Seven Kinds of Hell (34 page)

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“So we head to Claros and look for the last one,” Gerry said. “Then we try to figure out how they work together and figure out how to defang Knight.” He pushed his chair in. “It will take a couple of days of motoring, at least, so we can stay under the radar. So I propose to swap off captaining with Ben and Claudia, and I’ll get Zoe up to speed on Fangborn culture and try to get her powers under control. They’ll be looking for her, not a crowd of yachters,
and with any luck, by the time we get there, we’ll get this figured out.”

No one disagreed, and the idea of a few days of resting, surrounded by people who weren’t trying to kill me, was very appealing. There was one thing, however.

“Is there any way we can find out about Sean?” I said. “I don’t like the idea of him being alone, and a murder suspect.”

Claudia said, “Will?”

Will frowned and looked away. “I’ll try. I may be able to reach him, but I think you’re right. If someone got to him, I suspect Sean’s in Senator Knight’s hands now, willingly or no.”

We cleared up, and everyone drifted off to chores or their cabins. Will vanished, which was fine. I still wasn’t sure I could talk to him about all the personal stuff I probably should have discussed when we were still together, and I wasn’t sure he’d forgiven me for ruining his plans to capture Dmitri in Berlin. But I still wanted to follow him.

It took me a minute to remember where I was when I woke up the next morning. My cabin was well designed, small but not claustrophobic. After an unexpected lurch of the boat rolled my stuff from the top of the cabinet to the floor, I figured out that everything had to be inside a locker or under a net. I’d found the shower last night, so tiny I could barely turn around inside it; but it had hot water and that was good enough for me.

I was shy about going above. After all, I had gone to a lot of trouble throughout my whole life not to draw attention to myself, and last night’s revelations about my potential role in Fangborn and world affairs were plain horrifying. Under the sink was a bag of clothespins, so I rinsed out a few things and then brought them up to the main deck with me. A line was stretched out, and I hung them up, making sure they were safely fastened. The wind was picking up a little.

Then breakfast smells hit me. I forgot about shy and beat a path for the table.

Danny was there. He was eating like a horse. He looked tired but so much better, even with the small piece of surgical tape on his nose.

“Hey, you!” I hugged him around the shoulders.

“Hey!”

“I’m so sorry this happened,” I whispered to him. “It’s all my fault.”

“What do you mean?” He stepped back from me, cocking his head. “You’re the reason I got away from him.”

I was saved from thinking about what I’d eventually do to Dmitri when the others arrived. True to form, there wasn’t much talk during the first few minutes. When Fangborn get together, they generally—

I realized I was going to have to tell Danny I was a werewolf. In fact, that out of the seven people on the boat, he and Will were in the single-skinned minority.

Later, I decided hastily. After breakfast, at least. I already had about sixteen things on my “too hard” list, and this one could wait.

A few minutes later, Gerry got up. “OK, orders of the day. Ariana, you’ve got galley duty today, so you’re excused from everything else.”

Ben grumbled something about too much oregano.

Gerry—and everyone else—pretended not to hear him. “Ben, you’ve got the helm today. We’ll get underway, and when we’re clear of the harbor, Zoe, you and I will start Fangborn school.”

I felt my stomach clench. I tried to think of a word that sounded like “Fangborn” I could use to cover Gerry’s gaffe.

I turned to Danny, who was scraping off his plate into the garbage. “Uh, what he means is—”

He looked up. “I didn’t know you were a werewolf—how come you never told me?”

“Uh, what?”

“Claudia’s been explaining.” He shook his head. “You never said anything to me.”

He was calm, only curious. If Claudia had told him about the Fangborn and me, maybe with a little vampiric push, he was bound to accept the truth. “Um, I didn’t know? I thought I was going mental?”

“Oh, Zoe.” His brow furrowed. “You poor thing.”

I patted his arm, reassuring him so I wouldn’t start crying myself. “It’s better now. It explains a lot.”

“It opens up a lot of other questions, about your family.”

I held up a hand. “Yeah, trust me, I’ll be looking into that.” I didn’t tell him of Dmitri’s probable connection with my father.

“Do you mind if I sit with you and Gerry? Listen in?”

I shrugged. “Fine with me. You can leave for the naked stuff.”

“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?”