Seven Kinds of Hell

by Dana Cameron

  Will hesitated, then said, “You know, we’re going to need to spend some time breaking down what happened out there. What happened to you. People saw some seriously spooky—not to mention dangerous—things happening. We need to understand.”

  I nodded. “Sure. I’ll do my best.” I held up my right arm. “But you can’t tell me there weren’t already whole batteries of tests done on this while I was conked out.”

  There were faint lines in marker on the flesh of my arm, above the bracelet. The sort of thing doctors do to pinpoint a location when using a laser. It looked like I’d been scanned, X-rayed, and a whole bunch of other things while I was unconscious.

  Will’s mouth tightened. “I worked very hard to make sure you were treated well. That the docs were only making sure this wouldn’t harm you.”

  I snorted. “More likely wouldn’t hurt them.” I stared at the bracelet. It was made of flat gemstones ranging from deepest violet, ruby, sapphire, and emerald to palest translucence; through the two or three colorless stones, I could almost make out the veins, muscle, and bone of my arm. One dark-blue stone was dull and cracked, its surface blurred. The stones were mounted in thin bands of metallic wire; from a distance it looked like cloisonné or a cheap imitation of some rich, ancient wrist brace, stones mounted in gold and silver.

  From a distance. The gold wire really was gold; the silver wire was platinum. Will told me there was an ongoing debate over the nature of the stones, because every time someone had attempted to examine it while I was unconscious, they received an electrical shock.

  The bracelet was actually sunk into my skin and bone, a part of me. Nothing short of removing the lower portion of my arm would remove it.

  “Zoe.” Will had that stick-up-his-ass TA look on his face. “You’re going to cooperate, right? This is weird, and it’s dangerous. I’m worried about you.”

  “Yessir. I’m going to be good. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of fighting.”

  “Good.” He gave me the most amazing smile, one that knit bone and made me melty all at once. “I’m tired of having to chase you.”

  Danny came in just then, and I wouldn’t have thought he could hug so hard. I didn’t care; we laughed, cried a little, and talked over each other. Finally I had to sit back.

  “I didn’t get him, Danny,” I said, a little out of breath. “Will says I didn’t kill Dmitri. I’m sorry.”

  Danny shrugged. “You took a chunk out of him. That’s a good start. We’ll get him next time.”

  I loved “we.” I loved “next time.” Amazing words, the best ever. “You’re going to work with Will?” I said.

  “Yup. Signed away all my rights, got a TB test, and peed in a cup. I’m now a government employee, and Will can’t boss me around anymore.”

  Will snorted. “We’ll compare pay grades and see who the boss is.”

  “Hey, guys,” I said. It was wonderful having them crowd me and bicker. I felt a glimmer of that long-lost summer. “You better take it outside. I’m getting tired.”

  Danny gave me a kiss on the forehead. “Catch you later, Zo.” He was whistling as he shut the door behind him.

  As he got up, Will said, “Zoe, you’ve got a job now, if you want it. TRG-in-training.” He cocked his head. “We’ll be working together, if you like.”

  I liked it a lot.

  It was great, on paper.

  Over the next week, I got my strength back, read up on what I needed to know about the Fangborn, about myself.

  Danny and I trained together. I got more lessons in my powers. We mourned Sean.

  I made love with Will every night. There is nothing at all sexy about a hospital bed in a military installation, but being with the man I loved, who knew me entirely now—both the good and the, well, strange—made the mind-altering fireworks at Claros seem tame. There were moments where I almost felt the same power I had when I’d been in communion with the vessel. And yet, after, finding myself in a tangle of sweaty sheets, I’d lie in Will’s arms, listening to his pounding heart as it slowed to a normal rate, and it was as wonderful and familiar as anything.

  And every morning I woke up to him smiling at me. Glorious.

  It wasn’t a perfect summer, but it was pretty damn wonderful.

