Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (10 page)

“You’re not going to …” Adam paused, and in a moment I’m sure we both had looks of confusion.

I figured out what he meant, and scowled. “No, I’m not going to just break into his house and take it. That’s what you meant, right?”

“Not an unfair assumption.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “You stole the figurine from Grayling in London, broke into a house in Venice, and broke out of a government—”

“Let’s not go into that.” I gave him what I hoped was a withering look that said the discussion was over. “I’d
prefer
to think of a way to do what I have to do without theft or violence.”

Adam’s snort of disbelief startled some hopeful pigeons away from us. “And the award for cosmic naiveté goes to …”

“Hey, what happened in the past doesn’t dictate what can happen in the future.”

“No, it’s just a really,
really
good indicator.” He stretched out his long legs in front of him. “So what’s the plan?”

“I dunno.” I stood up. “Let’s have a look.”

The house was on a slight mound, raised above the other houses in the area and overlooking the harbor. The large lawn itself was unusual. There were several large plots nearby, unusual to what I knew of European planning and building, but this was really noticeable, especially as the yard and house were both neglected. In fact, the boundary lines of lawn on both sides had been aggressively mowed, as if to indicate the disapproval of a sloppy neighbor. It came to me that this had been part of a larger estate a millennium or so ago and had been altered through time.

In fact, the closer I got to the house, the better I could see that most of the facade was brick, but it incorporated other elements of other buildings—stone and brick—over hundreds of years. So maybe somewhere under what looked like an eighteenth-century house was a medieval core. Given half a chance, I’d love to excavate here.

The door lintel was decorated with a stone like that in the
cathedral
wall. Wolf head, serpent head, which the guide had said might represent Fenrir and the Midgard Serpent, the children of Loki. Or they might have been merely decorations. Fangs, nicely chiseled, on both of them. A slight tingle; it reminded me of the caduceus I’d seen in Venice, outside the home of two Fangborn. Two Fangborn who’d been guarding a gold disk they didn’t know about, which eventually activated Pandora’s Box.

My head ached just remembering it.

Maybe it would be more like Venice and less like New Jersey, I thought. I walked to the front door. No bell. I raised the knocker, which screeched with the resistance of disuse, and rapped three times. Flakes of rust dusted my hand.

I waited. No answer.

Adam placed a hand on my shoulder. “Zoe, I don’t want you to go in there. Is there any way you don’t—?”

“I
have
to.”

“I wish you didn’t,” Adam said, looking away. He squeezed my shoulder.

I sighed and rested my cheek on his hand for a moment. “Me, too. Gotta go.”

He stepped back.

I tried the knob.

A brief, stabbing pain in my finger. Definitely the right place. The doorknob had bitten me. With the artifacts in Venice and at Claros, there had been similar bites, and I had come to the conclusion that I was being tested, my blood sampled, maybe to see if I was the right one, if I had the right bracelet parts, the right
Fangborn
pedigree, or maybe the necessary guts.

The bite also reminded me to be on my guard.

The knob turned freely under my hand. Unlike the knocker, there was no noise, no protest, almost as if it had been recently oiled. I motioned to Adam to stay put and stepped in.

The first floor of the house was empty of furniture. Dust and dead flies covered the floors and sills; a mirror, murky with age, was the only thing left on the walls. The warmth and staleness of the room suggested that I was the only one who’d been here in some time. At least a year, to judge by the lawn.

The interior was mostly symmetrical, one room balancing another the same shape and size on the other side. A few modifications over the course of the centuries—the addition of molding, a staircase embellishment in the nineteenth century. Nothing much after that.

I moved to the center of the main hall. The ceiling was badly cracked and discolored; paint peeled, and I wondered if there had been a fresco once. An inlaid decoration on the floor drew my attention. The edges were chipped, then worn smooth from use, but when I experimentally rubbed a finger across the thick layer of grime, the marble was as colorful as the day it was installed. I spat down on it, and rubbed it clean—bright blue, part of an ocean scene perhaps.

A seam cut across the tile. I traced it around and discovered a straight line. There was a door fitted into the floor, the edges carefully matched so that it looked as though there were no interruption. The center of the design, a compass rose, hid a circle of iron.

I lifted it. Expecting resistance, I almost fell backward as the large door opened easily, again as if on oiled hinges.

