Hellbender (The Fangborn Series Book 3) Read online

  To my vast relief, the Change came quickly, and as it always did, with a thrilling sensation of power and goodness and enough adrenaline or endorphins or pixie dust to blot out the rapid and radical metamorphosis of my bones and musculature. I was still upright, still dressed like Zoe, but now covered in a wolf’s pelt, with upright ears and a jaw line that was more canine than human. I reveled in the feel of my claws lengthening and teeth growing, and the thought of a fight made me shiver with delight. For the past few hours, I’d been confused, scared, and weak. Now I felt like a purposeful demigod.

  I gave into my baser instincts and howled, loving that I had a cause to fight for. I howled again, reveling in the way my war cry reverberated against the walled compound and was audible over the rain and wind and waves.

  This also had the effect of attracting attention, which was all to the good. I dodged an overhand attack from an Order goon swinging a blaster; he’d probably run out of the chemicals they used to weaken us. On my way back upright, I slashed at his thigh and caught him across the femoral artery. Dark blood splashed against the already rain-soaked gravel and he went down screaming.

  A shout from Rose. “In the back building, by the cliff! That’s where our Cousin is!” She ducked a blow and slashed at the calf of the Order soldier who’d missed. He went down, and as he did so, a werewolf twisted his neck for him. The werewolf nodded her thanks to Rose and found another combatant. The Family redoubled its combined efforts to break through the Order ranks.

  I circled around, hoping to find a hole in the ranks that I could sneak through. I managed to kick one Order soldier in the back, giving a vampire the chance to sink his teeth into the guy’s neck. Then more shouts, and a scream. Rose was attacked by the Fellborn, who’d scrambled away from its assailants. She fought well with her knife, but the thing was single-minded in its brutality. I’d communicated with one of the Mark Twos briefly in Boston just . . . could it only have been hours ago? I learned that even they craved nothing but food and Fangborn corpses. I pulled it off her and bit deep into its neck. The blood was foul and black and, with the Fellborn weakened by its first attackers, soon stopped flowing.

  Rose was bleeding badly. Oracles don’t heal as quickly as shapeshifters and she could barely walk. I picked her up, slung her over my shoulder, and pelted back to the vehicles, the gravel crunching and shifting under my feet. I didn’t dare try to heal Rose myself—that was a vampire power, not one werewolves ordinarily had. But her siblings, who apparently knew their share of battle first aid, were ready and waiting. They got to work on her.

  “That was quick,” Ivy said. “Told you I was a better fighter.”

  “But I found the captured oracle,” Rose retorted. Then she grimaced as Ash began to clean the wound on her arm.

  “And so that’s why you were the one to go,” he said, working steadily.

  “You guys okay?” I asked.

  Three nodded responses. I ran back to the gate. I decided to cut through the first building, hoping to find a way around the Order.

  I’d vaguely been wondering why there were two Fangborn safe houses so close together, and now I knew. This wasn’t a house at all so much as it was a museum.

  I entered a long hall, the interior walls of which had traditional paper screens I recognized from samurai films as shoji. The light in the room was low but far better than the rainy night outside. Along the walls on both sides were tables covered in arms and armor from all over the world. Filing cabinets and notebooks and other recording information, even a photography stand, were scattered about in a makeshift lab space.

  The weapons all had one thing in common: They were bladed. One in particular spoke to me—a long, slightly curved Japanese sword of Tamahagane steel on a table at the center of the wall.

  That’s what brought me here, I thought, these objects. Like the vision of the powerful Fangborn artifacts that had almost physically driven me to seek them out in Denmark and Turkey, these weapons had drawn me not only to this hall but away from the Battle of Boston. My oracle friend Vee Brooks had given my own power a boost, and my inexperienced attempt to stop time had supplied the energy while the artifacts provided the target, taking me away from where I was needed.

  This time, however, there had been no visions, no terrible pain to make me desperate to find the artifacts. There had been . . . nothing. Were the artifacts now able to simply pull me to them, even from across the world?

