Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (15 page)

My head still smarting, still in a daze from the communication with the mosaic, I brought the pistol to his chest. The blood spilling down my arm, narrowing to a trickle as I healed. I recognized my assailant by smell long before I could focus on his face.

Zimmer. Clean-head assistant, occasional assassin, to
Senator
Knight. Every time I’d met him before, he’d meant nothing but violence for me and anyone near. He’d tortured a man to death in London, tried to take the key to Pandora’s Box from me in Paris. I had no idea why the senator—much older and stronger than me—could stand Zimmer near him. Every time I’d met him, I’d had the urge to Change, to beat the evil out of him.

This would be my chance.

I leaned into his ear, speaking very low. I could smell the blood and sweat on him, and, ever so faintly, so pleasingly, beneath his boiling hate, a whiff of fear. “Give me one good reason I shouldn’t finish this now.”

Zimmer said nothing.

“How did you get here? Was it Knight?”

I didn’t even rate a smirk. “The senator is otherwise occupied,” he growled. “He said to stop you. He didn’t say how.”

“Senator Knight wants to reveal the existence of the Fangborn, not have you wipe us out. I would believe
capture
, not
kill
.”

I’m not big, but even he couldn’t actually shrug with my
elbows
under his arms, and he didn’t dare, with the pistol still aimed at his heart. “I have my own reasons. London, Paris, Ephesus, to name a few. You’ve been making me look bad.”

I thought about it. “Those three scars on the back of your head—parallel, jagged?”

No answer but a hatred in his eyes. I wasn’t the first Fangborn who’d tagged Zimmer.

“How can you work for Knight?” I said. “Every fiber of me wants to make you go away, but he doesn’t? I need answers.”

“Suck my dick.”

I pistol-whipped him again, drawing blood. But if I wasn’t going to kill him immediately, I had to lose the gun. Before he knew what was happening, I’d removed the clip, checked and cleared the chamber, breaking it down and dropping the pieces just like Adam had taught me. I didn’t like guns, and I didn’t need anything that could be used against me.

“Tell me what you know.”

Zimmer never even blinked. “Get fucked, mutt.”

I’d been called worse, but the pain in my shoulder turned to a throbbing ache. Every other part of me told me what I had to do. Zimmer was wrong. He’d done nothing but cause me trouble and pain. More than that, my Fangborn instincts said the world would be better without him.

I raised a clawed hand. No way was I going to put my mouth on him—

My nose twitched; his eyes flicked, to something behind me as my proximity sense went nutty. Someone hostile was nearby.

Even before I moved, it registered that the smell was all wrong. It was Fangborn, yet with nothing of the rotten wrongness of the thing I’d found at Knight’s complex in Turkey. I rolled away from Zimmer, jumped up, turned, and raised my right hand. I noticed that the bracelet had gone dead while I fought Zimmer, but now it reestablished its synchronized communication with the mosaic.

Zimmer began to drag himself away. I could—

The vampire had hurled himself across the room at me, hissing with outrage. Dirt and indigo blood caked on his skin and hair, obscuring his features. Something was wrong with his throat; I could see the angry raw lines of a recent suture there, pale blue against darker scales. His fangs—

The bracelet took over. I stepped forward and, without thinking, shoved him hard, in midflight.

I knocked him away from me like a pillow thrown at me playfully. He flew into the wall to my left. I heard a sickening crunch of bone, smelled hot blood spilling.

His leg was broken. The bone peeped through ripped skin.

I held up my hands, this time in placation, the bracelet still mirroring the mosaic. “Hey, you okay? You surprised me—”

Another harsh, broken hiss, followed by a noise like a quiet whip
crack. I stepped away, an instant before the venom could hit me.

“Hey! What’s the matter with you?”

I thought about crossing the room, and suddenly, I was there. A wave of vertigo. Complicated, inhuman scents filling my nose. A buzzing in my head.

