by Dana Cameron
“Where are you…?”
“I don’t even want to think about it.”
I began counting as I ran, heading south. One, two…
I kept low, running between hillocks and ruins, feeling stupid hiding behind a pillar or fallen base. I just needed to get a little bit closer to the landing.
Thirty-nine, forty…
I located the best observation point and ran, crouching, as fast as I could, clutching that beating heart of gold.
Fifty-eight, fifty-nine…
I was getting faster and faster in human form, I noticed as I skidded on the pebbly pathway and hid myself behind a broken column base. As long as they didn’t see me, I was fine.
I could see one man, an American, on the western landing. Tall, lean, unhurried, and impeccable in a blue sports jacket and open-necked white shirt. His hair was receding and distinguished gray about the temples. His nose gave his face a hawkish look. It was the nose that cinched it: I was looking at the senior senator from New York State, Edward Knight. Just by his bearing you could tell he was used to wielding power and receiving obedience from others. You could also tell from the way the Greek officials were behaving that the guy in the jacket, the one Adam was talking to, was important. Must have been; visits to Delos don’t happen on Mondays, I reminded myself.
Then another American stepped from the boat, and I knew him almost before I saw him. He was Clean-head, the man who’d tortured and killed Rupert Grayling in London, who’d come so close to grabbing me in Paris.
He was working with a US senator. Working with Adam Nichols.
Fifty-nine, fifty-nine, fifty-nine…C’mon, Zoe!
My hackles rose, but I didn’t dare get closer. More than that, I found my attention drifting away from Adam, his boss—Senator Knight—and Clean-head. My attention was drawn to the boat. I wanted to be on the boat, I wanted to go to the forward cabin—
I could almost see the inside of the cabin. How was that even poss—?
I knew that instant the figurines were on the boat.
Fifty-nine, fifty-nine, fifty-nine, sixty. Waaay past time to go, Zoe.
I couldn’t drag myself away. I was desperate to get the figurines back, but there was no way I could sneak on board, no way I could get past that phalanx on the dock…
My phone buzzed in my pocket; it was Ben’s number. I glanced back at where I’d left Danny and could see two dark figures picking their way to him.
I was late.
With one last glance at the boat—
They were also looking in my direction. I saw a sailor with binoculars scanning the ruins, looking for me, I was certain. But they couldn’t see me, could they? Maybe they had satellite imagining—
Maybe Adam had ratted me out—
The disk seemed cooler now and almost…content. As if it had accomplished something. I pulled it out to look at it. Perhaps I’d been mistaken, hallucinating…Nerves, lack of water, heat, adrenaline—I was seeing things. I had to be.
The disk burst into a blazing white light. So bright I was blinded for a moment. Even brighter than in my room in Venice.
I wasn’t seeing things. Even I couldn’t ignore that light. With a wrench, I shook myself and stuck it back into my pocket.
Didn’t matter. I ran back to where I’d left Danny; two men were carrying him at a fast, low trot back to the beach.
There was Ben, but Ariana was nowhere to be seen.
The other man was Will.
Chapter 21
I caught up with Will, Ben, and Danny. I tried not to stare at Will. I didn’t know what he was doing here, but as long as he was helping Danny get away…
The two men had Danny securely and were moving quickly. There was nothing I could do to help, so after a glance at Will, who nodded, I ran ahead, looking for their boat. I tried to pick out the safest path for them to follow.
There was no sign of the small motor Ben and Ariana had used to get me to Delos. There was a fishing boat close to shore. I almost turned around until I saw Gerry Steuben was piloting it. He looked comfortable at the helm, and when he saw me, he nodded and revved up the engine, moving in toward the shore. A little rubber Zodiac outboard was on the beach; I headed for it. I didn’t know much about boats, but I did know it wouldn’t go anywhere with the line tied to a log on the beach, so I untied that and moved the rope to a safe place.
“Get in!” Will’s face was red and he was breathing heavily.
“Into the bow,” Ben said. “I’m driving.”
