Reckoning

CHAPTER TWO

We didn’t make the sort of time I hoped, but we got there. By late evening on the third day we were all sick of each other. Graves lit another cigarette, and the brief flare from the lighter he’d found somewhere made me blink.

I slowed down even more, squinting through the film of road grime on the windshield. The car bumped over washboard, and Ash made a small puppy sound from the backseat.

I hoped he wasn’t trying to tell me he needed to pee. “We’re almost there,” I said for the hundredth time. “Just hold on.”

“Where the fuck are we?” Graves clutched at the dash. “There’s no light.”

I knew what he meant. When night falls in deep Appalachia, it falls hard. There’s precious little orange citylight or townglow out here where the trees press close and the land pleats up like Gran’s face when she tasted something disagreeable. Up on the ridge roads sometimes you have star and moon to go by, when you can see them through the trees. But down in the hollers the dark is a living thing, and our little cone of headlight shine didn’t show much except the rutted-out road between dust-bleached, choke-close trees. A few places even had creepers coming across the road, a sure sign that nobody had been up this way by car in a while. We’d left town behind at dusk, and I was feeling my way.

The last turn—a sharp, almost axle-breaking right—and I could feel the trees drawing away. The road disappeared in a sea of high grass, and our headlights swam through it.

“Jesus,” Graves almost moaned. “There’s no road. Does this place have plumbing?”

“Will you quit bitching?” I’ll admit it. I snarled. My ponytail was a mess, and curls hung in my face. “There’s a well, and an outhouse. It’s better than being killed by vampires.”

“Bang,” Ash piped up, but softly. He was scooting between windows, looking on one side, then sliding across the seat to look out the other way. The car rocked slightly every time he did it, and I’d given up trying to buckle him in. The grocery bags in the backseat—enough to get us through a couple days, at least—rustled, and I groped for the window crank. My window rolled down, and the smell of spring, thin earth, rock, trees, creepers, the familiar metal tang of the crick down the way—it all about rocked me back on my heels.

It smelled like home.

The boys were quiet for a little while.

“You’re smiling.” Graves said it like he was surprised. He could probably see me just fine in the glow from the dash.

I found out I was. It wasn’t a big wide stupid grin, but it felt close. “Smells like home, that’s all. I lived here for a long time.”

“That must be the drawl you’ve got. Southern honey, anyone?” Lightly teasing, and amused.

I perked up a little. He sounded more and more like himself, the farther we drove. Bitchy and annoying, but still himself. “I don’t drawl. Yanks just talk weird. Bite off all their words like they’re personally offended by each one.”

He rolled down his own window and sniffed, cautiously. How he could smell anything with all the smoking he was doing was beyond me. “I’m Midwest, babe. That don’t make me a Yank.”

The longer I grinned, the more natural it felt. “You’re above the Mason-Dixon, boy. That makes you Yank automatically.”

“Great. And I suppose you’re Johnny Reb.”

It stung, but I knew he had no idea. “Don’t say that kind of thing around here, okay? As a matter of fact, someone comes around, let me do the talking.”

“Yeah.” He held up a hand, examining it like he’d never seen it before. Took a drag, let the smoke curl out through his nostrils. “Do I have the wrong skin tone for this red neck of the woods, Dru?”

Are you trying to call me a racist, or just my folk? “Jesus.” I tried not to roll my eyes. “I’m more worried about the vampires finding out we’re here. You stick out, I don’t. Much, I guess.”

“Have you looked in the mirror lately? You don’t blend, kid.”

Perversely, I felt warmed. “So you noticed. I look like my mom a bit.”

I should’ve known it was too good to be true. “Some mom,” he muttered. “You look . . .”

I waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

All the good feeling drained away. He’d seen me drinking someone’s blood. He’d also seen me kick vampire ass. And he’d looked completely disgusted. Now this. Great. Just great. “What? Unwashed? Redneck? Uneducated? Toothless? Like my mama and daddy were cousins? Shut up, Graves. Until we get to the house, shut your goddamn Yankee-ass mouth and let me drive.”

