Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (28 page)

“Want one? I found meatloaf.” I’d never felt betrayed by a long-term boyfriend before, but I knew something had to be done. Our last meeting, the last few weeks of my life … we needed to talk, probably, but we were having a hard time even looking at each other. “You should see the pantry. Awe-inspiring. Should
I make you—
?”

“Zoe … this is weird,” he said slowly. “Awkward. We have so much to talk about.”

“Wicked awkward, and yes, we do. And we have zero time to do it.” The sounds of Fangborn bustle, with the occasional squawk of a radio, could be heard. “I can still make you a sandwich, Will. Let me do that. We have time for that.”

He hesitated. “Okay.”

I handed him one of mine and got to work on a replacement. Before he ate, he said, “Zoe, I’m sorry. About New York—”

My heart swelled: He knew he was wrong and was going to apologize; maybe I could—

There was a noise to one side, and Adam Nichols hurried across to the island from the other door. He looked great, and it was damn good to see him, but his timing was always the absolute best or the absolute worst.

“Hey, Zoe! When did you get in? Look, I got something—”

His happy smile froze when he saw Will there.

Mine froze, too. What was I supposed to do—I had missed Adam, badly. I’d missed Will, too, until he chucked me over for a lie. Maybe I was being harsh on Will, but I’d slept with Adam and meant it. We had become something more than his reassuring me of my humanity—

None of the artifacts had any answers for how to deal with this problem.

“Uh, it’s good to see you, Adam.” I looked around. Will’s face was stony. Adam hadn’t come any closer, either, hadn’t tried to embrace me. “I’m making sandwiches—you want one?”

Not fast enough. “Adam?” Will looked from Adam to me and back again. “Adam Nichols? You’re the one who gave Zoe so much trouble in Venice, right? And Turkey? And I believe I heard your name mentioned after the Berlin debacle, too.”

“I helped Zoe out a week ago,” Adam replied. “When she was long on trouble and short on friends.”

Everyone was tired, everyone was looking for a fight; if it couldn’t be the Fellborn, these guys had marked out each other for the moment. Whether Will got that Adam and I had slept together, or he took Adam’s barb about abandoning me, or both, it didn’t matter. I could feel the testosterone building up around me in a cloud of aggression. I could feel myself wanting to knock a few heads together, too, but we couldn’t afford any more active fronts at the moment.

I had to be the one to cool this off. “Look, we can’t do this now,” I said. “We need to think about tomorrow, right? When we will try to stop a war or a couple of genocides?”

Neither one of them said anything. Will was pale, his lips
compressed
, and Adam’s fists were clenched by his side, his chest out. It might as well have been an exhibit labeled “Primate
Aggression
Signals.”

I wasn’t any happier about the situation. “I’m calling a truce, for the next forty-eight hours, okay? But for now … meatloaf?”

“Zoe—” Adam started.

“I’m not—” Will said.

“Look!” I interrupted them. “I cannot—can … 
not
—do any more tonight. I personally tried to blast someone to bits, and then I saw a museum and several city blocks exploding because he survived to detonate it. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and more is coming tomorrow. So I’m leaving. If you guys want to talk, you can. You’ll have to get back to me after the apocalypse.”

Both of them looked away. I finished making the extra
sandwiches
and shoved a plate toward Adam.

Adam nodded and took it, whether because he was being reasonable, territorial, or hungry, I didn’t know. He cleared his throat. “I came to tell you, Zoe. Meeting in an hour. Top floor. Thanks for the sandwich.” He took the plate and turned to leave, and stopped. “Wait. Remember I said I got something for you?” He paused, put down the plate, and pulled a plastic bag from his messenger bag. “I got this for you. You said you missed your o
ld one.”

He carefully unwrapped a small mason’s trowel and put it on the counter. It was a replacement for the one I’d left in Dmitri’s leg on Delos.

“Wow, uh, thank you,” I said, picking it up. I could feel my face warm with pleasure. I had missed having one. “That was really lovely of you, Adam. Thank you.”