Stairs led down into the dark. I pulled out a penlight, and hoping the ancient steps would support me, followed them.

The smell of rotting wood was very strong; the stairs creaked in protest under my weight, but held. Occasionally, the whole staircase let out a dry crack, its entire structure shifting under
unexpected
use. Dirt and cobwebs had accumulated, and I tried not to think about what might be scuttling around down here.

The stairs ended at a long, stone-paved walkway, about five feet wide. Then a gap, some sort of a trench, then …

It took me a moment to realize what I was seeing. A long ship was before me. It was nearly perfectly preserved, whether because of the stability of the climate below the house or by some magic, I couldn’t tell. I hardly dared breathe for fear of introducing some contaminant. I
was
one big contaminant—humidity, body oils, breathing, never mind me stepping anywhere.

I edged down the stairs a little farther. The light was faint, its source unknown, and the shadows loomed. A step moaned under me, and I got off it quickly, before it could split. Similar concerns drove me down the rest of the stairs, and I was at the bottom.

The wood of the ship looked like it did the day it was constructed, painted in autumn colors with a stylized dragon’s head at one end, covered in gold leaf. There were bundles at both ends, and at first, I thought they were cargo—bales of cloth, crates, stacks of hides and furs—covered up with waxed-cloth tarps.

A little closer and I understood: the bundles were bodies.

Wrapped in heavily embroidered shrouds, they were lined up in two rows, bow and stern. Most of them were very old, and I started to see gradations in them: the ones at both ends were the oldest, moving to the newer, near the middle. I didn’t exactly tiptoe but was hugely aware of the sound and weight of my steps as I moved to the far end. Without touching anything, I leaned over the edge of the ship and saw the cloth intact but fading, the metallic threads dull in the light. The embroidery reminded me of the “gripping beasts” style of ornament that evolved through the Viking period: stylized creatures entwined and gripping each other with claws, similar to the decorations at the cathedral and on the lintel of
the hous
e.

A brooch was on this bundle, too far away to see. There was an opening in the side of the ship, with a kind of gangplank. If I wanted to learn more, I was going to have to get on board.

A pebble in the dust by the stairs. I picked it up, and dropped it off the edge.

I waited for a long time and never heard it land, most likely because there were soft leaves or dirt or something muffling the sound below. But the breeze wafting up from the “moat” was dank and felt like it had come from a long way into the earth.

No sense in taking risks. It took me several minutes to gather my courage.

I stepped onto the plank tentatively. It swayed, but didn’t turn to dust or shatter under me immediately. Not daring to go out too far, I stood on it.

It dipped alarmingly but held.

A quick glance below me confirmed I didn’t want to fall off. I couldn’t see below me any better than I could from the bank.

Or could I? Something suggestive of flashing scales caught m
y eye
.

Possibly,
I thought,
it was water down there, not … not a giant snake.

And certainly not a snake twenty times the size of the biggest Fangborn vampire I’d ever seen, right?

Probably water. A puddle reflecting light, absorbing the sound of my pebble …

Before I could talk myself out of it, I stepped forward. The plank bowed; moving quickly and lightly was my only choice. Thinking my least heavy thoughts, two more steps took me safely onto the deck of the boat. It listed a little, then righted itself, as if both ends were on a fulcrum.

The deck was as sturdy as it looked. I moved to the center and caught my breath.

All of the bundles had brooches. Some were snakes, some were wolves, and some were crows or ravens, in that same intricate interwoven design.

A weird, sucking sound, and oxygen rushed into my lungs. I’d forgotten to breathe.

This was a burial of Fangborn, going back a thousand years or
more. I checked some of the other bundled bodies and saw that some
of the shrouds were much more recent, possibly dating to the early
twentieth century. You didn’t need to be a specialist in
Scandinavian
arts and artifacts to tell the difference between
interlock
machine stitching and something made with a bone needle.

I took out my phone and took pictures of the brooches. I used one of the apps to do a sketch of the layout of bodies, the ship itself. I cataloged detail to avoid thinking about the corpses around me. I assumed they were corpses, even though I couldn’t smell anything. But there were at least two dozen of them, and I’d never even excavated a burial before. This was an astonishing find.

I was very careful not to disturb any of the shrouds.

