Burning the Rule Book

by Dana Cameron

  Another jump in time, and Jack saw a group of resisting Fangborn and Normals trapped in a parking garage. The harsh metallic bark of automatic weapons filled the air. He heard a scream as a grenade landed among the party—

  Jack gasped, his clothing soaked through with cold sweat as he found himself back in the conference room. It was the nightmare vision of what would happen at Identification Day if it wasn’t handled precisely right. Jack was convinced that the Fangborn had to voluntarily reveal themselves, and should have done so long ago to avoid this very scenario.

  It would also have made his secrecy about Emily unnecessary.

  “I . . . I can stop all that?”

  “You can help. Other forces are at play, but until you get that object and bring it home with you, I can’t see what comes next. If you and your partner play your parts, exactly as I tell you, I’ll be able to tell you something about Emily. I may be able to direct you on how to find out more about your new love, and perhaps that will help her.”

  His heart soared. “I understand,” he said, though it was a lie. Oracles had always baffled him, with their power to predict the future or create luck or communicate via telepathy. But his skepticism didn’t matter now. She could tell him about Emily!

  There was the breath of a chuckle on the other end of the line, as if she recognized that pause of disbelief. “I assure you, this is no whim of mine. I would not undertake what I have done lightly. And when that’s been accomplished, you may ring me for my answers. That is, if I haven’t been subject to shedding or locked up in the loony bin.”

  “Answers, yes.” Suddenly Jack was ashamed; he needed to consider the Family’s business. “And if I do this, you’ll give the sword to the Family?”

  “Yes. Call the others back, if you would. I intend to keep your secrets; please don’t tell them what we’ve discussed.”

  “I’d rather claw out my own eyes. I promise.”

  Jack opened the door and motioned the others back in. Sully pushed past him but held Terrence back, saying, “Jack, you can go straight out to the hall, and don’t bother putting us back on speaker. If I gotta tell a secret, it’s not going to be with an audience.”

  The door shut behind her. In the dimly lit hallway, Jack watched Terrence fiddle with his pack of cigarettes and finally put an unlit cigarette in his mouth. “I’d nearly stopped, before the oracles,” he muttered. “Now look at me.”

  A few minutes later, Sully opened the door, beet red and scowling mightily. “She is crazy,” she mouthed to Jack, who could only shrug as he and Terrence returned to the room.

  Terrence spoke into the speaker. “How much time do we have to accomplish . . . whatever you’ve asked of Jack and Sully, Martha?”

  “I’ve mentioned that there are enemy forces massing against us. Apart from that, I have two flasks of tea, a mess of sandwiches, and two good books. I’d say you have forty-eight hours before I start getting bored and hungry. I think at about that time, our Family will be finding a way to get me out of here, which I can’t allow until you’ve succeeded. I won’t let the sword out of my sight until I know.”

  Jack and Sully exchanged a glance. “Okay,” Jack said finally. “We’ll call as soon as we’re done.”

  “Right-o.”

  The connection was broken.

  “Not a lot of time,” Sully said. “I’ll drive.”

  The drive from Boston to New York City should have taken about four hours, but Sully seemed to have had a former life as a fighter pilot and drove the black Trans Am as if she was homing in on the Kremlin. She insisted on playing rap—Salt-N-Pepa—at full blast, which made Jack even more convinced they’d be pulled over, and neither of them was a vampire who could charm the inevitable ticket away. He would have said he enjoyed driving fast, but clearly he didn’t know what the meaning of the word “fast” was until riding with his new partner.

  “You really don’t talk a lot, do you?” she asked two scary miles later after singing along to a track, advising some unseen someone to “push it real good.”

  He shrugged. “Most of my partners have been happier when I’ve kept my nose to the grindstone, kept quiet, and gotten the job done.” When he saw she wasn’t going to leave him be, he said, “Insurance claims adjuster by day, avenging werewolf by night. I live in Portland, but I grew up in Rhode Island. Moved up here after Academy. That’s pretty much it.”