He subsided, sucking on his cancer stick like it held the secret to world peace or something. Ash’s back and forth sped up a little. “Ash!” I barked. “Pick a side, sit down, and sit still!”

He did. Right behind Graves, cowering up against the window like he wasn’t sure if I was going to reach back and smack him. The silvery stripe in his hair gleamed in the uncertain dimness.

Great. Perfect. Just wonderful.

The house hove into view across the meadow. I was finding the driveway more by instinct than anything else; the meadow had reclaimed the ruts in a big way. Dad and I had only been back here once to close everything up. If we were lucky, the house would still be sound. If it wasn’t, well, it was only temporary. There are a lot of things you can just live with in summer.

Winter would be a completely different story. But by then we would be on the road to somewhere else. If we survived.

I didn’t want to think about it. Here was Gran’s, and Gran’s was safe, and for the time being that was enough. I’d kept this place like a card in my back pocket; it was my last best draw.

“You grew up way out here?” Graves sounded horrified.

“I told you to shut up.” But there was no heat to it. Of course he’d be horrified by the sight of Gran’s high narrow shotgun house, weathered boards festooned with creepers and kudzu, the pump out front still wrapped securely. There was another pump in the kitchen, and there was the crick if the well was low. Looked like nobody’d been at the cordwood, which should be nice and seasoned now. The chicken coop listed, its front door open and the fence around it pulled half-down. There’d probably been a few storms, and the fencing around the coop was one of Gran’s Perpetual Endeavors. Like baking biscuits or trying to civilize me into wearing a skirt.

The Packard slumped under a mound of creeping green in the carport; I could still remember driving down off the ridges with Gran’s terrible labored breathing in the passenger seat, bumping and swerving toward the hospital down the valley.

I blew out between pursed lips. The touch flexed inside my skull, and a tingle ran through every tooth I had. But especially the sharp upper canines.

Fangs. I ran my tongue over them carefully. They were just sensitive, not warning me. I hadn’t tasted the rotten wax-orange that would tell me danger was close. Instead I was just jumpy as hell, tetchy, and exhausted. Not to mention feeling a queer pain in my chest. Like my heart was deciding all this was too much hassle and it would just crack in half. Save the king of the vampires and everyone else the trouble of killing me by taking care of business at home, so to speak.

I squinted as we rolled to a stop, sliding the car into park. Yes, there were fine thin blue lines slipping through the physical fabric of the walls, knotting together and twisting in complex Celtic designs. The walls remembered Gran’s wards. She’d redone them every night and made me do them too, with her rowan wand and without, with candle and salt or just plain will. I could almost see the trembling of a candle flame behind the shuttered windows, a faint star of light.

My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, again.

All that warding, all those floor washes with yarrow and lavender, all those little tricks like doubling back and spitting to break a trail. All the times she questioned me—did I see anything or feel anything wrong? Was there anyone in town asking questions? All the care she took to scrub me down and keep me scented like something else.

It hit me all at once. She’d known what I was. Or she’d known something. She’d been protecting and training me as best she could.

Of course she knew. She’d take one look at Mom and figure something was up, and you just knew Mom was here at least once. Gran also had those fights with Dad, about me. “Whatchu gonna do wit dat chile, Dwight?”

My arms shook. The steering column groaned, and Ash made a little whining sound in the back of his throat.

“Hey.” Graves reached over. His fingers were warm. He pried my right hand off the wheel, one finger at a time, and didn’t seem to notice or care that my fingernails were lengthening. Sharp and deadly, a hell of a new manicure, the changed structures in my wrist aching as the claws slid free. “Hey. Dru. Dru-girl, come on. Breathe.”

“I think my grandmother knew what I was.” I managed to get the words out through the obstruction in my throat, but only barely. “But I never did. I had no clue.”

“Was it bad for you?” He slid his fingers between mine. Holding my hand, as if he’d never looked at me like I was some slimy thing from under a rock. As if he hadn’t spent the last three days getting on pretty much every nerve I had left, and me returning the favor. “Here, I mean?”

