Seven Kinds of Hell (35 page)

“Danny’s a Normal, but he’s signing up for something incredibly dangerous. You don’t even care about him, about our mission, enough to try to bring your powers on deck.”

I took a deep breath; he was right, but I didn’t like it. “Hey, you’re asking me to learn stuff that I should have been taught years ago. I didn’t get raised in one of your special schools. I didn’t even have a childhood Normals would consider normal—”

“Yeah, I get it, Zoe. But now you have a chance to fix so much of that, and you won’t.”

“
Can’t.
I can’t do it. Look, you want me to do something I’ve struggled my whole life to avoid. I’ve done everything in my power
to resist the Beast, Changing, for the past eight or nine years. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

“And we need it to.” He looked down, trying to think. “Let me think about this. Go help Ariana in the galley for a while. We’ll try again after lunch.”

The last thing I wanted to do was try again, so helping Ariana was fine.

“That didn’t take long,” she said, looking up from a grocery list.

“Little break,” I said. “Need some help?”

“Not a lot of room in here. How about you take these on deck and peel them?” she said, handing me a bowl full of eggplant. “Ordinarily I’d just cook them skins on, but these are still pretty tough.”

Great, I thought as I took the bowl. I’m banished from the galley, too.

I sat there peeling eggplant while the wind whipped my hair. That reminded me: I looked up just in time to see one of my bras go sailing off the line, off into the wild blue—

Will reached up and caught it. He glanced down at it, at me, and smiled.

I just about melted; his smile still did that to me. Then he fastened it back on the line, making sure to loop the bra through its own strap so it couldn’t get loose again. He did the same with the other things, finding clever ways to keep them all from sailing away.

Will hanging up my laundry still looked natural to me.

“How’s Danny?” I asked.

“Tough morning. We’re taking a breather,” he said. “This doesn’t look like Fangborn Academy.”

“It’s detention.” I shrugged. “I’ve been fighting my Fangborn nature for a long time, Will.”
And I gave up everything to do it,
I added to myself.

He hunkered down and replaced an eggplant peel that had escaped. “There’s an awful lot at stake, you know. Beyond our own interests. That’s why Gerry’s so afraid he’ll fail.”

“Afraid
I’ll
fail, you mean. He’s acting like I’m going to get all this in three or four days when it takes a whole culture more than sixteen years to train a real Fangborn.”

“You’re a real Fangborn, and no, he’ll be the one who fails. You’re right; you don’t have any of the training an adult Fangborn has. You don’t have the training an
eight-year-old
has. So when the world has descended into chaos, when the Fangborn are either overwhelmed and exterminated or in a state of civil war, fighting for the right to survive, or the unhappy peacekeepers in a genocidal stalemate, it won’t be a twenty-something stray people will blame. It will be the full-grown warrior who failed to get the edge that might have won.”

I put down my knife. “As if I couldn’t feel any worse…”

“The point’s not to make you feel bad. The point is to impress you with what’s at stake. It’s not just you and Danny anymore, Zoe.” He got up, brushed off his hands, and moved aft. He turned back. “It may not even get to that. The last figurine might be missing, and maybe Knight won’t be able to get the juice to pull off his plan. But if in the meantime we run into Dmitri again…wouldn’t you like to unleash on him? And know you’ve got control over it?”

He glanced over at the clothesline, a brightly colored row of underwear, merrily dancing on the wind like a row of cancan dancers. He didn’t quite turn around before I saw him grin again. He always did enjoy lingerie.

I sighed and went back to my work. If nothing else, I was good at peeling eggplant.

Gerry wasn’t at lunch. Things were worse than I thought.

“He’s working on something below,” Claudia said when I asked.

“Should I bring him a plate or something?” I said. Apologies went better with food.

“No thanks. He ate.” She laughed. “Trust me; if he’s hungry, he won’t stay away long.”

He didn’t. I saw him on deck while I was helping Ariana clean up after lunch. He was typing quickly on a laptop. “We’re gonna try something different,” he said without looking up. “I can’t do this the way I usually would, in hours instead of years. So I got a plan.”

“I think it’s risky,” Ariana said. She and Claudia had come up on deck.

“It
is
risky,” Claudia agreed. “Perhaps impossible.”

“You’re only saying that because no one’s ever done it before,” Gerry said. He finished scanning the screen, hit a key, then closed the cover. “What we’re going to try to do is suggest you Change.”

“I’ve told you. I
like
the suggestion,” I said. “Just not sure how to implement it.”

“No, I mean, we’re gonna get you to Change, and at the same time, Claudia’s gonna give you a little jab with some suggestibility venom behind it. It should incline you, when you think of a certain phrase, to want to Change. To give you a push.”

“Yeah, but what’s going to make me Change in the first place?”

“I’m going to Change, like we did in Berlin. If we need to, Ariana can, too, but I think she’s just here to keep an eye on Claudia.”

“What’s gonna happen to Claudia?”

“We don’t know,” she said. “Like Gerry said, no one’s ever tried doing this before. There’s never, at least not in the records I’ve seen, been the need.”

“We don’t know anything’s going to happen,” Ariana said. “Let’s not get excited before something goes wrong.”

“Our main concern is you.” Claudia caught her hair, whipping about in the wind, and tied it back. “I don’t like you having a crutch; if you do ever get the chance to train yourself properly, it might make it much more difficult. And—”

“And we don’t know what a dose of vamp juice will do to you while you’re in mid-Change,” Gerry finished. “Not really.”

“What do you mean, not really?”

“Messing with Fangborn blood chemistry is always hazardous, and we know nothing about your blood heritage. Doing something like this, it’s so risky it’s not sanctioned by the Family. Most of the Families worldwide signed agreements during the Cold War not to attempt this outside a very controlled environment.”

I shrugged. “I’m not much use as it is. This might help. Let’s give it a shot.” I looked around. “Where we gonna do this, and how?”

“Right here. I’ll Change, you try to go, and Claudia will bite you.”

I remembered what I’d seen her do with Danny. Alarm must have showed on my face.

“Don’t worry,” Claudia said. “You’ll feel nothing. Our fangs are designed to leave no marks, and there’ll be plenty of anesthetic.”

“No marks unless we want to leave marks,” Ariana corrected.

“But first, we need a phrase for you to think on. A mantra, a key,” Claudia said, ignoring Ariana. “Something unusual, but not too hard to remember. I don’t want you freaking out if you accidentally hear it.”

“How about ‘trowel bite’?” I said, thinking of Dmitri and my new favorite memory of him, with my trowel stuck in his thigh.

They all thought a moment and couldn’t imagine a scenario where it would be commonly used. “Let’s just hope Trowel Bite doesn’t become the world’s next greatest rock band,” Gerry said. “Ready everyone?”

We all nodded.

“Here we go.”

Claudia Changed.

I didn’t feel it the same way I did when Gerry had Changed; maybe because I wasn’t expecting it, maybe because it wasn’t the same vibe. Or maybe because it was only halfway: She was now bipedal, dark violet, her hair and lips purple, almost black. Her nose receded, her fangs extended, her claws grew.

I kept telling myself she was a friend. But it was weird, somehow more alien than when I’d seen Gerry as a wolf-man, and I was glad we were at sea. She looked pretty funny, a snakelike monster in shorts and a bikini top, her purple hair in a messy ponytail.

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.