I scrambled into the front, and they splashed into the water, heaving Danny in with me. I helped him pull forward best I could.
“Zoe, am I dying?” Danny was even worse now, if that was possible.
“No,” I said firmly, swallowing. “No way. You’re safe.”
“But I saw Will MacFarlane—your Will—he’s not—”
“Yeah, it’s me, Danny.” Will said as he and Ben shoved us off the pebbly strand and into the water. “It’s me, and you’re going to be just fine.”
Once the outboard had cleared the bottom, Ben jumped in. We were off.
Another time, I would have loved being in the Zodiac as it skipped across the waves toward Gerry and the fishing boat. But each soaring leap meant an equally hard thump as we hit the water again and again, spray soaking us. Every bounce saw Danny go a little grayer.
Worse than that, I could see one of the official-looking boats coming around the northern tip of the coast. Heading for us.
Gerry met us halfway, stopping at a safe distance. He hauled Danny up by himself, and then gave me a hand. Will and Ben secured the Zodiac, then the fishing boat wheeled around and away.
The fishing boat had something special for an engine, or else it wasn’t really a fishing boat, because we flew ahead of the official motor. I suppose we were lucky it was so large as it was more cumbersome, but it was slowly gaining on us.
There was no way we’d escape by the time we reached Mykonos.
We weren’t going to Mykonos, I realized. Gerry took us farther south, where there were several smaller boats ahead of us. He was heading straight for them.
Ben leaned over. “We’re going to get you on that boat over there,” he yelled into my ear, nodding at a small speedboat. “We’ll split up, different boats, then regroup off Naxos. If we’re lucky, they won’t try to follow all four of us.”
“Who are they? Adam works for them, right?”
Ben shouted something I missed, but we’d arrived at the little knot of boats, and there was no time to clarify.
“I should have gone with you. He looks awful,” Claudia said as she pulled Danny aboard. I clambered onto the deck and collapsed, as much from nerves as from fatigue.
“We had no time to spare, and Will couldn’t manage the fishing boat. You can work on him now,” Ben said. He looked over his shoulder at the pursuing boats. “Hurry.”
“We got him! Go!” Claudia hustled back to the wheel.
“I’ll be two seconds.” Ben maneuvered the Zodiac closer to the third boat, and Will got out. He immediately went below and his boat roared off—I assumed Ariana was behind the wheel.
I found myself furious that Will hadn’t even spared me a word. Barely a glance. OK, maybe I had disobeyed him back in Berlin and caused a lot of trouble, but that didn’t mean he had to be—
It didn’t matter, I told myself furiously. I’d done what I’d done, every time, for good reason. I hated hurting Will, but I had no problem taking responsibility for my actions. Why did I care? I’d dumped him. For his own good. It wasn’t like he owed me anything.
When Ben returned, he pulled the Zodiac on board with astonishing ease. “Go now, quickly!”
Claudia peeled out of there, and now our three boats were heading in three different directions.
I struggled to get up and landed heavily. We were bouncing again, almost as hard as in the rubber dinghy.
“Stay down!” Ben yelled. “We don’t want them to see you, most of all.”
He crawled over to where Claudia was standing, trying to eke out a little more power from the engine. I saw them yelling to each other, but couldn’t hear. Both cast worried glances behind us.
The official boat was still following us and had closed the distance since our short stop.
I picked up Danny’s hand, closed my eyes, and began to pray.
His hand jerked; I opened my eyes.
Claudia let Ben take over, and now she was next to me and turning…purple. Violet skin and hair, nails almost midnight black.
Her mouth was latched onto Danny’s other wrist, and while I could see no blood, her skin was…pulsing. Changing.
I felt the Beast respond, but I shoved it away, worried for Danny. Even though I’d seen Claudia Changed before, this was different. “What the hell are you doing?”
She looked up, closed her eyes, and shook her head gently, as much as she could with my cousin’s arm in her mouth.
“That’s how she works,” Ben shouted. “She’s among our best healers! Look at him, he’s already better.”