Tears pricked hot at my eyes. “Not here. Everywhere else, but not here. She, um, she died. I was twelve. I drove her to the hospital in the valley, and . . .” The words wouldn’t come. How can you tell someone what it’s like to have the whole world whacked away from underneath you?

You can’t. It just doesn’t happen. Sometimes people understand because they’ve been there.

And then I felt like an idiot, because Graves . . . well. He’d been living in the mall, for Chrissake. You don’t do that when your family life is highly satisfying and safe.

And even that had been taken away from him the instant Ash’s teeth had closed in his flesh. It was my fault in the first place, too.

Because Ash had been after me.

Graves leaned over, transferring my fingers to his right hand and awkwardly sliding his left arm around me. I was still in my seat belt, and he somehow wasn’t. He tightened up, and I leaned over into him. Took a deep breath, smelling cheap hotel soap and the last thing we’d stopped for—fried chicken in a supermarket deli, where I’d pushed the cart through the aisles and got everything we could afford that I thought we would need for the night. The bags in the back were still rustling a little as the breeze fingered its way through the car, a secretive sound.

Underneath the food, he smelled like wulfen and strawberry incense, male with moonlight mixed in. The tears were pushing out past every wall I had, hot and slicking my cheeks. My nose filled up, and I snuffled like a five-year-old.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “It’s okay. I promise. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

I knew he was lying. Everything was not all right, and things were getting more fucked-up all the time.

But at least he said it. I was grateful for that, and it helped.

Besides, they were both depending on me. Ash could probably get away if the vampires found us, but Graves? Not likely. Not in the shape he was in.

I was the responsible one, and just because I’d been utterly sucking so far at everything didn’t mean the pressure was off.

It just meant I had to do better. We were safe for the moment, so I had to get my head together and start doing right.

Still, I stayed there for a couple minutes while the Subaru idled and the headlights glared at Gran’s house, my face turned awkwardly so I could bury my nose in Graves’s neck. I was all torqued around like a pretzel, but I didn’t care. He smelled safe and he held me, and he kept repeating it.

“It’s okay, Dru. It’s gonna be okay. I promise. I’m sorry, everything’s gonna be fine. You’ll see.”

He said it like he was thinking he was the responsible one. And it felt so good I just let him do it. For a little while.

CHAPTER THREE

The key was still under the north side of that granite boulder, the one Gran poured milk over every new moon. The walls were still solid, thank God. The place smelled mildewy, and Gran would’ve got on me to clean every damn corner before turning in.

First things first, though. I hiked out to the corner of the meadow with a flashlight and found the connection box; when I flipped the switch, the tiny light came on, a sweet green flash. I could’ve sobbed with relief. Gran didn’t believe in “payin’ for the fool ’lectricity,” and this tapline had been here for decades. It was a pure miracle it was still working. If it hadn’t been, well, I’d brought a can or two of gas for the genny, but that wouldn’t take us far.

I hiked back to the house and found Graves and Ash taking the dustcovers off of stuff. They were shaking them off the front porch, too, which meant Graves was thinking. “Nice place,” he said over his shoulder as he passed me with an armful of canvas sheeting, his torn coat flapping around his knees. His eyes gleamed green in the dimness; the Coleman lamp I’d set on the kitchen table was feeble to say the least. “Good vibes.”

“Bang!” Ash nodded enthusiastically, bounding after him, pale bare feet slapping the polished floorboards. I found the moldering wooden-and-cardboard box of lightbulbs on its familiar shelf, right where Dad’d left it. Screwed the first one into the hanging cord over the kitchen table, and voila! The pleased exclamations from the boys made me feel like Edison himself.

The next step was priming the pump in the kitchen with a bottle of distilled water. When I worked the handle it made a gawdawful screeching, but I’d thought to bring some WD-40 and that made it just groan and shower rust flakes. After a few more pumps, though, things eased out. I worked it until a gush of rust-colored water came out, kept on until it turned clear and cold. Mineral-smelling well water, and plenty of it.

