Hellbender (The Fangborn Series Book 3) (8 page)

“Please come sit next to Okamura-san, on your knees if you can.”

Once I was arranged, Ken-san said, “Okamura-san would like to do a reading. And in order to do that, she will do a writing.”

Another secret smile, and this time, I got the joke. Okamura-san did her readings with calligraphy.

What “word” she’d find for me, I was very curious to learn.

When the ink was prepared, she sat back and stared at the paper. Sunlight flooded the whole room, and as hard as I tried to concentrate and be patient, I felt myself dozing off.

“If you would very lightly place your hand on Okamura-san’s,” Ken-san said quietly. “She is ready to begin.”

Okamura-san had picked up a brush and was poised to work. Her eyes were glassy and unfocused, and when I reached over, I was very careful to place my hand on hers without adding undue pressure.

Her brush suddenly flew across the paper, and as she worked almost effortlessly, I felt another flowing between us, similar to what I’d shared the first time I’d worked with the Trips. This was a fainter connection, possibly because it was just the two of us, but it was there, and my hand moved with hers over the paper, gliding like a planchette across a Ouija board.

The brush left the paper several times to finish characters, and once for more ink. The ink was beginning to thin as we made the last flourish, and Okamura-san sat back with satisfaction, placing the brush neatly beside her.

Okamura-san studied the calligraphy and then began discussing it with Ken-san. They both looked at me, and then Okamura-san shook her head.

“When you arrive in Boston,” Ken-san said at last, “please let us know. I will email you Okamura-san’s reading then.”

“Uhhh, but I’m right here now?”

“It will make more sense once you are home,” he said.

He was lying and I knew it. I was about to protest again, but instead nodded. No sense telling him I could detect lies, and no doubt, they had their reasons. “
Dōmo arigatō gozaimasu
, Okamura-san.” I bowed deeply and she returned it. I struggled to get back to my feet. My legs had gone to sleep.

I didn’t press Ken-san because I was horribly afraid he’d tell me how hard a time I was going to have getting home. I had enough bad luck without looking for more.

The ride to the airport was quiet. Our good-byes were muted, and my newfound Family rushed off once I was at the airport, because there was a lot of work to do in the next few days. They’d handed me off to a vampire named Viktor Denisov, who escorted me, easing my way through immigration with some pheromones that convinced the guards that I wasn’t worth noticing, and a few gentle, persuasive nudges suggesting my papers were perfectly in order. Only once we were through did I realize we were not going to the commercial airlines.

I was expecting a cargo plane of some sort and was surprised to see a sleek private jet. “That’s
us
?”

Viktor laughed. “Yes, that’s us. Welcome to Fangborn Air’s prize Gulfstream. As far as my Normal colleagues know, I cater to businessmen and the wealthy who aren’t rich enough to own their own jet. This will get us to San Francisco, and then we’ll refuel and change pilots.”

I sat by myself; another Fangborn was sitting in the back, working furiously on a computer and phone. She waved and then ignored me, which was fine with me. I pulled out the phone and new earplugs Kazumi-san had thoughtfully provided for me to replace my battered ones. She’d even added my sim card, so I could settle down and listen to music, a pleasure I’d been denied for . . . I couldn’t remember how long.

Viktor went through his pilot checklist. We took off, and I watched the cityscapes and cargo ships fall away beneath us. When we left the fascinating coastline behind, I slept.

“Hellbender! Where do you go?”

I sat bolt upright. I could not see Quarrel when he contacted me like this, but even when he spoke in my head, muted to keep from scrambling my fragile werewolf brain, it was a shock to hear the dragon’s voice come from nowhere. I looked around. The werewolf on the computer was still busily at work crunching numbers or writing press statements or playing
Angry Birds
.

“Uh, home?” I said quietly.

“You left in such haste. Naserian recalled something to tell you, but I cannot understand it. She asked if she might communicate directly with you, as we are now.”

“Uh . . . sure?”

As soon as I’d given my consent, an image blasted into my head—one of my visions from Ephesus, of a cave in a desert and a scorpion, coming back hard and vivid. The last time I’d had this vision, I was in the middle of a raging gunfight, in addition to opening Pandora’s Box and feeling the bracelet driven into my flesh for the first time. Now I had time to pay attention to the details.

