Seven Kinds of Hell (29 page)

I felt better almost instantly. I felt better than I had since Germany. Stronger. Righter.

It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to find them. The streets were a maze, narrow, curving. With so many whitewashed shops selling the same scarves, jewelry, and pottery, they all looked the same.

It was the smell that led me to him.

The closer I got, the stronger it became. And the worse it became; if I thought it was an open dumpster by the restaurant, it seemed more like a toxic waste site by the time I found the trail down the darker alleys off the main shopping district. It was as if the stench was hanging in the air, leaving a trail for me to follow. It was so distinct it may as well have been painted on the ground in luminescent green paint.

I was running now, so fast the shops and apartments were a blur of blue-white in the night.

I barreled into an alley that seemed to almost glow with the smell.

The Beast came. I gave in to it, and Changed.

There were none of the tentative prickles I’d felt in the Tiergarten. This was a rush of…everything. Furious glee, joyful rage. Boots gone; no problem. Clothes shredded and tangled; whatever. Killing this monster was worth it. An overwhelming, orgasmic flood only sharpened perception. I barely gave a thought to my backpack and its golden contents as I slid out of it.

The woman was unconscious. The drugs had kicked in—I could smell them now. Awareness grew, but the surroundings faded as I homed in on what was important.

Ending the monster.

He looked up, didn’t drop the knife. The woman’s blood was a narrow border on its edge. The sight of the blood dripping from the blade dazzled and focused me.

I growled. He smiled.

“Brother wolf, welcome!” he said. “I am happy to share my prey with you.”

Psychotic, stupid,
and
an asshole. Couldn’t even tell I was a girl-wolf.

I leaped at him, landed heavily. Heard his discomfort with satisfaction.

We bit at nearly the same time. His knife nicked my left paw. I grabbed his shoulder, felt the vise of my teeth crunch through skin, down to bone.

He dropped the knife then. Screeched, twisted, shoved.

Physics is physics. He was huge, I was the same mass I’d always been. I lost my grip, but tore off a large piece of flesh as I rolled away.

Another tingle and sizzle. Oh no, I can’t Change back
now,
please, God…

He was scrambling up. I hunched up, launched myself, no thought of my wound, no thought but keeping him here, away from the Normals, the innocents. No thought but killing him.

The sizzle came again, but I didn’t turn human. It was familiar, but it only intensified my Beastliness. I slammed into him, my heart joyful—

—as something—a freight train?—nailed me from the other side.

Cobblestones and gravel, over and over, as I tumbled away from the would-be killer. I rolled to my feet, shook my head, and got ready to—

There was another wolf tearing the throat out of the killer.

I shook my head again. A rush of emotion, confusion first and foremost. Then, fear and delight.

The wolf—bulkier and darker than me—worried the corpse a little, then stepped back, turned, and, with his hind legs, kicked disdainful dust over the body.

He raised his head to howl, and I felt drawn to do the same.

Before he could give voice to his victory, a silky voice said, “Thorben—control yourself!”

He froze. If a wolf can look annoyed, he did.

I turned from him and glanced into the shadows, where the woman was still unconscious. A form emerged. Not human—my quick eyes discerned scales and fangs, as well as a general lack of nose, and eyes that were too large and dark to be human.

I stiffened, recognizing their presence, their signature. They were the Fangborn from Venice. They’d come for what I’d stolen from them.

I backed away from them as fast as I could and stood over my backpack, baring my fangs.

The other wolf responded by turning immediately back into a human. A completely naked male human, and I was eye to eye with his…I looked up.

“We’ve been looking for you,” he said in heavily accented English. “We need to talk.”

I stopped growling, but that was it.

The vampire coughed delicately. “It would be easier if you Changed back.”

I believed her. Besides, there was something else…

I closed my eyes and concentrated, tried to recall what Gerry had said in the Tiergarten. Nothing happened. I whimpered and tried again.

I didn’t want to be stuck this way, not when I still had—

Danny!

