Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,6

again, before he turned and gestured to me.

He bowed. “Hello, Zoe. I’m Kenichiro Mitani. Please call me Ken.” He spoke English with an Australian accent; the way he said Ken was particularly striking. “I’ll be looking after you if you don’t mind. Please just wave the smoke over wherever you would like healed,” he said. Then with a smile he said, “Or if you think you need more beauty, or more brains, wave some over your head.”

At this point, I figured I needed to be smoked whole like a kipper if it was going to have any effect at all on me, purification- or healing-wise. But I waved smoke over my head, my wounded leg, and then, thinking of my friends at home, my weary heart.

I took a deep breath. My nose twitched, and I tried not to sneeze. The incense made my eyes water.

“If you would, perhaps start with a small prayer, or a moment of reflection?”

I bowed my head and thought, Please get me out of this mess and back home.

When I’d finished, he said, “Thank you. Now, may I?”

I nodded. Ken-san the vampire sniffed delicately, walking around me, and I was glad for his sake that I’d had a shower. He took my pulse and asked me where it hurt.

“Everywhere. But mostly, it’s my right leg. I’m not healing as quickly as I should.” The place where Buell had stabbed me still bothered me, having taken the better part of an hour to close up. Slow healing was disastrous for a werewolf used to fighting.

He nodded. “Anything else I should know?”

“Yeah. Last time a vampire bit me, she said my blood tasted funny.” I told him about how my friend Claudia Steuben had determined that while my blood was odd, I wasn’t evil. The word she used was “predator.” I mentioned the bracelet and jewels, how I got them and how they had just vanished. “So, given that I unexpectedly found myself across the world an instant after I tried to stop time briefly, and may have had communication with a seriously powerful set of beings, you may want to brace yourself. Or avoid biting me altogether.”

He smiled in a way that said he could handle it, that I was probably exaggerating, and then looked puzzled. “Beings? Do you know what they are?”

I shook my head. “I call them the Makers, because that’s what Quarrel—he’s a dragon—calls them. I assume they made him or made us Fangborn.”

It took Ken-san a long time to speak. “And . . . you’re in contact with a dragon?”

“Yep. Like I said: You may not want to bite me.”

I shrugged and held out my wrist. “I’m just sayin’. God only knows what’s happening inside me now. I might be radioactive or toxic or something. Your call.”

Ken-san paused then. I wasn’t joking. If I’d traveled through space and/or time, I might well have a new biology that would be dangerous to him. He took my wrist, though, and after a final, appreciative sniff, Changed.

Even now that I was used to seeing a man undergoing the half-Change into a bipedal snakelike creature, it still fascinated me. Kenichiro’s dark hair shifted from brown to reddish, and his skin transmuted to scales of coral pink and yellow, with flecks of blue. His nose receded into his face and became a snout with small nostrils; his eyes grew wider and darker. The fangs were the weirdest, I think, watching his jaw change to accommodate them. I could feel the tug of his Change, like bubbles under my skin, and resisted my urge to follow suit. Soon, I promised myself.

His bite was barely perceptible, and I tried, as I had with Claudia, to alter my own blood profile to show him just how strange my blood was. When I tried, I got something like a migraine mushrooming between my eyes, as if someone was using a hand-cranked drill and bit on my forehead. I stopped immediately. When he pulled back after a moment, I felt a kind of relief. My headache faded somewhat, and while I felt a bit less desperate, I was still starving, still weak.

“I don’t think there’s anything I can do for you, beyond this simple healing. Your blood is indeed . . . complex. I must take time to consider it. But for now, eat, sleep, and perhaps a bath tomorrow.”

“A bath?” I tried hard to keep the disbelief out of my voice, and failed.

“We have an excellent hot spring near here; this house

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