Seven Kinds of Hell

by Dana Cameron

  “Fine with me,” he said.

  “Not fine.”

  We looked up. Will was shaking his head.

  “Can’t do it. It would get me in trouble with the TRG, and worse, it would get you into a bad place with the Fangborn. If anyone ever tortured you, you’d spill it all, and we can’t risk the breach.”

  I saw a little flutter in Danny’s temple and saw his jaw tighten. “I’ve been tortured. How about you?”

  “I have training.” Will straightened and crossed his arms. “I have precautions put into place.”

  “I can get them, too. Forget-me juice in the back tooth or something.” He turned to me. “Claudia filled me in on a lot yesterday.”

  “I’m the only one who’s getting paid a government wage and benefits to take the chance,” Will said. “I’m the only one with a security clearance and training.”

  “Fine. Where do I sign up?”

  “Danny, you can’t do that!” I stared at him. “You have a good job, you have…a normal life. After all we’ve been through—”

  “You think I’ll still have a job when I get home? I’ve been AWOL for days.”

  “You know they’d take you back in an instant. Call them now, tell them it was a family emergency.”

  “You think I got the application forms in my pocket?” Will said.

  “I think you have a phone with access to websites with the forms. I think you have the authority to hire and fire anyone you like, and at your pay grade, you can—”

  “You’ve been prying into my—classified government documents!”

  Danny couldn’t conceal a faint smile. “Maybe.”

  “You could go to prison for this,” Will said. He was struggling to stay calm.

  “If you can prove I did it, first.”

  I’d decided this had gone too far. I stepped in front of Danny and growled at Will. Maybe showed a little fang.

  “Hold!”

  I froze in my tracks. Gerry had barked out the command so forcefully, I had no choice in the matter. Drill sergeants could have taken lessons.

  “We don’t do that,” he said to me. “You don’t use your wolfself to intimidate Normals.”

  “I thought that’s what you were trying to get me to do!” I backed off from Will, though.

  “In the face of evil, yes. In the face of a spat, no. You can yell, whine, bitch—punch him in the nose, for all I care. Anything a human would do. But you don’t show your fangs without real need. Got it?”

  I didn’t like it, but with everyone watching, I didn’t have much choice. Not if I didn’t want to look like a serious jerk. “Got it.”

  “OK.” He smiled, and suddenly everything was OK again, my slip forgotten and done with.

  He turned to Will. “This is an emergency. I’m not going to tell you who to hire or not, but I think we have to bend the rules a little. He might be able to help Zoe get the Change under control; he’s already seen us in action. And he needs to know about the political stuff if he’s gonna help us.”

  Will’s fists were clenched; he was struggling to stay calm. “Why not drop him off at the nearest airport and send him home? Why involve him at all?”

  “He’s already involved. He has information we can use against Dmitri.” He nodded at Danny. “You want in?”

  “Yes.”

  Gerry looked around. “Anyone else have strong feelings for or against? Or an option besides Danny being in or out?”

  Lots of shaking heads. “We need all the friends we can get,” Ben said unexpectedly.

  “OK, we’re done then,” Gerry said. “And if you want to blame someone after, if we’re still alive, you can blame me, Will.”

  “I don’t like it,” Will said. “But I’m living by your rules out here, just like we agreed. Considering me a kind of ambassador while we’re out of the US.” He turned to Danny. “If I can’t talk you into going home, which would be the smart thing to do, can I get your brief on Dmitri? I know it won’t be easy, but it would help.”

  “Whatever will hurt him,” Danny said. “Whenever you want.”

  “I’ll be with you,” I said. “When you tell him.”

  “No.” Danny and Gerry spoke at the same time.

  “You have class with me now,” Gerry added.

  “Let me do it with Will first,” Danny said. “It’ll be easier with…not-family first. I’ll tell you after I’ve sort of gotten used to it, OK?”

  I nodded, and tried not to feel hurt. But that was the way Danny did things, hiding away in his own world until he could talk to me about it. I sure wasn’t going to make him do anything he didn’t want to, not after what he’d been through.