He lashed out at me, barely able to lift himself from the ground. His broken leg wobbled the wrong way beneath him; I had no idea how long it might take a vampire to heal from a compound fracture. But whatever he was doing, it was too much, too soon.

“I’m on your side!” I reached out to steady him. Was he after Zimmer—hang on; where had Zimmer got to? Was he after me, part of the TRG? Or was this some kind of test? Was he the
guardian
of the mosaic, the way Ariana and Ben had been in charge of the Beacon in Venice?

Another slash with razorlike claws; I found myself out of the way and entirely too close. How he managed to stay upright was a mystery. How he managed to keep fighting, with such hatred, such disgust, was a miracle.

Wait—the mosaic was trying to decide between us.

We were competing for the power of this artifact.

The mosaic was somehow giving him a boost, same as me.

I didn’t want to hurt him; I had no reason to, apart from pure self-defense. But I had to have what the mosaic had to give me. Backing away from him, blocking each of his blows, I yelled in English, broken German, good Italian, and every word in every other language I could think of, trying to tell him I was no harm.

He was bleeding like a stuck pig. His leg was a ghastly ruin. And still he kept pushing himself to attack me.

There was only one thing I could do. I backed off hurriedly, putting more space between us, and then I dropped my guard
completely
.

I braced myself for it and let him land one on me—a dissecting punch that would have sheared my arm off, if he hadn’t been off balance. If I’d been human. I turned away at the last moment to avoid the worst of it, but kept my hands down, hoping he’d get that I wasn’t the danger here.

Vampire claws tore through my jacket and shirt easily, and then bit deep into the fur, muscle, and bone of my upper arm.
I wa
s
being
pulled apart, boned like a chicken. It hurt like a
motherfucker
. If I hadn’t moved, my arm would have been gone, and my ribs, and maybe my heart, too.

Turning from his blow was smart another way, too. Seeing his chance, he had used all of his strength, and mostly missing his target, the momentum had carried him through. He landed on the floor in a tangled heap. I could smell his blood flowing even more rapidly from his body; his desperation; and finally, his tears.

I stepped forward, stooping, as quietly as I could, not knowing what I was going to do—

Suddenly, I felt the claws of my good hand tearing the fabric of my shirt, my bra, grazing the fur and skin of my breast before I figured out what was going on.

The son of a bitch was trying to glamour me with pheromones. Trying to make me tear my own heart out.

The sight of my blood ruining one of the few shirts I owned in the world was almost as bad as smelling that blood on my own hands. But it was the blood that did it.

I lost my shit. Utterly.

Every instinct I’d had to avoid harming the stranger vanished.

Tear my own heart out—

My temper or my blood triggered something in the mosaic. It was focusing only on me now.

I stepped toward him, feeling the all-enfolding connection between the bracelet and the mosaic, a self-shattering immersion in their union.

The last time I’d experienced this was when Pandora’s Box had opened the universe to me. An infinite number of possibilities revealed themselves.

Without thinking, without a real plan, I reached out to him, through a space within and beyond our own, and found him. Thoughts raced in my head, the same broken unintelligible communication I’d felt before. Overwhelming power, like a river
rushing
through me, and I was stuck with this stupid human brain, little pile of gray oatmeal, so small, so lizard-rooted, so inflexible—

“Fuck understanding,” I heard Sean say. “Just roll with it.”

I nodded.

The vampire’s heart. It was right there, inches, eternities away from me. With one squeeze, I could crush his heart. Death for him was mere seconds away with a certain kind of retributive poetry that I found amusing.

I reached.

Paused.

Zoe, since when do you find death—killing—funny? Satisfying, occasionally, maybe necessary, but not funny. Never funny.

Something was wrong.

“He’s not going to stop, you know.” Sean’s voice was strained. “It’s you—us—or him.”

I waved my hand. Sean was silent.

I pulled my hand back from where in the universe I saw the vampire’s heart. I found the well of his being and nudged it.

