Betrayals

CHAPTER 23

The woods were a dripping, treacherous wonderland. It got a little warmer, and the trees ran with fat drops of sweat from all the moisture in the air. I wondered about that, but it meant that the helicopters passing over were nothing more than sounds. They got awful close and circled for a while, but faded away as we moved down wooded slopes, over small streams trickling with black water under ice, and slogged through slippery mud.

“At least it’s not raining,” someone said once.

Someone else snorted. “Djamphir,” he said, as if it explained everything.

Maybe it did. How was Christophe doing this?

I hung onto Graves, and slowly I realized the fog, or whoever was behind the fog, keeping us under a curtain of vapor, was watching us.

If I hadn’t been so tired and drained I might’ve seen it sooner. The empty place inside me started feeling a little bit more normal, three-dimensionality returning to the world, and I began to see faces peeking out of the thick white vapor. They were thin, sexless faces with burning deep-socketed eyes and mouths that hung ajar just enough that you could see the fangs.

Just after mid-morning it got pretty bad. No matter how many times I blinked, the faces wouldn’t go away. I could walk on my own now, a kind of lurching. There was a whispered conference about what to do with the oxygen tank. I just slung it on my own shoulder and kept carrying it. Leave no traces, that was the first rule of being on the run in hostile territory.

One of the boys, Beau, the slim quick redhead, had a package of beef jerky, and we shared that out equally at one stop. Everyone took a small piece and we walked while chewing. The salt in it stung my smoke-rough throat, but a couple of the boys had water bottles and we each got a swallow or two as we walked. It made the jerky into a flavorless cud of salt and ick, but I kept chewing. I was too hungry not to.

Graves had held me up until I could walk on my own. But I veered around so drunkenly he reached down and took my hand, warm fingers slipping through my cold, wet ones. I was worried about my sweating, filthy fingers for about half a second, until my legs made me veer again. I couldn’t find my bearings with the world looking as paper-flat as it did. And I was so tired. My head felt like a pumpkin balanced on a stem.

But it was better with him holding my hand.

The faces crowded around. The better I felt, the more the world started looking normal again, the more they clustered around us, their mouths open as they stared at me. Some moved their lips; others vanished into thinning smoke as the sun climbed toward noon.

Yeah. Some normal. Why was it that I only felt like myself when the weirdest shit was happening?

“Fog’s thinning,” Peter remarked.

This got Shanks’ attention. He sucked in a deep, sharp breath, raising his shaggy head a bit. He looked like death warmed over, but at least the blood sticking to him was dried instead of fresh.

Terrific bruises swarmed across his face, one eye puffed almost shut. And his eyes were there, not just the whites glaring between his bruised eyelids. “Noon. Sun at its highest.”

“Which means Christophe might not be able to cover us from wherever he’s hiding during daylight.” Graves said it quietly, as if he was just talking to me.

Oh. That makes sense. Kind of. My wrist throbbed. I didn’t want to peel the bandage back. I didn’t want to even look at it, because the thought of that pulling against everything inside me was too horrible. It made me sweat under my four layers and coating of dirt and soot. I itched all over, miserably, but it was a better feeling than the dragging drunken pain or the sense of the world having been drained of its entire third dimension.

“I didn’t know a djamphir could do this.” Dibs scrubbed at his cheeks with both hands. He had a little bit of peach-fuzz stubble. A smudge of dirt wandered across his forehead.

“They usually can’t, and now he’s pretty much crippled until sunset.” Peter hopped up on a fallen tree, its moss gleaming with fat pearls of moisture, and glanced back over his shoulder at me. “How much did he take?”

He means me. How much of me did Christophe take? A wave of dizziness passed through me, hit my heels, and rebounded hard enough to bring bile up into my throat. The remnants of beef jerky clung to my tongue.

Underneath that was the real thought.

He means how much of my blood. “I don’t know.” I had to pack my cheek with chewed beef jerky like a Bible Belt farmer sucking on a wad of tobacco. “It was… it was horrible.”

“Well, no shit. It’s not a pleasant thing to get bit by a sucker of any stripe.” Peter hopped down.

The rest of them drew closer as the fog thinned. For a group of teenage boys wandering through the woods, they were remarkably quiet. Not a leaf stirred or a stick crackled underneath, unless I stumbled and Graves didn’t give me a quick jerk on the hand to bring me back on my keel. “But seriously. How many gulps did he get down?”

Jesus Christ. “Th-three. I think.” The strange unsteady feeling under my heart was better than the emptiness, too. It was a relief to feel anything other than that soul-destroying numbness.

“That’s good, right?” Dibs looked up anxiously. “More than that and you’d be at risk of bonding and the blood-da—”

“Shh!” Peter stopped. Everyone froze. Graves actually stepped close to me before going absolutely still, most of the boys with one ear cocked. Wulfen never look particularly canine unless they’ve changed, but seeing them all holding their heads that way made me think of the RCA dog on some of Gran’s old records. A rancid laugh bubbled up inside me. I listened just like they did, blood pounding in my ears, and the sound of another helicopter split the eerie silence.

A nasty little thought came padding into my head on little cat feet.

A sucker of any stripe, huh? I didn’t know djamphir drank blood. I suppose that’s what the hunger was about. If I drank someone’s blood, would I be able to do…something? Whatever it is Christophe did? Or what we’re guessing he did, since this fog is nowhere near normal?

Sergej had made the weather change too. He’d made it as dark as night during the day, called up a huge snowstorm. And Christophe was his son.

