Hellbender

by Dana Cameron

  “Thank you.” I nodded at Max, who seemed happier without the racket in his ears, which were probably even more sensitive than mine at the moment. But I noticed there were lots of eyes making contact and silent communication. There were a lot of looks cast back at Max by someone with a radio as well.

  I don’t know how much ground—air—we covered, but it seemed like no time before I recognized the features of the landscape below me.

  We were nearing a Fangborn compound outside Chicago. I was about to be debriefed.

  As soon as we landed, things went wrong. A team of former TRG members were waiting for us, guns at the ready. A couple of werewolves were half-Changed and poised to attack, and one vampire, too.

  I decided to take matters into my own hands and jumped out as soon as the door was open, squeezing past Adam, which was its own reward. I jumped out and held up my hands, creating a shield between the welcoming committee and Max.

  Of course, everyone in the helicopter was armed and on edge, too. So mine was an empty little gesture, but it had to be made.

  I yelled as loud as I could over the dying noise of the helicopter engine. “No, no, nope, we’re not going to do this! Max was a prisoner, like me, and I’m sure you have questions for him. But you know, I think we’d all be happier without adding more guns and suspicion to the mix.” Finally the engine switched off, and it was a relief to everyone. “So put them down or . . . or . . . I will do something cataclysmic!”

  They’d all heard the stories.

  Max hopped out beside me. Guns bristled, werewolves growled, vampires hissed.

  “I mean it!”

  “Zoe, don’t bother.” Max put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, anyone got a cigarette? I haven’t had one in a dog’s age.” He caught himself and snorted at the joke. “Yeah, maybe a little longer than that, too, at least since I was a human, which was probably a couple of weeks now. But since then, I figure, I’m aging seven times as fast as the rest of you. Anyone? C’mon, help a brother out. I’m dying over here.”

  Someone from the helicopter team nudged him on the shoulder, handed him a packet and a book of matches. “Ah, jeez, thanks, friend. I cannot tell you how much I . . .” Before he could finish, he’d lit up. His eyes rolled back, and it seemed his anticipation in no way lived up to the act itself. I thought the next couple of puffs would bring the ash down to the filter, but he finally sighed. “Thanks. Zoe, don’t worry about it. You don’t know if I was put there to feed you false information, to help bust you out, or whatever. These guys are gonna have to find out for themselves. They can start by pulling the file on me from the TRG, Max DiSilvio. Then we can answer all the questions. Hey—hey, is that Eliot Thompson over there? ET, it’s me!”

  “Jesus, Max?!” Thompson stepped forward. “What happened?”

  “Long story. You vouch for me?”

  “He’s okay.” Thompson shrugged. “Don’t know about what else might have changed, along with his new haircut, but he was a decent guy, for what it’s worth.”

  One trooper relented. “We’ll still have to hold you until we verify—”

  “No problem at all, friend,” Max said. “Just as long as I can get a shower and something to eat.” He sniffed. “Better make it a big bottle of shampoo.”

  Finally, someone with a lot of stripes on his sleeve started shouting orders. Everyone seemed relieved to have procedure to fall back on. Max was whisked away, but I wasn’t worried now he’d found a friendly face among the new ones. Plus, I’d made eye contact with the shouting leader. He knew I’d remember him if anything happened to Max.

  “Come on, Zoe,” Adam said. “We gotta get you cleaned up and to a meeting.”

  “I have a meeting?” I looked at my torn scrubs, covered in rust, blood, and ash.

  “We’re going to downtown Chicago before we go back to Boston.” Adam’s face was carefully unemotional. “I’m going to take you to meet my mother.”

  Chapter Ten

  We ended up in a bland office building in Chicago, in a suite of borrowed rooms. There was only time for a quick shower and change into a borrowed uniform, which was way too big for me. Still, it was a chance to catch up with Adam, even if for just a few minutes.