“Get better,” I said, willing it to be so. “No more trying to kill me. Understand me when I say I don’t mean you any harm. That I’m doing the best I can.”

The vampire’s face froze in terror. His leg straightened, as if of its own will. The shattered bone pulled back through the flesh, fusing together, restoring itself.

He screamed and passed out.

If I’d been … me … human, without the thrall of the
artifacts
, I might have done the same. My stomach, somewhere in the distance, roiled. I saw a vision of another site, a sacred pool nearby, and the vision of the cave and a scorpion I’d seen in Ephesus—

I watched as his skin contracted and melded, leaving no trace, no scar. A bruise dissolved, and I saw a finger, broken unnoticed, snap back into place with a sickening sound.

I exhaled, elated. I’d won. We were both alive. The mosaic had given me another vision. And maybe healing him like that w
ould let
—

Pain filled me, toenails to split ends. I’d never felt anything quite so horrible in my life, as if my organs were turning inside out and every cell in my body was on fire.

Then blackness.

Then a voice.

Chapter Twelve

“You are very loud, you know.” In the dark, the voice rebuked me.

“I don’t mean to be. I think … I’m in a lot of pain.” But here, in the dark, suspended in nowhere, I wasn’t. Not being able to see, not being able to feel, I should have been alarmed, but I wasn’t. “I apologize.”

“Nice manners, that’s very good. You’re new, aren’t you? Never heard you before.”

“Me? New? Maybe.”

“You’re not as strong as the others, but you’re close by. You must come to see me. We have much to discuss.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Didn’t my Arab trader mention someone of great wisdom? My thoughts were too remote to recall. Distantly, I could feel something—my hand. Something patting it
rhythmically
.

Pain began to creep into the dark, and the voice faded as it said, “Visit soon.”

I woke in the abandoned house, to a warm wetness on my hand. I looked down to see blood dripping into my hand, pooling in my palm. My nose was bleeding.

Zimmer was nowhere to be seen. The vampire was staring at me dully.

He had Changed back at some point, then sat up, coughed harshly, and swallowed a couple of times. I glared at him, and when he only shrugged, I turned, dug into my bag, and handed him my bottle of water. He coughed again, and nodded, brushing at his eyes. The coughing was aggravating his other injuries.

He drank. “Thank you,” was whispered, hoarse. There was a freshly healed scar across his throat, which had nothing to do with me, and another I’d given him across a high cheekbone. His face was haggard, pale, filthy, bruised. He needed a shower and about a week in the sun to recover his vampire strength.

I didn’t know if his response was for the water or for not killing him, but I was too wretched to acknowledge it. I finished off the rest of my own water, leaned back, and let the waves of pain and illness wash over me. Now I knew what it was like for Vee when she overdid it. The thought of trying to heal myself any faster intensified the pain, so I let it have me for a while.

Eventually, I could sit up without thinking I would vomit or that my ears would start bleeding. The vampire was half-sitting, half-lying against the mosaic wall, which had gone dark and dull again. It was only an ordinary artifact now. I’d sucked out all of
its ener
gy.

He rubbed his previously broken leg and stared at me.

“Who are you? What are you?” His voice was still hoarse but getting better.

“Same as you.” I tried to raise myself and found I could sit. “What’s your name?”

“Toshiharu Yamazaki-Campbell. Call me Toshi.”

“Zoe Miller. You know what I am. I’m Family.”

He went pale, his eyes widened, and he rubbed his arm as though he were cold. “They … 
they
asked me about you. The ones who did this to me. They knew your name, wanted to know where you were.”

“Wait, what do you mean, ‘did this to you?’ Left you here?” Suddenly eager to get away, I hauled myself up. I could stand without the room spinning. Mostly.

“No. Cut my vocal chords, so I couldn’t glamour them vocally.”

My throat nearly closed at the cruelty needed to do such a thing. “But … why? I mean, I get why, but …”

“Basically? Vivisection. That was a real strength of mine, once upon a time. The lack of screaming was just a side benefit while they experimented on me. Somehow … you … or that thing over there … fixed that.”

