by Dana Cameron
Claudia started talking to me, low, so I almost couldn’t hear her words. It didn’t matter; I felt the effect immediately. I felt comfortable, relaxed, a little sleepy at the same time. At the same time, I wanted to pay attention; I wanted to focus on following Gerry into the Change. I was there, on deck, ready to do whatever they wanted.
Honestly, it was the best I’d felt in years. I almost didn’t mind it wasn’t entirely my will driving.
“You ready, Zoe?” she said.
“Dig in, Claudia,” I said. I wanted to be cool about it, but I was too drowsy. A part of me wasn’t inclined to watch the process, any more than I could look at a needle going into my arm at the doctor’s office.
I felt her take my hand. Warm, dry. A little pressure, the merest idea of a bite, somewhere at the back of my thoughts…
Then I couldn’t not look.
Claudia held my hand, her mouth over my wrist, working in that inhuman way. I wasn’t scared, but it was pretty freaky to remember her as I’d met her in Boston. Ariana had Changed, too, and she whispered in Claudia’s ear, guiding or anchoring her.
Ariana looked up, her green-and-black-toned scales still alien to me. Her voice was familiar, though her Italian-accented English was now made even more exotic by vampiric hisses.
“Zoe, when you want to Change, remember the words ‘trowel bite.’ Gerry, go!”
Gerry Changed halfway.
I felt the urge I had in Berlin. This time, I didn’t think about it, I just went with it. Let the pull of Gerry’s Change bring my own. But this time, it was more like a bicycle drafting behind an M1 Abrams tank.
Claudia let go of my arm, because she got a mouthful of fur and because I suddenly needed all four limbs for balance. I rolled around on the deck awkwardly because my tail was stuck in my shorts.
Gerry had pulled out a knife and said, “Zoe, stay still.”
I waited patiently as he opened up the back seam of my shorts, just enough for my tail to stick out. The rest of my clothing hung oddly, but I didn’t care. I raced down the stairs to the wheel, woofed at Ben, and turned tail and ran back to the bow. I skidded on the smooth deck boards and would have gone right under the railing and into the drink if Ariana hadn’t grabbed the collar of my shirt just in time.
“Take it easy, Zoe,” she said. “First you master the Change. Then you master shipboard life as a wolf. Can you go back to skinself? Just think of your phrase and let the suggestion take you.”
I tried, and when I thought trowel bite, I felt the urge coming on me. I followed it.
With limited success. I was back on two feet, but a wolf-woman.
Before I could get discouraged, Claudia looked up, a little blearily. “Don’t sweat it right away. Check it out. Last time you were half-Changed, you didn’t even know it. Get the hang of this body, this skin. Can you say something?”
“Of course I can say something,” was what I’d meant to say. But my palate and teeth had altered dramatically, and it took a few tries. Thinking about it made it even harder. “Yes.”
“Good! Keep working on it. Start with the alphabet, try a couple of tongue-twisters when you get that down. It’ll help with your enunciation.”
Gerry helped when I got hung up on some of the harder sounds. I watched how he moved his mouth to compensate for the lack of human lip structure, and pretty soon I was very nearly selling sea-shells by the seashore.
Will came on deck and set down a tray of food. If I’d been capable of blushing, I would have. It took all my self-possession to keep from running away.
He truly knew what I was now.
It didn’t matter. We weren’t together anymore. So why did I always feel so amped-up crazy when he was near me?
“If you can Change back, you can have a snack,” he said, waving a cookie at me.
“It’s not obedience training,” I said slowly. He was grinning wickedly. “Wait, what’s this?” I pretended to fish around in my pocket and pulled out my fist, middle finger extended.
“Good, Zoe! Awesome pronunciation!” Gerry had gone to skinself and made a beeline for the sandwiches. “Thanks, Will.”
Claudia and Ariana also crowded Will and his tray. The thought of three hungry Fangborn descending on food I suddenly realized I was craving should have provided the impetus for me to Change instantly.
I got tangled up in my own thoughts.
“If you get stuck, Zoe,” Gerry said from around a too-large mouthful of sandwich, “just calm down. Focus, and remember your phrase.”
“What’s the phrase?” Will asked.
“Trowel bite.”
“Trowel bite!” Will said, raising his hands.
“It’s a psychological trigger, not a magic spell, you jackass,” I said. I even got “trigger” and “jackass” out pretty good, but I still wasn’t human. I closed my eyes and tried to center myself, suddenly seeing the point of what Gerry had been trying to teach me this morning.
A sudden shift in perception and swirl in my reality, and I was back in my own skin. One of my own skins, I reminded myself.
No more demonizing the Beast. No more demonizing myself.
There was one sandwich left, and I dove on it, slapping Gerry’s hand out of the way. “Nice try, buster. Back off.”
“Well, when you finish that, I made you this.” He took a folder from Will’s tray and handed it to me. Since I couldn’t eat it, I hadn’t noticed it before.
“What is it?” I opened it and saw a sheaf of papers clipped together. No cover sheet, no index, just a set of lists interspersed with text. “‘The Ten Lessons’? ‘The Twenty Laws’? I don’t get it.”