  A shout from outside woke me. The katana I’d been attracted to glowed violet, and I felt a hum through the air as I raced toward it. But something was badly wrong. My proximity sense flared a warning.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” A hateful drawl broke the silence.

  I turned, growling before I saw him. Jacob Buell, his craggy face drawn with exhaustion, was limping and reaching for a pistol. His wavy hair was plastered flat, black with sweat and rain, and he still had burn marks on his hands and neck from where I’d hit him with an acid venom attack in Boston earlier this very strange day. Whereas I’d had the chance to shower, heal, and eat, I could see a long series of bruises and cuts ran up his face, and his head was hastily shaved and stitched, probably from where I’d bashed him into the floor before our sudden and instantaneous trip across the globe. If he still had a few burns on him, from the explosion he caused that destroyed the Museum of Salem, that was fine with me.

  But there was not nearly enough damage. He was still upright.

  “You can’t go anywhere without taking me with you, can you, stray?” He limped a few steps closer, his bad left leg still fucked up from a rough landing in the alley, the gun pointed at me. “Why did you send me here?”

  As I lunged for him, I realized that before I fainted in the alley, I had teleported him here trying to defend myself. That was what had knocked me out. But that wasn’t uppermost on my mind.

  Nothing else mattered, not the kidnapped Cousin, not the battle in Boston, not the rest of the world. Only Jacob Buell mattered. I wanted him to feel a little of the torture he’d put me through. I wanted him to know it was coming from me.

  I landed on top of him as he pulled the trigger. I felt bullets slam into me and didn’t care. I’d pay for it later, gladly, so long as I killed him first. When my knees hit his shoulders, he went over backward; I knew that unless I tore out his heart, now, forever, I was going to get shot again, at close range to way too many organs.

  I felt more blows to my gut and dying suddenly seemed all too likely. I still wasn’t healing fast enough and heard humming as a strange dizziness overtook me. It was as though I was losing control of my senses and my body. Why go for his heart, when his throat was right there?

  Definitely dying, I thought bleakly. But not before I take him on this one last journey with me—

  I shook my head, trying to quell the buzzing. I finally managed to stop digging through his rib cage—it felt almost as though I wasn’t a werewolf at all, that I was a girl with a plastic ice cream spoon, trying to make a dent in Buell. With an effort, I raised my claw back, ready to tear his face off.

  My hand brushed the table with the katana. The sword shifted slightly toward me and I grabbed it.

  The long chamber’s shojis and exterior walls vanished in a bank of flame that was gone almost as soon as it appeared, leaving the beams and posts untouched. We now could see everyone in the courtyard, and they us. Each of the other weapons and pieces of armor on the tables was glowing pale green, brighter and brighter, until each burst into a ghostly flame. Even while I felt life’s blood leaving my body too fast, even while Jacob Buell was in my grasp, I could only stare.

  The flames took on the distinct shapes of the pieces of armor themselves, and rose, sorting themselves out in anatomical order. The parts didn’t match—the Incan helmet of wood and copper had no business hovering above the Mycenaean Dendra plate armor—but they created a nearly humanoid form.

  They hovered briefly, and I had no sooner wondered what I should do next when all of the weapons flew in
to the katana I held, each slamming into the next—curvy bladed Indonesian kris, an improvised fauchard made of a scythe, an assegai with a long, leaf-shaped blade—until they formed a giant two-handed broadsword of green and violet flame in my hand. Each blow was like it had been made by a supernatural adversary, and I struggled to hold the changing weapon.

  Before, when I’d assimilated artifacts, I’d been at least in decent shape. Mostly. Now I was pretty sure I had even less power than before, and was on the ragged edge of exhaustion, physically, and . . . magically. I wasn’t sure I was going to survive this . . .

  The green ghost of fiery, mismatched armor turned to me. The incandescence was blinding. I held up the flaming sword and braced for the inevitable. Pain and death.

  I really hope this isn’t the guardian of this collection, I thought. Because if it challenges me, I’m in big troub—

  The buzzing increased, filling my head. A vision . . .

