Seven Kinds of Hell (43 page)

The front fell away. There was a space behind it. Too valuable to leave in the ground, too dangerous to be trusted to another man or even to the priests guarding the temple strongbox, Secundus had hidden his treasure within the walls of his own house.

Not caring about scorpions or spiders or snakes, I thrust my hand in and felt a piece of ceramic, heard the familiar clink of pottery on pottery. Very carefully I pulled out the object. It rattled, and I could see what I had: two bowls, one turned over on top of the other, both of the same fine red earthenware as the sherd from Paris. They’d been put together to protect something else. Removing the top bowl, I saw a leather-wrapped parcel in the bottom of the other.

The leather was brittle, and it took me a moment to realize that it was coated with something metallic. Shiny flakes disintegrated as I pulled the bundle free.

I brushed the rest of the metallic substance from the surface. A wax-coated thong tied the top of the leather sack shut, and carefully I worked at the knots.

The leather fell apart quickly. It would, being clawed at, even if it hadn’t been two thousand years old.

Inside the leather was a vessel similar to the one in the picture I’d seen in Jenny’s office. If everyone who’d been after the figurines was correct, I’d just discovered Pandora’s Box.

A shout from down the hill. “Zoe, we got company! Whatever you’re doing, make it fast!”

The sun was up, and I was out of time. I could see two truck-loads of men coming from the same direction we had. Knight.

I turned my attention back to my find. The small vessel in the leather wrappings looked like something you’d see in the museum from anywhere in the Mediterranean world: flared mouth, narrow neck, bulbous body, flat base. Although there was an unusual flange around the middle, indented in four places, it was different from the picture Jenny had shown me. More ordinary looking, but odder, too.

It wasn’t made of clay. It was metal. It shone dull silver in the creeping morning light.

Just as Secundus had written to his brother. An “unbreakable” vessel, as the text of Hesiod suggested.

The indentations, shaped like footprints, gave me an idea. I had to see if the figurines could be fitted onto the flange around the waist of the vessel. I had to know this was what Knight had sent me after.

There must have been some core of magnetic metal worked into the clay of the first figurine, the one I’d taken from the museum. I had no sooner placed it near the flange then it was pulled into place, upright, standing on the flange. The dull beige of the clay blushed, and, as if it was being suffused with life, the traces of pigments darkened. My female figurine now had dark hair and light blue robes.

A shot whizzed over my head. Knight’s men were firing at me. Or maybe at Adam, who was returning fire from behind a pillar somewhere below me. I heard shouts in response; they might want me gone, but they didn’t want the Box damaged.

I grabbed the next figurine, the one in the shape of Athena. It bounced back from the lip, like two magnets of equivalent charges resisting each other.

“Zoe Miller!” It was Knight’s voice, electronically amplified, echoing through the hills. “You are not, under any circumstances, to handle the Box. It requires controlled, laboratory conditions—”

Knight was hardly “controlled conditions” as far as I was concerned. As if in agreement, the gold disk—the Beacon—began to glow.

“Sean’s here with me. He wants to see you.”

Even the power of Knight’s suggestion, even the offer of talking to Sean couldn’t move me. I was enthralled, captivated, enslaved by the vessel and its artifacts.

A bit more fumbling; I was moving too slowly. Suddenly the vessel turned itself around, and the second figurine snapped into its correct place.

Holy shit.
Pandora’s Box was taking matters into its own hands.

Athena’s helm was gold, and the snaky head of Medusa on her shield was black and green, her serpents coiling and darting. I could have sworn I saw gray eyes, too.

More gunfire erupted, this time from above me on the slope.

Dmitri’s men had arrived. I was barely paying attention, but it was as though my proximity sense had graduated to high-definition. I could see the men and their movements with crystal clarity, but had no will to do anything but focus on the Box.

The third figurine I snatched up was the one I’d retrieved from Claros. The queenly figure with the elaborate headdress was pulled
out
of my hand into its place. As the paint returned, I could see her golden hair, and there were tiny snakes wound around her arms, reminding me of the statue of the priestess from Crete.

