Seven Kinds of Hell (42 page)

There was something else, though. Somewhere beneath all that foulness, I could smell blood, old and drying. I looked over in the corner and saw the corpse of a young woman chained to the wall. Bite wounds and claw marks covered her body.

Horrified, I didn’t see it coming when he punched me in the muzzle. My head snapped back; he stumbled. I knew, as if I was reading his mind, that it wasn’t just my death he was interested in. The young woman hadn’t died quickly.

I launched myself at him without thinking. He was sated, overfull, too slow and too clumsy, and I had just a fleeting glimpse of some truly unorthodox dentistry covered in blood when my jaws closed around his throat.

I felt his neck snap, the sound like a boot crunching through a windblown branch. There was no room for me to chide myself—
who’s the bully now, Zoe?—
just a feeling of righteous wrath so complete, it made me stronger, smarter, more focused.

The rush was like nothing I’d ever experienced. The taste of his blood was an encyclopedia. I knew the taste of the woman from his throat. I understood that he was the most evil thing I’d ever encountered. But he didn’t taste…human.

He was Fangborn.

But Gerry had said there weren’t any evil Fangborn.

I must be getting a better grip on my powers,
I thought.
Of course, there’s no one brand of evil. It’s complex, it’s variable.

Drunk, I threw my head back and howled.

“Time to celebrate later,” Adam said, pushing his way into the room. He froze when he saw the two corpses, his face gray at the horror of it. Even a Normal could sense the evil here, and Adam made a living from violence.

He swallowed and handed me my pants as he glanced back down the hall. “We gotta jam.”

I got Human in a hurry, dressed, grabbed my bag, and ran.

Not too far ahead of Adam, though. He was good in a fight.

We ran into one more guard running over as a door to the outside closed behind him. He glanced at me, looked to Adam.

“Sir! Parshin’s men have breached—”

Adam stepped in and busted his head with the butt of his rifle. We ran outside and I looked around, trying to get a bead on where we were.

Adam jogged toward a jeep and motioned for me to get in.

I stopped. “Wait! Sean! We can’t leave him!”

“We can’t let Dmitri or Knight have those things. This is our one chance to keep them—and you—out of their hands.”

Why did I get the impression Adam was good at making rationalization sound like purest reason?

He shook his head. “I am totally compromised. I
have
to leave. You coming?”

I opened the door but cast a glance back at the compound. “But Sean!”

Adam gave me a venomous look and took a deep breath. “Knight won’t do anything with him,” he said, trying hard to sound patient. It was almost convincing. “He thinks if he controls Sean, he can control you, so he won’t hurt him unless you’re there to see it.”

He started the engine. “We need to leave. Now.”

Another explosion in the compound decided me. I needed to be away from here and take the figurines and my newfound theory with me. I had to keep it out of Knight’s hands—and Dmitri’s.

I got in. We tore out of there, leaving the rumble of another explosion and the sudden, sharp smell of burning building behind.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“You tell me.”

I had to decide whether to trust Adam or not. Again. If he was still working for Knight, it was too elaborate a plot to get from me
what I’d willingly give Knight to help Sean and get my file. Adam must really be switching sides.

“Ephesus. There’s a spot on the site. If I can find what I think is there…”

He turned away from the road to stare at me. “We can’t let Knight get it.”

I nodded. “So why the sudden change of heart?”

“Not so sudden. Remember, I was at Delos.”

“Yeah, and I remember you were in Venice, too, busting into my room and waving a gun around, taking my stuff. So break it down for me.”

Adam tapped on the GPS until he found a route he wanted. “We’re going to avoid the main entrance.”

I glared at him. “Ya think? Now talk.”

He cleared his throat and started to drive. “I’ve always wanted to serve my country. Knight was a friend of my father’s. I learned he was Fangborn—and about the existence of the Fangborn—just a year ago. Only a few of his staff know he’s a vampire. I only learned about his other plans more recently.”

I waited. “And?”

