Defiance

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Things went okay enough for the first few minutes. I dropped down on the other side of the high brick wall and didn’t immediately glance up to see what Dad was doing. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be out at night, sneaking around somewhere the Real World was rubbing through the fabric of the everyday.

No. I hadn’t forgotten. I’d just forgotten what it felt like to do this with Dad, him taking point and me doing backup and sweep–behind. The comfort of knowing that I just had to wait for orders and let training do the rest.

A thin film of rotten, waxed oranges slid over my tongue. I swallowed hard, the aspect smoothing down over me in deep waves of sensation. Christophe had marked this entrance in red pencil on the satellite photos, along with a couple other routes.

Always planning ahead. Had he thought I’d never find out?

The thing was, I still flushed hotly, thinking of him. Thinking of his hands in my hair and the lightning that went through me whenever—

My grandmother’s owl hooted softly, sharply. Consciousness of danger prickled under the surface of my skin. The shifting in my bones retreated, silence filling my flesh.

I faded back into the shrubbery lining the wall. My breathing came soft through a wide-open mouth, my right hand reaching up and curling around a malaika’s warm wooden hilt. I felt a pair of nosferat pass, a drift of bad drain-smell and hatred sending glass pins through my temples.

That’s the thing about suckers. They hate so much. I don’t understand it. It’s not like they have a monopoly on hate—human beings have a big chunk of the market, and other Real World stuff has its slices of the pie too—but a sucker’s hate is so intense, and it clouds around them like dust around that kid in the old Peanuts cartoons. The one who was always filthy.

I didn’t blink, I didn’t move. The aspect made it easier, and I suddenly understood how the older djamphir fell into that spooky immobility. It was so easy, a stillness enfolding the entire body like a cradling bath, the world moving past on a slow river. My concentration turned fierce and one-pointed, and all Gran’s training seemed like kid games.

Two more suckers, patrolling. They smelled male, and peppery with excitement. The touch whispered in my head, averting their notice. Gran’s owl called again, but neither of them noticed. One made a low aside in some consonant-filled foreign language, their shapes blurred like ink on wet paper, and the other one laughed before they vanished with a tiny, nasty chattering little sound.

Man, I hate that. I hate it when djamphir do it, too.

I studied the house a little more. It was a big sprawling brick monstrosity, looking for all the world like a square red-brown fungus had suddenly got drunk, smoked crack, and decided to stack itself up to impersonate a mansion. It was dark, a dark the coming morning probably wouldn’t penetrate very far. I didn’t have to think about where I’d seen this sort of miasma before.

It had been back in the Dakotas, under a snowy sky with Graves in the truck right next to me. Going to meet Sergej.

Christophe had saved us then. Or, more precisely, saved me. Like he was always doing.

Like I was counting on him to do now.

A complex, tangled wash of feeling slid over me like the aspect. I was counting on him an awful lot here.

Just as I thought it, I heard the thwap-thrum of a helicopter. It got louder and louder, and the fungal mansion took a breath. Like a lion smiling right before it gets up.

Let’s hope this goes well, Dru.

I slid out of the bushes, thin danger candy waxing and waning on my tongue. Creeping along, each foot placed silently, my right hand still awkwardly up, clasping the malaika’s oddly warm, satin-smooth hilt. The path marked with red pencil took advantage of every bit of cover, and about halfway to the house I paused, something nagging inside my head.

You’re in terrible danger, Dru.

Well, duh. But Graves was also, and he was in this house. Who knew what they were doing to him? I had a chance now to—

“Svetossssssssssssha . . .” It was a hiss, off to my right. A cold, lipless, hate-filled voice. “Little svetossssssha, come out and play.”

All hell broke loose.

A high scream cut short on a gurgle came from the other side of the mansion, and the night was suddenly full of noise and motion. Geysers of dirt exploded up, black scarecrow forms leaping free and bits of grass flying. I tugged sideways on the malaika hilt, a motion I’d practiced so many times with Christophe it was now natural, like loading a gun. My left hand flashed up, closed around wood, but I wasn’t ready when the first sucker leapt for me, its narrow teenage face contorted. His hair stood up in dead-black spikes, rubbing against each other with little squealing sounds, and I had my right-hand malaika free, the edge cleaving air with a gentle whistle lost under the chaos.

Bloodhunger lit up inside every vein in my body. I felt it, as if the map of my circulation had just been filled with electricity. The aspect flared, my fangs dug into my lower lip, and I slashed—

—but the curved edge just slid through empty air because the sucker dropped in midleap, clutching at his throat like he had a rock lodged in there. He curled up like a pillbug, but I was already past. I’d expected him to hit me and flung myself forward. Landed hard, sneakers digging into soft-churned earth, the left-hand malaika free and whirling like a propeller.