The cave I’d seen was actually a tomb overlooking a small village on the Nile. The blues and greens of the river and its banks stood out starkly against the sere brown of the hilly desert that stretched out beyond.

It had just dawned on me that Naserian was telling me I had to go to Egypt. The urge to get the artifact that was in that place was distressing.

Before I had time to panic, to worry that I might suddenly wish myself to nineteenth-century Egypt, more images flooded my brain, this time somewhat more familiar.

A young woman, in a smart 1940s suit, walking down a runway with a small square suitcase in her hand. She was clutching a ticket that said “Kuskokwim” and hurrying from a small prop plane to a log cabin with red shutters.

The artifact was in the Alaskan bush. I had to get it.

Naserian was gone as soon as I’d had that thought. I felt a vague sense of satisfaction from her, as if I’d successfully understood her meaning.

“Quarrel?”

“Hellbender?”

I chose my words carefully, knowing how dragons could be about objects of power. “Why did Naserian give me that information?” I was curious about why Naserian didn’t try to seize it for herself, but didn’t want to tip off Quarrel if I didn’t have to. I would not want to fight him over such power, especially because he seemed so much more vigorous than our first meeting when he considered eating me.

“She says she pledges herself to you.”

“Ah.” Which meant exactly nothing to me.

“She claims there’s power to be had by following you.” Quarrel didn’t seem convinced yet. “She is terribly learned among our kind, but she is so old she sometimes forgets how to communicate, with you, with us . . .” He continued in what I think was meant to be a whisper, but would have put the jet’s engines to shame for volume. “I think she may be losing grasp on her human memories entirely.”

“Well, convey my thanks.”

“What did she say, Hellbender?”

“I didn’t understand most of it. Mostly it felt like . . . best wishes. That sort of thing.” I decided if she wasn’t sharing her conversation with Quarrel, I wouldn’t, either. I changed the subject quickly. “Quarrel, why do you call me that? Hellbender?”

“It is what you are,” he said, a bit puzzled. “It is very unusual in one so young as you, especially with your incomplete—” Quarrel often became incomprehensible when speaking in terms only a dragon could understand.

“Well, thank you.” I thought a moment. “What are you up to now?”

“Up to?”

“How do you occupy yourself when I don’t see you?”

“I am often resting. Moving about as I do takes much energy.”

“I can imagine.”

“But sometimes I am in communication with the Makers.”

That reminded me of something I’d prefer stayed buried in memory. “Quarrel . . . how greatly did my speech, my manner, offend the Makers?”

“They were curious as to why you left so abruptly. They found that . . . worrying.”

“I left? They didn’t . . . send me away from them? How did I get to Japan, then?”

“That was all of your doing. If you do not yet comprehend your powers, as you seem not to, you must study them as I do.”

The dragon’s rebuke was as stern as it was silly to me. If I’d had a chance to catch my breath, I’d be studying those powers very closely indeed.

“Perhaps I could speak with the Makers directly? I have many questions, especially about how we are considered to be broken. And what does ‘broken’ mean?” I recalled my own issues and the mishap that landed me in Japan. “What do
they
think we
should
look like?”

“I shall see if we may speak with them. And I shall ask your questions.” The dragon’s attention was suddenly elsewhere.

There was a long pause that worried me increasingly as it continued. At least Quarrel seemed relieved when he disengaged from the conversation and returned to me. “Ah, much is made clear.”

I tried not to be impatient. What was clear to dragons wasn’t necessarily clear to the rest of us. “Okay.”

“I have explained what most of us born to the Fang and the Talent perceive as our function. The Makers expressed great surprise at this, which is only partially what their intent was. Not at all what they expected to find here.”

“And what did they expect to find?”

Naserian picked up here; she could speak more easily now. Her voice was like iron, ringing against stone, with the weight of years and authority. “They anticipated, with some logic, to find, once we had grown sufficiently in power to communicate with them, that we would rule wherever we went.”

The dragons, believing their tasks completed, vanished.

I rested my head against the window, the vibration rattling my brain almost as much as my thoughts were. I’m as open-minded as a girl who’s a werewolf fighting an evil mutant army can be, but understanding dragons was beyond me. It made me worry about meeting something even more inscrutable than they were.

When Viktor came out to chat, I told him about my change in plans. “I guess I’m getting out in San Francisco. I’ll find my way to Anchorage, and maybe someone will be able to help me find Kuskokwim.”