“And…I couldn’t get behind them. We…humans…aren’t ready for you guys. You see what we do to each other over the slightest differences in religion or politics? We beat each other up over
baseball
games. We’ll kill over the wrong-colored bandanna. What would we do faced with the Fangborn? I was only waiting to see how he was going to reveal himself and out you all, and then figure out how to keep him from executing his plans.”

Sounded plausible, even truthful, in parts of it, but there was something about his hesitation and his delivery that didn’t quite convince me. He wasn’t afraid of violence, theft, lying, or other types of lawbreaking. Still, I was committed to trusting him.

But only for the moment.

It was still dark when we got to Ephesus. Dawn was another hour away. Because we were avoiding the main entrances, we ran out of paved road quickly. Between his GPS and the coordinates I’d taken from the report, I knew we had to look for a small cluster of ruins halfway up one of the rolling brown hills. There was an overgrown path, but rocks and loosened soil made the going treacherous, and there were tangles of thorns and thistles that would deter all but the most determined goats.

I could see pretty well, but Adam was stumbling across the uneven terrain even with a flashlight. We got to within a hundred meters of the right area and I turned to him.

“Keep watch for Knight and Dmitri here. Warn me if they show up.” I also wanted a little privacy while I looked for the thing. No sense leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for my enemies.

Plus, I had the sneaking suspicion I’d only find the Box if I was at least half-Changed. I didn’t want Adam seeing that again; it would be like letting him catch me getting out of the bath.

It was incredibly hard to navigate the uneven ground quietly, even with my excellent vision. Loose rock and rubble littered every inch, and I slipped a number of times on goat poop. I discovered an unexpected and weatherworn trench when I stumbled into it. It hadn’t been on the map. Looters had been here since the end of last year’s official excavation. Picking myself up, I found I’d torn my trousers and had a jagged scratch in my leg.

If only I had something to clean it out with. I didn’t know how quickly this would heal while I was in human form. There was no sign of my wounds from the fight while I was still a wolf. Interesting. I found myself wondering about my last tetanus shot, and as soon as I thought of water to clean the scratch, I became aware of how thirsty I was. I hadn’t come to the site prepared.

With a groan, I realized I didn’t even have my trowel. I’d left it in Dmitri’s leg.

I got up, took a deep breath, and pushed on for the “merchants’ houses.”

Secundus had been a merchant.

My heart still pounded, and every noise—rock against rock, the distant crowing of roosters—reminded me that time was short. Only two bare hours until the appointed time. I had to hope I could find the Box before Knight or Dmitri found me.

As the sun rose, I found an elevation marker embedded in concrete and knew I was at the approximate center of the site area. What I prayed was Secundus’s house was about ten meters north. I began to count my paces, praying I wasn’t on a wild goose chase.

Left, right, left, right. Sinister, dexter, sinister, dexter…

I hope Grayling was genuinely on my side when he directed me to the sherd in Paris,
I thought.
I hope he truly wanted to keep this from Dmitri and wasn’t just flipping me off as he died.

Can’t second guess yourself now, Zoe. It’s all you have. Start with what you know. Work to the unknown from there.

It was hot, even though full daylight was still an hour away. Sweat trickled down my neck and back, and I was so drenched my sleeves made a slapping noise when I moved.

I was there. A series of ruined stone walls indicated the complex I was looking for. Now to find the right house.

Where to start? I had the vague impression of a map I looked at for about ten minutes, a scratch on my leg turning septic by the minute, and a ruined wall.

The wall. Before he was a merchant, Secundus had been a soldier in the Roman legions, seen the world, seen the ruins of cities that had thrived and died long before Rome. He would assume that the walls of the city would be there long after his departure. Ephesus was huge, and although the walls had been largely destroyed, meters and meters of them still stood—

I had to focus on what I had. If I went beyond that, if I tried to figure out all the possibilities, I’d go mad.

Stick with the house. If Grayling screwed you over, you’ll move from here.

Three buildings had sections of walls standing. One was outside the excavation area. Two were inside.