I was already in second form, Christophe’s voice echoing in my head. Knee! Keep your knee in line! Think of the whole edge, not just the point; for God’s sake, kochana, keep your back straight! It was like hearing Dad’s barks while on the heavy bag, an unwilling comfort.

The scarecrow shadows leapt at me, and I almost panicked. Fangs glowing ivory and champing, foam spraying from their reddened lips, their hair standing up as their version of the aspect crackled through them, the suckers moved in with that unholy speed. The world slowed down, the clear plastic goop that was my own super-speed kicking in hardening on every surface, the malaika whirring outward in the two great defense-movements in second form, which is the beginning of the one-against-many. First form is to build your speed and precision; second through eighth form are all about being the underdog; eighth through thirteenth are the solo combat forms.

I’d barely begun on third form. But Christophe also said that mastery lay in the first two, that if you practiced only those, you would have the essence of all of them. He took me through them every night before sparring, over and over again—

Quit thinking about him and start paying attention!

I hop-skipped forward, weight precisely balanced, and the malaika bit preternatural, stone-hard flesh. But it wasn’t the wooden swords that did all the asskicking. As a matter of fact, I might as well not have had them.

Because the scarecrow vampires seemed to hit an invisible force field. The bloodhunger flexed inside my veins each time, and the suckers crumbled, choking and gagging. One of them fell before I even hit him, clutching at his throat.

Looked like I’d finally become toxic to suckers. In a big way.

Toxic enough that Sergej can’t get to me? That’d be real nice. I leapt forward again, my feet landing as if I was running with the wulfen in Central Park’s dappled light and shade, my heart in my mouth and the world rolling underfoot while I popped from place to place like a girl playing hopscotch.

But if Sergej had been able to endure my mother’s toxicity for long enough to hang her in the oak tree outside that yellow house—

Dad’s yell snapped me to attention. Focus on what you got in front of you, Dru! The malaika whistled, I was moving so fast. Suckers fell, gasping and choking, I hit the small wooden door on the side of the house like a bomb and was through, splinters flying so fast they embedded themselves in the wall opposite. Spinning on a dime, my left-hand malaika flicking out like a snake’s tongue.

This sucker was more durable. He was choking as the blade sheared through his right leg, and it was a good thing I’d ducked because his claws were out and whistling through where my head would’ve been if I hadn’t been down. The touch burning inside my head like napalm in a barrel, a gush of black stinking acidic blood from the sudden shortness of his leg, I drove up with long muscles in my legs, left-hand malaika flicking again. His eyes were like pools of rancid oil, and the worst thing was he looked a little bit like Dibs. Golden-haired, with a soft babyface contorted in agony before my aspect flexed again and he fell, choking up a thin green-black scum.

Why couldn’t this have happened earlier? But I was already moving up the hall. The walls were painted white, but there were streaks of something I didn’t want to think too much about all over them. Crusted streaks, dark red and smelling of copper. It was a complex braid of smells, like in Paranormal Biology where you had to open the ampoules, sniff the blood inside, and list characteristics. Blond, male, young, hospital. Brunette, female, middle-aged, wounded.

Sometimes suckers like certain victim types. And also, doing the sniff test sharpens your tracking ability. With the touch burning in my head, I was never wrong.

These were shutterclicks, images of bodies carried down this hall, prey thinking it had escaped and brought down so close to freedom, a collage of nasty images slamming through my head like iron dodgeballs smacking unprotected flesh.

The floor plan was clear in my head. The door was ahead of me, looming, and I left the ground in a sidekick that would have made any superhero proud. The thought that maybe if the door was locked or barred I’d just hurt myself didn’t even cross my mind, because before I got there, it exploded.

Literally exploded, a flash like heaven itself opening and the shock like a wave face-crashing a surfer. I tumbled, head over heels, the wall clipping my shoulder and sending me spinning. Landed hard, the malaika still clasped in my fists and the world ringing like a gong inside my skull. The aspect flared with heat, cushioning me from the blow, but it still rang my chimes pretty good.

Smoke. Yellow flame crawling over the walls. What the—

Then I was scrambling to get on my feet, because he appeared out of the flames. Honey-brown curls and a face stamped from an old coin, chiseled and hurtful. A thin black sweater, jeans, and his paleness with its tint of copper over the top. And his eyes, my God, his eyes now black from lid to lid and so deep. You could fall into those eyes and drown before the soft sucking blackness at the top closed over your face.

You wouldn’t even struggle.

My mother’s locket gave a flare of painful heat, so hot I was suddenly afraid it had melted on my sternum. I let out a soundless cry—soundless because it was loud, my ears still ringing and shouts, cries, the sounds of a pitched battle going on all around me.

Sergej grinned. And right before he blurred through space and I brought the malaika up, I thought, for one terrible second, how much his smile looked like Christophe’s chilling little grimace when he wanted to scare someone.