The bundle closest to me was the most recent. I stepped over to it—did I feel the boat tip again under my weight, or was that some trick of the dark and my nerves? There were letters and
numbers
worked into the designs. Initials, it looked like, and a date, m
aybe: 189
5.

I settled back on my heels, careful not to touch the fabric.

The brooches reflected some shaft of light that had found its way down into the basement. That had to account for the weird shine below the ship.

The ship tipped again, or I tipped, and over I fell. My head hit the planks of the deck. My eyes closed.

I felt a lurching in my stomach, but it was all right in a minute. I opened my eyes, and scrambled up, not wanting to get too familiar with any of the ship’s other passengers.

Everything was not all right.

To my right, some of the bundles were missing. I hadn’t seen anything move, hadn’t heard anything. There was no way those bundles, those bodies, should have been able to move. There was no sign of them having gone over the side.

To my left, the bundles were still there. But now, two cloak-wrapped figures stooped over one of them.

Chapter Nine

No sense of the Call to Change. I had no idea how they’d gotten there, but maybe they were here to help, like Ariana and Ben.

“Hey,” I said. Which also sounds like “hi” in Danish and Swedish. “Uh, I’m Zoe—”

A sharp, low syllable—I didn’t need to speak Danish to know it was swearing. They straightened and put themselves between me and the bodies on their end of the ship.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch—”

Their cloaks dropped away. I saw period garb: she was in a black
wasp-waisted gown with an absurdly large bustle. He was in black,
as well, a finely cut jacket. Mutton chops and jet mourning jewelry.

She growled and Changed. So did he.

Facing the two wolf-people, I sensed the frisson of their transformation, and before I could blink, I felt myself Changing as well. I slid into the half-Change almost without volition, feeling the urgency of their need to track.

“Who are we—?”

They stopped fast at the sight of my transformation. Their fur bristled, and they exchanged a look. He shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of a flea in his ear. She crossed herself.

“What’s going—?”

It was as if the sound of my voice confirmed something for them. With a snarl, they launched themselves at me.

I glanced around, to make sure there really wasn’t anything behind me that needed killing. Nothing, but when my head swiveled around again, a glint of something gold caught my eye on the far side of the room, just beyond the ship.

No time for intellectual curiosity now, not with two
steampunky
-
looking Fangborn getting the wrong idea about me.

I couldn’t remember a word of the “helpful” Danish words I’d read in the guidebook I’d bought at the airport. “Hey, stop! I’m one of you!”

Not working. He landed first, and I dodged out of the way. His clothing was tight, and seams were splitting in ways that were
gonna
embarrass him when he Changed back to skinself. As
he clos
ed the distance, he slowed, seeming surprised by me for some reason. Maybe he wasn’t expecting a girl in jeans, maybe he wasn’t expecting another werewolf, but he continued on. His pause gave me half a chance, and I threw my best roundhouse at him. I caught his chin and sent him over the railing.

I heard a howl that went on too long, and abruptly, nothing. Not a thud, not a cry. Simply a complete absence of everything that might have been.

The wolf-woman stumbled, slowed by her skirts and her
corsetry
, which weren’t terribly sensible for fighting or accommodating the werewolf form. She watched her colleague disappear. A small, noiseless movement of her lips, and she turned on me. With one slash of each hand, she removed most of the bottom half of her skirt, which fell away in a heavy pile. The stockings and boots she wore underneath didn’t seem to slow her a bit.

The whole structure of the boat shivered, groaned, and the structure twisted beneath my feet. I could feel the strain on the boards as they split apart. I was flung up and saw that glint of gold again. Something substantial, just on the other side of the ship.

A horrible noise of wind and wood, a roaring that was beyond any sea—

The other werewolf lunged, growling.

I didn’t want to hurt her because she was probably some distant, weird Cousin of mine, but I was damned if I was going to follow the guy down into the abyss. I shoved her aside, mid-leap, as the deck planks began to separate.

The ship heaved, rocking side to side, then bucked stem to stern. I was thrown overboard, away from the staircase and pavement that brought me here.

I flailed wildly and grabbed at the railing. My claws dug into the wood; my arm was being wrenched from the socket as the ship twisted again. I growled, twisted around, grabbed on with my other hand, and pulled myself back on board, though it was only marginally better to be on that self-destructing ship than to find out what was in that dark below.

