Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,24

. . that was complicated. I was drawn to her, right away, and she to me, but she had this odd shyness about her. She struck me as . . . different, and at first, I thought she was a Normal. Then I kept thinking she wasn’t, but it didn’t matter, because I loved her. After I caught a scent of her a few times while I was out on Family business, I began to wonder, and when she vanished . . . I didn’t know what to think.

I began to look into the story about her past, the “orphans asylum,” and began to wonder if she hadn’t been a member of the Order, and then I began to wonder if she hadn’t once been a subject of theirs. I found her trail easily enough, but gave her the space to think herself hidden from me, until I could find out more.

He’d known my mother was pregnant, I realized. He knew of me, knew my name, had seen me. He’d kept our secrets.

Once I discovered she didn’t know what she was, that she truly believed she was a Normal human, I knew if she was so driven to hide from me and the Family, it would be dangerous for me to try to stop her. She had the knack of knowing when I got too close, so it took time to find exactly the right distance. That’s when I figured out some of the story of her past—and if I live to write the next version of this letter, I’ll have the proof I need and share it—and determined that she was an oracle, who had been subjected to some kind of tests by the government’s secret agency, the TRG, for Theodore Roundtree Group. Later, many of those left the TRG to join the Order of Nicomedia. The TRG’s goal was to conceal her Fangborn identity from her but keep her powers viable until they were needed. But I was there, Zoe, trying to watch you and trying to keep your life as little complicated as I could.

Now I had a letter from my mother and my father, filling in some of the blanks of my history. I folded the print out of his and would keep it with the well-creased note she’d left in a cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two parents, two letters. Two communications from beyond the grave.

I sucked up my courage to read the last page.

Zoe, there’s this sword. I was charged with transporting it from London to the research facility in Japan. I felt something I couldn’t explain when I handled it and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to keep it and stare at it and study it all the days of my life. But I brought it where it would do our people the most good, and didn’t think about it after. I wanted you to have it. Zoe, if you have the chance, if you should find this, if you should ever see this letter, try and go to Kanazawa, in Japan. They told me the sword was two thousand years old, a mishmash of styles with some kind of medieval jewelry set into the end of it. It’s not mine to give you, but if I had one wish, besides meeting you, it’s that you have it. I feel certain you’ll see what I mean when, if, you ever have the chance. There’s just . . . something special about it.

Wishing I’d had the chance to meet you, and knowing I would have loved you as soon as I did, Richard Klein.

I looked over at the sword on the table, which had to be the one he described. While I certainly felt an affinity for it, it hadn’t joined the other artifacts in assimilating into me. Something was up with it. Someone had made a sheath for it, probably more to protect it than to use it, but it would do for the time being.

“Do you mind if I take this?” I asked Ken-san. “I mean, I know this is part of a reference collection, and you don’t just take things from it, but if it’s at all possible . . .”

Ken-san raised an eyebrow. I remembered the overturned tables, the blood-smeared floor mats, and the general destruction of the place left when the flurry of artifacts had abruptly raced for me. Then the sudden vaporization of the walls of the structure when the artifacts found me. “Whatever the collection once