“Thank you, sonny Jesus,” I muttered. It was just what Gran would’ve said. “God willing and the well ain’t dry.”

Next thing—a fire in the potbellied iron stove. I worked the damper, hoped the chimney wasn’t blocked—fortunately there was a bit of a breeze, and I could feel the air moving past my fingertips. The stove was cleaned out, a neat fire laid among spiderwebs, so I just had to grab the matches and light her up. The draw was fine, and in a little bit I had a merry crackling blaze. Night would get cold around here even in spring, and all we had were sleeping bags. I wasn’t sure if moths would’ve gotten into Gran’s quilts too.

I’d solve that problem when I hit it, but even moth-eaten quilts would be better than none.

The boys had finished carrying everything in from the Subaru by then, and Ash let out a little cry of joy and wandered up to the stove, stretching his hands out like the fire was his personal friend.

The plates and skillets were dusty, but I just rinsed them off. Gran would’ve had my hide, but by this time I was yawning and working through mental mud. I locked the front door, told the boys to arrange the sleeping bags upstairs, and put together something easy—bacon, pancakes from mix, eggs. I could’ve made this in my sleep, and I pretty much did. When the boys tromped downstairs I was already coaxing the balky old electric stovetop and thanking God that I didn’t have to cook on the potbelly. I can do it, sure, but it’s no fun.

“More food?” Graves stretched, yawning hugely. Ash galumphed over to the stove and crouched, staring in through the grate at the fire’s orange and yellow crackle. His eyes ran with orange sparks, and his expression was such serene contentment it was hard to believe he was the same creature who’d been almost-eight feet of unstoppable Broken werwulf.

Now there was a thought I didn’t want. Could he change into his wulf form now? And once he did, could he come back?

Don’t borrow trouble, Dru.

“I’m not complaining,” Graves added hurriedly. “Can I help?”

“You can check the icebox.” I pointed with one of Gran’s old wooden turners. “If it’s working, load the stuff from the cooler in there and put the cooler on the porch. And don’t bitch if you don’t like scrambled eggs; that’s all I’m making.”

“Won’t bitch. Scout’s honor.” He gave me a fey grin, green eyes lighting up. “Well, I was never a scout. Couldn’t afford it. But still.”

Well, ain’t we cozy. I was beginning to get whiplash, he was going back and forth so fast between hating me and actually seeming to think I was okay. “I kind of wanted to be one too, but they don’t take girls.”

“What about Girl Scouts?” He opened up the ancient, tiny fridge and stuck his hand in. “Looks like it’s working. This is really cool.”

“Girl Scouts have great cookies. But too many girls. I don’t get along with girls.” Except Nat, and she probably hates me now. I poured pancake batter, heard a satisfying sizzle, and poked at the bacon. Considered cracking some eggs, decided to leave them for last. “I guess I never will.”

“There’s time. I don’t get along with chicks either. Well, except you. You’re, like, the only girl I’ve ever met who isn’t . . .”

Maddeningly, he stopped. I was too tired to even wonder what I wasn’t. There was a long list of things I wasn’t, starting with cute and probably finishing up somewhere near lovable.

I brushed my hair back, wishing my ponytail would hold. Tomorrow I’d find some string and braid it up.

Braiding made me think of Nathalie at the Schola Prima again. I’d gotten along with her just fine, until I’d been a total bitch. Granted, I’d been getting ready to go rescue Graves . . . but still.

The longing to see Nat, her sleek head tilted to the side and her wide cat-tilted blue eyes considering an outfit or the mess my hair had become, shook me right down to my bones. I sniffed, wiped at my nose with the back of my hand, and turned the pancakes. Graves busied himself loading up the fridge. Ash rocked back and forth in front of the stove, humming tunelessly. Graves carried the cooler out on the front porch, and when he didn’t come back, I figured he was lighting another cigarette.

The way things were going, I might almost take up smoking myself. Dad would’ve killed me for even thinking about it.

But he was dead. He’d never take me up about anything ever again. My throat was sore, something stuck in it, but I just cleared it a few times and concentrated on cooking.