  “We got three hours before lunch,” Gerry said once we were at the front of the boat. “What do you want first? The cultural stuff or the physical stuff?”

  “Cultural, please.”

  “OK, we’ll do that second. That will be the carrot for getting through working on the Change.”

  I gave him a sour look, which had zero effect. We sat down, and I felt my palms begin to sweat. I really hated wrestling with the Change.

  “OK, when your power first started to manifest itself,” he said. “You were…what? Twelve, thirteen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  Gerry looked troubled. “Seriously? That’s old for us. Was it at the same time as your first period?”

  “Oh, jeez, really?” It wasn’t my cycle I didn’t want to talk about. It was the horrible years of junior high and high school I wanted to avoid.

  “It’ll help me help you,” he said. “I promise it’s not for kicks.”

  “A couple of years after I started. So when did you start…being able to Change?”

  He frowned, then nodded. “I was twelve. Puberty and power seems to go hand in hand for most of us, so your case is a little unusual. But with your upbringing, or lack thereof—”

  “What was your upbringing?”

  “Raised at home until I was ready for school, when we’re packed off for special training.” He shrugged. “We call it ‘Fangborn Academy,’ and it’s tough—regular school lessons, but lots of extra education on Fangborn history, ethics, that kind of stuff.” He looked a little wistful. “Lots of training in ‘Scenarios,’ how to use our powers. That part was the best.”

  It sounded nice to me, being surrounded by family, being guided so carefully. But the notion of the Academy reminded me of another institution, the one my mother had escaped from.

  “My mother…she had to be Fangborn, too, didn’t she?” I said suddenly. I wanted to know and didn’t want to know.

  “Yes. I mean, we can have kids with Normals, but it’s super rare, and you never get a shape-changer offspring. Probably she had some oracular power, if you don’t think she was a werewolf or vamp.”

  If she was an oracle, her hunches—about when we needed to run, trusting Sean to keep her papers, all sorts of things—were starting to make sense. “So why didn’t she teach me all this?”

  Gerry thought a long while. “I don’t know. When we found out about you, we couldn’t find any records of your parents. That’s odd; we have long, fairly complete genealogies. There are some groups who isolate themselves, some who try to deny what they are. This happened back in the 1930s. I thought almost all of them had been contacted and reintegrated after, but maybe not. Maybe she was brought up like that. There were as many different responses to being Fangborn as there are cultures, but there was the Great Convocation in 1946, and we realized, if we were going to survive, we needed to act with as much unity as we could.”

  He looked up sharply. “And you are getting me off the point and into the history, which is dessert. All right; you’re going to be a tough one, but let me ask you some questions.”

  He went down a whole list: the first time I felt different, the first time I Changed, what happened after, the times I’d felt the call to fight evil, etcetera. It was a little bit like being head shrunk, which I hated—I’d had my share of guidance counselors and
social workers. But privacy wouldn’t make me more effective against our enemies. I gritted my teeth and promised myself I would beat them down for all of this.

  “No help there,” Gerry said after the last question. “OK, exercises. Remember what we tried in Berlin? We’re gonna work from there.”

  I told him about my failed attempt to Change on my own in Venice, on the stairway, with so many people in view.

  “That’s good. We make every effort not to Change, not to be seen by Normals.”

  That reminded me of the fight on Delos. After I told him, Gerry shrugged. “We know Dmitri has information about Fangborn, even if he doesn’t know everything about us. We got a bigger problem at hand.”

  I sagged. “Like what?”

  “I’m guessing you smoked a lot of dope, drank a lot when you were younger? To keep from Changing?”

  When I was younger? Try right up until this trip, bud. “It kept me mellow, most of the time. Which I think helped me keep from Changing every time I got pissed off, which seemed to be always. But the times it didn’t work, I always blamed it on the moon. And then it helped me forget, once I slipped up.”

  “That’s a lot of reinforcement to overcome. Let’s get to it. Close your eyes.”