I caught another sight of the gold not far from me, on the far side, and felt called to it. The bracelet blazed red-gold, bright as day, and I closed my eyes against it. This is what I had come for, and I had to get it now, before the ship was gone and there was nothing to get me back to the other side of the plank and the staircase.

I flung one leg over the railing, and a fortuitous heave of the ship brought me back on, minus some scraped-off skin. Without thinking, I threw myself at the slender ledge with the pedestal.

I landed, slamming into the far wall. Not a lot of room to move around, not a lot of room to make mistakes in, especially since my exit was determined by the increasingly unstable corpse ship.

No time to lose. I scrambled up, and looked at the gold that had caught my eye and fried my Fangborn soul.

And was mesmerized.

It was a tiny replica of the ship that was currently being destroyed, perfect to the last plank and peg, in gold, silver, and jewels. The silver sail was fully unfurled and fluttered. The oars shipped, unneeded—some divine wind drove this vessel over imaginary waves.

Another vessel …

Instead of shroud-wrapped bodies, there were ranks of warriors lined up along the center of the ship. I looked more closely: men and women, their clothing as carefully depicted as the details of the ship’s architecture. Some were northern looking, in what I imagined was Viking-period garb, complete with perfect little brooches holding their cloaks and designs on the ax heads and swords. One of the figures wore distinctly Arab garb, with a scimitar, and one wore the skins and bore the barbed spear of what I imagined was an Inuit. Some were in post-medieval dress.

Nearly all of them had tiny fangs.

It was beyond the work of a loving artist. This was photorealistic. I could see whisker hairs and moles, individual jaw lines, scars, a broken nose.

A clue to the Fangborn past. I had to take it with me.

I picked it up, marveling at its lightness. Stuck it inside my hoodie and zipped it up.

There was only one end of the burial ship left. Where the rest had gone, or how this was being supported, I didn’t know. Another piece snapped and fell into the abyss.

All I knew was that I had to get going before that last fragment was gone, and I was stranded on this side.

The female werewolf was clinging to a railing. When she saw me with the golden miniature ship peeping from my hoodie, she lost it. Hauling herself over the railing, driven by pure rocket-fuel rage, she charged me. One arm free, I lucked out and landed a solid right on her jaw. She went down to the deck.

I hurled myself across to the remains of the bow. I clutched the dragon’s head, saw its teeth and tongue flicker, its eyes flash. It turned and darted at me, teeth snapping.

I jumped, praying the fragile model wouldn’t collapse under the weight of my hoodie.

The last planks of the bow fell away as I leaped. The dragon’s head shuddered, turned to dust. An unearthly howl behind me: The werewolf bayed her anger and bereavement.

The stairs to the first floor had never seemed so far away. It took me forever to fall across the abyss.

The werewolf vanished, mid-howl. The ship vanished, ghastly contents and all.

I looked down and saw a flash of scales, purple and green and blue and gold, churning, a serpent turning on itself, consuming itself—creating the universe? Supporting the world?

I landed with room to spare, which meant I kept skidding until I smashed into the far wall. Stunned, I saw a light from beneath the churning nothingness.

Something prompted me. I reached into my hoodie and pulled out the ship, cradling it in my arms.

Shields lined both sides of the ship. They had to be personal insignia, Family marks, totems of some sort—

The light was dim; I held it as close as I could. I needed to s
ee mo
re—

So focused was I on inspecting one of the women’s faces, I didn’t notice how close I’d gotten.

My nose bumped one of the shields. A sickening tinkle of
fragile
, breaking gold and enamel, and it snapped off.

I grabbed, missed, caught it with my right hand. I held it up to inspect it.

It burned its way into my palm.

The golden ship melted.

Screaming, I watched as it shivered and liquefied, the shields slithering their ways to my arm, the gold turning red hot. Where
the heat came from, I couldn’t have said. I couldn’t drop it now,
even if I wanted to. The reddish gold moved like mercury, snaking,
slithering
, climbing my arm in burning, glinting streams.
I recognized
the phenomenon, but it was a burning rather than the biting of
Pandora’s
Box.

