Seven Kinds of Hell (6 page)

It had started to rain hard now. The only light came from my flashlight and the city-night glow of Cambridge.

Water plastered Sean’s hair to his head. His clothes were soaked through. “Zoe, what the hell are you doing? This is…it’s seriously messed up.”

That hurt more than I imagined. I knew I had problems, but I didn’t like Sean thinking I was anything but normal.

I shrugged. “Ma told me she left me something with Grandma, something that would tell me about my father’s family. All those years we were on the move, she somehow kept us two steps ahead. But she only told me about this when she couldn’t protect me anymore. I need to know, now.”

We’d arrived at a modest headstone, just where I remembered it, at the intersection of two lanes, near the tree missing a branch that had come down in a blizzard.

He stared at me, wondering how crazy I’d gotten in the past two years, the rain running down his face. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, wiped his nose.

“OK. Give me the trowel. You don’t have a shovel, a trenching tool or something? This is going to take all night.”

“What?”

“You can’t afford to get busted for grave robbing, not with those goons after you. Give me the trowel. I’ll get us started.”

I couldn’t help it; I started to laugh. Call it giddiness, fatigue, nerves, or burnout, I lost it. Sean thought I was going to dig up my grandmother and was now offering to help.

I pulled my trowel from my belt loop. One look at the tiny thing, worn down from years of work, and Sean was ready to explode.

“No, Sean, I’m not going to open the coffin. Just dig under the roses.”

It took him a minute to parse that information; it would have taken anyone a moment. Finally he said, “OK, you can start.”

He settled down two headstones over and tried to look relaxed. Hard, with the rain plastering his hair down, dripping off his nose.

It was hard work, made no less easy by the weather, the dark, and the dead little roses. I didn’t want to just dig them up, leaving my work for everyone to see, but it would have been easier to work without the thorns grabbing at my sodden sleeve and bare wrist.

“Just like old times, huh, Sean? Working on your grad school projects?”

“What?”

“Me working, you watching, pretending to take notes.”

That brought a smile, but any retort he might have made was cut short by a small noise, something barely audible above the rain but to which we were both well attuned.

Metal on metal.

I scraped the trowel through the wet earth and heard it again. Something was there.

We both worked now, me defining the edges, Sean shoving the overburden aside. Different noises now; it wasn’t just metal.

Once I felt it move, I stuck my trowel in the ground and felt. I moved my fingers across the surface, obscured by mud and pebbles. Round, with something wrapped around the edges.

I pulled, and it came away, grating against damp, sandy soil beneath. Sean held up the flashlight. I brushed off the surface, tried to wipe away the smears of dirt and rust.

A blur of blue and gold. The letters OY and NSK were visible.

It was a tin for Danish butter cookies.

It took me a minute to realize it probably wasn’t cookies, not if my mother had buried them in a cemetery, having sealed the top with duct tape. Not even Ma was that crazy about cookies.

I shook it; it didn’t rattle, just a slow
thunk…thunk
as something heavy—wrapped—shifted inside.

I tried to find an edge of the tape to remove it, but kept slipping. Age had caused the tape to melt into itself. The cold and wetness did nothing for my dexterity. My hands were shaking; I set down the tin and grabbed my fingers, trying to stop the trembling. Then I pulled out my knife.

“Zoe, wait.”

I looked up.

“It’s too wet out here. Whatever’s in there might be fragile. Let’s find someplace dry, get some light before we open this.”

It took me a minute to realize he was right. I nodded and handed the tin to him so I could put my knife away.

I froze. Something was out there. Suddenly I felt as though we were surrounded, but I couldn’t see a thing through the rain.

I felt the call of the Beast.

Five of them, I knew without knowing how. Closing a circle around us. “Sean, we need to get—”

A twig cracked.

“Zoe!” Sean grabbed my arm.

“Run!”

“The hell I will,” he said. “I’m not leaving you!”

“Sean! You can’t let them get this!” I shoved him in the direction away from whoever was out there, willing him away. “Get out of here, now!”

He shook his head but took off. That was a first; he must have heard something in my voice, because Sean almost never did what he was told.