“Who?” But I already knew.

He shuddered. “The Order of Nicomedia.”

My flesh crawled.

“Some long tall freak with a drawl and a bad attitude. Picked me up over here while I was working with some Cousins … some friends … on a project.” He sipped the water, swallowed a
little
more readily this time. “Wanted to see if they could isolate th
e compo
unds that make my venom heal, compel, wound, an
d the r
est of it. For a month.”

I thought about Buell in the bar in New York and tried not to think about being chained to a tree in New Jersey. “Yeah. We’ve met. He had me, too. For an hour or two.” Surely it couldn’t have been so short a time? “So … I’m familiar with their methods. How did you end up here?”

“That’s the problem. We were looking for this.” He tilted his head at the now dull wall. “A number of us were in the area. I think that’s what drew them. When I escaped, I stumbled across this place, thinking I could hide. There’s a room higher up with a window. I think I slept for three days, maybe longer. Then … I lost my mind.”

“You mean just now? In
here
?”

He nodded. “At first, I thought it was another hallucination. There had been a lot of them, even after I escaped.” He closed his eyes against the memories. “Then, I felt good—then … I don’t know what. I sensed a whole lot of evil, and the more I was aware of where it was, the more frenzied I felt. The only thing I’ve been able to manage to come up with is that it was a reaction to ha
ving be
en …”

“Tortured.”

He swallowed and flushed. It hurt his pride—it had hurt mine—to admit it. “Yeah, tortured, all that time.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said slowly. “I’ve been having this strange effect on people lately—some Fangborn seem to have it, some don’t.” I thought about what Gerry had said, how I smelled wrong, and shook my head. “You seem to have got it worse than most.”

Toshi looked thoughtful. “Maybe it was that … thing?” He glanced at the wall.

“The mosaic? Yeah, I
think
it sensed another Fangborn and gave you a push to see if you could beat me and claim it for
yourself
.”

He swallowed. “Is that what it does?”

I held out my wrist, showed him the bracelet. There was a new rank of stones closer to my wrist. “Apparently.”

“That’s …” He made a face. “Well, whatever it is, it’s gone now. I mean, you still don’t smell right, but not bad.” He looked at me. “Not evil. How is it possible that you’re a werewolf, and I still … felt the Call to Change?”

“The short version is: I think it’s the bracelet. But now … you have a plan for getting out of here? Someplace you need to be?”

“I’d like to eat. I should find my team.” He paused. “I mostly want to find that lanky bastard and kill him hard. I’m worried he has more of my team or will find them soon.”

I knew the guilt attendant on leaving friends in the lurch. Trying to stay alive was a complicated, ethical business.

I thought about it for a moment and decided I couldn’t just leave him there. “Okay, come with me. I’ll hide you at my place, get you some food. I have a friend with me. I’m looking for … something myself. It’s possible our search will overlap the Order’s. If you’d like to stay with me, I could use—”

“Zoe! Come now!” From the next room, Danny’s call was
frantic
.

Even before we got to the front room, we heard the noise. Someone—I was willing to bet it was Toshi’s captors—had found us. They had come in the back way, through a courtyard, and
started
firing, the shots muffled by suppressors.

We were going to die. I couldn’t rely on Toshi, not knowing how badly hurt he still might be. Anything we did was going to have to account for Danny’s human slowness and the city around us.

“Okay,” I said to Toshi. “I’m going to draw their fire, running out back. You—you’re going to pick up Danny and run as fast as you can. Get off the hill and call the police. You might not be able to use your voice glamour, but you’re still plenty fast and strong.”

“I can’t tell you how much I hate this idea,” he said, wincing.

“Right there with you on that. You have a better plan?”

A sensation came over me that was like a shiver that never resolved itself. Freaky, and a little unpleasant, to feel as if your body is made up of television static.

Toshi opened his mouth, and I waited for his answer, attributing the shiver as a side effect of the bracelet.

