Defiance

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Tucking. Rolling. Great gouging pain in my side. The aspect burned, and I stopped short, lying against the wall. The malaika clattered, both my fists clutching reflexively. I hadn’t lost them.

Which was good, because Sergej, a huge hole in his flapping T-shirt, drenched in black blood and with his face a purple-red, hateful leer, was already on me. I jerked, my right-hand blade blurring up and missing him by a fraction as he bent back. He looked like he was about to do an overenthusiastic back walkover, spine creaking and crackling, the tip of the blade whispering past his chin.

I was somehow on my feet now, the wall at my back and red agony jolting up and down my left-hand side as broken bits of rib grated together. The aspect turned to liquid fire, peeling back my skin and grinding in as each break in my bones sang a hallelujah chorus of pain.

Sergej spun the length of iron lamppost, its end making a low hard sound as it tore through air. His mouth opened, but a roaring covered any sound he might’ve made—it was the sound of fire as a cool draft slid past us.

There was an open door somewhere, and the fire down the hall was sucking at it like a calf at a mama cow’s teat.

Sergej snarled, his face turning even more alarmingly purple. I didn’t dare glance past him, but I’d guess the boys had gotten Anna out of here. Graves was probably gone, too, thank God. At least I’d done what I’d set out to do.

Now I just had to face down the king of vampires, the one who had killed my mother. Kill him, if I could.

Yeah. Right. I’d settle for just escaping.

Screaming and gunfire through the roaring noise. Sergej choked, but he scuttled in quick, swinging the length of iron still dripping with thin black fluid. My right arm still worked; the malaika flicked out like a snake’s tongue, deflecting the are of his attack and slicing inward. If I’d been just a little faster it would’ve opened up his belly, but my left side seized up with a mother of all cramps, bones grinding together, and I screamed.

The sound cut through all the other chaos. The draft of cooler air coming from behind Sergej—he was between me and escape, just great—swirled and flirted uneasily. Heat touched my back.

Nosferatu crispy-critter really quickly; open flame or direct sunlight are really bad for them. But I wouldn’t put it past him to wait for the fire to be too much for me—I couldn’t move my left arm, my breath came in coughing gasps, and if he could get over getting stabbed in the heart and still have this much juice left a little thing like an entire fucking burning warehouse wasn’t going to put much of a dent in his day, you know?

Sergej darted forward again, the aspect bit down in my left side like there were metal jaws meeting in my flesh, and I battered his attack aside with my right-hand malaika again, with a thunder crack of pain and effort.

Over the roaring and the gunfire, another sound penetrated.

“DRU! DRU!”

My name, screamed over and over again. I knew that voice.

Christophe. Oh, God.

I didn’t take my eyes off Sergej. He shifted his weight, and I did too, Anna’s long-ago training echoing in my head. Her blood burned in me, whispered, tried to show me more of her. The touch pushed it back, making a fist inside my head so I could concentrate. He was going to come at me again, and I didn’t know if I could hold him off. The smoke thickened, tearing at my eyes just like the fluorescents. Who knew when the lights would give out, too? Something about the sound of the fire told me it was Serious Business.

Sergej dropped back a step. Two.

I stared. The aspect gave one last crunching flare of pain, then, amazingly, I took a deep breath. Smoke rasped against the blood-hunger; hot tears slicked my cheeks as I blinked furiously. The agony retreated, turned into a deep bruising ache, and I raised my left-hand blade. Held the malaika in second-guard, naturally as breathing, and straightened. My face settled, eyes narrowing, and I had the sudden lunatic idea that I looked like Dad.

Fury boiled up inside me, pushing aside the pain. The hunger fed on rage, feasted on it, and this time I was a clear glass girl full of red wrath, but it didn’t own me. I stood in the middle of all that anger, a ribbon of cold steel inside me, and felt something inside me shift like a key clicking over in a lock.

Sergej stepped back again. Under the dirty honey-gold curls, he looked almost . . . my God.

My God.

He looked frightened, his eyes completely black now, widening—but the force in them wasn’t reaching through to crush all independent thought. Fine thin threads of gray crawled out of his eyes, fanning like crow’s-feet toward his temples. A great gout of black stinking blood pattered down from his chest, slicking his jeans and boots, and for a split second I saw something else far back in his gaze.

Recognition.

Serves you right, you bastard. Do you see them? Do you see both my parents in my face? You’re not the only one. Come and get me. Come on.

The malaika twitched, my weight shifting forward just a crucial millimeter, playing through the very first initiation of the attack.

This is where the first mistakes are committed, Christophe’s voice said, dry and pedantic, inside my head. Why hadn’t I absorbed his training when he forced me to drink his blood?

But I couldn’t think about that. Because something blurred behind Sergej. A flash of black cloth, pain-darkened green eyes—

—and Graves skidded to a stop, lifted the gun, and started firing.

The first shot went wide. For the rest of my life I will swear, on a stack of Bibles if I have to, that I saw it as it whistled past my head and blew a chunk out of the wall behind me. A little more to the left and Graves would’ve shot me.

The second took Sergej high up on the shoulder from the back, just as the king vampire was whirling to face this new threat. The bullet blew out through the front of his shoulder, fragging and sending splinters, not to mention spatters of black acid blood, everywhere.

And I leapt. The hot hard lump of Anna’s blood in my middle was shrinking, and either the aspect was cooling off or the radiant heat from the fire down the hall was getting much more intense. Either way it was bad news, and we had to finish this, now.

My heart swelled up like a balloon. Graves braced himself, his coat flapping around his knees in the backdraft, and made his triangle, aiming carefully. He didn’t look particularly hurried, and I could see each bruise on him, smell the blood streaking him under the coat, and almost taste the colorless rage fuming off him as well. His lips skinned back from his teeth, and for a moment his eyes flashed bright emerald again. The wulfen Other filled his face with unholy light, and my heart made a funny jumping movement like it was going to break out of my ribs and fly straight toward him.

Sergej twisted back around, bringing up the iron spear. It was too late; I was already inside the critical zone, malaika both slashing in the crux au courant pattern. Christophe had only shown it to me once, but he’d taught it to Anna over and over, drilling her like he someday knew this would happen.

The blades bit. I was a little off, but not by much. One slashed across his face, grating against bone, and the other scored down his chest and bit into his midriff. The iron spear cracked against my shoulder in a flash of crimson pain; I went flying. Hit the wall on the other side, I was a regular old pinball, landed on my feet but my left-hand malaika went tumbling free. The fluorescents flickered, and there was a living glare from behind me.

The fire had found us.