Some of the gold drove through my skin, a thousand needles through my pores. The shields shifted, as if they were scales being sloughed off, and found their way to the edge of the bracelet. Bone shearing, skin slicing, and I could see the tissue beneath. It only lasted an instant, as the shields—now jeweled tiles—clicked into place along the bracelet. The bracelet now reached from my wrist halfway to my elbow.

A few didn’t stop, and I watched in horror as several of the shield-tiles went past the bracelet, flowing up my right arm on the surface of the streaming gold.

The molten metal was to my shoulder now, with no signs of stopping. I tried to scrape it off, and although I could make a faint impression in it, the gold was already a part of me. It was too much like trying to shove off my own burning skin.

I got a blinding shock between the eyes for trying. My head flung back, but hitting the wall didn’t even distract me from t
he pa
in.

The gold reached my throat, a burning whisper as it crawled up to my ear, then around my neck.

Three hard jolts, bolts being driven into the back of my neck and spine. Three more along my right collarbone.

I bashed my head against the wall again, trying to knock
myself
out, make the hideous pain stop. When it was clear that wasn’t
going
to work, I considered the abyss.

The gold slipped between my lips. I gagged and then wasn’t able to do anything. Not breathe, not worry, not live.

My reality, my world, was being torn apart.

Another click of stone on bone, and suddenly the pain stopped. The gold didn’t stop flowing, and I saw silver snaking its way between the new gemstone additions to the bracelet, but I didn’t feel so hideously, dangerously tortured any longer.

At least I no longer had the urge to smash my own brains out.

Whatever was beneath me was similar to what I’d experienced at Delos and at Claros and Ephesus. Something calling me from the other side of a cosmic rabbit hole, through the worm—

Hypnotized by the swirling, I leaned closer. I could almost hear words now, words I was sure I could understand if I could only get a little closer. An image of a dry mountaintop, a caldera covered with beehives—

My hand slipped off the edge, and the thought that the rest of me might follow it into the chasm beneath the ship jolted me into action. I did not want to fall into that maelstrom, no matter what I thought it would tell me. I inched away from the edge of the floor until my back rested against the wall of the cellar again.

The floor began to shake, and as I scrambled on all fours to the first few stairs, it began to buckle and heave. A whirlpool of dirt and stones formed, occupying the entire surface of where the floor and ship had been. I covered my head instinctively, but rather than the floor falling away, the void created by the loss of the ship was filled in. It was as though the mound on which the house was built had shrugged and redistributed its mass.

I dared to look again only when the rumbling stopped. I saw a last flash of those scales as the abyss sealed itself. A nondescript surface of hard-packed earth was all to be seen.

It took my heart about five minutes to start beating again.

I clawed my way up the stairs, every part of me aching from the destruction and reconstruction of the basement and the—battle? Was that what I had to call it? The assault? Violation. I didn’t like what was happening to me but was helpless to keep from pursuing the goals of the bracelet.

Only … it wasn’t just a bracelet anymore. It wasn’t jewelry; it was a part of me. But what—a disease? A collar? An upgrade? Maybe a little of all of these. All I could think about was the way the jeweled plates felt under my fingers; not quite like a scar or a scab that was suddenly there. A little like when I had the chicken pox and suddenly found strange things were covering my body, unasked, without warning, when they hadn’t been there the day before.

My brain still rebelled at the idea. I also didn’t like the thought of how stalwartly the Fangborn couple had fought, probably giving their lives, against my intrusion. Against me.

At the top of the stairs, I was shaky more from the mental adjustment than anything else. I didn’t have time to walk it off—a walk to China wouldn’t have been far enough—but I had no choice: Adam was waiting, pacing on the lawn outside.

Curiosity made me stay longer than I meant. I went to the
mirror
, polished it with the cuff of my sleeve until I saw a clean patch. I pulled back the collar of my shirt and turned so that I could see the back of my shoulder.

After a moment of taking it in, I straightened my shirt.

I stared at the door; there was no way to lock it. And now there was no need to lock it. Whatever had been in the basement could take care of itself. I pulled it shut, zipped up my hoodie all the way, and started for the park paths.

I needed to get away. Get hidden. I couldn’t let anyone see what I’d become.

“Zoe!” As soon as I stepped from the porch, Adam grabbed my arm. Rather, I could sense his intent to grab my arm, and I moved aside before he could close his fingers around it. I didn’t want him to see me like this: beaten up, overtaken, mind blown.