Pack of Strays (The Fangborn Series Book 2) (16 page)

A muted sound, then a bullet hit the car and ricocheted off. Danny jumped a mile, then hit the ground.

She aimed and shot three times. A man—the one I’d only hit on the head—fell over.

“Vee, how did you—?”

She didn’t look at me, at any of us. She simply got into the car and slammed the door. “Another conversation for later. We need to move.”

We cleaned the dust and blood off ourselves as best we could, then stopped at the first restaurant we saw. We stopped at two more by the time we reached Danny’s neighborhood. Toshi looked better after each meal, but even then I was still hungry. At a teahouse, I finally began to unwind. It might have been the series of very close calls. It might have been the little walk outside time. It could have been lack of sleep, as well, or the length of time since my last go
od me
al.

The tea was very good, and the little sesame cookies tasty, not too sweet. I was tired and wished I could curl up inside this moment and savor it for a week or two. I could tell the others were reluct
ant to
start talking, too: Danny, making wet patterns on the
table
with the bottom of his cup; Toshi chewing absently on a
cookie
, staring blankly into the rest of the room; Vee leaning back with her eyes closed, her face lined.

Finally, we all sort of stretched, exchanged guilty looks, and admitted that we needed to get back to figuring out who had attacked us.

I told them about Zimmer. “It’s possible he sent them. Did you see where he got to?”

Toshi shook his head. “He made it out of the building, but I was focused on you. I recognized a few of the other ones. They were Order goons.”

“Same guys hounding me in New York,” I explained to Vee.

“So, Victoria—Vicki, is it?” Toshi started, trying to piece together what had happened.

“Call me Victoria, Vee, Rory, Tory, or anything else you want,” she said, “but please, please, please, never Vicki.”

Toshi was at least as worn out as she was. “Okay, sorry. Jeez.”

Vee held up both hands. “Sorry, sorry. My bad. I’m wiped. I just misplaced my sense of humor, along with about five minutes of real-world time. It takes it out of a girl.”

“Hey!” I looked around—no one was close enough to hear, and no one would have understood us anyway, even if they spoke English. “Um, euphemisms, please. Just to be on the safe side.”

Vee nodded, clearly exhausted; I was worried about the bruising that had occurred around her fingernails. Toshi had recovered a lot of ground, and I wondered how effective my accidental healing of him had been. We’d all been through a lot.

“Speaking of which,” Danny said to her. “Thank you for, um, helping me out back there.”

“No problem.” Vee didn’t look at him, but reached over, shook the carafe, and emptied the last of the tea into her cup. “Dan.”

“I was kinda surprised you went … old school, with the gun back there,” I said. “I mean, when you could have …” I looked around, then wiggled my nose like Samantha on
Bewitched
.

She leaned back. “Like I said, it takes it out of a girl.”

“Yeah, but—”

“
Yeah, but
—that’s
another
conversation for the two of us to have on
another
occasion.”

And that was the end of that.

“For your information,” she said to Toshi, “I was out here, because I saw … I knew I was needed.”

“I told you back in New York you were needed,” I said. “Didn’t seem to make much of an impression on you.”

She frowned. “Yeah, well. Later on, I … got a good idea what might happen if I didn’t show up at the right moment.”

We got up, paid, and left. We found a parking space near
Danny’s
place, went in, and collapsed. Toshi was in the shower. Having turned us loose with his first-aid kit and refrigerator,
Danny
was busy finding clothes and bedding for everyone.

I turned to Vee. “Okay, so what did you see?”

She opened her mouth, then shook her head. “I can’t … I’m not telling you that. It’s too personal; it’s too awful. I will say that the feeling I had was the worst I’ve ever had. Like seeing
Alderaan
blowing up. Like sensing a million Hiroshimas, Dresdens—pick your apocalypse.” She licked her lips and looked away. “I’m scared to death. I don’t do fieldwork. But even I’m not that selfish. I got on a plane, I came.”

“So … now that you’ve told us, we’re good, right?” Toshi said. He was drying his hair with a towel, and now that it wasn’t matted with dirt and blood, I was surprised to see it was an aggressively modern razored cut. “I mean, you’re able to see what we’re supposed to do, and … we can just do it?”

“No,” Vee said sadly. “It means that thing that happens is less likely to happen. I don’t know if it’s by ninety percent or one
percent
. My precog doesn’t come with a set of directions or a
manual
. It’s only a peek at one part of my future. Sometimes a more general future that I might be able to affect.”

“My sister’s an oracle.” He shrugged. “I know how tight you oracles all are. She’s mentioned you—your split from the Family.”

“Seers need to stick together in the face of the collective
chauvinism
of the Biters.” Vee crossed her arms. “When a significant percentage of your so-called Family think of you as something less, you tend to stick with those Cousins who don’t.”

Vee’d brought this up before, in New York. Maybe it was listening to Gerry and his “We Are the Champions” rhetoric, but apart from the division of politics of Identification, I’d had no idea there might be disquiet or even discrimination within the ranks of the Family. But you get enough people into a group, cliques and divisions were bound to occur.

