by Dana Cameron
Excavations? Not the Via Cavalli in Venice? Maybe the Beacon really did want me, had been leading me to it in Venice. “Hey, I’m just glad I figured out what you were saying.” I was in a bad mood and let it show. “Things were a little hectic back there in Berlin.”
At the mention of Berlin, Dmitri scowled. “I trust you have the figurines.”
“No. They were taken from me by that guy I saw in Berlin. Adam Nichols.”
“How? When?” He strode over to my table, slammed a pistol on it. “How could you, when so much relies on it? One of my men betrayed me, and Nichols has been dogging my steps ever since.”
“Trust me, it wasn’t my idea.” I eyed the pistol, and before Dmitri could pop an artery or do anything crazy, I said, “But I have something else, something that might be even better. A gold disk.”
“Do not waste my time.” He paced back and forth, then called one of his men in. He barked at him in Russian, and the only words I recognized were “Adam” and “Nichols.” Didn’t sound good for Nichols, whatever it was. Then I heard him say, “Connor,” and my heart almost stopped.
He strode back to me. “It was only those things I needed. Only those things I can use to become oboroten.”
“Does that word mean wealthy? Because I have access to an artifact that will certainly help.”
“That word means ‘werewolf.’ Here, today, I was going to become oboroten.”
I swallowed. “You can’t. It doesn’t work like that.”
He leaned into me. “What do you know about it?”
“You don’t get familiar with that kind of artifact without learning some weird shit,” I said. I was lying so hard about my familiarity with the figurines and the Fangborn I could have made the Olympic team. “And the reason I knew about them was because one of them has been in my possession for years. I met the people who’ve studied those things. I’ve listened, and I’ve read—it’s been my life’s work. And the only way you can become a werewolf is to be born one. You don’t get bitten, you don’t use broken fragments of two-thousand-year-old rubbish.”
“Nonsense.”
“You’ve been watching the wrong movies. You have to be born oboroten. Trust me.”
“Liar! I know I have the potential within me—it runs in my family! I have seen!”
That gave me pause—was it possible he was some kind of demented oracle Fangborn but not a shape-shifter? If so, he was almost as ignorant as I was, a stray, and I wasn’t going to give away any of my hard-won information about the Fangborn. It wasn’t up to me to solve his riddles.
“You know who has the figurines now; if you still want them back, you’ll find Adam Nichols. I bet a tough guy like you would be up for a rematch.”
No response from Dmitri, whose eyes had darkened and whose hands were clenched. I spoke in a hurry to keep his attention.
“I can buy Danny’s freedom, though, with an object at least as old as those taken from me. It won’t turn you into a werewolf either, but it’s worth a bomb, the price of gold these days. But before I hand over that to you, before I leave here safely with my cousin, we’re gonna have a little talk about what you knew about my father. See, I discovered the fragment around your neck mended with a fragment Ma’d had for years. A piece that belonged to my father. How did you know him?”
“Enough of this.” He snapped his fingers. Another man stepped forward.
Was that a noise back there? In the courtyard, a kind of scuffling? Was it possible Ariana and Ben had been able to circle around, undetected? My hopes soared, even as Dmitri shoved my chair over next to the wall.
“Check her bag.”
I had to buy some time and wanted to hold the Beast in reserve, so I made a show of hanging on to it. I tried not to let any of them see how the noise in the courtyard, real or imagined, had stripped away my fatigue.
Bad Guy One tore the bag out of my hands, unzipped it, upended it on the table. A half-drunk bottle of water: thud, slosh. Pens clattered; random notes, a thousand itineraries and ticket stubs fluttered out. Toilet paper. A plastic bag with Band-Aids, antiseptic cream, aspirin, and the spice container along with a couple of tampons topped the pile, as did my ratty, perennially empty wallet. Almost as an afterthought, the pile of cell phones I’d accumulated fell out and off the table.
Dmitri pawed through it, faint amusement his only expression. “This is the detritus of a very sad life, is it not, Zoe? I myself…frankly, I would be ashamed of this kind of poverty, not of material wealth but a…a sheer lack of character. There is nothing to distinguish you here. And I do not see the disk you promise.”