I waited. And kept waiting. And waiting …

Toshi was frozen, I realized suddenly, his mouth open, eyes unblinking, one hand slightly raised as if he were about to gesture.

What was wrong with him?
I turned to Danny who stood in the doorway, looking at me expectantly. He’d been in the process of running toward me, his hand and opposite knee raised improbably; if he’d been in charge of himself, he never would have stopped like that—his balance simply wasn’t that good. His muscles would have been shaking.

If physics had been behaving, he would have toppled over.

I suddenly recognized the sensation of shivery static. I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to it the first time I encountered it; I’d been too surprised, too busy trying to figure out how to save Sean’s life.

Time had stopped, or at least slowed to beyond human
comprehension
. And I wasn’t responsible for it.

I didn’t like it, but I was going to have to try and move, to see who was doing this and then decide if I dared try to do anything about it.

Like what, Zoe?

Move first, hard questions after.

I felt very silly when I marshaled all my strength and found I could walk normally—no moving through molasses, no swimming through thickened air. The only thing different was how it felt to move and the way it felt to touch things. The way my feet hit the ground was like rubber, a bit springy and resistant. As long as I kept focusing, I could keep from being so disconcerted that I lost my balance.

Toshi and Danny were safe in the front room; time to find out if it was the gunmen who were responsible for freezing time.

I kept low but didn’t hear any more bullets. In fact, I’d passed one suspended in air. I briefly considered touching it, then realized that if someone had control over time, I’d better address t
hat firs
t.

In the courtyard out back, one sniper was nearly obscured by a bloom of smoke and spark, a flower created when the escaping gases and explosion were captured by time. I walked around and, with a wrench—he was still hanging onto the gun with too tight a grip—pulled the rifle out of his hand. I took the rifle like a bat and walloped him upside the head. He didn’t move, but he’d have a hell of a headache when things snapped back or when he woke up, whichever came first.

The second assailant was higher up the slope of the hill. I ran in a crouch—who knew when things would go back to normal? I’d only had a minute while I was in communion with the vessel of Pandora’s Box. I didn’t know if it was possible to
sustain
more.

I readied myself for the last few steps, intending to do the same grab-bash-and-fling, when I stopped dead in my tracks.

Vee Brooks was standing over the man, staring at me. A large cement brick was in her hands, big enough to cave in the guy’s skull.

“How are you doing that?” she said, angry and disbelieving. “How are you able to move?”

“How are you doing
that
?” I said, gesturing at the stilled life around me. “How did you get here? Where—I had no idea anyone else could—”

She shook herself. “We don’t have time—well, we have …” She glanced at one of her two watches, and suddenly I knew what it was for. “We have two minutes and forty seconds left. You can help me, we can get out of here, and then we can compare notes on these things neither of us should be able to do.”

I swallowed, nodded, and looked away when she smashed the rock over his head. I didn’t know why a werewolf should be squeamish, especially in matters of self-defense. That done, she took his gun but, instead of throwing it, tucked it into the back of her waistband, pulling her shirt over it.

“Did you toss the other guy?”

“Uh, toss?” I shook my head. “I was trying to figure out what was going on.”

She rolled her eyes and said, “No time, now. Let’s get back to your boys and get out of here.”

We didn’t quite walk fast enough and hadn’t made it all the way to the front room when the blood seemed to roar in my veins, the feeling of uncertain static vanished, and I stumbled as time snapped back into place.

Vee cast a glance at me, but didn’t stumble and didn’t slow.

“—No, I don’t have a better idea. On the count of—” Toshi broke off. “What the fuck? Where did
she
come from? Where a
m
I
?
”

Danny, so focused on making his way to where I had been before, took a minute to discover where I was now. He shook his head, as much in denial as to clear it.

“No time,” I said. “We caught a break, and we’re getting out of here.”

We’d made it to the car when suddenly Vee turned around and raised the gun she’d taken. “Get down!”