The vessel was whirling faster now, as if it was building itself. Sparks were flying out from it.

Not sparks. Tiny lightning.

The Box was choosing me over Knight, I knew. Just as the Beacon had, back in Venice.

The last figurine was the broken one, the one I’d pieced together from the fragment my mother had taken from my father and the piece I’d torn from Dmitri’s neck.

I could smell faint traces of hellebore cocktail. The men downslope were readying their guns. One had Changed into a wolf and was attempting to sneak up the slope far to my left. A familiar snake was slowly slithering into a helicopter that had landed at the top of the hill. Its markings—how could I see its markings in this poor light, from behind a wall?—were green and black.

Ariana. How had she found me?

Knight’s voice was eerily omnipresent, disembodied, calling over the scuffles breaking out. “Stop now, Zoe. I’ll make you rich if you stop now. You’ll end up killing everyone here if you continue—”

A shout and a scuffle below. The shout was familiar: Sean was tearing up the hill. Adam fired over him, just enough to keep anyone from following Sean.

Rock clattering on rock, a miniature landslide. Dmitri was descending the slope above me. Coming for me.

“I think you all want to stop shooting,” I shouted. It was my voice, and yet how was it carrying over all the other noises so easily? “I think hitting this thing with bullets would be very, very bad. Remember what supposedly happened last time this thing was opened? I’d back off, if I were you!”

“That’s mine!” Knight screamed. “You have no right, stray!”

“No stopping it now. It’s going to—”

I fit the last, broken key onto the vessel. It made full contact, and a band of the lightning built up around the figurines. The face of the last one was chipped off, but I now had the impression of
a wolf’s muzzle and pointed ears; an Egyptian kilt was wrapped around its waist. The area around the missing hand caused the band to be incomplete, and there were weird jumps and flashes of light. Arcs of electricity.

The vessel spun free of my hand, defying gravity. I no longer perceived only shapes of the humans and Fangborn around me; I sensed the connections between them. I could see Dmitri, because I had bitten him, knew his blood, I could understand his orders in Russian—since when do I speak Russian?—to the man next to him, who was a distant relation…

I could see Ariana sinking her fangs into the neck of the helicopter pilot, binding him to her will. I could taste her fears that Ben would not be in the right place at the right time, that her talent for persuasion and control wouldn’t be enough…

Somewhere at the edge of perception, I could feel Ben’s panic. Claudia and Gerry and Will were closer now, clearer. I could feel the fury boiling off Will and realized his target was Knight himself…

And Sean, somewhere under all that was Sean, scared and massively pissed off.

I couldn’t feel my feet anymore. I worried that I was going into shock; the lightning was encircling me and I couldn’t extricate myself. I wasn’t certain if I wanted to, despite the surfeit of information pouring in, threatening to blow the neurons out of my brain. It was the upload and download of the experience in Venice, but now there was too much information for me to digest.

“Not for you! That is never for you!”

Dmitri, his face a mask of rage and desperation, had skidded down the stony slope. He had a pistol in his hand, and not even the shock of seeing me as a wolf-woman slowed him down. He’d be here in forty-three seconds. I could “see” the engraving on the side of his pistol, could smell the lubricant used on the gun, smell the wound in his leg healing, taste the bitter coffee he’d drunk in haste this morning…

Too much.

I couldn’t have done anything if I’d wanted to. I was aware of what was going on around me—both sides readying for a final assault to claim the vessel.

But only distantly: the vessel was still in command.

::but not yet complete::

There was a piece missing. Something prompted me to take the disk from its place on the ledge of the stone wall. It was burning red-gold now, flashing, a beacon…

I knew what to do. I placed the gold disk on top of the vessel. The red-burning gold melted as if it was wax, sliding easily over the surface of the vessel, coating every part of it.

Two more shots rang out. “Clean-head” Zimmer had fired at Dmitri, who was now just twenty meters away from me and approaching fast. Someone from up the slope fired in return. Concern about the safety of Pandora’s Box had evaporated in a storm of gunfire.