  “Two minutes,” I said as I finished a sandwich, then tied the laces of my loaner boots. “You first.”

  “After you . . . left Boston, it took us a while to realize that you weren’t coming back immediately, so we were really concerned about what had happened. Eventually, we figured out we’d better start the mopping up. It was looking grim until that . . .”

  “Dragon,” I prompted.

  Adam still didn’t seem to believe what he’d seen. “Yeah, dragon showed up. We had a lot more cooperation with our prisoners and many more surrenders because of . . . him?”

  “Him, yes, Quarrel.”

  “Since then, I’ve been helping look for the missing Fangborn and Normals.” Adam hugged me suddenly. “I was so glad when I got your text from Japan. That you were all right.”

  His lips brushed mine and we used the last thirty seconds of his two minutes in a kiss that was warm and passionate. I was almost willing to bet that Adam’s kiss might be the antidote to the Order’s new brand of mace.

  His watch alarm went off. “Time to go.” He paused. “Just so you know. I told my mother that you’re . . . important to me. That should help a little.”

  “Help, why?”

  “Because she’s still pissed about the trouble you got me into in Venice.”

  Adam had once worked for Senator Knight. He hadn’t known the senator was a vampire, and that the senator had been using Adam to stop me from finding and opening Pandora’s Box.

  “Well, you should tell her that’s all on Knight and that you were picking on a girl.”

  As we hustled to a conference room, I was happy from the kiss and even happier to be feeling, well, clean. I was prepared to see Adam’s mother—Representative Nichols. I was not prepared to see my occasional enemy, the vampire Senator Knight, or Heck Murphey, who’d been organizing the Family in Boston.

  Interesting. I knew the senator and congresswoman had once been friends. They were as far apart in the room as they could be. Apparently, the brutal use of his office for personal gain, even if he believed it was for the eventual good of the Fangborn, hadn’t sat well with her.

  “Welcome home, Zoe.” The congresswoman was tall like Adam, and her hair was cut in a bob that was blond going to gray. She looked as though she’d just stepped out of a bandbox in her bright red suit. “I’m Elizabeth Nichols. Are you hurt? I’ve been learning since Boston that there are some things that will harm the Fangborn?”

  She shook my hand firmly, but I saw trepidation in her eyes. Fair enough; she’d only just learned there were such things as vampires and werewolves in the world and I’d manifested a sudden and scary power. I felt the same way, only she’d actively achieved and cultivated her power, which made her scarier to me. She had the government on her side, and I wasn’t a fan of how my Family had been treated at their hands.

  It didn’t help that I was nearly a foot shorter than her and that I was wearing fatigues that were too big for me.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Thank you. I’m getting over the effects of a particularly nasty new injection they gave me. Might want to have a vampire check my blood, find out what that is, see if we can counteract it.”

  “Excellent. Now, if you’re up to a few questions?” She settled into a seat after indicating I should sit.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me everything, starting with how you left Boston.”

  I did, and then she surprised me by recapping them right back to me, to make sure she had it down pat. “So your powers are greater, probably, but still unreliable. You show distinct abilities usually only associated with oracles and vampires. Additionally, among other things, you moved through s
pace and are capable of stopping time. You’ve been in contact with something or someone you refer to as the Makers, and you’re in the confidence of creatures that are . . . dragons.”

  “Yes.” It was actually pretty impressive when you spelled it out as she had. I was also amazed at how quickly she caught on.

  “Carolina Perez-Smith funds the organization we know as the Order of Nicomedia, and that Order has basically declared war on the Fangborn, across the country, perhaps the world. How am I doing so far?”

  “You got it, ma’am.”

  “And you managed to escape from one of her facilities, bringing with you a third . . . version . . . of their, er, Fellborn experiments?”