The last of my paces brought me right in front of the one still outside the excavation area. The one I believed to be an original part of Secundus’s house.

The wall was a fixed location, easy to recognize, comparatively durable, easy to find. It was almost everything an archaeologist looked for when establishing a datum point, the point from which an entire site was mapped and organized. I had to hope this was the last link in my chain of evidence.

I had no trowel, no crew, and no time.

Time to put aside the archaeology and invoke the Change.

I arranged the figurines and disk nearby. I took a deep breath, reached out to touch the wall, and tried to assume my wolf-girl form.

It was always a little disorienting, but now I saw the scratch I’d gotten while in human form fade. The wounds from my fight appeared, but they were already starting to close and heal.

If I thought that I’d experience phenomena like those I had in Claros, however, I was sadly mistaken. Nothing but dead stone and increasingly light skies, and me futilely patting a stubbornly ordinary stone wall.

What if I was in the wrong area? What if it had already been stolen? What if by coming here I had just killed Sean? What if—?

Hold on, Zoe. Nothing’s less attractive than a panicking werewolf.

The figurines had elicited the response in Claros, I told myself. No reason to think, once I had all four together, they’d do anything else.

You’re still an archaeologist, even if you’ve got fangs and claws. Use that.

I took a deep breath and stared at the wall. Nothing unusual about it, what was left of it. Plain plaster, because the painting had long ago been weathered away. There was one patch, smoother and whiter than the rest, though. Almost exactly where I was staring, about four and a half feet above the ground. About as high as a short man could comfortably carve while standing.

Before I could think about it, and maybe stop myself, I reached out and scratched at it with my sharp claws.

It was fragile and fell away in fragments. My distress in having so carelessly destroyed something two thousand years old set my cheeks burning.

Until I saw what was under the plaster.

There was a crude rendering of a phallus scratched into the rock, along with a deeper inscription. The inscription was a series of letters and Roman numerals—or more letters.

…LEG VI VICTRIX.

The victorious Sixth Legion. If you knew some of the standard abbreviations, it was easy enough to fill in the rest. Secundus had marked the wall with his brother’s old legionary designation. I didn’t know how Tertius had found his way to Vindolanda—his legion would have been stationed in York—but it didn’t matter. His brother had left him a clue here.

And the carved image of the phallus? That was just for good luck. The walls and roads of the empire from Scotland to North Africa to Turkey were covered in them. Gerry would have been scandalized.

This particular bit of graffiti was marking something. Had been concealed to smooth the surface under a painted wall, and now it pointed the way to something else.

The sun was rising. I had an hour, maybe, to use whatever I found to barter for Sean and the file. Or would I have to sacrifice them to keep Knight from unleashing the power of Pandora’s Box on the world?

I needed to find the object before I could make the decision.

The raking light of the sun made the letters stand out as if they’d been waiting for my approach. I reached out and felt the carving in the stone, which was different from the others in the wall.

I longed for my trowel, but made do with a flat stone and my claws. I chipped away at the mortar, which flaked away at the surfaces but was harder to remove the deeper I went. I worked diligently, my patience rewarded when I realized the stone was moving. It wasn’t nearly as thick as the surrounding ones. It was like a veneer, a false wall concealing a space where the original stone had been.

I realized that I was doing the very thing I hated most in the world after bullies: destroying a piece of the past, something meant to be shared with everyone.

Jenny, my friend, forgive me. Sean’s future and my past are on the line. Maybe the rest of the world, too. I can’t let the others find Pandora’s Box first.

It struck me: Secundus had wanted someone to find this object eventually. He wouldn’t have left the clues he had, or sent the letter to his brother, otherwise.

It was enough of a rationalization. I didn’t need much at this point. Too much was at stake and the only way I could hope to affect any of it was to be the one who found the Box.

All archaeology is destruction, I thought as I worked, trying to ignore the blood welling from the cuts on my clawed fingers. As we dig, we destroy context. But we do it so that we can get the information, more important than the artifacts themselves, no matter how fascinating they might be. I tried to convince myself that’s what I was doing now.