  Except…

  I loved being together with Will, and I was delighted that, after all the trouble I’d caused him, Danny had a direction and a real passion in his new research job, something I’d never seen before. I liked the idea of getting to know my new Fangborn Family. They wanted me to take over researching artifacts and antiquities, and the TRG were willing to send me back to school, all expenses paid.

  A real life, with all the trimmings, on a silver platter. A gift from the gods.

  But a gift that comes with a price isn’t a gift.

  The price started showing up in small ways.

  The TRG wanted to find out exactly what I was and what my groovy new jewelry could do. I’m allergic to white lab coats and have never liked going to the doctor, so I wasn’t keen on hearing “just a few more tests today,” with no end in sight. I tried my best to cooperate, and Will and the Steubens had promised they’d look into changing my situation, but I didn’t like the way they had specialists asking me questions about my background and my memories, and if I could move the pencil by thinking, and what were the limits of my proximity sense, and were there any other side effects from the bracelet?

  I’d started to learn, back on the yacht, that a few things, like my proximity sense, like a limited ability to suggest things, weren’t standard on werewolves. I seemed to have a blend of Fangborn abilities. But Gerry and I were the only ones who understood I’d had these abilities before the bracelet. I suspected it was due to the testing Knight had said was performed on my mother, but kept my mouth shut.

  Yeah, I admitted, there were side effects, all right. I admitted to headaches and stress, mostly from their tests. I wouldn’t tell them the latest side effect I’d noticed, because I realized I was being isolated.

  At first I thought something big must be heating up somewhere. My friends had less and less time to visit. And then one day Will didn’t visit at all. Or the day after, or the day after that.

  At the same time, the Steubens and Danny stopped showing up, too.

  This stunk to high heaven. I didn’t like it and made the inquiries as carefully as I could.

  They were on other business, I was told.

  “And didn’t say good-bye?” I asked.

  I was met with shrugs, a change of topic.

  I didn’t believe for one second Will would leave me without so much as a word. Danny would have broken any number of rules to say good-bye—and what emergency missions do linguists get sent on, anyway? I wouldn’t buy Dr. Claudia, knowing my trust issues, taking off without an e-mail, a text, an explanation. Even Gerry—I somehow knew that, with his Galahad instincts, he wouldn’t abandon me, not without a very good reason.

  Everyone had left without letting me know? That was just the purest bullshit.

  Worse than that. No matter how much I tried to explain, the white coats didn’t seem to buy my side of the story. About how I’d activated Pandora’s Box and what happened after. I tried to describe the temporary omniscience, the fleeting omnipotence, but they didn’t believe me. They didn’t even believe I’d discovered Pandora’s Box, for the simple reason that there was no proof. No evidence. No one had seen me with it, not even Adam Nichols. Sure, folks could attest to bright lights, loud noises, and odd sensations, but this could all be attributed to the fight, explosions, nerve gas.

  “What about this?” I said, holding up my wrist. “I didn’t get this at the Duty Free!”

  Their response was that it was very interesting, but so far inert as far as their tests went. A funky new brand of surgically implanted self-adornment.

  “Are you kidding me?” I shook my head and did an impromptu demonstration: I Changed, assuming each of my forms. Each time the bracelet was there, unchanged each ti
me.

  “Wouldn’t my Fangborn body spit that out if it was human jewelry? How come it stays put and adapts to the new shape of my arm?”

  “We’re still looking into it,” was all the response I got.

  “And what about everyone who was with me, before Ephesus? They didn’t notice me taking time off to get implants!”

  “You were alone with Senator Knight for nearly a day,” they said. “That’s what we’re trying to investigate. We need proof.”

  Clearly they weren’t telling me everything they knew, trying to sell that weak tea about the bracelet and “proof.” They didn’t even believe it themselves. They just didn’t have a better answer yet, one they could believe.

  I understood, sort of. There were too many questions, and I was trying my best to get them answered. But not everyone seemed to agree on what the real questions were.

  Before he suddenly vanished, I had been working with Gerry, talking about the different tastes of blood and what it could tell, and I’d become convinced: I’d killed a Fangborn who was evil. “What about the guy in Knight’s compound?” I asked. “I mean, I know I’m a noob, but I know evil and I know Fangborn!”