“A Fangborn primer,” Gerry said. “Not as good as we keep at home for the kids, but then, we keep very close account of those. This isn’t nearly as comprehensive, but it should give you an idea.”
“And if the worst happens, and someone does find it,” Ariana said, “I can tell them it’s part of the prototype for the game I’m designing.”
“If the worst happens, it won’t be someone finding that,” Gerry said. The humor was gone from his face.
“Just because things suck,” Claudia said, “doesn’t mean we get lax about everything else.”
Danny joined us, and that jarred loose memories of Dungeons & Dragons, long afternoons with rule books, polyhedral dice, and graph paper. I started laughing so hard I nearly coughed up my sandwich.
“What? What is it?” he said.
I held it up when I could breathe again, tears streaming down my face. “They made me a Monster Manual, Danny.”
“Good to know there’s a manual,” he said. “Can I see it?”
I shrugged, handed it to him, and looked around. “You can read the whole thing when I’m done, I guess. Everyone seems to agree you’re on the team.”
He glanced through it before handing it back. “You know, Ariana, the more original documents I look at, the more I might be able to help. I can get a lot of information from the arcane prophesy sentence structures and word choices that a regular translator might have missed.”
Both Ariana and Will looked interested. “We have some copies of the Tapestry text and some others on my machine,” he said. “Since you’re on the team. The funding at the TRG has been so strapped, we’ve only been able to deal with the most immediate of problems, so antiquities research has given way mostly to biological research. Anything you could do, we’d appreciate.”
“Speaking of what you can do.” Gerry turned to me. “Tonight. You. A brief lecture on what we will find at Claros. What we should be looking for and the most likely place we’ll find the figurine.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me? I’ve never been there. I had one class on religion and temple sites, maybe heard of Claros just once before…before London.”
“But you know the architecture and city layouts, or whatever—you know roughly what to expect,” Gerry said. “I said before, Zoe, whatever little you have is way more than what we have. And we all need to be up to
speed when we reach the site.”
“I can cobble something together, if someone can get me a computer and some Wi-Fi. But honestly? Most of these sites have been excavated for decades, even centuries. There’s no guaranteeing the artifact will still be on the site. And even if someone excavated it, there’s a good chance it will be in a museum in London or Berlin or Rome or Istanbul or Ankara. If it hasn’t been lost, stolen, or sold.”
“We have something else on our side, though,” Claudia said. “We have Zoe’s disk.”
“It’s a map,” I agreed, “but it’s very crude. It really only lists those four towns. It’s not going to help us on the ground.”
“Unless proximity to the other figurines was what caused that column of light.”
We stared at Claudia.
“Like, how?” Gerry said. “They were…texting each other?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “When I think about it, I come up with Victorian words like ‘resonance’ or ‘vibrations’ or ‘refraction.’”
“The more I think about it, the more I think you’ve been in the sun too long. You’re the last person who’d be hinting that these things are magic, Claud. You’re the one always yapping about ‘science.’”
“Yes. Just because I can’t explain something doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Zoe and her golden disk aren’t shining right now, and they weren’t before she got to Delos and—more importantly—close to Adam’s party. Assuming they had the figurines with them, I think that’s what caused that reaction. If that’s true, then it stands to reason we may be able to locate the fourth and final figurine by proximity, too.”
“And what if the fourth figurine is underground?” Gerry said. “Or smashed into bits? Or…any of a hundred other things?”
“Then we’ll be no worse off than we are now. But I think it’s a good hypothesis.”
Gerry rolled his eyes, but I liked Claudia’s notion. “It felt like…it wanted to be somewhere,” I said. “It was excited about something. And there was a response, the first time, when I was in my room in Venice. There was a burst of light, and then a kind of…review…of my memories.”
Everyone stared at me. I felt incredibly lame. “You had to be there, I guess, but that’s what I got.”
“I guess that makes it final,” Ariana said. “You’re the heir to the Beacon.”
As tidy as that sounded, I’m not sure I liked my new title and potential status as ender of the known world.
Chapter 25
I practiced several more hours until we found a mooring off a small island to the east by late afternoon. I spent a couple of hours with the reports I had from Professor Schulz and from Jenny Kelner and the images Will got me from the TRG files with the flaky Internet we were able to pick up from the nearby marina. I promised myself that as soon as I had any money, I was going to buy myself an electronic reader so I could download books instantly. It would sure beat trying to re-create notes I dimly recalled from classes years ago.
Ben and Ariana arrived back from the marina with boxes of supplies and something that smelled like fresh-baked bread and cheese—bourek. Food was turning out to be a quick gateway into a new language for me. Once the carnage of dinner was cleared away, I got out my notes and, with a nervous glance around, started to talk.
“OK, so, temples are basically the houses of the gods or heroes. Inside, they’re made up of a series of concentric spaces that lead you into the holy of holies. Outside, you are led to the edge of the precinct by a sacred way, which is sometimes even paved with marble. This leads to a reception area or propylaea outside the temple area, where people would gather and wait to be greeted by the priests. Closer to the temple, there was an altar, which was outside the temple because sacrifices were to be shared among the populace—only the bones, hides, and smoke belonged to the gods.”