“I’ve never heard of the place, and I have close Family in Alaska,” Viktor admitted. “But let me see what I can do to help.”

At least I had that much flexibility, though I didn’t like the idea of anything that took me away from going home. “Thank you.”

“I’ll let the folks in Boston know, too. Try to get some rest.” Viktor looked at me appraisingly. “You’re going to need it.”

Eventually, I managed to sleep, but my dreams were full of bloodshed and overdue library books.

Chapter Six

Viktor managed to arrange it so that a California Cousin, Hal, who was one of the western American partners in “Fangborn Air,” picked me up and flew me to Anchorage. From there, Hal gave me instructions on how to get to McGrath. I discovered that I’d have to travel on a small prop plane that only carried about a dozen passengers, which made me much more nervous than the very sleek and quiet jets Viktor and Hal had flown. We flew for about an hour into the bush to McGrath, a very small town where I’d get an even smaller plane to Kuskokwim. It was in there my luck ran out. The weather had turned; a nasty front was predicted. The sky was already dark and the clouds loomed.

I called Cousin Hal back in Anchorage. “I really need to get to Kuskokwim.”

He said, “You can need all you want, but if the pilot doesn’t think it’s safe, she’s not going to go. And the airfield isn’t going to let her.”

“I don’t suppose there’s a train? Or a rental car?”

His silence told me how fond a hope those were. “The only way in there is by plane. You could get there by boat, but only from somewhere else you’d have to get to by plane.”

I paused. He said, “There’s still a chance, but even if you get to Kuskokwim, you might not be able to get out again.”

“Can’t you fly over and take me?”

“Zoe, even if I could, if the weather is bad . . .”

“I can pay you,” I said. “Whatever you want.” The Family in Japan had set me up with emergency funds and credit cards. There were advantages to being Fangborn, and apparently, one of them was a platinum card.

“It’s not that. For one thing, I’m on my way to shore up the front in the northeast. Some Family there is threatening to go public, and we’re hoping to talk them out of it. For another, I wouldn’t fly in that weather, either. For a third, my plane is too big. The airfield at Kuskokwim can’t handle it—too short, too narrow.”

I remembered his plane, which was actually pretty darned small to my eyes. I was getting a real education in small aircraft, hitherto a mystery to me, if you didn’t count the airplane ride outside the Kmart when I was a kid. If his plane was too large . . .

“Okay, I guess I’ll take my chances.”

“It’s not only your chances you’d be taking. Ms. Whitbeck’s gonna take you. There are old pilots, and bold pilots, but not both. She’s got enough mileage on her that you’ll be safe. She’s not one of us, but she’s good people and I trust her. It’s not up to you, unless you can Change into a wolverine and run all the way there.”

I had been about to snap at him when I glanced over my shoulder.

“Hal, uh, I think my ride may be here.”

“All right, Zoe. Good luck.”

I sighed. “Thanks. You, too.”

I turned off my phone, took a breath, and focused on my ride.

If her plane was anything like her car, I was in a whole new world of trouble.

The station wagon was at least twenty years old. The windshield was cracked in three places. A bungee cord was holding one of the back doors closed, because there was no handle. The number of scrapes, dents, and broken trim on the outside suggested it had been driven blindfolded and drunk.

The passenger-side window was rolled down—check that. It was missing entirely.

“I’m Luanne Whitbeck.” She had the same drawl and aviator sunglasses every other pilot I’d met today had, with what sounded a little like a Northeast accent, but definitely not Massachusetts. “You Zoe Miller?”

Seeing her car, I thought about denying it, but I’d come this far . . . “Yeah.” At least her name checked out.

“Get on in. We have a very small window for getting out of here, and I understand time is of the essence.”

I nodded and got in. The inside was no better than the outside. The upholstery was cracked in places, missing entirely in others. Duct tape abounded. I could see glimpses of tarmac through the floorboards on my side and made sure to keep my feet along the edges that seemed intact. The odometer said “65,094” on it, and I was pretty sure next time it turned over would be its third, not first time.

The pilot was dark haired, tall, and slender; better, she radiated confidence of age and experience. A little weather-beaten around the eyes, she gave me the impression she could handle whatever aviation and Alaska could throw at her. She shook my hand, and we were off before I could shut the door.