“Where’s Danny?”
“Danny is fine, fine.” Dmitri absently shoved the things back into the bag. He looked up and whistled sharply. “You can see him now.”
Bad Guy Two dwarfed the doors to the entrance. He dragged Danny in behind him.
Danny was a long way from “fine.” His face was purpled with bruises, both eyes nearly shut. His nose was bloody and twisted at an angle, and when he breathed through his mouth, bubbles appeared. He made a noise when he saw me, and got a fist in his stomach that doubled him over.
I cried out, stood. Dmitri pushed me back down.
“The figurines.”
“Stolen! Adam Nichols has them!” I couldn’t take my eyes off my cousin. Was this what I’d heard, just now, Danny being beaten up? “I can get you the gold disk! Give me ten minutes, I can get it! Take the gold, forget I ever had the figurines! They won’t turn you into a werewolf!”
“How do you know?”
“Because I am a werewolf!”
I felt stupid as soon as I said it out loud.
He stared at me, and I knew what he saw: a small woman, dirty and disheveled, the opposite of the power he sought. He knew about the Fangborn, but he didn’t know all about them, else he wouldn’t be so obsessed with the figurines.
And it seemed he didn’t know about me.
He laughed hugely, then gestured.
Bad Guy Two took out a knife. The sight of it made Danny sink, all strength gone from his knees.
The knife should have terrified me. It should have triggered images in my mind that would haunt me all the years of my life to come. It should have immobilized me.
Danny was the last thing I had on earth, the last indication that I mattered as a person, all on my own, no hinky family troubles, no bizarre shifts in reality.
Somewhere beyond the now-familiar buzzing that seemed to fill my head as I saw my cousin begin to weep, as Bad Guy Two licked the blade with a kind of lust, I had only one thought:
Never mind the Beast. I’ll kill Dmitri with my own two human hands.
I began to catalog the vulnerable spots of the human body. Years of studying skeletons had provided a list.
Neck: Too narrow. I’d never hit it square enough.
Chest: Too many ribs.
Eyes: Too small a target…
Thought stopped. My head dropped. My hands fell to my sides. The buzzing grew, filled—charged—my entire body. The Beast was different, somehow, this time.
No time to figure out why. No matter. It was here and I embraced it.
I reached behind me, pulled the trowel from my belt, and stabbed it into Dmitri’s thigh with all the force I had.
Dmitri howled. Blood drenched his trousers, began to spill onto the floor in a torrent.
I tried to wrench the trowel back, hoping to get another blow in or make the tear in his leg worse. Even with Dmitri’s meaty hand crushing mine as he tried to remove it, the trowel was stuck. Sickeningly, immovably.
I’d struck deep, deep into bone.
Dmitri roared, hauled off, and backhanded me. My head snapped back; I hit the wall. My vision blurred for half a second then sharpened beyond human capacity. I grabbed his arm in both hands, bit as hard as I could. With horrifying ease, I felt my fangs slice through his flesh; I braced myself and, with both feet, kicked, shoving him from his chair.
There, I’ve bitten you. May
be that will show you once and for all.
I grabbed my bag and scrambled away; the table went over on him. A rickety affair, but it landed smack on the trowel handle, jarring the blade that was stuck deep in his femur. Dmitri screamed again.
Bad Guy One was stunned by the noise his boss made, but grabbed me in a bear hug. I felt my ribs being crushed inward. I shoved my elbow into his groin and raised one knee as high as I could. Then, with all my might, I stomped on his foot.
Low-tech boots win over high-tech sandals.
I felt the crunch of bones, but better than that, felt the air rush into my lungs as Bad Guy One released me. I took a deep breath, put him from my mind. I had to somehow grab Danny and run.
I looked up and was stopped in my tracks by what I saw.
Danny was biting the wrist of the man who held him, and doing a good job with his laughably small, human teeth. The reason he was not being stabbed with that wicked blade was that Adam Nichols was holding onto Bad Guy Two’s wrist and using all his strength to do it.