I looked around, a little sheepishly. “That, traditionally, was considered to be the doing of Prometheus, for what it’s worth. He tricked the gods into accepting the lesser parts, so humans could have the meat.
“Generally speaking, the temple was organized so you moved from profane to sacred. Past the altar, you went up steps to a platform, where columns around the temple on the platform separated it from the outside world. An interior room without windows—the cella—was further divided by a row of columns. Each time you move forward, you’re being prepared, in a sense, to encounter your god. The cella also had a porch at the front, the pronaos, and a screened-off sacred space in the back, the adyton, or holy of holies, where the god was housed. Usually that was an important statue, and very valuable. This part of the temple often acted as a vault, housing the treasure from both the temple and town.”
I looked around, but no one seemed to have any questions so far. “Most of the temples in Greek sites were located near springs or water sources, also considered sacred. Often there were even earlier temples to other gods here, so there’s a kind of pedigree of holiness associated with these sites, going back thousands of years.”
“But these are sites in Turkey, not Greece,” Ben said. “We have to go through customs tomorrow.”
“Right, I mean ‘Greek’ in the sense that these sites were Greek colonies. And actually, ‘Greek’ is kind of a misnomer, because we’re really dealing with city-states like Sparta or Athens, and not what we think of as the modern state.”
I hoped he wouldn’t ask any more because I was only about three chapters ahead of my small class. “The towns, too, followed a regular format. They were usually within walls for protection, and the streets were often gridded. They all had acropolises, or high places of religious or secular power, as well as temples, theaters—which were also for religious festivals—and shopping areas or agoras, houses, baths, running water, and gymnasia. Malls, gyms, and plumbing—all you need for a civilized life.
“In this region, the towns usually were on the coast, so they relied on trade; they were often within eyesight of each other. If they failed, it was because their harbors silted up, pirates raided them, or there was an earthquake.” I shook myself. “OK, that’s enough of generalities. Now for the specifics. This “—I pulled out a map from my pile—” is Claros. It’s been excavated by French and Turkish teams, and it’s pretty important because so much of the subterranean temple structure is intact. Also, the oracle was supposedly the second most important in Asia after Delphi.”
“I thought that was Delos?” Gerry said.
“That’s what every oracular site that isn’t Delphi claims,” Will said. “Big money in temples and oracles, today and in ancient times.”
“It’s important to us,” I said, “because we think that’s where the last figurine or key can be found, if it’s still undiscovered. I’ve looked through the reports I have and everything online. I don’t see any mention of any pottery with figurines. Usually something unusual like that would be the star artifact, and made much of.”
Will looked over at the map. “But most of this temple’s been excavated, right? Wouldn’t they have found any of the figurines or pottery that might be associated with the temple? I hate to be a buzzkill, but I’m afraid if there was a figurine here, it’s long gone.”
“Maybe. But we have to check here. The problem is narrowing it down to looking in one or two places—these sites are extensive. So I have to ask you guys: Are there places that you—we—Fangborn—generally leave messages for each other?”
Ariana frowned. “You mean besides our phones?”
“OK, that’s why you’re in business and not history,” I said. “I mean from the old days. Were there traditions of meeting at the nearest church, say, or at the city gates at midnight, or by the local water source?” I thought a minute. “Wait—vampires can cross moving water, right? Go into churches? That’s not real, right?”
“Right.” Claudia was trying hard to be patient. “I like sunbathing, I like garlic, I don’t like silver, but it’s not an allergy. I don’t feed on humans.”
“I do,” Ariana said, preen
ing. “But only if they ask nicely first.”
“You’re a disgrace, Ariana,” Claudia said. “So much for getting rid of the notion that all vampires are oversexed.”
“I’m not oversexed enough then.”
Now it was my turn to strive for patience.
“Grandpa used to talk about meeting at the edge of town, or the city gates or something,” Gerry said. “Something about respecting the territories of other Fangborn, I think? Claud?”
“Sounds right.”
“OK, so we’ll look near the gateways to the temple—propylaea—and for anything that suggests an official entry point. I’ll make up a list, narrow it down to probables and possibles.” I looked through the satellite images and the maps from the articles. “These are really nice, Will. The definition is very good.”
For a moment, the two of us bent over the maps was like the best of the old times. Magic of a familiar sort. Our eyes met. With a raggedy breath, I turned away.
Will cleared his throat and leafed through the maps. “The guys at the TRG can get some time on a satellite for photos, if you give them enough notice. It’s even better than a regular aerial shot.”
“Why do you need different pictures, Zoe?” Ben asked. “These drawings are much clearer.”
“Those are the archaeological surveys,” I said. “They are good, but they only show what was excavated—actually discovered—and what was on the ground nearby. The photos are helpful because if you compare it with the drawings—you can see these different colored spots? Those are changes in the ground, and may be some indication of what is beneath the surface. The plants will vary, depending on the soil, and there’ll be differential drying out, depending on what’s underneath them. You use a little bit of everything that’s available.”
“Isn’t it assuming an awful lot, to go by what we are saying our grandparents said?” he said. “It doesn’t seem logical.”