  “Why?” I was tired of him poking, prying, and giving orders.

  “Because I said so.”

  I closed my eyes. I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth. I searched for my happy place, a quiet place in the universe.

  I felt an insistent nudge. Gerry’s foot against my side. I opened my eyes. Yawned.

  “That’s not meditation. That’s a nap.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You don’t seem to be trying very hard.”

  “You keep telling me to do the opposite. ‘Let yourself go,’ ‘keep control of yourself,’ ‘just trust me,’ ‘go with your instincts.’ What the hell am I supposed to do?”

  “Danny’s a Normal, but he’s signing up for something incredibly dangerous. You don’t even care about him, about our mission, enough to try to bring your powers on deck.”

  I took a deep breath; he was right, but I didn’t like it. “Hey, you’re asking me to learn stuff that I should have been taught years ago. I didn’t get raised in one of your special schools. I didn’t even have a childhood Normals would consider normal—”

  “Yeah, I get it, Zoe. But now you have a chance to fix so much of that, and you won’t.”

  “Can’t. I can’t do it. Look, you want me to do something I’ve struggled my whole life to avoid. I’ve done everything in my power to resist the Beast, Changing, for the past eight or nine years. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

  “And we need it to.” He looked down, trying to think. “Let me think about this. Go help Ariana in the galley for a while. We’ll try again after lunch.”

  The last thing I wanted to do was try again, so helping Ariana was fine.

  “That didn’t take long,” she said, looking up from a grocery list.

  “Little break,” I said. “Need some help?”

  “Not a lot of room in here. How about you take these on deck and peel them?” she said, handing me a bowl full of eggplant. “Ordinarily I’d just cook them skins on, but these are still pretty tough.”

  Great, I thought as I took the bowl. I’m banished from the galley, too.

  I sat there peeling eggplant while the wind whipped my hair. That reminded me: I looked up just in time to see one of my bras go sailing off the line, off into the wild blue—

  Will reached up and caught it. He glanced down at it, at me, and smiled.

  I just about melted; his smile still did that to me. Then he fastened it back on the line, making sure to loop the bra through its own strap so it couldn’t get loose again. He did the same with the other things, finding clever ways to keep them all from sailing away.

  Will hanging up my laundry still looked natural to me.

  “How’s Danny?” I asked.

  “Tough morning. We’re taking a breather,” he said. “This doesn’t look like Fangborn Academy.”

  “It’s detention.” I shrugged. “I’ve been fighting my Fangborn nature for a long time, Will.” And I gave up everything to do it, I added to myself.

  He hunkered down and replaced an eggplant peel that had escaped. “There’s an awful lot at stake, you know. Beyond our own interests. That’s why Gerry’s so afraid he’ll fail.”

  “Afraid I’ll fail, you mean. He’s acting like I’m going to get all this in three or four days when it takes a whole culture more than sixteen years to train a real Fangborn.”

  “You’re a real Fangborn, and no, he’ll be the one who fails. You’re right; you don’t have any of the training an adult Fangborn has. You don’t have the training an eight-year-old has. So when the world has descended into chaos, when the Fangborn are either overwhelmed and exterminated or in a state of civil war, fighting for the right to survive, or the unhappy peacekeepers in a genocidal stalemate, it won’t be a twenty-something stray people will blame. It will be the full-grown warrior who failed to get the edge that might have won.”

  I put down my knife. “As if I couldn’t feel any worse…”

  “The point’s not to make you feel bad. The point is to impress you with what’s at stake. It’s not just you and Danny anymore, Zoe.” He got up, brushed off his hands, and moved aft. He turned back. “It may not even get to that. The last figurine might be missing, and maybe Knight won’t be able to get the juice to pull off his plan. But if in the meantime we run into Dmitri again…wouldn’t you like to unleash on him? And know you’ve got control over it?”

  He glanced over at the clothesline, a brightly colored row of underwear, merrily dancing on the wind like a row of cancan dancers. He didn’t quite turn around before I saw him grin again. He always did enjoy lingerie.