No time for questions, I thought. Danny. Door. Run.
I strode up, hauled off, and planted my boot in Bad Guy Two’s crotch. Fueled by adrenaline, the man noticed but didn’t let go. Determined to put an end to this, I leaned back and kicked again; I could feel the impact throughout my body.
Not hurt. Just surprised at how good I felt.
Bad Guy Two went down. Danny had the presence of mind to let go and get out of the way. Adam still held on, but freed one hand to reach into his pocket. He pulled out a wicked-looking sap and brought it down on the man’s head. Bad Guy Two wouldn’t get up again soon.
I grabbed Danny and followed Adam out the door. I paused; there was a jeep. The rest of the piazza was empty, but I was afraid we’d be visible forever. It was a small island; we’d be easy to track down.
“Zoe! Get in!” Adam had started the car.
Still I hesitated. Danny could barely support himself, but the enemy of my enemy wasn’t necessarily my friend.
“You better get in, because I’m leaving!” Adam shouted. “Right now, they’re madder at you than you are at me!”
Unable to help his boss, Bad Guy One was limping toward us.
An unearthly scream froze us all, and I understood:
Somewhere inside, Dmitri had wrenched my trowel from his thigh bone.
The scream decided me. I hauled Danny over to the jeep and shoved him in the front seat.
“Feet, Danny!” I yelled. “Get your feet all the way inside.” My voice sounded strange to me.
My cousin moved, but not fast enough. Bad Guy One had nearly reached the jeep.
“No time!” Adam put the jeep into drive. He pulled away, heading north.
I ran, matching speed with the jeep.
I dove for the backseat and landed ass over teakettle.
I pulled myself in. I looked up, triumphant, but Bad Guy One had grabbed the door handle and was hanging on.
I righted myself and lunged for Bad Guy One, raking my nails across his hands. His eyes opened wide, his mouth worked. Then he let go of the door, fell hard to the stony ground.
Adam turned briefly, a small smile on his lips.
“What’s wrong?” I yelled. It was as if my mouth was full of cotton.
“It seems you’ve mastered the half-Change.”
I looked down and saw I had furred arms and clawed hands; I bet under my jeans my legs were similarly covered in fur. I reached up and touched my face; a muzzle and teeth, mine and yet unfamiliar.
The Change with two feet. The Change, when I got to keep my clothes, mostly, and keep upright. Mastered nothing; I hadn’t meant to, but it was a gift at the moment. And how the hell did Adam know about Changing?
I tried to Change back, leave this partial-Beast behind. No luck.
For the moment, I didn’t care. “Where we going?” My words were still somewhat unintelligible. Delos is a very small island, with not much in the way of roads. A bump almost jarred my pointy teeth out of my head. Danny moaned.
“We gotta get out of here, pronto!” Adam said. “There are people arriving at the main dock soon, and I want to get you away from them.”
“Wait!” I said, suddenly remembering. “We need to stop!”
“Exactly what we don’t need—”
“No, just a moment, up by that pillar over there!” Desperation aided my pronunciation.
“What pillar? There must be dozens—”
“Over there! Between the two doorways! Look where I’m pointing!”
He got close enough, and impatiently I vaulted out. Three long, loping strides, and I was at my pillar. I reached back for my trowel—it wasn’t there. Out of habit, I tried the other hand, tried to turn around, before I realized I’d left my trowel back in Dmitri’s leg.
At least I had claws.
But when I looked down, I didn’t. A feeling of carbonated blood, then claws transformed into human hands, bruised from when I’d buried the disk, but no more furry than usual.
“Zoe! There’s no time!”
Didn’t matter. I grabbed a rock, scraped down, and dislodged the disk. I stuck it inside my bra, gritty and uncomfortable but secure, and ran back to the jeep.
Again Adam didn’t wait for me to get in properly before he roared off.
“Where are we going?” I yelled. We were nearly at the beach where Ben and Ariana had landed me. There was still no sign of them; I began to worry. “I have a boat—people came with me! I need to—”
“We need to get you out of here.” He glanced at Danny, who wasn’t moving, then back at me. “Need to get him out of here.”