  “And that’s pretty much what I got from the file,” Sully replied. “Except for those other things.”

  Jack sighed. His partners—there had been seven over the ten years since the last incident—always claimed to want to talk about “those other things,” but they almost always found an excuse to ask for a new partner shortly after he did. He’d resigned himself to it; he’d made his bed with his choices long ago, and they’d changed his life. “Those other things, they’re in the file, too.”

  “Yeah—you were ordered to leave a hostage situation because the police and the news crews were getting too close. Instead, you clocked your partner, who was a good deal senior to you, and went in to take on the bank robbers yourself.”

  “I knew I could do it. We all make tough decisions,” he said automatically.

  “Sure, it’s how we know we’re ready to take on the job. But you went too far. Your partner took a couple of stray bullets in the chaos you caused. That’s insubordination and imperiling Family.”

  “I got everyone out safely, including the bad guys. If we’d left, there would have been casualties for sure.”

  “You slugged your senior partner,” Sully repeated. “He almost died. You were seen in your half-wolf form. The vampires had a huge number of false memories to implant, and it took the better part of an evening. All with the press outside, just slavering to get a look inside the bank. You could have exposed us all, on the off chance someone might have died if you didn’t.”

  “I thought I could keep everyone alive.”

  “We all think that, but we have to work as a team. And then there was the other thing, five years after that, just as you were starting to rebuild trust.”

  “It was a school bus crashing into a mall—how could I not act?”

  “You could have acted without Changing.”

  “I wouldn’t have been strong enough!”

  “But you wouldn’t have been seen. Again.” She sighed. “It’s not like you’re strutting around, telling people you think you’re better at making these decisions than everyone else, but you sure are demonstrating a real disdain for our rules—rules that have let us do our job for millennia.”

  “What’s your point?” This was old news, something that had colored his entire life. He’d outshone everyone in his class at Fangborn Academy in tracking, but for every accolade he’d received, he’d received a demerit for not following Family protocols. “You seem to live for burning the rule book,” one instructor had told him.

  But what was the point of working in secret? Jack always asked. It complicated too much, and they’d be even more effective guardians and citizens if the Normal world knew the Fangborn existed. He’d almost failed his Finals, but his nose was too good and he was given a chance. And then a second and a third chance, but he knew that the Family was beginning to find him more of a liability than an asset.

  So Jack had known the danger when he’d made the choices; the second time, he’d almost paid for it with his life. Or rather, his Fangborn abilities, which amounted to virtually the same thing. Shedding was the most severe punishment given a Fangborn, and he’d come within a whisker of a vampire draining him nearly to death and then injecting him with chemicals that would keep his powers from returning. The shedding was rare, but it was ugly and it was permanent. Only his youth and his almost unparalleled ability to sniff out evil had swayed the Family in his favor again.

  “Why start taking chances now? Why not walk away from this girl if you’re afraid to bring attention to her?”

  It was a different question than he’d been asked before, and Jac
k wasn’t sure he knew the truth. “I’ve been living on the fringe of Family life for ten years now, working hard and trying to reduce the number of chances I have to screw up. I’m good at what I do. I save a lot of lives, and I can't stand to think that I might lose that ability because I act on the opportunities I see. If we’d Identified ourselves years ago, this wouldn’t be a problem; I’d be a hero. But because we have to hide, I’m an outcast living on the fringe. Do you have any idea what it’s like?”

  “I’m a six-foot-tall lesbian who grew up in a conservative, working-class community known for its generations of career criminals,” Sully said without emotion. “While the Family’s politics might be more advanced than most of humanity’s, I still have to live among Normals. So, yeah, I know about living in the margins.”

  “Okay, but you’ve still got the Family. I don’t. And since I first saw Emily, I’ve had . . . something. I’ve been a part of something. And I wanted to protect it.”

