individually now, about a dozen of them, moving from my hand and the ring—which presumably was creating them—and hovering around Carolina’s head. They hovered a second longer, before all twelve—or was it twenty?—drove themselves into her forehead. More extended, and began to curl around the chips in her arm, plucking them out delicately.
Carolina screamed. In this weird communion, I screamed, too, a chorus of pain to hers. It felt as though something in me was digging through her bone, brain, and psyche; it reminded me of trying to grab something valuable before it got lost in a trash can filled with glass fragments and metal industrial waste.
The world around me blurred, which I assumed meant that she was getting weaker, or at least her hold on the reality she’d created was getting weaker. I didn’t like betting, so with a great deal of concentration, I jumped? Teleported? Moved us to the platform again. At least we’d be out of the way of the train.
I felt good, felt like I was getting the upper hand, at long last, but I couldn’t seem to keep my balance. Carolina weighed virtually nothing, but she dragged on me like a laundry bag full of anvils. But that still wasn’t it. She wasn’t fighting me; she’d gone limp and I couldn’t let go.
The ground, the platform beneath us, was shaking. Disintegrating.
Shit. I was going to have to take her with me. I couldn’t go back to the lab—there was no way I was going to let her in there, no matter how dead or unconscious she might appear to be. I didn’t know what would happen if these two worlds—multiverses—collided. I had no idea of how to get to some neutral territory . . . some place that wasn’t me, and wasn’t Carolina’s fractured simulacrum of her internal world.
I cast about, desperately. Like an earthquake, the whole tunnel was collapsing around us now, and God only knew what was on the surface that might come crashing down on us. Worse, maybe there’d be nothing and we’d cease to exist.
But then I saw what looked like a ray of light, a ray of hope, and not the oncoming train. “I don’t know what or where or who you are,” I shouted. “But this is an emergency and I’m coming in!”
I looked down. The tentacles had transformed once more and were now terribly fine circuits that were running through the skin on Carolina’s face and neck. It was terrible, an alien intrusion into her body and mind, and I didn’t dare break it now. “Hang on, bitch.”
Grabbing her tight, I made with another one of those jump/morph transitions I still didn’t quite understand and felt myself hurtling toward the light. Maybe it was sunshine, maybe it was a firestorm, but I didn’t have a lot of choice.
The trip seemed to take an awfully long time, but eventually, the light grew larger and stronger, and I heard a voice so welcome, I thought my head would explode.
“This way, Hellbender! It is safer for you here!” I heard Quarrel’s commanding voice.
“Quarrel, you are the very best power-hungry demonic manifestation of a friend a girl could have,” I muttered to myself. I redoubled my efforts and found the going easier, and finally, I found myself settled on a grassy hill, overlooking a meadow.
My hand—the ring—was no longer stuck to Carolina’s head, but a connection remained. Those red electrical circuits remained, line segment geometry, laser-pure glow eating up the last of the Order’s implants. Carolina didn’t move, but she was still breathing, and I was glad of that. I hurt all over.
I Changed back to my skinself. I noticed that the tendrils had evaporated and whatever connection Porter’s ring had made was now broken. I needed to think about finding a way to get her home—or at least back in her own little world—but that didn’t stop me from wishing, just for a minute, that I had a marker so I could draw a penis or write “douchewaffle” on her forehead.
“Any thoughts on how I can get her home, Quarrel? We can’t keep her here.”
Quarrel snorted. “Why not? She will cause less trouble here than in your world.”
I had to marvel at a dragon’s pragmatism. “She’d cause more by being missing; we’d be the first ones suspected.”
“You only have to push her,” he said. “Her inclination is to go back where she belongs.”
“Okay, how do I—”
“You really are not very skilled, are you?”
“I’ve come up in the ranks suddenly,” I said, at once realizing the way I needed to behave with Quarrel and the others. I continued with a coldness to indicate he shouldn’t be fucking with me. “It’s to be expected that I will need advice from older, if lesser, beings.”
At first I was afraid I’d gone too far, but Quarrel simply nodded. “You are correct, of course. I meant no disrespect.”
“I understand.”
“I’m not sure how to explain it, but if you think of how you used to track an evildoer, in your wolf form—”
“Yes, I know. And I still do.” I said it as much for my sake as Quarrel’s.
“That’s very unusual, for a dragon of your considerable abilities . . .”
The floor fell out of the reality elevator as I grasped what he meant. “Quarrel, what do I look like to you?”
“As I do to you, no doubt. A fine beast with an aura that indicates your strength.”
“Tell me what you see? For I do not think my perception is the same.”
“A fine young beast—quite small, but the quality and number of the jewels in your armor more than impresses. As for returning that one, if you imagine you are scenting her track, you can . . . urge her to return that same way. It should not take much energy.”
I nodded, doubtful. I let my eyes unfocus, and after actually sniffing with no result, tried feeling around for her trail. I found a slender iridescent blue thread, almost like a strand of spider silk, leading out of the space I could currently perceive. It reminded me of the threads that bound the Dickson Trips’ souls. There was a light of blue at the end, which I realized was Carolina. I shoved gently and watched the light fade as it followed the trajectory back, I hoped, to wherever it was Carolina was supposed to be. Before she vanished, however, I reached out, as I had with Dmitri Parshin, and nudged Carolina Perez-Smith’s being.
I was going to change her mind.
When she disappeared, I suddenly got nervous.
“Quarrel, she’s okay, right?” I asked, suddenly worried. What if I’d sucked too much . . . whatever out of her?
“Oh yes. You’ve merely removed the . . . alien artifacts from her. And given her a new way to think about things.” He snorted contemptuously. “She is no worse—or no better—than she was before she assumed the powers of that dragon.”
And now I’d found what
I was looking for. If I was in the field, doing archaeology, I’d say I’d defined the edge of a feature. I’d identified that I’d found something, still not knowing what it might be—a rubbish tip, a post hole, a privy, a fire pit. I’d identified what I needed to do about the Makers.
“Thank you, Quarrel, you’ve been of tremendous help to me today. If you would help me return to the fight I just left?”
And I was back in the woods.
Because of the ill-conceived space that Carolina had taken us to, it took much longer to return than I expected. Nearly ten minutes had passed since I’d left, and I arrived back spent and battered from my own fight and the long journey between meta-realms.
A lot can happen in ten minutes. Too much.
As soon as I got there, I smelled smoke from the barn, and heard screams and shots. I thought I’d slow things down to suit my own pace, but stopping time really had lost its appeal for me after Kanazawa, and I couldn’t risk taking myself away from here again. And I suspected I was too weak to do that anyway.
I could still Change, however, and felt better immediately. Claudia Steuben was suddenly by my side, her hair streaming out of the braid she’d had, her black ninja wear torn and matted with blood. She was smiling broadly, and it had nothing to do with humor.
“Zoe! I was afraid you’d popped off again!”
“Not as far as Japan this time. What’s the situation?”
“We’re winning,” she said. “We’ve found the Boston Fangborn and Normals. The vampires have started coordinating memories so that we can turn this into a dinner party gone wrong.”
“What?”
“For some reason, Carolina Perez-Smith is trying to calm everyone down. Says her house caught on fire, and she’s concerned about her guests. Nothing so far about the Fangborn.” Claudia gave me a look. “Was that you?”
I nodded.
“Well, now there are reporters, firefighters, and police officers here. We’re going to keep all trace of the Order out of the news, but we Fangborn, we’re going to star in the late news. We’ve decided that we might as well be caught on camera, saving folks from the burning buildings.” She looked at me. “I-Day.”