Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,10

so get back to work,” Ash muttered, his eyes still closed. “We’re nearly there.”

Everyone who had been discussing our plan or checking gear looked up and waited.

“We’re at a crossroads,” Ivy said to no one in particular.

“You are the crossroads,” Ash corrected, his head jerking toward me.

“Whatever comes next, you’ll decide everything,” Ivy said.

“The Family will never be the same again,” Rose said.

“The world will never be the same again,” Ash amplified.

“Go down, deep, into the ground.”

“Climb up, high, among white stone pillars.”

“Close the box you’ve opened. It will be a pity if you do.”

“Drink Family blood, rend Family flesh.”

“Splitter of worlds, binder of all.”

“If you don’t destroy us, we will perish.”

The beeping that signified the end of the game broke the silence that followed, broke the spell over us. The Trips shook themselves and dropped hands with me, checking each other, reassuring themselves they were all safe and well.

“Yeah. Seriously,” Ivy said to an unspoken comment. There was a shuffling among the non-oracle Cousins, and a cough. It had been as unsettling to watch as to participate, I guess.

“Sounds like you’re pretty well screwed, whatever you do,” Rose said.

“Thanks, guys,” I said, shaking. “You couldn’t give me anything more solid to go on?”

“Nope. But you can’t afford to fuck it up,” Rose said.

“Big help.”

Rose shrugged. “At least you can stop worrying that you’re evil.”

I glanced around at the nervous adults around me and caught Kenichiro-san’s eye. “See? Just like Claudia Steuben said.”

“Yeah,” Ivy said. “You’re definitely gonna end the world, but we didn’t get that you were actually bad.”

“This should help quiet the Family buzz about that,” Ash said. “That’s a lot of bad reputation to be running around with.”

My shoulders slumped. “Well, that’s something, I guess. You guys gonna stay here with the vehicles?”

The three shared a look; all three shook their heads. “Not all of us.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“One of us goes with you,” Ash said.

“I think it’s me,” Rose and Ivy said at the same time. Perturbed, they looked at Ash, who shrugged.

“I can’t see it,” he said.

“I’m a better fighter,” Ivy said.

“But I’m the one who saw Zoe coming—our paths are entwined,” her sister replied. “I feel it, Ivy.”

Once again, they looked to their brother. “We get to an impasse like this, we go by protocol,” Ash said.

Rose and Ivy nodded, and then, at the same time, both held up a fist.

“Once, twice, thrice,” they said together.

Rose’s hand was flat; Ivy’s was still bunched up.

“Rose,” they said together.

They were deciding my fate and theirs with “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

The gate was unlocked, ajar, and we pulled it open to see a wooden building in what looked like a traditional style, emerging at the end of a short, winding garden pathway. At the end of the path, we saw that the building formed the right side of a courtyard; a second, similar building abutted the far end, forming an upside-down L, with the branches to our right and ahead of us. The courtyard was completed with the continuation of the wall on the left and the side through which we’d entered.

A battle was raging in the courtyard. I saw seven Family members: four werewolves half-Changed so that they resembled humans with fur, claws, and wolf-like visages, and three vampires with their even weirder snakelike heads and scaled, clawed hands. They were fighting maybe twenty members of the Order in their hateful black uniforms, and one of the Fellborn. I was glad it was one of the earlier Fellborn models, which was vicious and unthinking, and moved somewhat like apes, with loose skin covered with gray fur. The Mark Twos were nastier, smarter, and stronger, but even so, it took one vampire and one werewolf to keep this Mark One from doing more damage than it already had.

The remaining vampires and werewolves were using everything in their considerable arsenals to get past the Order’s best weapon against us, after the Fellborn: their blasters. A combination of a compound that included a lot of black hellebore, which I knew had a horrible, sickening, disorienting effect on us, and electricity, which further scrambled our circuits and made us even more vulnerable to the hellebore. The vampires were slowly able to glamour or “suggest” that some of the Order assailants put their weapons down. Some were spitting venom. When one ran out of venom, I saw him emulate his werewolf kin and pick up a blaster and bash its owner over the head.

Somehow we needed to get past them