  Sully drove awhile longer, thinking it over. “So if it came down to sacrificing me or Emily . . . ?”

  It was Jack’s turn to be silent. “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you know it’s impossible to answer that.”

  “That’s a shitty answer, but it’s honest.” Sully nudged the Trans Am’s accelerator as if to express her frustration. “I hope we don’t find out. In the meantime, Terrence filled me in while you were on the horn. There’s a guard out in front of the house, on the street side. The owner has an antiques store, and sometimes brings his work home. He goes to the library every night for an hour—one of our people at the New York Public Library responded to our flash. You get in through the back, and I’ll keep the guy in front busy.”

  Jack agreed, then begged for a turn picking a selection from the cassettes he had in his bag. He found one with a yellow label and slid it with a click into the player.

  Sully made a face. “Awesome. Beethoven.”

  “Okay, where to?”

  Jack rattled the map flat against the dash and located the block that he’d circled earlier. “Uh . . . ten more blocks, then head for East Eighty-First Street between First and Second.”

  “You got it.”

  They parked a couple of blocks away and did a quick walk around to check out the entrances and exits.

  Just as promised, there was a guard outside the front door. “You sure you got to be the one to steal the, uh . . . dingus?” she asked. “I’m much better at B&E than you are, according to your file.”

  “I’m just going by what the oracle told me; I can’t tell you more. Anyone on your radar?”

  She pressed her lock picks into his hand. “Nary a tingle. And until I notice anything, I’ll distract the guy out front.”

  He glanced at her Red Sox tee. “Well, we’re deep in the heart of Yankees territory. Let’s hope he’s a Mets fan or that he’s got a thing for big, nasty redheads.”

  Sully wagged her finger. “There’s more than one way to distract, my friend.” She paused. “And name one person who isn’t into big, nasty redheads.”

  He smiled, just a bit. “You got me there. Go get him.”

  “Make it quick, homeboy. We’re on the clock.”

  He slipped through the alleyway, blending perfectly with the shadows. He smiled to himself as he startled a cat from its prize—a fat rat—and delighted in parsing out the individual smells on the spring evening air: flowering trees, sizzling olive oil, the cracked vinyl of taxi seats. Well, most of the scents were pleasant; apparently trash collection was due. And . . .

  Jack swore under his breath. Somewhere in the night air, he picked up the fetid stench of evil. It was faint—just faint enough to put him on edge—and he knew that Sully hadn’t noticed it. He felt his gut tighten and his blood start to tingle as the Call to Change began to make its demands.

  The lock to the back door was more complicated than he expected, and he was glad to have Sully’s lock picks, which were far nicer than his own.

  The house lock wasn’t the problem, though it was just at the limits of Jack’s abilities. As he entered, he saw that every square foot of the place was covered in cases. And every case was stuffed to the rafters with dolls of every sort—from baby dolls to Day of the Dead calaveras figures to tiny classical bronze statues. The rooms were spotlessly clean, but the floral wallpaper was curling at the edges, and the clutter of dolls and statues made Jack think of what happened when the frail Normal elderly were left alone for too long. If the brownstone was four stories, and each floor had two rooms off the side staircase, the number of objects he’d have to examine was in the thousands . . .

  Martha Hudson had instructed him to look for a small clay figurine, but how would he ever find it amid all these things? It looked as though the collections of several museums had been crammed in here. There was no order that Jack could see—not by material, not by style, not by . . . anything. He was no expert and only had the description of a possibly rebellious oracle locked up—by self-inflicted choice—in the Tower of London.

  And he had less than forty-five minutes to complete his search, according to the Cousin at the library. The smell of evil grew stronger and stronger over the smell of old floor wax as he climbed the creaking wooden stairs. His wolfish side cried to be unleashed, and his blood began to roar in his veins, insisting that Jack find the evildoer and destroy him.

  Many things went bad as soon as he had that thought.

  First, he heard shouts, faint, then increasingly distinct. One voice was Sully's.

