Seven Kinds of Hell (26 page)

If I squinted really hard, they looked like the heads of snakes. Almost the same configuration as the top of the caduceus, staring at each other. With a significant difference.

There was some kind of clay pot suspended between them.

Anyone else looking up might have only seen a flourish with a knob, a finial, a decoration. Suddenly, to me, it was fraught with meaning.

I knew I needed to get at whatever was in that pot.

“Sean!”

I jerked my head toward the pot, and he understood right away. He sighed but looked around for observers. Seeing none, he laced his fingers together.

I stepped into the cradle of his hands, and we nodded together in time: one, two—

On
three,
Sean heaved me up, and I stretched as far as I could to reach the window ledge on the second floor. I couldn’t quite reach it, until Sean pushed me up farther. After some precarious scrabbling, I grabbed the sill. I found a toehold between aging brick and somehow pulled myself up.

“Nice going! Now get it and get down!” Sean hissed from below.

Easier said than done. I squatted in the window, hanging on to the inside of the frame with my left hand while I carefully reached with my right hand.

Three inches too short.

I tried to stand, half-hunched, and reached out.

My fingers brushed the pot. It swung back and forth, and now I could tell it was only attached to the terra-cotta decoration by a thin and rusted wire.

Another inch and I could unhook it.

I stretched with everything I had. Maybe a little more; I felt the Beast growing restless inside me.

Another stretch, and I felt my hand…lengthen. Fingers grew clawlike, bones shifted. I panicked and made another desperate grab at the vessel.

I snagged one of the little handles. The wire snapped and I had the pot. I’d also managed to pull off the corner of one of the terra-cotta decorations.

I lost my balance, nearly toppled over. I held onto the window frame with all my might and righted myself.

The terra-cotta embellishment continued to fall as I watched helplessly.

Craa-aack.
Sharp and final, it hit the pavement. The noise echoed through the fading sunlight.

No time to see if anyone heard. I jumped down from the window.

Sean had the sense to not try and catch me.

I landed hard, but rolled, the pot tucked under my arm like a football.

No one else was on the street. No one else had heard.

My epically shitty luck was changing.

I dusted myself off, let Sean help me up. We began walking quickly down the street, back toward Piazza San Marco.

That’s when the shout came up.

Two figures from the opposite end of the street were standing under the roofline. They gestured, shouted again, then began to run toward us.

We took off.

When twilight falls in Venice, the whole city seems to fall into a mystical slumber. The crowds disappear, the fog rolls in over the canals, muffling sounds, and the lack of motor traffic is ever more noticeable. It’s eerie, it’s evocative, and I hoped it would help Sean and me escape.

The thing was, the prickling at the base of my skull made me more and more certain our pursuers were also Fangborn.

I didn’t know—or care—what their politics were. I didn’t want more new friends and family. I had stolen something they wanted back, and I couldn’t let them have it. Maybe it was something Dmitri had sent me for, maybe it was just dumb luck I saw someone’s antique bird feeder on their roof and thought it was an important artifact. Didn’t matter. I didn’t have time for the luxury of curiosity.

We hid in an alleyway near a shop closed up for the night. I realized it was a shop where they made the straw wrappings for Chianti bottles.

“The guy. On the backpacking-in-Europe show.” Sean was wheezing from exertion, and even I was out of breath. “He never hung out. In alleys as nasty as this. The guy on the survival show might have, though.”

“This is off the beaten path. A true Venetian experience.” I started giggling, until a noise in the middle-distance caught my ear. “We’ve got to get going, if you can.”

He nodded, and we were off again.

An hour or two later, I felt an…absence, as if our pursuers were no longer there. It occurred to me that they had been distracted from us by…what had Gerry called it? The call to Change. Perhaps they’d left off chasing us because something worse, something evil, had come along.

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of some evil in the world actually helping me. First in the cemetery in Cambridge, and now.

I was determined not to think about it. “I think we’ve lost them. Let’s head back to the hotel.”

Sean nodded, winded, and we trudged back. He must have been tired because he didn’t even ask about the clay vessel. It was unlike him, but it saved me thinking up another story when he just went to his room. I heard a soft thud behind the closed door; I knew he’d just collapsed onto his bed.

As soon as I got to my room, however, I knew I had to examine the pot. It might be nothing, but maybe it would be my ace in the hole in getting out of this alive.

Besides that, I sensed the pot and its contents were hugely…Fangborn. My automatic recognition of it, the way it warmed as I touched it—this was powerful stuff.

My heart fell as I looked inside my bag.

The vessel was ancient, all right. No magic here. It had crumbled to dust.

I upended my bag in hopes of finding a larger piece.

A puff of reddish smoke came down from my backpack. Despairing, I pulled apart my clothes and carefully shook out each bit. Not only was everything I owned coated in fine red dust, but the pot was completely destroyed. I was at a loss to say how it had
survived up there long enough for me to pull it down but then had disintegrated in our dash from the house.

I frowned. It had seemed sturdy enough during my fall and chase…

Then I saw the disk lying under a notebook, almost blending with the yellow bedspread. I picked it up; it was surprisingly heavy.

A sharp pain in my finger made me cry out, and I saw a drop of blood on the gold surface. There must be a burr on the metal, I thought, but as I gingerly pulled the disk closer to look for it, a light so bright filled my mind I could no longer see my hand or the disk.

Images followed the light, so many and so fast I couldn’t pick any single one out.

I began to recognize the images in a moment, because they were my memories.

I dropped the disk and threw my arm over my face to block it all out.

My head ached as if I’d been clipped with a brick. I tasted copper and bile. When my breathing slowed, I poked the disk, very carefully.