Maybe the panic forced it or maybe now that the killer—and I knew he had planned to kill the woman—was gone, I could focus on what mattered to me. I was suddenly human again, and scrambling to find my clothes.

“She’ll be OK.” The vampire looked up from the unconscious woman, who moaned and seemed to settle into sleep. “Don’t worry. You’re among Family.”

“Yeah, well, if you don’t mind, I can’t stay. I have to be down at the harbor. Like…” No watch, where was my phone? My panties? “Like, yesterday. What time is it?”

“It is nearly three thirty,” the vampire said with a glance at her watch.

“No, it can’t—I can’t stay here, I have to check, the boat might not have left—”

“There’s no boat at the wharf. No one should be going out this time of night in any case,” said the werewolf—had she called him Thorben? “We just did a sweep, looking for you, when we got the scent of…
that.
” He jerked his head at the bloody mess next to him.

I’d gathered my things, gotten dressed, and was tying my boots. I wished the naked guy would get dressed as well. “You don’t understand—I have to get to Delos.”

“No one is allowed there after three p.m., and not on Monday,” he said. “And technically, it’s Monday morning now.”

“Don’t be didactic, Ben,” the vampire said. She’d fanged down, and instead of black-and-green scales, she was a stunning blonde. “And yes, we do understand. You are Zoe Miller and you need to get to Delos to save your cousin.”

I wasn’t surprised; everyone seemed to know my name, but “Delos” had only come up in Berlin, during the fracas. I had to assume Claudia and Gerry had heard Dmitri, too. “You can’t stop me,” I said, picking up my backpack and shrugging it on.

“We want nothing more than to help you. We are
bound
to help you.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Look—that thing you took? The disk? It’s called the Beacon. We’ve never seen it, but we know it’s ancient and it’s important to the Fangborn. Both of us, Thorben and me, have sworn to guard it, but when it was claimed, and we knew someday it would be, we also swore to help that person.”

“Uh-huh.”

I clutched my bag nervously. It was too much talk of “swearing” and “claiming” and it sounded like something out of
Le Morte d’Arthur
to me. Worse, it sounded exactly like what the disk had done in the Venice hotel room: claimed me. That made me even more nervous, and I already wasn’t sure I could trust them—

A cold shock settled in the pit of my stomach, and I looked at my watch. Their statement about the time had settled in. I’d missed the rendezvous. I’d missed my chance to save Danny.

Unless these guys weren’t lying…“You can get me to Delos? Immediately?”

“We can leave now. We need to talk first,” Thorben said.

“You need to put some trousers on first,” she snapped. “You have no shame.”

“Yes, please do,” I said.

“I understand the American being backward about nudity, but not you, Ariana. It’s warm out. It’s Greece.” He spread his hands, as if that explained everything.

“You don’t go shopping naked, do you, you great idiot?” She threw a pair of cargo shorts to him, which he pulled on, then a shirt. “You don’t go out in town naked, either! Any excuse, any excuse at all.” She turned to me. “Yes, an hour. We can get you there, but we need to talk first. About what you took in Venice. The Beacon.”

“I…I’m sorry. I can’t, I won’t give it to you. My cousin’s life is at stake.”

“I don’t want it, and I wish you’d never found it. It’s yours by…birthright is not the word. It’s yours, though. I’m just sorry for you.”

“What do you mean, sorry?”

“The Orleans Tapestry tells of…a curse? A prophecy. I can tell you while Thorben readies the boat.” She shook her head sadly. “You seem nice enough, and you did a good job tracking this evil one down. But I’ve read the Tapestry and I wouldn’t wish the Beacon and what it means on a dog.”

She meant what she was saying. I felt a pit open up where my stomach should be. “What do you mean?”

Ariana—that was her name—said, “My Cousin Steuben called us because we were closest to Delos. To think we missed you by a block!” She shook her head. “I understand you don’t know much about being Fangborn, but I’m going to tell you things most Fangborn don’t know. There are some of us who are chosen for duties beyond what we Fangborn take upon ourselves—”

“You mean like the TRG?” I said. “I know about that.”