I had no capacity to respond. I was outside, beyond. I was now…part of the process. I felt structures in my brain tearing and reforming beyond anything human or Fangborn—gods-cursed, gods-possessed, gods-reclaimed—

“Stop it!” Knight screamed. His voice was full of uncharacteristic panic. “Don’t hit the vessel!”

Claudia and Gerry fought their way through Knight’s men. A hole in the mob, and Will found his way to Knight…

The vessel was open now, and the light I’d seen on Delos now radiated from inside. The others saw it, too.

I reached in. Hesitation was no longer a part of my vocabulary. I was being driven. The vessel wanted me to reach in, and so I did.

Knight screamed, “Sean, stop her!”

Will tackled Knight.

Even though I couldn’t see Sean, I knew he was just ten feet away. I could taste the residue of the two inept vampires who’d worked on him, and a third, much more recently. And at Knight’s
order, I could feel something…switch off…in his brain. Sean was missing. He was a shell, a robot driven by someone else’s commands.

No time for Sean.

No time for Dmitri, who was one step away from me, rage contorting his face, greed in his eyes.

No time for petty human wrangling and gunplay; bullets were still whizzing past, profaning the site. The smell of hellebore toxin grew greater.

It didn’t matter anymore. The Box had what it wanted.

As my hand passed through the neck of the vessel, the lightning ran up my arm and enveloped me. The lightning consumed and subsumed me. At the bottom of the vessel was…

…nothing. A vast emptiness.

The vast emptiness of space.

I could reach everything in the universe. Numbers filled my awareness, sequences that made no sense to me. Then faces of strangers, places I had never been, followed by texts in languages long dead or inhuman. The vessel was patient as it tried to communicate with me, my monkey brain, even enhanced, still too rigid for easy translation. Finally it settled on pictures.

Fir trees surrounding an ice-cold lake. The water was clear, but the bottom was slick and murky, dense brown with rotting vegetation.

A cave in a desert, empty for thousands of years. A scorpion scuttled across a stone.

The ruin of a wooden temple, the trees around it filled with ghosts.

The cornerstone of a stately home, bricks cracked and mortar disintegrating.

There were four other vessels out there in the world. I needed to find them.

All I had to do was reach out, through the Box, and—

An eternity since his last step, Dmitri was on me.

I had to respond to him, even as the vessel revealed itself to me. The distraction caused me to miss whole segments of information. There was a taste of my own impatience with Dmitri and his ceaseless, selfish violence, in the vessel.

I reached out to him instead of seeking the other vessels.

Billions of souls, past and present, and there was Dmitri Parshin’s grubby little being at my fingertips. I reached
into
him and touched…

Dmitri froze, wonder in his eyes.

The lightning around me flickered as the vessel slowed its revolutions and the fragmented figurine whirled past. The break in the figurine caused an imperfect circuit, and there was a sharp crack.

Then, excruciating pain.

Whatever had been dulling some of my senses, and expanding others, was gone.

The neck of the vessel had closed around my wrist. And was squeezing. Like a vise.

I screamed and howled. The Change, always just barely out of my control, now shifted wildly. I felt my molecules morphing uncontrollably among my forms. Fangs, fur, claws, and once, briefly, I swore I saw scales.

Time sped up and the real world—my present—was again at the fore of my consciousness.

Pandora’s Box exploded. Its metallic shards hit the ground, scattered like beads of mercury, and melted away.

Sean tackled Dmitri, who raised his pistol.

I fell to my knees, too human now. Shining red all over the wrist that had been bitten by Pandora’s Box.

Dmitri’s pistol fired into the air.

Another shot from downslope. This one connected.

Clean-head had shot Sean.

Sean screamed. Blood was everydamnwhere.

As the last of the fragments melted away, a voice inside my head whispered,

::what do you need?::

Nearly blinded with pain and unable to concentrate, I gasped. “I…just give me a minute.”

Instantly my bitten hand jerked up. I felt a pulse like a shock wave spread out from around me.

Everyone around me—human and Fangborn, friend and foe—fell to the ground.

I stared. I could see something like veins and bone exposed three inches above the bend of my wrist. I was surprised my hand was still attached.