Nothing.

I brushed at the surface with my blood on it, but there was nothing there, no telltale burr, no rough edge I could have cut myself on.

I took a deep breath, then another, and went to the bathroom to wash my hands. I examined my finger carefully, but could see no cut. Nothing to clean out. I rubbed antibiotic ointment into the fingertip anyway before I went out to examine the disk again.

Very, very cautiously I picked it up.

Nothing special happened.

It had to be pure gold. It was so heavy.

It was a very short cylinder, about three and a half inches across and three-quarters of an inch thick. The edges were ornately decorated in a continuous band. The side facing me was blank.

I flipped it over, carefully, carefully. Maybe I had a head-rush, maybe fatigue and my heavy conscience was catching up with me—

I paused.

There were marks. Man-made.

I wasn’t breathing as I tried to find the sense in the lines that were fine, but deeply engraved into the surface. Some were curved, some were straight, and—

—and that one was a letter.

It wasn’t English or any modern language. It looked like Greek, but while I could recognize the alphabet, I don’t read Greek. Some of the letters were…well…archaic looking.

It was the circular form that gave me my first clue. There was a kind of squiggly circle, not entirely closed, that fit inside the edges of the circle. The letters formed four words, distributed unevenly across the surface.

It was a map. The ancient Greeks believed the world was round, the top of a column suspended in space.

Δελϕοι.

OK, the first one was delta, and the next, epsilon and lambda…DEL…

Delpoi?

A thought struck me. I got out my phone and Googled it.

Delphi.

I grabbed my recently acquired and well-worn map of Europe, and compared modern Greece with the shape on the gold disk. It was hopelessly crude by modern standards, but even I could make out the stiletto heel of modern Italy, the mainland of Greece, and coastal Turkey. The names were scattered across what today is the Aegean. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the words were, but a little longer to determine what they represented.

Delphi. Delos. Didyma. Claros.

There was a kind of mark I couldn’t quite read, under Claros, like a compass rose. I assumed it represented the importance of Claros, because, as far as I could remember, compass roses were a later convention.

I knew they were all the sites of temples. More specifically, temples with oracles, all dedicated to Apollo. Importantly, they were places that Grayling had mentioned with relation to the figurines. But what connection might they have to Pandora’s Box?

What I’d originally thought was just touristic trash seemed to be connected to some very heavy-duty temple sites. Sites associated with Apollo, sites associated with oracles. Claudia had said there were oracles among the Fangborn. It got me thinking about the snake aspect of the Fangborn; there were many serpents associated with Apollo. Perhaps this was yet another connection.

I had no idea what the disk might mean. Maybe it was nothing at all to do with my problems, a coincidence, but it was probably worth a fortune in gold alone.

As soon as I had the thought, I knew it was incorrect. The disk
had
to be related to my troubles. The reaction I’d had when Sean had pointed out the Via Cavalli, the way the thing had—
tasted
me was what came to mind—when I picked it up the first time; it was finding out who I was. It wanted to be found. It wanted
me
to find it. Somehow the disk was acting on my Fangborn nature.

That scared the shit out of me.

With shaking hands, I photographed all the objects from several angles with my phone. Just to be on the safe side.

Then I crashed. It was morning, just a few hours before we were supposed to leave. I fell asleep, the disk still in my pocket.

When I woke, I pulled apart all my things and set them on the bed, trying to reorganize and take stock. Underwear was becoming a priority and a problem; I was still OK for toothpaste and had one shirt that wasn’t covered in red dust.

I pulled out the figurines to make sure they were still carefully wrapped. Realizing the cardboard box I’d kept them in was crushed, I cast about for an alternative.

I picked up my plastic pencil box, removed the freezer bag I had closed around it. Its vibrant yellow had faded over the past
twenty years. I emptied out the playing cards and the SuperBalls, and sadly said farewell to Optimus Prime, setting him on the bedside table. Nice for him to end his days peacefully in Venice.

I carefully tucked the figurines into the box and nodded, satisfied. A snug fit, but better protection. I slipped the freezer bag around it, another layer of waterproofing.

The door opened. Sean or the maid. Cursing, I jammed the pencil case into my bag.

“I’ll be three more minutes.
Tre minuti, per favore, signora.
”

It wasn’t Sean or the maid.

It was Dmitri’s attacker from Berlin.

He seemed twice as large as he had in Berlin, close up and personal. Still with the Red Sox cap, blond, and sunburned now. He’d been out in the Italian sun, it seemed. His nose wasn’t quite straight, as if it had been broken and badly set. Scary, intense light-blue eyes. “Adam Nichols. I’m a government official.”

Government officials were more than eager to tell you which part they represented; this guy was a total phony. “Prove it. Better yet, get out of my room.”

He held out a badge for an agency I’d never heard of, signed by Senator Edward Knight. The senator who’d been so very interested in Greek pottery, according to Professor Schulz. The one who was also Fangborn. He seemed to be awfully close to the trail I was on.

I nodded. “I got one of those, too. Came with furry handcuffs and a policewoman’s uniform with the breakaway snaps.”

“I assure you, my title, my badge, and my power are all quite genuine. I don’t want to hurt you—”

“And I don’t want to be hurt.”

“But I want those figurines you have.”

“Can’t do it. I need to save my cousin. Dmitri, that guy you were pounding into Silly Putty in Berlin? He’s got Danny. I need to meet him with the figurines, or he’ll kill Danny.” A thought occurred to me, and hope kindled in me. “Or is he out of the picture? Please
tell me you locked him up someplace horrible, that he’s no longer a threat to me or Danny!”