  From the front window of the second-floor hallway, Jack saw Sully run across the street, away from the man she was supposed to keep occupied. Her destination was a loud argument turning physical between another man and a blonde woman in front of a small family store. Sully’s shout of “Yeah, well, I’m from Charlestown, Massachusetts, and we shit bigger things than you!” was drawing attention up and down the street. Her behavior went against everything the Fangborn prized.

  Another curse—the “C-word”—and although he was no oracle, Jack could have foretold what would happen next. Sully hauled off and punched the guy in the nose. Blood poured from the guy’s nose, and he swung back—

  Jack almost called to her—he needed her to be a lookout and a distraction, not a concerned citizen and righter of social wrongs! How could she go against protocol like this? It was almost as if—

  Then, a terrible smell, the purest of evil. Something like a dumpster filled with raw sewage and spoiled milk exploded in Jack’s nose. He tried to resist with everything he had, but the Fangborn compulsion was too strong. He had to find whoever it was and stop them.

  Fortunately, the offender giving off that rank odor of evil was not far.

  Unfortunately, he was in the next room.

  Jack froze as he realized this. Was it possible they were on the same errand?

  He began to move silently from the hall to the door, somehow able to avoid another creaking floorboard. Carefully, he peered around the doorway, trying to suppress the urge to growl at whoever was there . . .

  When Jack saw the source of his agitation, things got worse. A giant of a man stood there in a green tracksuit and tee, with a mane of carefully styled black hair and a bank vault’s worth of gold chains and charms around his neck. He looked like any other guy you’d see in the city, but it was nearly a joke, camouflage for a dangerous predator. An untidy heap of crushed dolls and figurines lay at his feet; whatever the man was looking for, he wasn’t finding, and he was removing the failed contenders from the competition.

  Jack’s sharp nose picked up traces of an unfamiliar shampoo and the heavy scent of borscht and sour cream.

  Russian, maybe, he decided, and then, for the first time in many years, Jack felt real fear. The thrill of adrenaline raced through him—from the hairs on the back of his neck to the pit of his stomach—and he fought the tiny voice that wanted him to run.

  It takes a lot to scare a werewolf.

  It
wasn’t the size of the guy, which was huge, or the jacked-up, steroid-driven air of hostility that sat on him like a cloak, but . . .

  Jack understood at last. He’d seen for himself: others, the old oracle had said, would suffer unspeakably.

  Another, an early nineteenth-century porcelain doll, unbelievably rare, even to Jack’s untutored eyes, was hurled to the floor with a sickening crack. The head lolled toward Jack, glass eyes looking as though they were pleading with him when the heavy Nike basketball shoe descended, leaving nothing but a pile of torn and yellowing lace dusted with grayish powder.

  Already enraged by his Fangborn senses, Jack felt his anger reemerge anew. What if this monster had already destroyed the object of his mission?

  Even as he had the thought, Jack knew they were looking for the same thing. Jack had to be the one who got it first. The Russian had to be stopped.

  That broke the chains of his fear, sent his hackles up. Jack Changed. A rippling sensation of power washed over him, as if his blood was heating up in anticipation of the joy of fighting. His muscles grew and changed to accommodate shifting bones; his face elongated into a muzzle filled with sharp, sharp teeth; and his fingers turned into heavily nailed claws. There was no need for words when he was capable of such glorious transformation, and he was filled with a wonderful sense of purpose. Even if it was incongruous that a wolf-man should be wearing a blue Oxford cloth shirt and khakis, no one would laugh seeing the teeth that filled his mouth, or the ears, standing up from his head, go back with anger.

  The transformation was barely complete as he launched himself at the big guy. He knew there was a good chance that if his enemy was Russian, he’d know combat sambo, so he decided to get in close to avoid getting kicked and punched. Get in close, stay there, and go to work on whatever target presented itself. He did not want to go to the ground and find out what kind of grappling moves the big bastard had.