It took three more slams for the door to shut. I looked over at Luanne, wondering if she would chastise me for being too rough on her car.

“There you go,” she said, nodding. “You show that door who’s boss.”

I nodded, my heart sinking.

“Now, we’re going to take a left turn up here. The door’s going to open again. Just slam it again.” She caught me looking around. “No, there isn’t a seat belt, sorry. But I know you’ll do the right thing.”

The right thing was apparently jamming my heels under the seat and clutching the ragged upholstery with one hand while I reached out to slam the door again with the other.

“There you go. Won’t happen again.”

“The fourth time’s the charm?”

“No more turns until the other side of the airport.”

It took five minutes and we were there. A fleet of small planes of various colors and shapes greeted me. I looked for the worst one, convinced it would be my ride.

“We’re over there, on the end.”

I saw three sleek little planes, all in what looked like perfect shape. Any of them looked up to the job.

I may have exhaled my relief. All Luanne’s money went into her fleet, not her ground transportation. I could live with that. “Have you always been a pilot?”

“Past fifteen years. I was a geologist for ages. But now I like seeing the earth from the air. A new perspective.”

“Oh. I’m an archaeologist.” I thought about “used to be,” and decided, no, fuck that. No matter what happened, I was still me. Falling off my feet with fatigue, I handed her my bag to stow, and climbed into the cabin. I found the safety belts—yay, safety belts!—and strapped in. After being on small planes for the past day, I knew the “in the event of an emergency in Alaska guns and survival gear” drill.

Luanne gave a slightly different version of the drill than I’d heard before. “Okay, there’s a flare and supplies in back if we decide to go camping. There’s a gun up here if we want to go hunting. And if I pass out from too much partying, there’s a radio here, and in back, in case you want to take over the DJ’ing. You got it?”

I blinked, and it was the first time I’d smiled all day. “Yeah, I got it.”

“You know, I don’t like the looks of the weather. I think it’s coming faster than I expect, I’m going to ground us. I’m not going to get us killed.”

I thought about giving her a vampiric nudge, about making her forget the weather and just going. I could have done it. But I didn’t know anything about planes, and Cousin Hal trusted her. I’d seen what it took to fly, today, and I didn’t have it. So it was her expertise, and my skin, and I wouldn’t do anyone any favors by being dead. Alive, there were always more options.

“It’s really important I get to Kuskokwim today. But I don’t want to be killed.”

“Anything you can tell me about?” She was assessing me but didn’t ask why it was so important. “Maybe I can find you another solution.”

I shrugged. The smartest people I knew, with the most on the line, hadn’t been able to come up with another solution.

She waited for an answer. “Hal has some very strange friends.” She cocked her head at me. “But this is Alaska. My friends are all strange, too.”

I shrugged again.

“Okay, let’s get going while we can.”

She called back to the tower, got a satisfactory response, and we were up before I could have another thought.

The light faded dangerously fast. The clouds moved in. My time was running out. Never had thirty minutes seemed to drag so slowly.

“You’ll want to hang on here,” Luanne shouted over the noise of the engine, almost deafening in the small cockpit. That was the most she’d said about anything since my instructions on boarding, and even the Chuck Yeager drawl every pilot affects couldn’t conceal the fact that it was getting hairy.

Suddenly, through the clouds, as if out of nowhere, a ridge appeared directly in front of us. I saw what looked like a line segment of a dirt road on top of a mountain, no houses in sight.

I realized:
Fuck me, that’s where we’re supposed to land . . .

“I can do this, but watch your lunch. Here we go.”

Another direct reference that I didn’t like. I hung on.

We went into a steep climb, followed by an equally steep descent, our only chance of hitting an airstrip barely worth the name. Clouds had rolled in again, and I couldn’t see a damn thing.

Luanne Whitbeck couldn’t see a damn thing, either. She pulled up. Hard.

“We’d be better off heading back to McGrath,” she said. She looked at me, trying to decide.

I didn’t think I’d used any pheromones on her, but she sighed and turned around.

“Okay. One more try.”

Another realization:
Today, Luanne’s gonna have to be an old, bold pilot, the kind that don’t exist.

Luanne sat up on top of the windscreen, peering out. Then she glanced at the controls.

She finished the loop. “Gonna be close.”

“Gonna be close” meant we may end up smeared on that little dirt line segment.