The whole line of thought made me feel queasy. It was one thing to have something inside yourself ripped out by the roots. It was another thing entirely to think of doing that to someone else. I mean, that made me one of the things from the Real World, all right.

It made me one of those things that my dad would have loaded up his guns and gone hunting after.

Oh God. I shivered. Graves squeezed my cold, limp, sweating fingers. The weighted whir of the helicopter sounded different than all the other ones that had passed since morning. Just how I couldn’t say, but—

I smelled dirt, a thread of warm perfume, and the colorless fume of violence approaching. A tingling touched my chest, as if the locket was vibrating again. “They’re looking for us,” I whispered, not knowing I was going to say it until the words slipped free of my lips. “And they’re not friendly.”

Graves glanced down at me, his mouth opening as if he wanted to ask how I knew. Dibs slid down into a crouch, and before I knew it the rest of them had crouched too, except Graves and me.

We stood, and if my knees hadn’t been desperately locked trying to keep me upright, I would have fallen down in a heap. Something slid through my head, broken glass and cigarette ash scraping through tender places I hadn’t even known were sore, and I flinched, driving my shoulder into his.

He didn’t move, solid as a rock, and his head tipped up. The fog was thinning in curlicues of steam, and I suddenly smelled a thread of apples and spice mixed with rotting dirt. The scent came in waves, flaring and fading, trying to draw a covering over us.

“Will the bloodfog hold?” Dibs whispered. He looked up at me like I should know, and my throat closed up. I didn’t know what to tell him, and the touch quivered inside my head.

The thopping sound got closer. It was hard to tell because of the fog, but it was circling. I could feel it like a sore tooth, nagging inside me.

It was a relief to feel the touch throbbing inside me again. I never thought I’d be happy to have that place on my palate open up again. I never thought I’d be so happy to have the thing that made me unable to fit in anywhere coming back.

My teeth turned aching-sensitive inside my salt-dry mouth. My hair tingled, and warmth spilled down my skin.

The fog thinned further. Sunlight intensified, glaring through like a bulb shining through wax paper. Oh shit.

“Dru—” Graves’ voice cracked. He was staring at me like I’d grown another head.

The aspect flooded me. I took a deep breath, the locket heating up as if held near a candle flame.

Had it done this for Dad too? Or just for me? What did it mean?

There was no time to ask, even if there was anyone around who could tell me. The copter’s sound grew nearer. A shadow loomed through the membrane of water vapor keeping us safe.

Come on, Dru. Do something, anything!

The raw places inside me twitched and twisted. I pulled on them, something that should have been easy as breathing suddenly like lifting a Buick with my bare hands. Blue sky peeped through the shredding fog, and the shape of the copter loomed darker, its down-draft swishing the fog around in vapor trails.

It built up around my hands, my canines sliding free and touching my lower lip. The wad of jerky in my mouth turned into an irritation of salt, but I couldn’t worry about that. My belly buzzed, and the smell of spiced apples bloomed around me. Only it was deeper, with an edge of familiar, warm perfume.

The woods around me smelled suddenly like my mother, and memory crashed inside my head.

Memory and new certainty.

We’re going to play a game, Dru.

“What the fuck—” Peter rose halfway from his crouch.

I jabbed my free hand up, letting out a short cry lost in the sound of the helicopter. The hex, just like the one I’d thrown at a teacher in the Dakotas, a bolt of intent, flew free, sparking and fizzing, and arrowed toward the mechanical shadow. Graves caught me as my legs buckled, and my heart labored in my ears. My ribs flickered, fast shallow breaths, and for a moment the sharp divots of canine teeth touching my lower lip dug in. Warm trickles slid down my chin, and Graves went to his knees trying to hold me up.

There was a weird pinging sound, and the copter veered off, its shark-shadow slicing through the naked tree limbs and thinning vapor. A screech of metal twisting and shearing, and Graves came up in a rush, hauling me with him.

Helicopters are very complex machines. And if you throw one little bit of that complexity off, bad things can happen. It was a tiny hex, barely even worth the name, but Dad would’ve been proud.

Easy to bring a copter down, he told me a couple times. You just remember that, Dru. One little thing goes haywire and alla sudden, whammo!

Had he known somehow?

My heart hurt at the thought. I would’ve given just about anything to have him back and dealing with this. He would have sorted this right out.

“Whammo,” I whispered, and sagged against Graves. It was only the second hex I’d actually thrown in my life. The first one had been a few weeks ago, and I’d almost killed Bletchley, my American history teacher. She’d deserved it, but still.

What was I turning into?

“Jesus.” Peter’s soft, awestruck whisper. A deep rumble sounded in the distance, thunder, swallowing the screeching sound the copter was making.

That can’t be good for anyone in it. The smell of rain suddenly rose from the ground, thick and wet, and a huge grinding noise screeched through the clearing. A deep, coughing explosion.

“Ouch,” I said, and pressed every muscle down against a retch. The beef jerky was having a hell of a time staying in my mouth. My bones felt floppy. The world receded on a tide of gray shot through with little spangles of blue sky and Graves’ voice saying something.

A rending, crashing noise snapped the grayness. Everything got confused, my hands and arms flopping like a rag doll’s. My stomach hurt, someone’s shoulder was in it, and the world was jouncing up and down.

“Whammo,” I whispered again, and the grayness swallowed me whole.

I think I shouldn’t have done that, I thought hazily, and then I thought no more.