  “There is no such thing,” Gerry had insisted. “History tells us this. Don’t worry, Zoe, we’ll work through it. You’ve got a lot to learn, but you’ll get there.”

  For all his insistence that history never recorded such a thing as an evil Fangborn, I had to wonder. Any history is incomplete; every history focuses on what is most important to its culture. Gerry had been raised drinking the Kool-Aid, I had not. I knew there were evil Fangborn.

  “No evidence for that” had been the official response, too.

  The bracelet, and my insistence I’d removed an evil Fangborn predator, was my undoing. The investigators began to treat me as unreliable. They kept asking me the same questions in different ways, as if I would change my story. I sneaked a peek at the file one of them had left behind, and it was full of files from my many schools, informing who it may concern that my permanent record was one of noncooperation and truancy, with borderline psychosis or ADHD or dyslexia or lactose intolerance, or whatever the fad diagnosis of the day was.

  Well, yeah, I explained. I’m a werewolf who was left on her own to discover what she was. Bound to be a few bumps in the road growing up that way. Really, I’m doing my best now, even without my friends.

  And I was trying, until the day one of them slipped and mentioned that the current theory was that there really was a Pandora’s Box, but I’d given it to Senator Knight.

  I lost my shit. I half-Changed and put my fist through the wall. It wasn’t that big a deal; it was only sheetrock, but it freaked out the human analyst.

  I went into a funk for a week. It had only been a couple of months since my mother died. Unoccupied by adventures, I now felt all the grief I hadn’t allowed myself to feel. I had the confusion over her past and mine—and concern over what the experiments performed on her had done to my powers.

  Alone in a hospital room, grieving, and considerably messed up. It all felt awfully familiar.

  I realized I was dying for a joint.

  I felt as if I’d lost all the progress I’d made in the past weeks, but eventually I figured out it wasn’t lost. I hadn’t lost Will and Danny or the Steubens; I hadn’t misplaced my newfound knowledge of myself and what I was. All I’d gained had been taken from me, by Dmitri or Knight, and now by my new employers, who were lying to me. Probably lying to my friends, too—or worse. Was it possible Danny and Will had been imprisoned? Perhaps a government vampire “suggested” I’d never existed, or, even easier, that I’d run off again.

  That’s when I realized that I needed to get out of there. I had to find out what happened to my friends and save myself.

  By my logic, there were three possible scenarios: that I was a traitor, having given Fangborn artifacts away to Knight; that I had possession of a vastly powerful artifact, a weapon that was now considered the property of the United States; or that I was a free citizen and could leave any time I wanted.

  Guess which I picked.

  I started a whole bunch of my own tests. I was no longer allowed outside within the compound, even with an escort. One day, when I got back to my room, I found that the door no longer opened from the inside.

  I was only allowed to go out for a run with escorts. They didn’t have weapons on them, but I noticed the guys at the guard towers now had hellebore toxin shooters.

  I told them over and over that the bracelet hadn’t done anything. I didn’t tell them about the one new side effect I had noticed.

  I was crazy again.

  I’d started hearing voices, all the time. Whispering to me. I thought it was tinnitus until I realized I could make out words. The voices were suggesting ways I could break out, which I figured was my own subconscious.

  It took a few more days to recognize it was Sean’s voice I heard. It sounded just like him, wiseass comments and all. Eventually I realized I was agreeing or disagreeing when he pointed out something I should know. But I didn’t realize it might not be insanity, until one night, when I started answering him. And noticed the fractured blue tile in the bracelet glowed with each word I heard.

  My mother had heard voices, too. She’d been part of an experimental group of Fangborn, without their knowledge, without their consent, and I wouldn’t be party to that. Not even for the good of the nation.

  I wasn’t good at staying in one place, anyway.

  Maybe it was my own paranoia, maybe it was simple bad judgment. Maybe it was the bracelet, or Sean, or guilt, but I had decided for sure.