  I moved toward the armored ghost, arms outstretched as if to embrace my own end . . .

  No, not my end. There were craftsmen and technicians laboring over their wares. I needed to embrace the result of their skill, their ability to imbue the artifacts with power . . .

  The ghostly artifacts winked out of existence and popped up less than a meter away from me. Somehow I managed to stand, found the strength to hold my arms out. I closed my eyes, not at all certain it was a good idea . . .

  I felt the barrage of energy as the armor touched me, pressed itself onto every part of me, and . . . didn’t stop. The armor melted into me, and it felt as though the energy was racing around inside my body, weaving bone and blood together with something else. Maybe this was what it was like to be electrocuted, I thought raggedly, or to be on acid while someone stuck knitting needles into random sections of your brain. This was what other people imagined it was to turn into a werewolf—a curse of bone stretching and crunching, muscles straining beyond human endurance, and the systematic ripping away of your humanity. The dizziness of reaching through time and space through Pandora’s Box was a pony ride compared to this roller coaster. Just when I thought it could go on no longer, it found a way to get worse.

  No, the ecstatic reward of the Change was the utter opposite of this.

  But why were the artifacts still coming to me if I was depleted?

  The armor had vanished, and I wondered if I was now burning with the pale green flame. I opened my eyes and saw the mystically born sword, still glowing violet in my hand. Then that slid out of my fist and up my arm and, like the armor, became a part of me.

  I may have passed out, because I hardly noticed when it stopped, hardly noticed that I’d fallen down again. The only signal I had was that I could feel my heart racing so fast, it felt as if someone had set a drum machine for the bass drum at two hundred and forty beats per minute. When I registered the cool of the straw tatami floor under my cheek—how was it not burned?—I began to wonder if I’d become enmeshed with it, an integral part of the house. Then I felt my breath moving between my lips, which brought an unpleasant taste of rusty iron and bitter greens.

  Buell struggled to his feet. Maybe it was some kind of “die in your boots” mentality, but he just stood there unsteadily, wobbling, not quite sure what to do with himself. His blank look told me he’d run out of mind to boggle. Outside, the battle was slowing down, as the Fangborn took the opportunity to disarm the Order soldiers who were staring at the spectacle of me melding with the hoard of arms and armor.

  I was at least as beat up as Buell was, but I was still a werewolf and I was owed pain. I knew what to do, even though I could barely think with the images that were filling my brain, scenes of metalworking and leather curing and forges and workshops, showing me the Fangborn makers of these artifacts. Buell looked like a martial arts training dummy to me, and even if there were no magic on deck, I still had claws and fangs and a heart burning with the need for vengeance.

  Slash across his chest—I’d finish what I began, tearing out his heart eventually. I wanted him to know that his death was here, in me. Another slash caught a corner of his eye and would have had all of it if he hadn’t fallen back. I managed to tear the end off his nose, and the blood spurting out muffled his screams, which were music to me. His bad leg gave and he fell; his arm and face burns were still angry and red.

  It was time to end it, before I couldn’t. I needed time to acclimate to the rush of artifactual power, but all I required was just a second to kill him. One more slash to his throat and it would be done.

  One, two, three shots. I went down, hard, my head spinning. I looked down. More blood poured from my abdomen. I didn’t dare look further, afraid of what I might see.

  “Zoe!” Ken-san called out. He had dispatched the shooter. There was no more threat. Just me and Buell.

  Remarkably, Buell was still trying to crawl away. Whatever synthesized healing ability he’d had from Porter was still working. I rolled over onto my stomach and felt my insides slosh in ways I knew they shouldn’t, but it was the only way I could move. I raised my hand, willing one last blast from it, one last bolt of power . . . Just one more, please God, give me something to kill this monster . . .

  Nothing but a blinding, crushing headache, the sutures of my skull grinding against each other, bony plate against bony plate, with my brain a pool of lava compressed inside.

  I tried dragging myself after Buell and managed to get to my knees. That was as far as I got. I reached into my pocket, hoping I’d find something I could throw at him. Nothing.