“The TRG—?” She cocked her head.

It made a nice change to know something someone else didn’t. “Never mind. It’s an American thing. Government, possibly top secret. Forget I said anything.”

Ariana shrugged and pursed her lips, a European gesture of dismissal. “There are some artifacts of Fangborn history, very rare, very precious, and very…odd. Most of which we don’t know the meaning of. Ben and I were charged with guarding the clay pot suspended between the roofs, which contained the Beacon. Some of us are chosen to defend certain objects, certain places that are mentioned in the fragments of our histories. In those histories, we have the stories of our people the Fangborn from—well, from the time writing was invented. There are also records of predictions, of things to come. From our oracles.”

“And the oracles mentioned
me
?”

“No. But the Orleans Tapestry mentioned that someone would come for the Beacon, and that whoever that was would need our assistance. So for hundreds of years, someone has been living in Venice, waiting for someone to come. Most recently, Ben and me. Ben, he always treated our position as an honor post—he doesn’t believe in the more mystical elements mentioned in the histories.” “Tell me about the Tapestry.”

“The Orleans Tapestry is five hundred years old,” Ariana said. “Sewn into the back is an even older piece of fabric, and on this, in
gold thread, is stitched a prophecy in Latin. The text itself is even older, probably from about 1000 AD, so I assume the Beacon has been hidden in Venice at least that long. Someone was working to preserve this prophecy through time—you can see the errors made by later translators and needlewomen, but they worked very hard to save the words, though the Tapestry itself was largely destroyed in a fire.”

“But some part of it was saved?”

“Yes. The fragment remaining refers to someone stealing the Beacon, unchaining the Fangborn, and revealing too much to the world.”

“What does that mean? Oracles were supposed to talk in riddles, weren’t they?”

“We don’t know what it means. Some say it will mean the time of Identification, when we reveal ourselves to humans. Some say it will be when humans are ruled by us. Some say it will be the release of the Fangborn from their obligation to humanity.”

“Um, doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”

Another Italian shrug. “I’ve never met an oracle yet who was either specific or optimistic, but you can’t be sure. As you said, oracles speak in riddles. We can only assume it indicates some change, a massive upheaval.”

I wasn’t sure how that was better.

“When they say ‘unchaining the Fangborn and revealing too much to the world,’ that’s always reminded me of the Prometheus myth, or perhaps Pandora.”

“
What
did you just say?”

“Pandora—you know, the one who opened the box and brought ruin to the world?” Ariana frowned and reached into her pocket; her phone was vibrating.

“Yeah, I know—” And I wished I didn’t.

“Ah, Thorben—Ben is ready. We should make our way to the boat.” She nodded and replaced her phone. “We do know one thing now.”

“What’s that?” Certainty, in any form, was welcome.

“You’re the one who’ll bring this change.”

I was still digesting the notion of me bringing ruin to the world when I received a text from Dmitri.

“I generously assume you are on your way. Remember the video. You have until noon.”

I shut off my phone. No point in giving myself away now. I was eager not to think of Dmitri’s threats, Danny’s face.

“How did your English get so good?” I asked Ariana as we hurried to the wharf.

“I attended university in California. Business school.”

“B-school?” I bit my tongue before I could exclaim,
But you’re a vampire!
“Um, why not…law or, I don’t know…medicine?”

“Vampires need marketing, too.” She shrugged. “At some point we Fangborn are going to reveal ourselves to the world. It might happen sooner, it might happen later, but when the Identification Day comes, I’m going to be ready. I’m working on a game.”

“Game?”

“I happen to think the easiest way for an outsider group to emerge and be accepted into the mainstream is through popular culture. Zeitgeist. I’m working on an RPG to soften the ground for us identifying ourselves to Normals. There’s a sociologist and a psychologist I’m working with, too.”