  More than time to go.

  I wasn’t sure how I’d do it. They were clamping down on me big time, and I’d started to notice I felt dizzy and tired all the time. It wasn’t my food; I woke one night to the gentle hiss of a gas coming through my air vents. Hellebore-based, if my nose was to be trusted. It made me drowsy before I could do anything about it, and in the morning I had a headache and couldn’t concentrate.

  But one day shortly thereafter, I woke up without the headache. I didn’t do or say anything unusual, though, and acted as though I was still gassed. I’d wait for a chance.

  The chance came late that afternoon. A man in a lab coat appeared in my room. Tall and thin, with dark red hair and freckles that were incongruous on a serious demeanor.

  “I know you’re not drugged.”

  I acted woozy. “Huh?”

  “I know you’re not drugged, because I swapped the canister of hellebore toxin gas for oxygen myself.”

  “What do you want?” I sat up.

  “I want to help you get out of here. We don’t have a lot of time. I pulled the security camera offline, but the guy I offered to cover for will be back soon. We need to get going before he finds his station unmanned.”

  I suspected a trap, possibly a trick to get me to reveal the powers of Pandora’s bracelet. “Uh-huh.”

  The guy wasn’t much older than me but was thin and worn. “Look. A number of years ago, I was a college student. I was the night manager for a little art cinema in Massachusetts, and one night after work I was attacked by three guys. I would have been killed that night, except there was a young woman who turned into a wolf and saved me.”

  My jaw dropped. If he’d announced, “No, Luke, I am your father,” I couldn’t have been more stunned. “That was you?”

  He smiled briefly. “And it was you. Suffice it to say, my interest in werewolves was piqued, and after a long series of adventures, I found myself working for the TRG.” He frowned. “But here’s the thing. Either the Fangborn are citizens, with all the rights of citizens, or they’re not. Until they’re going to come out and lock up all the Fangborn, I don’t believe they should be holding you. Lying to you.”

  “Will, the Steubens—they didn’t just go away about their own affairs and leave me here.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know how they got rid of them, what they told them, and that w
orries me.”

  “You know, this is a hell of a way for the FBI to treat its employees,” I said, remembering Will’s description of the TRG in the café in Berlin.

  “Things are changing,” he said, his face dark. “There’s been some reshuffling upstairs. I don’t like the direction we’re taking now.”

  “Reshuffling?”

  “The director’s brought in a new head of the Biological and Historical Intelligence branch. I don’t know the new guy personally, but I hear he comes with friends in high places and worked closely with Senator Knight himself.”

  I felt sick. “You can get me out of here?”

  He nodded. “I’m going to trigger an alarm on the far side of the building in a few minutes. Can you get out and over the wall, if it’s not guarded, in that time?”

  “No problem.”

  “Is there anything you need to pack up?”

  “No.” My old backpack had been packed for days. Just in case.

  “OK, give me five minutes to get over there and two to get the diversion going.”

  I grabbed his arm. “Thank you—?”

  He squeezed my hand. “Rob Watson. And you’re welcome. Thank you, Zoe, for what you did all those years ago.”

  I nodded. It was nice to think my youth hadn’t completely poisoned my adult life.

  “Seven minutes, OK?”

  I picked up my bag and waited by the door, keeping it open a crack after he left.

  Seven minutes later, an alarm was dimly audible. I waited until I could no longer sense anyone in the hall near me. I ran out to the main corridor and down to a side office. I threw my bag out, then eased myself out the window.

  I thought about Will and the last night we’d spent together. I loved him desperately, perhaps even more than before the first time I left him. And Will loved me, fur, fangs, and all. I knew that. I had to find out what happened, how they managed to convince him to leave me. Or, if it hadn’t been convincing but coercion, I had to fix that, too. Same for Danny and the Steubens.

  I sneaked down past the main gate and did a wide loop around until I found the outside road. I knew most of the staff were at the other end, so I wouldn’t be seen.