I didn’t have much alternative. Unless my new friends showed up soon, I had to find my own way out of here, and so far Adam was it.
I nodded, and he roared past the small yellow buildings I’d learned had housed the French archaeological teams who worked here. Up a hill, then—
“Oh shit.”
I looked where Adam was looking and saw a large boat waiting in the official harbor to the west. It certainly hadn’t been there when I arrived, and it didn’t look like something Dmitri would have had, not with all those official-looking policemen and flags and…guns.
“You do not want to let these people find you,” Adam said, frowning. “If we’re very lucky, they’ll still think I’m working for them.”
“They must have seen us,” I said. “Keep going!”
“They expect me to be here. They think I’m coming to get you and Dmitri. They don’t know I’ve changed the game.”
“This isn’t a game! Get me out of here!”
“I have to go to them,” he said, almost to himself. “I’ll tell them there was nothing but blood and overturned tables in the museum center. They won’t have seen you, probably, and Danny, well, his posture isn’t too good right now.”
The sun was very hot. Sweat began to roll down my neck and back.
“When we get past that next hill, I’m going to slow down and you get out. Try and reach your friends. When you see them, tell the Steubens: Knight believes he’s the heir to the Beacon. He believes his time is coming, and now that he has three of the four figurines, he’s not going to retire from his Senate seat. He’ll begin the Identification soon.”
“Huh?”
He looked back over his shoulder. “As for these guys, with any luck, everyone will think you’ve already left. You’d better get gone.”
Was this some kind of trick? Some kind of joke? I stared at Adam’s face, trying to read what was going on. I tried to sense whether he was telling me the truth and got nothing but determination and, beneath that, a little unfamiliar fear.
In any case, I still had to fly under the radar, and those flags meant official business. There was no sign of Ariana and Ben, so I nodded and tried to remember what I could of the layout of the ruins. If I kept moving north and east, I’d end up at the little beach I’d come in on.
I got out and helped Danny. Adam did a tight turn and headed back t
o the west.
Danny was conscious again, and he could walk, but not well and not far. He was skinny and pale, even for him, and I was getting more and more worried by the second.
“Hey.” His voice was hoarse and faint.
“Hey.”
“You got any water?”
“Just a little—don’t drink too much, OK?” I dug the half-full bottle of water out of my bag and handed it to him. Stupid! If I’d been thinking I would have had a full bottle of water, a first-aid kit, a commando team…
I was sweating like fury now that the sun was coming up. More than that, I needed an antacid.
Wait.
Suddenly I had heartburn? Since when did the Girl with the Cast-Iron Gullet get heartburn?
It took me a moment, but I realized the burning wasn’t inside me. I reached down into my bra and pulled my hand back sharply.
The disk was hot, hotter than body heat. I grabbed it out of my shirt before it burned parts of me I really didn’t want burned.
I looked at the disk. Nothing had changed; still round, still the same crude/elegant map.
“OK, either I’m hallucinating or you’re trying to get my attention,” I said to the disk. “Whaddya want?”
I didn’t really expect anything to happen, so when the damned thing started beating like a living heart in my hand, I dropped it. Clamped my hand over my mouth. Glanced at Danny, whose eyes were closed now that the water was gone.
I stared at the thing, then picked it up. “You didn’t start doing this until we saw the other boat, the one that scared Adam. You want me to check them out.”
Why I was thinking of the disk as a living thing and why I was talking to it was the least of my worries. When I thought check them out, I felt such an upwelling of enthusiasm I knew I had to do something.
My phone vibrated madly in my pocket. It was Ben. I was faintly surprised there was cell phone reception here.
“Zoe, what are you doing? We can see you. Why are you waiting?”
“Ben, my cousin Danny—he needs help.”
Ben muttered something I was glad not to understand. “Stay there. We will come to you. Three minutes.”
“Three minutes.”
Three minutes wasn’t long; it would give me sixty seconds to get out toward the official landing beach, sixty seconds to watch Adam with the other men, sixty seconds back. “Danny, stay put. A friend, Ben, is coming to help us. I’ll be right back.”