Seven Kinds of Hell (39 page)

“OK, I’m going to cover about a thousand years of history and religion and architecture in fifteen minutes.” I took a deep breath. “Claros was important for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it wasn’t a proper town, but a refuge. It was considered particularly holy, special, even though two towns nearby also had temples. Claros had something else, and I’m starting to wonder whether the something else wasn’t Fangborn related. Anyway, Claros was
so important that Alexander the Great stopped by here to ask the oracle whether he should build his city at Smyrna.”

I pointed over to what looked like the top of a small underground maze. “The temple would have been over there, and beneath that was where the oracle worked. You’d be told to feel your way down those steps and into a gradually narrowing tunnel. Remember, this would all be under the temple, so you’d be in complete darkness. Claustrophobia would be easy to come by, because the walls were closing in around you as you found your way forward. You’d hear echoes of the water, and the space would be filled with weird noises as you moved, literally, deeper and deeper into the world of the sacred and away from worldly life. You’d eventually find a space and a bench, where you were told to sit, and an attendant would take your name to the oracle. Who would…prophesy. Maybe in verse.”

I shivered. It had to have been a profoundly weird experience. I led them across the uneven ground, then down the stairs and through the tunnel, to the spring. A grate was over the well, which was filled with green algae and a dyspeptic-looking toad. Not much mystery left here, today anyway.

“There certainly was a theatrical aspect to the oracle’s visit,” Claudia said. “A theater of prophesy, to get the client into the…spirit of the thing.”

Gerry just looked uncomfortable.

I tried to feel the walls, even tried to sense beyond them, but without much success. I couldn’t tell if there was a frisson by the well or if that was just a breeze coming down the tunnel. Already the place was playing tricks on me. When the disk stayed cool and dull, when I realized there would be no pyrotechnics, I shrugged. We left the tunnel and wandered past the altar stone, the giant foot from the statue of Artemis, and around the remains of the temple, but still no real luck.

There were a couple of places I thought I felt a…something. A kind of a tingle, a change in temperature to the touch? A flicker
before my eyes? Not unexpectedly, these were never at the same time Gerry or Claudia might have sensed something, and for the most part, I was willing to chalk it up to microclimate or plain old hopefulness. Finally we sat on the bench at the propylaea, where pilgrims sat thousands of years ago and scratched their names into the stone while they waited for the priests.

We were starting to draw attention from other tourists and what looked like a few young archaeologists taking their friends for a tour. Their body language and behavior was so familiar, so like mine with Will and Sean, I almost couldn’t stand it. When it was clear they weren’t leaving any time soon, I gave up.

“We’ll come back later,” I said. Perhaps the night—and the moon—would bring better results.

We waited until it was completely dark before we dared return to the site. The Turkish authorities took a very dim view of anyone messing with their sites, and I certainly couldn’t risk Knight finding us. Praying the moon would give me a boost, I moved to the propylaea, the entrance to the temple, and knelt down. I ran my hands over the inscriptions left by visitors and felt…

…nothing.

I tried hard to remember what I’d felt when the disk had gone crazy on Delos. I reassured myself it was still in my pocket, hunkered down, and tried not to think about what I was doing. I focused on the things outside myself, tried to relax, and thought,
trowel bite.

A tickle, a tremor—something related to the Change, but nothing I’d experienced before. A surge of adrenaline.

A warning. Was it like the call to Change I’d felt on Mykonos? No. Subtle, too different.

“Gerry, Claudia!” I hissed. “Something…is going to happen!”

“What?”

“I don’t know, I need to Change, I tried, and I got…warned, instead. Something’s coming!”

“I’ll be right over.”

Gerry was by my side in an instant. He grabbed my shoulders and said, “Ready? One, two—”

I Changed before he finished. The half-Change snapped into place so quickly, it felt like a slap. Again, nothing like before. “Did you feel
that
?” I was too dizzy to whisper. “What was that?”

He shook his furry head as if he had a bee in his ear. “I don’t know, but you’re right—that wasn’t normal! Something’s coming. Claud!”

“I’m on it. You guys, get hid.”

“I need to get to the temple ruins,” I said. “I need to check out the hot spot in the tunnel.”

“Good a place to hide you as any,” he said. “Go!”

We zigged and zagged across the site, avoiding fallen ruins and deep excavation pits. I would have laughed with the joy of moving so fast, so silently in tandem with Gerry under that moonlit night sky. But something was coming, and something—the site?—was telling me I didn’t have much time.

The oracle’s tunnel was darker than the night. It was darker than the shadows around it.

And yet, I flew down the stairs, uneven and slick, as if I was running into my own home, a familiar place I’d never known. The dark closed in around me, but not like this afternoon, when I understood how the suppliants were drawn into an eerie experience by the confinement of the tunnel, the descent into the ground, the sounds echoing from the dark. This was a blanket of black.

Down there—a light, something glowing at the end of the short, narrow tunnel. If I hadn’t been absolutely certain we had been the only ones on the site when we arrived, I would have imagined this was some kind of official police light, the strobing bubble on the
roof of a cruiser. The closer I got, the brighter it was, until it was so bright, it was nearly white.

Like Delos.

It hurt my eyes, but I kept moving into it. It seemed as though it was coming from the well of the oracle.

Either my eyes adapted or the brightness faded. The stones themselves were no longer granite or marble, but seemed to be made of glass, the light coming from inside them. Behind them? It was like being inside a model of “the visible man,” where I could see the entire structure illuminated from inside.