He looked me in the eye. “You’re welcome.” Then he picked up his sandwich and left.

I hooked the trowel through the back of my belt.

“So,” Will said, “that was nice of him.”

Yep, Will understood every one of Adam’s meanings.

“Will, I thought you trying to return me to the TRG was probably as good as a breakup. Besides—”

“Got to know you pretty well, did he?” Will’s temper was starting to show—unusual, for him. “I’m just sayin’.”

I slapped the table. “I said not
now
.”

“Zoe, I was under a vampiric
compulsion
, lied to.”

“All I knew was you were trying to trick me until you could get backup. You believed them when they told you I took off.” I took a
deep breath; both of us explaining, complaining, would get us
nowhere
. Time for brutal honesty. I hated revealing that the artifacts were taking
over. I didn’t want to do this now … but it was Will. I couldn’t help it. “Maybe it feels worse about you because of what we were.”

“What we
are
.”

I sighed. “The bracelet … there’s even more, now. And when I got that, it was a bad time, Will. I needed to feel like something besides a monster. You weren’t there. Being with Adam … you know I don’t do that casually, and he had my back. Look, we can do whatever—talk, fight, scream—after tomorrow. We need to get to that meeting now.”

Will didn’t say anything, but he nodded. “Finish up. I’ll show you where.”

I exhaled; we were okay for the moment.

The past was past. For the moment.

I wolfed down the two sandwiches I had left, and took an apple for later. I followed Will to an elevator, and we rode in silence to the top floor.

When the door opened, I froze. I recognized one of the guys from the TRG. Then another and another.

I looked at Will, horror filling me. “What have you done?”

It took him a second to figure out my concern. “Oh, no! No, it’s okay! The Virginia facility has been shut down, along with all the rest of the TRG. Some joined us. Some of them quit. Some of them are being held for questioning.”

I wasn’t reassured until I saw a familiar gangly redhead:
R
ob Wat
son, the guy who’d helped me escape the TRG just weeks ago. He was checking a clipboard, giving answers to someone on a phone tucked under his ear, when he saw me. He held up a finger. “I’ll call you back.” He put his phone away. “It’s you?” he said, holding out a hand.

“And it’s you,” I said, taking it. His freckles still stood out vividly against his pale skin.

“Well, things have gotten very complicated since we last saw each other, haven’t they?”

I glanced at Will. “Yes, they have. Will, Rob helped me escape the TRG.”

“And I was one of the people to raise the alarm about the synthetic vampire venom,” Rob said. “And now I’m out of a job. So I hope I’ve at least done what’s right. We’re in here.” He nodded to a conference room.

I passed a room filled with a tangle of technology and saw a
familiar
face among those hastily stringing cables and placing routers and ran back. “Danny!”

He looked around, jumped up, and gave me a hug. “God, am I glad to see you back! Vee told me what happened.” He nodded at Vee, who held up a hand in greeting, never taking her eyes from a scrolling screen. She looked better for a solid night’s sleep, but still wrung out. She was much happier to be in front of a screen, though.

Danny lowered his voice. “Thank you for getting Vee out.”

He was wearing his favorite T-shirt, which I figured was either because he was dressing up for Vee or because he was
pulling
an all-nighter and needed Superman’s “S” for moral support. “Yeah. Well, she was mostly responsible for saving us,” I said. “I was just the muscle. But … what is all this stuff? Where did all this come from?” I asked, looking around at the monitors, servers, and what looked like dangerously jury-rigged electronics stacked
everywhere
.

“I called some people when we left Turkey. Remember I said I could do something, maybe? Some of the TRG were sympathetic to us, and they liberated some stuff from the labs as they left. We’ve got communications with the Fangborn, and the … er … people Parshin is bringing in. I’m coordinating the Family and getting the oracles on deck.”

This was good, this was positive. I was responsible for this, I thought. I didn’t bring only chaos to everyone. I’d brought these folks together, too. There were good things among the bad.