Didn’t matter. I needed to keep the tin from them. They’d leave Sean alone, surely, if they were after me?

I felt a rippling down my spine. Two of the men I sensed…weren’t there anymore. There was something else out there now in the spaces they’d occupied. The air all around me felt just like last night.

The men were gone, but now I sensed
wolves.

I knelt down, stowing my knife and my trowel. I stepped out of my shoes and rolled up my jeans. And then I tried to recall the feelings I’d had when the Beast came before. I
needed
the Beast.

I heard a shout. It was Sean.

Did I want them to get Ma’s last bequest to me? The hell I did. I thought about them opening the tin, seeing what was in it before I did—

The Beast arrived.
Arrived
was too small a word: a roaring in my ears, a riot in my soul. I welcomed it, for the first time in my life.

Good. If anyone deserved the Beast, they did.

Two wolves were chasing Sean. I tore after them. I got close enough to bite one in the haunch, and he yelped, staggered, and plowed over into the other. Lucky for me, Sean never looked back, just booked out of there.

The two wolves untangled themselves, one reddish, one with a dark black pelt. I ran. In and out and around and among the gravestones and monuments, it was easy to dodge and duck.

Suddenly, on an intersection of two roads, I was surrounded: two wolves behind me, a wolf-man and a sort of horrible walking snake before me.

The snake-man’s face was barely human: two enlarged nostrils instead of a nose, yellow-and-brown scales instead of skin and hair. He walked upright, wearing a tracksuit, but he was a monster, fangs gleaming in the rainy night. His large black eyes were the deadest things in that acre of burials.

But the half-wolf, half-man was even worse. His ears stood up on his head, his face and jaw elongated, full of sharp teeth. I’d seen wolf-headed gods in the museum, but never one wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt and jeans. He was the one I’d seen in Salem.

My growl turned to a whine. My tail wagged, involuntarily, and I paced a step or two, uncertain of what I was seeing, of what to do. They were just like me, and they couldn’t be.

Maybe this is it,
I thought.
Maybe this is where I finally unspool. This is where the world goes crazy and I wake up in the rubber room.

“Zoe,” the wolf-man said, and my ears pricked up.

He reeked of Beastliness and he could speak. Holy shit, he knew my
name.

“Zoe, there’s no need to worry. We just want to talk to you. You can trust us.”

I shook my wolfy head.

“You need to know what you are.” He nodded to another figure behind me. I turned to see the fifth, a human man, emerging from
the tree line, removing a glove carefully as he negotiated his way around the headstones. “Download, if you’d be so kind?”

“This won’t hurt a bit.” Before I could move, the man put his hand on the back of my neck. That’s when the movie started.

As I stared, frozen, images played out in front of me. No sound, no words, but impressions accompanied them.

A variety of artifacts from around the world with transformed humans, wolf, or snake imagery seemed to suggest the long history of these creatures among humans. Some of them I recognized, like the Egyptian god Anubis, the caduceus of Asklepios, Hindi nagas, ouroboros, the Norse image of Fenrir. Other images were totally unfamiliar to me. But the one common theme was images of monsters—wolves, giant snakes, and every shape in between—attacking humans.

No, not simply attacking. Making the world better. Tracking and killing murderers, rapists, evildoers. But the viciousness of it all—

It was too much. I shook off his hand, backed away. They were exactly what my mother had warned me about, but she’d never said anything about wolf-men.

“I know you’re confused, Zoe. You must trust us. What Download showed you, that’s just the merest surface.”

Trust was not in my vocabulary, or the Beast’s. I moved a few steps, then backed up, uncertain.

“Let us help you—”

The two behind me tensed, ready to fight.

I bunched, ready to leap over them. I was drenched, my clothes and fur were matted down. There was no way I’d get away. At least I’d given Sean a chance.

The snake-man went on point; the others followed him, sniffing at the air.

I sniffed, too. I recognized the smell without being able to identify it, until I remembered the night at the cinema. I felt ill.
Something
wicked
was out there and I had the insane urge to do something about it. Fix it, make it right.

One of the wolves howled, making me shiver. The two wolves and the wolf-man tore off away from me, but also away from Sean.