There were no stars over me now. It was as though the temple was now intact. There were walls, fully formed and raised to complete ceilings. No more plain white marble: all of the architecture and statuary was gaudy with painted and gilt color. Chambers that hadn’t been here this afternoon were here now, that hadn’t been standing for centuries maybe. It should have been impossible to see them—I couldn’t see through the walls of light. It was more like the idea of them was now alive in my brain, an instant reconstruction. If I pushed my proximity sense just a little, I had a blurry image of the colossal statues of Apollo and Artemis just beyond.

The well was now complete, just the same, as solid to my touch as any cold stone. It pulsed, as if some giant engine somewhere were rumbling to life.

No mere feeling or hunch now: one of the rocks near where I imagined I’d found a hot spot earlier was glowing aquamarine among the pale blue-white walls. The disk, tucked securely in my shirt pocket, was radiating the same color.

In the discipline of archaeology, we are trained to notice the slightest variations. I giggled, nerves overtaking me: this glowing blue light was, as we called it in the trade, a clue.

I reached down to it, feeling warmth I knew was impossible emanating from stones that couldn’t be there. I pulled back before I could touch it, suddenly afraid.

“Hey, guys!” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Anyone else seeing this, or am I about to fall over and drown in this hallucination of the sacred well?”

Nothing. I couldn’t even hear wind or crickets, the noise from the far-off road.

I turned back to the one stone, still beckoning to me. Sucking up all my courage, I reached down and pushed at it, thinking to dislodge it.

The warmth confused my sense of touch; the “stone” felt like hard rubber, and I thought it must be a trick of my trembling clawed fingertips. I leaned over even farther, and I understood. My hand had passed through the surface entirely. I was sunk into the glowing stone up to my wrist.

The warmth was all around my hand, and although I couldn’t see anything but the blurry shadow of my hand within,
omigod,
the stone. More, I felt something just beyond.

I stretched, almost to the limits of safety. I didn’t see the modern protective grate, and the water below me was no longer murky green but a roiling red. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I fell in.

My hand penetrated another centimeter, then—

A sharp pain in my middle finger, as though I’d been bitten. I yelped, and the noise seemed to be drowned out by the thrumming all around me. I pulled back instinctively, but my wrist was seized by the stone, as though I was locked into colonial stocks. Stretched out over that pool of boiling…blood?

“Shit, help! Somebody help me!”

Still nothing from outside, and I could hardly hear my own scream over what was now the roar of a hurricane. The light of the pool was growing, and crazy red shadows played over the glowing white walls. I pulled until I thought my arm would come out of the socket. I threw back my head and howled, long and loud, for all I was worth.

Still stuck.

I was panicking now, wondering if the temple of ice and light was going to collapse into the growing scarlet tempest, my hallucination finally killing me. Desperate, I shoved myself toward the rock, figuring maybe I could force the whole rest of my body through the glowing wall of not-stone.

The red was creeping up the walls now, like blood soaking into cracked glass. Veinlike patterns appeared.

That couldn’t be good.

Desperate scrabbling; my claws scraped something. I reached again, a muscle-tearing effort, and this time I grasped something small. Maybe a lever I could manipulate…

The rock opened or the force field relented. I fell backward, hard, my head hitting the stone floor—now ordinary, dark, and
hard.
The stars I saw were all too familiar, friends from my tumble-down and fractious youth. Could werewolves get concussions—?

As the brilliant icy blue and red light faded, I could just make out a figurine, so like the ones I’d had and lost in my hand.

Screams and howls. I could hear the outside world again.

The outside world sounded like a preview of hell.

Every hair on my body stood up. I had the urge to Change fully, but I knew I needed to hang onto the figurine I’d wrested from the wall; it seemed important, a crowned female figure. I shoved the fourth key to Pandora’s Box into my bag, tightened the shoulder straps, and ran out to the fray.

There were men, everywhere. Normals, heavily armed and armored, a blur—

Scratch that.

My proximity sense told me of nearly a dozen Fangborn and Normals. None of them were happy.

I reached out and found Claudia and Gerry fighting other Fangborn. Fighting hard, letting blood. Somewhere else out there I could feel familiar others. I recognized the presence of Dmitri Parshin almost immediately, picked out the scent of his blood. I recognized the other Fangborn because of our common lineage, not because I knew them personally. Not only were the Fangborn and Normals attacking the Steubens, but they were attacking each other. Knight’s men and Parshin’s, converging, all after the fourth key.

It was horrible, and I knew this was a glimpse of what the world might look like when the Fangborn were revealed, their powers feared and coveted by humankind.

The thought was terrible and I hesitated. I didn’t know who these other Fangborn were. Maybe I was supposed to abide by some kind of rules, like Ben had said, some kind of cultural courtesy. Fangborn weren’t meant to fight each other, right? Or was it kill other Fangborn? Perhaps if I just hurt them, took them out of the game…

I didn’t know who they were, only that they were attacking my Family. That was enough, I decided.

“Zoe, get out of here!” Gerry yelled. His shirt was torn nearly off, and there was an ugly gash on his back. He slammed the head of his human attacker into a marble column.

That was going to leave a stain…

The blood glittering on the marble focused me, drove away my panic. There was blood everywhere, lighting the space almost like the scarlet light in the oracular well.

The battle called and I was filled with energy and eagerness. I looked for where I could do the most good.

There.

A small group of men who were skulking up, trying to get a bead on Claudia. She was slashing out with claws and fangs as she fought a human I’d never seen before and an unfamiliar vampire—blood everywhere, human and Fangborn. In the moonlight, she looked even more inhuman than she had when she was healing Danny. She executed a violent ballet as she fended off the attacking vampire; his reddish scales gave him a devilish look. Venom flew through the air, smoke rising where it hit the ground. He kept her at a distance, distracting her, while the human darted in where he dared.