I couldn’t deny the grayish pallor was gone, and his eyes were open, clearer, less bruised. The horrible swelling had gone down.
Claudia, on the other hand, looked less and less human every minute.
All I could think of was ticks, leeches, mosquitoes.
I turned away. If I hadn’t, I would have said something offensive, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I knew, deep down, Claudia was one of the good guys. I knew she couldn’t turn Danny into a vampire. But I still didn’t like it. Seeing her biting him, drawing his blood, freaked me out.
A laughing shout, one I could hear over the roar of the engine. “They’ve turned around! We’re safe!”
Claudia rolled away from Danny, gasping. Danny had a dazed, happy, almost goofy look on his face. I had to admit, it was far preferable to the semi-conscious mess he’d been before.
He squeezed my hand lightly, then fell into what looked like a comfortable slumber.
Claudia had lifted herself up and was staggering toward the bow, using the rail for support.
I let go of Danny’s hand and followed her. When I caught up, I put my arm around her waist and helped her forward. “Thank you. For what you did for Danny.”
She sank to an empty spot on the minuscule deck, eyes closed. “I’m fine. I just had to do a lot of work on him. More than I expected.” “Expected” sounded a little like “espected” around a mouth full of fangs.
I cast an eye to the sun; it was getting warmer and warmer by the minute. “Would you be more comfortable in the shade?”
“No! No, sssun is the besssst thing.” She laughed; it was a strange, inhuman sound. Lots of hisses, lots of…vampire. And sure enough, her skin was rippling again; she was processing the chemicals she’d just injected and removed. “I won’t get sssunburned.”
I nodded, then found my way back to the helm. Ben had taken off his shirt and was singing as he steered.
At first I thought it was opera, from the deepness of his voice and the dramatic quality of his phrasing. Then I caught the words and realized he was belting out Gladys Knight.
I blinked. Well, it was no more outrageous than anything else that had happened today.
I fell asleep to a German werewolf in a Speedo joyfully singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” as he steered us over the choppy waves of the Aegean.
It was late afternoon when I woke up. The sun was dipping into the horizon, and I was hungry. We’d stopped and dropped anchor. There was a cluster of small islands ahead of us, no sign of pursuit behind us, and, better, the smell of food cooking nearby.
I hoped it was someone I knew. I didn’t really want to jump onto someone else’s boat and snatch the gyros out of their hands, but I would.
I was saved from causing an international incident because it was Ben, on the boat moored across from ours, carrying food to a long table under a canopy. No sign of Danny or Claudia on board, so I got into the dinghy that was tied between the two boats, cast off, and hauled myself across.
This boat was larger—a yacht—and made for cruising. Ben put a plate of food on the table. “Danny’s asleep below,” he called over his shoulder as he returned to the galley.
Nearly everyone else was seated, and I bolted to the last chair. The food was gorgeous: small fish, tomato salad with basil, eggplant stewed in a fortune’s worth of olive oil, tiny meatballs, and bread. But no one was eating.
Ben set the last plate down and sat. He looked at everyone gravely, solemnly, and said,
“Eat and enjoy.”
Then it was like someone had fired a pistol, and Fangborn and Normal alike were eating as if for a time trial. There was no talk for the first ten minutes, just solid chewing and the occasional “pass the tomatoes” and “cheese?” and “is there any more of that lamb kofta?”
The worst of hunger at bay, wine was served and the plates were passed around again. Now we looked like any other collection of tourists enjoying a civilized meal. We even said “please” and “thank you,” but conversation was still limited to the food and praising Ben for his cooking until he went to get coffee and dessert, fruit and baklava.
When it was clear that no one was going to go hungry and we could talk without choking on our food, Gerry looked around. “We have a lot to talk about.”
“Danny will be OK?” I asked.
“Yep.” Gerry grabbed another piece of baklava, popped it into his mouth, and wiped his fingers.
Ariana said, “I’ve been wondering about something. You were supposed to meet Dmitri’s man at the harbor but missed the rendezvous when we tracked that would-be killer on Mykonos. If we hadn’t been there, how would you have made it over?”
