by Dana Cameron
The Steubens, the guys who’d cornered me—these were my father’s “family”? They were all Fangborn?
“So that other guy,” I said slowly. “The one who…showed me that history reel? He was telling the truth?”
“History reel?”
I shook my head. “He sort of put his hand on me, and I saw… lots of this. ‘Download,’ I think someone called him? It was freaky. I busted out of there in a hurry.”
Claudia and Gerry had worried looks. “‘Download?’ You know him?” Claudia asked.
Gerry shook his head slowly. “This ain’t good.”
“Why?” I really didn’t think we needed more badness. “What’s going on?”
Gerry shifted his weight, rubbed his shoulder where I’d hit him. “We were looking for you, because we’d heard rumors of a female stray—”
“Unacculturated pack-sister,” Claudia corrected. I was kinda glad they had words for these things, “Change” and “skinself” and “pack-sister.” Made me feel better about myself, not so rudderless.
“—in our area, and we were sent to find you. The fact that this other group is looking for you is…irregular.”
“What do you mean?” I nodded. “Who are these other guys? And…” I rummaged through my bag, found the wallet Sean stole. “What do you know about this one?”
“Where did you—?”
“Wallet fell out of his pocket when he attacked Sean,” I said.
“Ah.” Gerry flipped through the cards, and frowned. “Claud, it’s like I said: someone is bringing in Family from out of state.”
“There have been some political tensions among our people lately,” Claudia said, almost apologetically.
Gerry snorted. “What it means is that some Fangborn, who want to reveal themselves to humans, are adding to their side by rounding up any stra—Fangborn who might not have been raised in a pack or nest. Some think a preordained date for announcing our presence is coming up. So they’re listening for news, then pouncing before the local Families can find them.”
“The Identification Issue has been heating up.” Claudia gave Gerry a “you’re not being helpful” look. “Identification, revealing the Fangborn to Normal humans, is incredibly dangerous, I think. If it happens at all, I think it should be taken very gradually, a slow reveal if you will, very carefully orchestrated and supported by the vast majority of all the Fangborn. Even then, many of us worry about how Normals will respond and what will happen to us all. Others believe the world would be a better place if Fangborn ruled. Some think we’d be able to organize searches for evil, streamline the justice systems of the world if we identified ourselves. Both sides have their points, and their radicals, but so far no one has taken it upon himself to reveal us for what we are.”
“Look, I don’t have time for this. I need to get to the airport. I need to get on that plane and try to find whatever this Dmitri wants.”
“Who’s Dmitri?”
“The asshole who’s taken my cousin and is threatening to kill him! I don’t know who he is!”
They shook their heads. “We don’t know anything about him,” Claudia said.
I ran a hand through my hair, ready to pull it out by the roots. As much as I wanted to know all this stuff, answer the questions that were my life, I needed to focus on one thing. “You’re devoted to defeating evil and I’m not crazy: check. Let’s use these powers to get my cousin back from that evil sonofabitch!”
“OK. We can do that, only—”
“No only! We go now! And…and what have you done to Sean?”
“We’ve done nothing to him. But by the way he responded to my suggestion, it looks like someone in the Family has given him a little forget-me juice.”
Suddenly my hackles went up. “Wait, why should I believe you? If you can manipulate us—make him forget, make me stop resisting you—how do I know anything you’re saying is true?”
“You can sense it, can’t you?”
“I…I don’t know.” The question caught me by surprise. I dug in, tried to concentrate. I could sense good intent, if not truth. And at least the Steubens appeared to be trying to help me—the other…Fangborn?…had only seemed interested in getting me to go with them. I had to make a decision.
“Look, trust isn’t my strong suit, but if you’re willing to help me, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. But please: my cousin’s in danger and time’s wasting.”
I looked over. The whole time, Sean had done…nothing. Had said nothing, even when we’d all transformed. “Can’t you…do anything about Sean?”