  “Yes.” I frowned. “I’d told that bitch of a guard she should let me go, before we broke out. That could be the only reason she fell for that trick. They were understaffed and ill prepared for the number of prisoners they had after Boston. And . . . I had some of my vampiric persuasion working on my side. But they were understaffed because Carolina helped organize and fund the attack on Boston. They needed more victims to advance their research on creating the Fellborn. And part of the reason Max was a failure was because Fangborn weren’t drawn to him to kill or be killed by him.” And that’s why no one attacked him on the chopper, I finished to myself.

  “Yes,” Representative Nichols said. “She’s been using the Order’s synthetic copies of vampire venom to make people forget. Her news operations have been instructed to keep a lid on things, until she says otherwise. It won’t last, but we need to be the ones who determine how the world finds out about the Fangborn.” The representative looked down, checked her phone briefly. It was a stalling tactic, and to be fair, it was a lot for anyone to think about.

  After Representative Nichols composed herself, she said, “We need to start informing the rest of the government about you. And to that end, we’d like to set up a demonstration, not only of the various Fangborn abilities, but of your own, um, peculiar talents. And I have people who might be able to help you with the artifact you mentioned—a sword? We have a lot of work to do.”

  “Why don’t we just expose Carolina for what she is?” I asked. I probably hadn’t been the first or the only one to bring that up, but I had to know why we didn’t call her a kidnapper, a murderer, and a whole slew of other things. “Arrest her, shut down the Order. Bring on I-Day. With the information Max got us, we’ll have all kinds of public outcry, criminal prosecutions, you name it. We take destinies into our own hands when we take her weapons away from her. It’s time. Too many people know already.”

  Funny how strange it was to use the word “destinies” and have it be meaningful to you directly. It sounded too grand for everyday use.

  “It is one option,” Senator Knight said. His voice surprised me. He’d been so quiet through our discussion. Somehow, despite his tall thin build, his hawk-like nose on a distinguished face, and his air of authority, he was able to hide in plain sight, but that’s vampires for you. “It’s certainly the option I’ve been favoring for some time. We should have started immediately. I-Day will bring losses, inevitably. I’m not squeamish about the handful of dead Family and Normals the Order has.”

  I stared at him. He had all the viciousness of a cobra. The heartlessness of a plague. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “We can’t for the moment, for forty-seven very good reasons, as you well know, Edward,” Representative Nichols said sharply. “Zoe, you may have heard how there are many Fangborn Family members not accounted for at Boston? Ms. Perez-Smith let us know she has the forty-seven missing, as well as the civilians—Normals. She’s threatening to kill them and reveal the identities of all the Fangborn they know about. We go public with her, she goes public with us. Mutually assured destruction, and we want some control over how this data gets out. We’re at a stalemate, even with the information you brought us.”

  Damn Carolina, and damn the Order, I thought. Bastards get to be evil just because . . . they’re willing to be evil.

  “Zoe, we’re going to do both,” she continued. “I-Day is catching up with us, and the cover-up is starting to get complicated. What was it they said, about Watergate? The cover-up is what kills you? So, we’re going to try to rescue the prisoners at the same time we’re preparing for I-Day. The government is leaving it up to this group to decide, but won’t for much longer. It’s getting too hot for them, too.”

  “The vote is a straight-up majority among the Fangborn,” Herrick “Heck” Murphey said, glancing at Knight. He was an older werewolf who’d been key in organizing our trap for the Fellborn in Boston. “For now, the Family has decided to try and keep the lid on it for as long as possible. It was a slim margin, and I think everyone understands the time is short. They’re preparing for it.”

  “Preparing how?”

  “Some are hiding. Some are going through with premade plans to help with the announcement. Some are laying in supplies, in case of attack. Some are just writing their wills, also in case of attack. Some are deciding what to tell their kids.” He looked at me. “What would you do if you had to tell them the world as they know it was about to undergo a tectonic shift? It’s a revelation on the scale of the atomic bomb.”

  “My own experience has been so brief, with so much information, I haven’t had time to respond at an emotional level,” said Representative Nichols. “But the background emotion I feel is purely panic. Of what will happen when people learn about the Fangborn.”