“I’ll be liaising with them and Adam Nichols.” Cla
udia Steu
ben
had joined us. “He’s working with our connections in
Washington
at the moment.” Her face was healed now, and she had a
businesslike
air. “C’mon, meeting’s getting started.”

I was secretly pleased at the redundancy and definitely wary of Parshin, despite his good faith so far: Buell had shown up at nearly the same moment we had. On the other hand, it made sense to have Normal, Fangborn, and government interests working in concert.

The room was bustling, lots of maps, some uniforms, and a lot of talking all at once.

“What’s going on?” I asked Claudia.

“We found the container ship,” she said. “And better than that, we found the containers. The problem is, they’ve been moved from the container terminal on the waterfront to a big place on Dorchester Avenue. They’re even closer to downtown Boston. We don’t know what Porter’s plan is, whether he’s going to move them again by water, down the Pike or down I-95, or if he’s going to turn them out in Boston, but—”

“It happens tomorrow,” I said. “Right?” I looked at my watch to double-check the date. I’d been through so many time zones, I still wasn’t sure.

“Yes, but we have a plan. We’re gonna let them find
us
.” Her words were resolute and confident. Her eyes, less so. “We know they’re tuned into Fangborn scent and can’t resist us. We’re hoping they’ll come busting out of their hiding places, and we can
lu
re the
m to a safe place. We’re thinking down in the Seaport
District
,
if we can get the civilians out of there.”

I shivered. “Claudia, you were there, in Istanbul. You know what they can do.”

Her hand reached to her cheek as Fergus joined us, squeezing Claudia briefly. “And that’s why we have to draw them away from the general population,” he said, “Cull them from the herd, round ‘em up, ship ‘em out.”

Claudia looked pained. “I adore you, you know that. But
cowboy
slang?”

“I’m trying to fit in, while I’m in America,” he said.

“Oh, please don’t.” She turned back to me. “One group of us will be busting in on them and leading them out, I hope, down to the waterfront. Another group, my group, will be waiting for them, there.”

I thought about the combination of Dmitri’s “army,” the
Fangborn
, and the Fellborn. “But that’s … there are too many
people
down there. We can’t do that!”

“We’re evacuating the area. Representative Nichols has been helping us with that.” Claudia said it calmly, without any
inflection
.

“Adam Nichols’ mother,” I said. “She doesn’t want a Normal population slaughtered. She knows we aren’t ready for I-Day yet.”

“She’s bought us time and resources, but you’re right. Too many people know about us, and even if we can delay it tomorrow, I-Day is coming sooner than we’d like. The best we can do now is containment.” She turned around. “Gerry, where are we at?”

Gerry was a mess. His clothing was disheveled, and his shirt was incorrectly buttoned and untucked. His running shoes weren’t laced, and he had no socks. He hadn’t shaved in days. It didn’t look as though he’d slept much, either. I’d never seen him look so depressed, so spiritless, so discouraged, especially among his own kind, doing what they did best.

If I was responsible for the concerted effort of the Fangborn against the Order, then I was responsible for Gerry’s state, too. I’d been a stray, Vee had opted out, and Toshi just had lost his family, but with the dissolution of the TRG, we were all orphans now. Being unanchored or unsure didn’t sit well with Gerry.

“We’re moving the Fangborn kids under age eighteen and anyone too hurt or too old to fight to the retreat houses.” His voice was gruff from overuse and too much emotion. “We’ll shift a quarter of the new graduates from Parkhurst, St. Cuthbert’s, and Edgewood to protect them.”

“Those are the Fangborn Academies east of the Mississippi,” Claudia whispered to me. “They spend their last three or four years in a local high school while they prepare for their exit exams.”

Gerry continued without looking at me. “The next half of them … we’ll move to the bigger centers and high-priority
targets
. The rest, who have the highest marks in ‘Simulations,’ will j
oin us
.”

“And where will I be?”

Gerry turned toward me but still didn’t make eye contact. “You’ll be with those by the bridges, to make sure none get through.”

I nodded. Even though he couldn’t see me, he didn’t look for acknowledgment, either.