“Here we go.”

We made the descent. For a critical thirty seconds, we could see the landing strip. It seemed smaller than a football field, impossibly narrow. But it had a light and it was clear, for the moment.

“Hang on.”

We hit with a bump and immediately started decelerating. I hoped it wasn’t skidding I felt . . .

As the trees slid past us, I reviewed the scant emergency procedures I was given at the beginning of the flight before I figured out that there wouldn’t be any need for them if we went over the side. According to the maps I’d looked at in McGrath, the drop off the strip was close to seventy feet.

Luanne pulled up hard.

We stopped, finally, ten feet from the edge.

Every single muscle in my body was tensed for falling, crashing, dying. I tried to relax them, with varying degrees of success.

“That’s closer than the manual recommends,” she announced after taking a breath.

I was inclined to agree. Breathing unnecessarily would, it seemed to me, tip us over the edge. “Mmm . . .” I finally took a deep breath, rotated my shoulders. “Thanks.”

She understood I meant “Thanks for the ride, for not killing us, for getting me here.”

“No problem. Who are you going to visit?”

“I’m not sure.” I’d been so busy finding my way here and making connections that I had no idea of how I’d find the house on the hillside. We’d landed on a small mountain, and there were foothills and mountains all around us. “I’m looking for a log cabin–styled house, red shutters, on the side of a hill?”

“You want Fatima Breitbarth’s house.” Luanne paused, opened her mouth, and then shut it again. “I’m sorry. It’s just kind of unusual to come to Kuskokwim if you don’t have a pretty good reason.”

“I have a good reason,” I said. “Just not a lot of details. Can you point me toward it?”

“Sure.”

We said good-bye and I saw Luanne batten down her plane for the night. The weather was turning bad indeed. I pulled up my hood and followed the pilot’s directions, keenly aware that every eye in the village was on me. Curtains twitched in the windows of the tiny, weather-beaten single-story houses that clustered by the river along a dirt road. Another road wound around the base of the mountain we’d just landed on. Gas tanks were behind every house—
How did the fuel get here?
I wondered—and a few of the more ramshackle places looked as though they still utilized outhouses. I nodded and greeted the five people I met on the road, which was probably about a tenth of the population, telling them I was heading to Fatima’s house and asking, was she in?

“Maybe,” one of the kids on a three-wheeler said. “Sometimes she takes off into the bush.”

My heart sank, and I thanked him. He tore off down the road toward the one large, modern building, which I assumed was a community center or school.

While it was possible I could track her down in my wolfself, I couldn’t handle another detour. I really needed Fatima Breitbarth, whoever she was, to be at home right now. Among other things, it had started to rain, and in Alaska, October feels more like winter than autumn.

By the time I finished the hike up the hill, it was pouring down, and it was cold. Any colder and the snow would have been flying. In my borrowed and mended clothing, I was not dressed for the coming winter.

I knocked. A light at the back of the house gave me hope, and when I felt the vibrations of an interior door opening, I couldn’t help myself. I started to cry quietly.

Fatima Breitbarth was very old indeed, with bone-white hair piled up on top of her head in a style that seemed appropriate to the nineteenth century. The skin of her face was brown and fine and paper thin, her sharp features reminding me of the Moorish trader I’d seen in a vision once. She wore wool trousers that were getting rubbed thin at the knees and a sweater I’d seen in an L.L.Bean ad.

“You’re Zoe Miller, aren’t you?” Her accent was a mix of Arabic and German. “Please come in.”

“What? How the hell do you know that?” I said, crying harder now. “How do you all keep knowing when I’ll arrive before I know I’m going myself?”

She smiled and guided me into the house, and waited until I had controlled my sniffling before helping me with my coat. “Even if I didn’t know the sound of Luanne’s plane arriving off her usual schedule, even if I didn’t have the airstrip in McGrath calling this morning to let me know someone was on the way, even if it wasn’t for Viktor Denisov tracking down Family in Alaska to find the one closest to Kuskokwim and let me know, even if everyone in the village didn’t know, for perfectly mundane reasons . . .” She shrugged. “I could feel it in my bones. It’s always been my private theory that the older we get, a little bit more of the oracle takes over to make up for the lack of speed, the dullness of tooth. If we’re not killed outright before now. It’s just a shift in roles, an easing out.”