  I shook my head. “I know how hard it was to learn about the Family, even with Claudia Steuben pumping me through with vampire venom. This is going to be tough, for everyone.”

  “There’s been a plan in place for nearly seventy-five years,” Heck said. “We’ve just been too reluctant to go ahead and use it. It’s up to date, and we’re reexamining it now to see if there’s anything left to add.” He sighed. “The Internet, hell, the telephone made our earlier plans obsolete in a hurry.”

  I thought about it: What do you do? Call up a reporter and say, “I know you’re totally not going to believe this, but I’m a werewolf. And I’m not the only one”? Phone click, dial tone, blocked on caller ID. Even if you could contrive to get one alone and give him or her proof, which we could, it would be much harder to get that interview past the higher-ups at the station.

  Then, what would they do with that information? Most people would also dismiss it immediately as an elaborate hoax, the ghosts of Grover’s Mill, Piltdown man, and the Cottingley Fairies hovering in their memories. Those who didn’t dismiss it will freak out, because most people don’t want to know about upheaval or anything that challenges their idea of the world. If there are vampires, and werewolves, and oracles, however inaccurate or inscrutable, what else might there be in the world?

  “Were there other moments when we thought I-Day was near?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure,” Heck said, glancing at Senator Knight, who was nodding slowly, a faraway look in his eyes. “We were on the verge a couple of times. Once, at the very end of the Second World War, but there was such a bad taste in everyone’s mouth from the references to the Nazi Werwolf guerrilla teams we decided against it. The next time we considered bringing I-Day was during the Cold War, but still, the threat of using an atom bomb seemed less scary than Fangborn.

  “Speaking of scary . . .” Heck smiled and shrugged as he handed me a schedule. “We need to take blood from you, to test that new weapon they’re using. We need to organize the plan for the rescue—it’s complicated, because the property we believe Perez-Smith is using is in the middle of some Family territory . . . and they’re not exactly friendly to us or amenable to our plan. And Victoria Brooks came up with a few folks who might be able to make some headway with your investigation of the artifacts you’re, uh, collecting. I’d like you to meet with one in a few minutes, just take her temperature, see if you can live with her. Then I’ll need thirty minutes with you to work out
our demonstration.”

  “And we need to get you in front of a camera,” Representative Nichols said. “We want to bring a recording of you and your experiences to the government, as I assume you’ll be too busy to be on the Hill.”

  I broke out into a cold sweat at all these tasks—and public speaking? “Why not just bring them a report?”

  “I want them to see you, Zoe,” Elizabeth Nichols said softly. “I want them to see you; I want them to hear your story in your own words. And show them your extraordinary powers.”

  “You’ve been recorded as showing an ability to blow up things and people,” Senator Knight said impatiently. “You’ve been particularly hard on museums. We want you to do it for us. On cue.”

  I shot him a look of purest hate. “I’m not a weapon. I won’t be a sideshow spectacle for you.”

  Elizabeth Nichols broke in quickly. “That’s not what we have in mind,” she said, ignoring the senator. “We need them to be aware of just how big this is going to be.”

  When the meeting adjourned, I pulled Heck aside. “How did you know where I was? How were you able to find that facility?”

  “We’d tracked you and Fatima, and then your phone from their headquarters. Then we started listening in to the Order’s calls. We got a load of chatter and found it based on that.”

  “Yeah, but we were in the middle of nowhere.” But Fatima had told me that someone had been asking questions about us in the village. I didn’t put anything beyond the Order.

  As we walked down the hallway, Heck smiled, humorlessly. “I had eyes in the air.”

  “Must have been a pretty good pilot to see through those trees. I wasn’t sure I could see the sky through them, but it felt like someone was watching me.”

  Heck gave me a strange look. “Well, someone was. Just . . . maybe not what you were expecting.”

  “In any case, I’d like to say thanks.”