I had the worst urge to go with them. If it hadn’t been for the cookie tin, and my need to guard it, I’m sure the Beast would have carried me off with them. I wanted to run, chase whatever they were after, and be there for the kill—

If the snake-man hadn’t spat just then, breaking the thought, I would have gone.

He hissed. “You’re becoming a problem, stray.”

With that, he melted into the rain and mist, following the others, making no sound at all.

Goddamn.

I stood, confused, angry, and thwarted. I waited a few minutes to make sure they were really gone, then resumed my human form. It was one of the easy times; I was so tired, it just sort of happened.

I found my shoes, put them on, and headed for the car. I hoped Sean was still there.

Every kid dreams they have a secret family, I thought as I trudged across the wet gravel pathways. It was just my shitty luck that I actually had a secret family full of threatening, dickhead monsters.

Sean was in the car. He had it turned on and was ready to tear out as soon as I appeared. I was glad for the heater; the spring rain was freezing and I was soaked.

“What about those guys? Who were they?”

I thought about the one with the Harley T-shirt, the one who’d shown up in Salem and then Boston. “I didn’t get any names. But definitely my father’s people.” I shuddered. “I was mostly running. Not a lot of talking.”

We drove until we found a coffee shop, but then sat in the parking lot. I wasn’t going to open the tin in public.

Under the dim yellow light of the overhead, I pulled the tape off the lid, brushing bits of roots and dirt from it. My hands were clammy; the cold of the metal didn’t help. With the last of the tape gone, I slid my fingernails under the lid and pulled: no luck.

Rustle of cloth, followed by a sharp click: Sean handed me the screwdriver on his knife.

Nodding, I turned the tin over and jammed the screwdriver under the lid. Two good whacks and it started to move. I chased the loose edge around until the top came off with a grating noise and a shower of disintegrating metal.

Inside a sealed baggie was a swaddled package. I unwrapped several meters of plastic wrap until I uncovered a plain mailing
envelope with a clasp closure, yellowed paper faintly discolored by foxing around the edges.

I unfolded it, and in my mother’s handwriting was my name and a date, from six months ago. The date of her diagnosis with brain cancer.

I ripped off the top. Inside was a smaller, sealed envelope, addressed to me, which I was not about to open in front of Sean; I stuck it into my pocket for later. The rest was a collection of photos that slipped out in a cascade across my lap. A sheaf of yellow legal pad paper was folded in half.

Somehow, I wasn’t as concerned about Sean seeing these, even when I saw the images on the photos. If this had anything to do with the Beast, surely Ma would have told me before she died.

I had come to the conclusion she didn’t know anything about my personal problem.

The photographs were hard to look at. There were a dozen, all told, from what looked like crime scenes. Murders—maybe two, maybe three different cases.

They weren’t tidy deaths, like in an Agatha Christie book, where the body would be artistically sprawled on the library carpet, a glass of poisoned wine spilled alongside.
These
were bad deaths in dark places: a badly lit alley, a storeroom, a basement. The bodies were torn apart with a viciousness difficult to fathom.

I don’t know what kept me studying them, but I did. My stomach was in a knot, but otherwise I was dispassionate. Sean had gone green and sweaty.

Shuffling the photos, I saw they all were blurry, dark, and taken in haste. Amateurish. They showed the bodies fully, emphasis on the wounds. There were numbers on all of them, one through ten, in the same hand.

The first sheet listed numbers I assumed corresponded with the photographs. There were dates and place names, none of which I recognized, all from before I was born.

“That,” Sean said, looking at a nearly decapitated body, “is one
hundred
percent fucked up.”

“Welcome to my world. I guess this is why she didn’t want me near my father’s family.” I wondered privately: Had Ma somehow had a baby with a werewolf? That brand of mayhem looked all too familiar. Is
that
what I was destined for? I remembered the urge to run with the others from the cemetery, to do…what? It made me ill to think of it.

“What now? You’re not going to go—?”

“Not to the police, no. I have no idea what this is, and I don’t want to know.” I realized after the last interlude, I wanted to put as much distance as possible between me and my father’s family—which now had a whole new twisted meaning for me. “I’m leaving, Sean. Tonight.”