“I hadn’t heard from Dmitri for a long while, after Berlin,” I said. “So I didn’t even know if he’d be on Delos, much less offer to ferry me over. So I took a cash advance and bought a small raft with an outboard motor.”
“You were going to motor over there in, what, some inflatable thing?” Ariana murmured something in Italian I felt sure Mama Luongo wouldn’t have ever taught me. “Crazy girl!”
I didn’t like to think of having to navigate my way over those rough waves. “Where’s Claudia?” I asked.
“Forward, still sleeping in the last of the sun. She already raided the galley,” Ben said. “You know, there really is an order to this kind of discussion, where so much is involved and there is so little time. You should follow the protocol.”
Casual enough about being naked, Ben seemed to care a great deal about the rules. “Sorry, I didn’t know.”
“You should have known, or you should have asked,” he said.
I set my cup down, trying not to swear at him—after all I’d been through, parliamentary procedure was the furthest thing from my mind. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“And you should mind your temper.”
Before I could respond, Ariana said, “Perhaps you should remember she’s been unacculturated?”
“And how else will she learn,” Ben said, “if no one tells her?”
“We have more important things,” Will said before I could respond. “What was that light we saw from the beach, Zoe?”
“What light?” I went suddenly shy. “And what are you doing here?”
Ever been stared at by two intimidating uncles, an equally formidable aunt, and an ex-boyfriend? I can’t recommend it, especially not when three of them were built to detect the truth and the other knew you better than almost anyone alive.
“OK, there was a light,” I said. “I’m not sure what—”
“Zoe, I saw it,” Will said. “It came from you.”
“Not really me,” I said. Reluctantly I reached into my shirt and pulled out the disk. “I found this in Venice, when I met Ariana and Ben here.”
“You mean when you broke into our house. Ha!”
Several hostile glances at Ben.
“What? It’s funny,” he said. “All the time we
were meant to be guarding the Beacon, and when, after generations, someone finally showed an interest in it, we thought she was a house thief.”
“House thief?”
“Well, at first. She doesn’t look like the one foretold in the Orleans Tapestry, does she? The one who will ‘unchain’ the Fangborn?”
Everyone seemed to go on point. I felt like slinking under the table.
No one actually moved down the table away from me, but I could tell they were considering the ramifications of what Ben had said.
“Wait, how did you know to go there?” Gerry asked me. “Why did you go looking for the Beacon?”
“I didn’t.” I told them about Dmitri’s instructions to me in Berlin. “When he said ‘Cavalli,’ I thought he was talking about the professor, but he meant where Cavalli had excavated on Delos. It was Sean who suggested the street name was Cavalli, in Venice. I found the bench with the caduceus there.”
“Ariana?” Ben asked.
She shook her head. “That bench is just a signal to other Fangborn, to let them know it’s our place. There’s no way Dmitri or this Sean person could have known about the location of the Beacon. I can only assume your instincts took you there. Maybe a little nudge from the hand of fate.”
I didn’t like the sound of “fate” at all. “I wasn’t going after the pot thing for any reason but to get Danny back,” I said quickly. “It started…I don’t know. Throbbing? Pulsing? Beating. It started beating when I was near the ship.” Just saying it flooded my mind with memories: the way the Beast had reacted, making me bide my time at Rupert Grayling’s house until I could recover the figurines safely; the way the disk had “bitten” me, drawing blood and memory; the strong interaction and blinding light when it was close to the stolen figurines on Delos.
“Is it possible…I don’t want to sound conceited or anything, but is it possible that the figurines have been acting on my Fangborn powers and sort of, I don’t know, guiding me to bring them all together? I shouldn’t have gone to Venice, but maybe they…prompted me, somehow. I felt the Beast urge me to take Sean’s advice about looking down the Via Cavalli. And then the disk kind of…well, tasted me, in Venice—there were all these memories, and now I’m wondering if it wasn’t finding out who I am.”