  I tried once more to blast him, screaming, feeling the rage at the futility of it all, the blinding pain of pushing past depletion. He was right there . . .

  “Hellbender, I am here!”

  The roaring outside and within my head would have flattened me if I hadn’t already been down. Quarrel, a vampire who’d grown so old he’d acquired the form of a dragon, had materialized in the courtyard as if out of nowhere. His sudden appearance and terrifying aspect had resulted in screams from the Order soldiers and more than a few from the Fangborn, to whom dragons were a thing of the distant past, if not myth. He raised himself up onto his great haunches, glittering black and silver in the rain, and spoke even louder, to make himself heard over the racket of his lesser kin and their enemies.

  “Why do you assume that posture, Zoe Miller? It does not look like a fighting stance to me!”

  Chapter Four

  When Buell saw Quarrel, he did the only things possible. His jaw worked, he stared, and he dropped his empty gun, a dark stain spreading across his trousers. It is one thing to know, vaguely, that dragons exist and to understand something of their pedigree and powers. It is quite another to see one in real life: thirty feet long, a glittering bluish black, lizardlike body, with a red-gold belly; thick scales dotted with brighter jewels that looked similar to the ones I had on my body; foot-long teeth, and claws like polished daggers.

  I was so happy to see Quarrel that I got to my feet. I nearly tore Buell’s guts out with a slashing kick before I fell back to the floor, totally spent with that effort.

  Buell and I stared at each other with impotent hatred. He looked at me blearily across the tatami as if to ask, “What are you doing? Don’t you see this thing over here?”

  Still, not quite dead. Whatever Porter had given him had been strong, and I was getting sick of it. There must be some way to counteract that. I must find out—

  “Zoe Hellbender, why do you not finish with him? I have much news!”

  I bet you do, dragon, I thought, and even some answers for me, but I think I’m dying over here. “Not doing so good, Quarrel.”

  I tried to push myself off the floor, but my arms were tingling like they’d been asleep, deprived of circulation, and I could barely feel them. Finally, I managed to sit up, my legs straight out in front of me. I heard shouts. I had to ignore those and Quarrel and get to killing Buell.

  “It is no wonder I found you so easily! You are quite radiant with—” He used a
word I didn’t understand. “If I had been here sooner, perhaps there might have been some for me.”

  Reaching delicately through the standing members of the house, with no walls to impede his view or him, Quarrel nudged me with his snout, breathing small wisps of steam that added to the humidity. Being nudged by a dragon is a little like being nudged by a very dainty bus, even when you haven’t been in a fight for your life, mystically transported, and shot repeatedly. I smelled a familiar aroma, bitter herbs, and felt my insides move sickeningly again, the pain from the gunshots and blood loss dizzying, as I settled back onto the mats. Maybe Quarrel was concerned; more possibly he wanted to see if there was any loose power left he could grab.

  Quarrel had been a friend and ally, but I could never forget that he had once, on a hillside in Turkey, threatened to eat me and take my power as his own. This proximity and my weakness was not a good combination, as far as I was concerned. At least if it was Quarrel who killed me, it wouldn’t be Buell.

  “Oh, I understand. You have not—” He again used language I could not comprehend. He gave me a look of something like awe. “You are very weak.”

  I understood that okay. “Yeah.”

  “Pray, allow me.”

  He stretched out his claw daintily through the standing members of the house. I thought he was going to put me out of my misery and seize what power he could from me. This would be my obituary, I thought, as I felt the point of a claw dig ever so slightly into my flesh: Zoe Miller, briefly an archaeologist, a werewolf for an even shorter period, leaving a trail of dead friends and chaos behind her, died finally by being dispatched by an ambitious dragon, Quarrel . . .

  Instead it was like lightning coursing through me, enveloping me. Somehow it was different from the artifacts’ assault, controlled, like jumper cables being correctly applied, and oddly cooling. Then, way too cold; I felt myself go numb through and through. The big chill, the biggest . . .