Gerry glanced over at him. “I like him docile.”
Claudia frowned. “Gerry.”
“What? I’m just saying. He’s easier to deal with.”
Gerry was determined to work my nerves. “Is it fair to let him just sit and drool?” I asked.
“Zoe, he’s not drooling,” Claudia said. “There’s no indignity; I wouldn’t allow it. He’s just waiting for someone to give him direction, which I will do.” She glanced at me. “Even if I weren’t bound by oaths to keep my secret self…secret…would you want him to know about you?”
She had a point. “Uh, not yet. Not until I know more myself. Just…make him as normal as possible.”
“Don’t worry. I’m good at this.” She knelt by the immobilized Sean, looked him in the eyes. He was already mesmerized by her.
“You got knocked about when you ran into those muggers on the construction site,” she said. “Things have been a little crazy, with Danny’s disappearance, but you feel fine, and you, my brother, and I are going to help Zoe however we can, right?”
“Absolutely. I like Danny, even if he can be a little smartass sometimes.”
“That sound about normal, Zoe?” Gerry said. He tried, and failed, to keep a straight face.
I felt a flare of anger; he had no business making fun of Sean, being amused by our imperfect selves. Deep breath, Zoe; you’d have made the same joke under other circumstances. “Let’s get going,” I said.
Claudia held up a hand. “Wait. Your flight leaves in four hours. We’ll come with you. That gives us time to think, to plan. This Dmitri needs you to make contact with someone, make an exchange?”
I nodded. “He wants me to find another object like the one…I already have.”
“Why doesn’t he do it? Why doesn’t he just ask you to give him the object you have for Danny? Then he can get the other himself.”
I thought about it. “Maybe he can’t. Maybe he’s known to this guy Grayling.”
“How do you happen to have this object?”
“It’s nothing, it’s a small figurine. And it’s a long story,” I said, my face burning. “Save it for the ride. For now, I want to focus on Dmitri. We don’t know much about him.”
Even as I said it, I recalled what I’d been imagining about Dmitri while he spoke. Gerry noticed my hesitation.
“I bet you know more than you think. Even if you don’t know what you are, you still have your Fangborn powers, however untrained. And we have resources most people don’t.” He pulled out a gadget and waved it over Danny’s computer. He typed in a few commands and then nodded. “There was something there, but now I’ve zapped it. Your cousin has some very sophisticated software on here. As in, not ‘off the shelf,’ and close to ‘hacks just brushing the law.’ He spends a lot of time coding?”
I nodded. Memories of Danny working on a piece of code all hours, of Sean and Danny trying to whip each other at Halo, came flooding in. No tears, I told myself. Not now.
Gerry’s fingers flew over the keyboard, hitting the keys so fast I couldn’t follow what he was typing. “What did he sound like?”
I spilled all the details I’d gleaned—however I’d noticed them—from my conversation with Dmitri. He nodded and went through one database, entering all the key words. Then he typed some more and I saw an FBI database come up.
“Whoa! You’re not supposed to be in there!”
“Nope. But
a Cousin of ours is. And it’s a great catalog of bad guys.” Gerry kept typing, searching. Pictures began to flash across the screen, some of them mug shots. “It’s also how we found you. Once we heard rumors of a…that you were in the area, we made a call to our Cousin in the Federal BI, and we were able to find your phone and track that by GPS. We only managed to home in on you a few days ago.”
I thought about someone stalking me via my phone. It gave me the creeps. “Above the law,” “vigilante,” and “gang” were words my mother had used more than once to describe my father’s people. I wasn’t sure what to think; the Steubens were definitely dangerous. Clearly I was like them. I still couldn’t reconcile what I was learning about them with what I’d been raised to believe. And they didn’t seem the same as the other Fangborn following me.
The computer had paused in its flickering. “What do you have there?”
“List of possible ‘Dmitris.’ All have associations with antiquities theft or smuggling, all have the characteristics you described…Uh-oh. I don’t think this one is a coincidence. Dmitri Alexandrovich Parshin.”