  I sighed and went back to my work. If nothing else, I was good at peeling eggplant.

  Gerry wasn’t at lunch. Things were worse than I thought.

  “He’s working on something below,” Claudia said when I asked.

  “Should I bring him a plate or something?” I said. Apologies went better with food.

  “No thanks. He ate.” She laughed. “Trust me; if he’s hungry, he won’t stay away long.”

  He didn’t. I saw him on deck while I was helping Ariana clean up after lunch. He was typing quickly on a laptop. “We’re gonna try something different,” he said without looking up. “I can’t do this the way I usually would, in hours instead of years. So I got a plan.”

  “I think it’s risky,” Ariana said. She and Claudia had come up on deck.

  “It is risky,” Claudia agreed. “Perhaps impossible.”

  “You’re only saying that because no one’s ever done it before,” Gerry said. He finished scanning the screen, hit a key, then closed the cover. “What we’re going to try to do is suggest you Change.”

  “I’ve told you. I like the suggestion,” I said. “Just not sure how to implement it.”

  “No, I mean, we’re gonna get you to Change, and at the same time, Claudia’s gonna give you a little jab with some suggestibility venom behind it. It should incline you, when you think of a certain phrase, to want to Change. To give you a push.”

  “Yeah, but what’s going to make me Change in the first place?”

  “I’m going to Change, like we did in Berlin. If we need to, Ariana can, too, but I think she’s just here to keep an eye on Claudia.”

  “What’s gonna happen to Claudia?”

  “We don’t know,” she said. “Like Gerry said, no one’s ever tried doing this before. There’s never, at least not in the records I’ve seen, been the need.”

  “We don’t know anything’s going to happen,” Ariana said. “Let’s not get excited before something goes wrong.”

  “Our main concern is you.” Claudia caught her hair, whipping about in the wind, and tied it back. “I don’t like you having a crutch; if you do ever get the chance to train yo
urself properly, it might make it much more difficult. And—”

  “And we don’t know what a dose of vamp juice will do to you while you’re in mid-Change,” Gerry finished. “Not really.”

  “What do you mean, not really?”

  “Messing with Fangborn blood chemistry is always hazardous, and we know nothing about your blood heritage. Doing something like this, it’s so risky it’s not sanctioned by the Family. Most of the Families worldwide signed agreements during the Cold War not to attempt this outside a very controlled environment.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not much use as it is. This might help. Let’s give it a shot.” I looked around. “Where we gonna do this, and how?”

  “Right here. I’ll Change, you try to go, and Claudia will bite you.”

  I remembered what I’d seen her do with Danny. Alarm must have showed on my face.

  “Don’t worry,” Claudia said. “You’ll feel nothing. Our fangs are designed to leave no marks, and there’ll be plenty of anesthetic.”

  “No marks unless we want to leave marks,” Ariana corrected.

  “But first, we need a phrase for you to think on. A mantra, a key,” Claudia said, ignoring Ariana. “Something unusual, but not too hard to remember. I don’t want you freaking out if you accidentally hear it.”

  “How about ‘trowel bite’?” I said, thinking of Dmitri and my new favorite memory of him, with my trowel stuck in his thigh.

  They all thought a moment and couldn’t imagine a scenario where it would be commonly used. “Let’s just hope Trowel Bite doesn’t become the world’s next greatest rock band,” Gerry said. “Ready everyone?”

  We all nodded.

  “Here we go.”

  Chapter 24

  Claudia Changed.

  I didn’t feel it the same way I did when Gerry had Changed; maybe because I wasn’t expecting it, maybe because it wasn’t the same vibe. Or maybe because it was only halfway: She was now bipedal, dark violet, her hair and lips purple, almost black. Her nose receded, her fangs extended, her claws grew.

  I kept telling myself she was a friend. But it was weird, somehow more alien than when I’d seen Gerry as a wolf-man, and I was glad we were at sea. She looked pretty funny, a snakelike monster in shorts and a bikini top, her purple hair in a messy ponytail.