Of course, I’d never spent personal time with an oracle before, either. The benefit of perspective.

But Toshi still hadn’t let it go. “If your powers were more
reliable
—”

“You’d still use the term ‘Fangborn,’ which seems
exclusionary
to me. Why not go with ‘Empowered,’ as many of us have suggested for so long?”

“Because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

“Look, we’re getting off track,” I said. “Vee, I know you’ve separated from the Family, because—”

“Because I’m retired,” she said. “People found out about my other talent, and any interest in the accuracy of my predictions fell away. Didn’t care about me so much as my powers. I was done with being a tool.”

“So … why not just
use
that other talent?” Toshi insisted.

Danny had come in and was now staring at the floor; I knew he’d been thinking about the time when I’d manifested that same ability. Now he looked up. “We don’t know what it will do—to Vee, to time and space. It’s wise to be cautious.”

Vee and I shared a look. We didn’t know what it would do to me, either.

“Yeah, but isn’t it worth a hangover or a nosebleed or, I don’t know, cramps?”

Vee’s eyes hardened at Toshi’s stubbornness. “That’s what everyone says. It’s easy to wave someone else’s pain aside when you have no skin in the game. When you stand to benefit. It’s easy to say, a little sacrifice to gain a lot, but there’s no way to tell that I’ll help, even if I
do
act. It’s not the only drawback, either.” She looked really ill, and if she felt anything like I had when I went after Toshi, I wouldn’t use it lightly, either. I might not want to use it at all.

“Any other gifts we should know about?” Toshi asked. He chucked his towel on the table and sat. “Any other skills you wo
n’t use?
”

She smiled sweetly. “I can kill you with my brain.”

Toshi’s face went blank with horror, until he realized she was
joking
. Then I saw something I never imagined possible. Vee held out her fist, and even as he smothered a laugh, Danny bumped it. It was the most effortlessly cool I’d ever seen Danny be in his whole life.

“Okay,” Vee said. “Enough about me. Zoe, what next?”

“I have to go back on the hunt. Somewhere near, a pool, a grotto of some sort. That’s where the vision was sending me. Adam was right when he said the Order would be thick on the ground here; I think it’s because it’s been such an important area that the Fangborn had centers here, too. You’re coming?”

Vee nodded. “I’m here now. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?” She was trying too hard to sound casual, but something had happened to Vee to change her mind.

“Toshi?”

He shook his head. “I need to find my team, tell them I’m okay. Warn them about the Order’s activities here.”

I tried to put a little persuasion in my voice but wondered if it only worked when I was under attack. “I could really use the help. Another pair of hands—I wish you’d stay.”

He rocked his head, frowning, undecided. “Okay, I’ll call them—”

“Please don’t tell them about me, okay?”

Finally, he exhaled. “Okay, nothing about you. Nothing about … how we met. I’ll give you a week or so. I owe you that much, but I get first dibs on the Order.”

I cocked my head. “Only if I don’t find them first.”

It was easy enough to search for sacred pools in holy places in
Istanbul
. It was more difficult to narrow them down. Eventually, I found myself in the district of Fatih, an older part of Istanbul within
the old walls of Constantinople on the Golden Horn. Once prosperous,
the glory of the architecture had become run down: buildings with elaborate carved details now housed electronics shops and bakeries.
The busy markets were covered by tarps, to keep the sun from wilting
the customers—and the piles of stunning fruit and
vegetables
. The hilly streets were sometimes cobbled, sometimes paved, but always bustling, I watched as a young boy stopped his mother and sisters, waiting to check for traffic before letting them cross.

In one Eastern Orthodox church, I found what I was looking for: a treasury of silver icons glittered on the walls, and paintings of saints against gold backgrounds covered the ceilings. And in one corner, an arched alcove housed an irregular cutout in the wall. Amid the hand-painted tile and icons, a large, shallow basin bubbled with water.

Noting the heavy doors, the high walls with decorative glass set into the top, and what looked like a very modern alarm system set into the ancient walls, I pulled my scarf closer over my head, as much out of respect as a disguise, and returned to Danny’s.

I explained what I’d seen when I got there.

“And you didn’t get anything?” Danny said. “No response from …?”

“Nothing. Not a peep from the bracelet, not a hair raised. No glowing, no humming—
nada
.”

“Are you sure? Maybe it was … subtle?”

I frowned. “Danny, since when has this thing ever been
subtle
?”

“And it’s the right place?” Toshi said. “For sure?”

“Yes! It’s the right place on the maps; it matches what I was told in my vision, and from what I got on the tour today, it’s one of the places everyone has been using for years. That’s the thing with holy sites: often there’s water, and water draws people to a place.” I chewed the inside of my lip. “It makes sense that I had the right church, but—nothing.”

Vee shrugged. “Well, then we are SOL.”

“Wait!” Danny said. “Didn’t you say you could hear dripping?”

“Yes, yes, in a big basin. The wall was irregular there, probably to allow for the natural shape—aha! The site I was looking for wasn’t upstairs.” I slumped. “Okay, how to break into a church and get into the basement where the spring—and probably the
artifact
—was. I really don’t want to do that. Again.”