Claudia made a small noise in her throat. Her eyes narrowed. “I thought he was in prison?”
“Not anymore.” Gerry turned to me. “He’s kind of obsessed with the Fangborn, werewolves, especially. He’s made a living—after dealing in antiquities and illegal arms—of hunting us down and torturing us. I know of at least three stories of him killing vampires, slowly, over days, depriving them of sunlight, injecting them with vile things like a distillation of black hellebore, which really weakens us Fangborn.”
I swallowed. “And now he thinks I’m one? Why take Danny, then?”
“I don’t think he’s hunting you because you’re Fangborn. If we only discovered you, chances are he doesn’t know, and if you’re lucky, he’ll never find out. I think it’s really the artifacts, just as he said.”
“But why? Why does he hate you—us—Fangborn so much?”
“It’s not that he hates us. He wants to become us. He still thinks we can turn him, but we’re born, not made.” Gerry ran his hand through his hair, frowning. “And I think he believes the artifacts you have will make him a werewolf.”
Chapter 7
“Wait, you just said we were born.” So maybe I couldn’t have turned Sean by biting him. “If we’re born this way, how can these artifacts make him—?”
“They can’t,” Gerry said. “Reason’s not Dmitri’s strong point, if this is our guy. The files we have about him, his family history, tell us he’s obsessed with the mistaken idea he’s descended from werewolves—”
“We’ll discuss it in the car.” Claudia reappeared suddenly; I hadn’t even seen her leave the room. “Zoe, do you need anything else besides what I found in the guest room? Do you need to go somewhere to get the figurine?”
I hadn’t even had time to unpack since I’d arrived at Danny’s. I’d made sure the figurine was in the bottom of my bag, made sure my passport was where I put it when I left Salem. “No. I’m good.”
She threw a bag to Sean, who had dozed off. “We’re heading to the airport, Sean. I’m glad we had a chance to meet you. Time for you to go home.”
“I’m coming.”
“You got your passport on you?” I piped up.
“Go out partying in Boston on Friday night, wake up Tuesday in Cabo, you learn to take precautions,” he said.
“You can afford to leave your job?” I demanded. “I doubt it. And those guys who broke into your place in Boston, they won’t bother you anymore.” I didn’t want to drag Sean into this. I didn’t want him to find out that I was a monster. I didn’t want to worry about him while I tried to save Danny’s life.
But the selfish part of me didn’t want to leave him behind. He was the last shred of normal I could call my own.
Besides, as long as Claudia was with me, she could keep rearranging Sean’s world to a reality where I wasn’t a werewolf. However imaginary or chemically induced that world was, I wanted to hang on to it.
In the car, however, nerves overtook me. I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d be better off without the Steubens. They were exactly what Ma had warned me about. They were clearly adept at manipulation, and I’d known them, under adverse circumstances, for less than a day. A day during which I’d been threatened and my cousin had been kidnapped, his blood spilled.
But they were helping me so far, and they weren’t telling me I was crazy.
Claudia drove her BMW like someone used to getting where she needed to go, fast and without getting caught. Gerry sat with a notebook computer, working on the files he’d acquired at Danny’s place. Sean sat up front, asleep, at Claudia’s suggestion. He’d always called shotgun for as long as I’d known him. Didn’t matter that he was almost thirty.
“So, how could Dmitri kill Fangborn? Aren’t you guys pretty much impervious?” It was only then it clicked for me: Claudia hadn’t been affected by daylight. If anything, her color had improved since we left the apartment. And didn’t she say Dmitri tortured vampires by keeping them in the dark? Not even what I knew from fiction was accurate.
“We’re not immortal, just long lived. Hard to kill and quick to heal,” Claudia said. “Forget what you know about a stake through the heart—it would kill me, but the same as any massive trauma. But holy water, crucifixes—” She touched the little gold cross at her throat. “Not a problem. Plus, it would make going to Mass awkward. But with the call to Change, we know there’s trouble brewing and we are compelled to help prevent it, if we possibly can. We’re strong in human form, but much more powerful half-Changed, or in fur- or scaleself.”
“Yeah, but you kill people.” I’d blurted it out before thinking, then decided it needed to be said. “I know you said, and the other guys said, you’re trying to protect humans, fighting evil. But…there is such a thing as due process. How do you know it’s justified? You guys are never wrong?”
“Never,” Gerry said firmly. “We’ve never been mistaken in identifying predators. Fangborn aren’t capable of true evil. And no Fangborn has ever killed another Fangborn.”
Logic and suspicion made me wonder how that could possibly be true. His statement certainly told me a lot about Gerry, though. “How do you know?” I asked carefully.
“Our history.”
“History isn’t a perfect record,” I said. “I can tell you that, as an almost-professional.”
Claudia stepped in. “I had similar questions when I was younger. I finally decided the world was better because of us, because of our actions.”
I felt as if I was treading in the dangerous territory of faith or religion; time to change the subject. “How was it Dmitri was able to kill so many Fangborn?”
“From the autopsies we performed, we learned he’s aware of some of the chemicals that will weaken or disable us, like the black hellebore we mentioned. It worries me, because he seems to know so much about us. That’s one of our most carefully guarded secrets.” She clutched the wheel. “I hate to think how he got that information.”
“When we get to the airport,” Gerry said, shutting down his computer, “I’ll send this to your phone, not the one Dmitri left for you.”
“What are the numbers for your phones?” Claudia asked.
I recited my number, then read off the new one to Gerry, who entered them. “How about yours?” I wasn’t about to let them off the hook for their contact information. “Quid pro quo, Dr. Steuben.”
Gerry snorted a laugh—Claudia wasn’t much like Hannibal Lecter—then rattled off the numbers for his phone and Claudia’s. OK, so I didn’t trust him, not entirely, but he seemed…OK. Hard not to start liking a guy who laughed at your lame jokes.
The next few moments were filled with plans for how we’d travel. Somehow there had been no question they would try to go with me, and I was steadily more impressed with the idea that there was more going on than just me and Danny. I already had my ticket and I was going to use it. I stopped by the ATM to get a
s much cash as I could, this last time; maybe, if Dmitri was capable of tracking me, having even a little currency might help if I needed to get off the radar for any reason.
Claudia and Gerry would buy their own tickets. Dmitri didn’t know them, and as long as they were helping, I was resigned. Sean, determined to follow me, would buy one, too.
“It’s probably OK for him to come with me,” I said. “If they know so much about me, they know he’s with me, that he’d come even if I asked him not to.” I looked hopeful at that last comment, but Sean shook his head.
“I’m coming. You can’t stop me.”
But the ticket counter could.
The flight to London was sold out; even Claudia’s persuasive inquiries couldn’t get seats on a plane that was full. Not even first class, where, I was surprised to find, I was seated.
“Probably the better to observe you, if he has someone following you,” Gerry said, handing his sister his passport. “I’ll be over at the coffee shop over there, the table out front—next to the bar? Claudia will get the tickets. There’s Wi-Fi, and I’ll send the rest of the files to you.”
Inquiries at the counter and we had a last minute plan: the flight for Berlin via Munich left shortly after mine. There were seats and they booked three tickets. We’d arrange to meet up in central London as soon as everyone landed, and pray it wasn’t too late to find some kind of plan that would give us an edge over Dmitri.
I glanced at my watch. About a half hour before the flight boarded. We joined Gerry, sitting at one of the tables just outside the coffee shop. He held up a finger: he was almost done.
Sean glanced out toward the concourse. His face froze. I saw something go dead behind his eyes, then light up again, as if he’d been rebooted. “Zoe, the muggers! From the construction site!”