The ancient Folgers can for coffee grounds, eggshells, and vegetable scraps to go in the compost heap was rusted but still sound. I tossed the eggshells in and had a plate together in a trice. “Ash! Come on. Take this to the table. Graves, get him a plastic fork, and one for you too.” I felt like Gran, hollering from the kitchen.

“You gonna eat?” Graves ambled back in, his chin set stubbornly and his eyes dark. Almost black.

I looked back down at the skillets, the pop and fizzle of bacon filling my head for a moment.

“Yeah,” I lied. “But there’s work to be done first. Come on, you two. Tuck in.”

The wide loft held Gran’s big four-poster and my smaller corn crib, and the mattresses reeked of mildew even though we’d wrapped them in plastic. But the quilts, packed in mothballs and plastic, were still good. The moths hadn’t gotten at them at all.

I meant to carry my brand-new sleeping bag downstairs after a while. I thought if I sent the boys up to get settled and gave them enough time, they’d be out cold and I’d be able to sneak my bag downstairs and stretch it in front of the door.

Plus, there were things to do to close the house up for the night. I finished by warding the walls again, watching the faint blue lines running through the wood take on fresh life. They didn’t need to be redone so much as refreshed, and it was amazingly easy. I just had to remember to think up high enough to get the second story involved. I could almost hear Gran muttering to herself while she followed me around the open room that was the entire first floor, checking my work.

I was hungry, but my stomach had closed up tighter than a fist. The effort of warding made my head swim, and every bone in my body ached down deep. I sat down on the loveseat to rest, just for a second. It was an old horsehair thing, meant for company—Gran always sat in her rocking chair and I used the old hassock, or I sat at her feet while she knitted. The bare bulb in the kitchen gave off a mellow glow, and if I shut my eyes and inhaled, I could almost smell her.

Tobacco juice, a faint astringent old-lady smell, baby powder, and the musky yeasty scent of cooking good things and working hard all day. Her spinning wheel sat under a drop cloth I’d told the boys not to touch, but I could almost hear its hissthumpwhirr and her occasional soft mutters as she spoke to God or told me things.

I loved to listen to Gran talk. She was always rambling, said it was a product of living alone. Dad was never the chatty type, but days with Gran were a constant stream of information, admonition, attention. Do it this way, hold that end up, good girl . . . I could tell him, now what’s the price of cotton, but he wouldn’t listen . . . Yes, you look like your daddy, that’s a look like a mule, fetch me my scissors and go check the coop for eggs. My, you’re good at findin’ eggs, it’s a true talent, Dru-baby. Come now, no use wastin’ sunshine.

She taught by example, but the talking was something else. A lifeline, maybe.

I folded over and pulled my feet up, lying on the dusty loveseat. It felt good, even if the thing was harder than the floor and slippery too. The fire glowed through the stove’s grate, and the good scent of seasoned wood burning—I’d banked it just before I warded everything—was like a warm blanket.

Blanket. I didn’t have one; I’d left them all upstairs. I was going to get cold if I settled here for long.

I didn’t care.

My eyes drifted shut. I was so, so tired. The wards in the walls hummed to themselves, and that was something new, too. I’d never heard wards before, singing in high crystal voices that turned into harmonies where the knots laid over doors and windows twisted.

Well, Dru. You got here, and you got both of them here. Tomorrow you start figuring out a longer-term plan. But you did what you set out to do, and there hasn’t been a vampire attack. Yet.

I told myself not to borrow trouble. Curled up even tighter on the love seat. It just felt so damn good to stop moving, to stop concentrating so fiercely on the next thing, and the next, and the next . . .

That was the first night I slept, really slept, since rescuing Graves. Every muscle in my body eased its useless tension, relaxing all at once. I went down into darkness, and there were no dreams.

Except one.

INTERMEZZO

He crouched, easily, on the edge of the rooftop, blue eyes burning and his sharply handsome face haggard. Lines etched themselves onto teenage flesh, and for a moment you could see just how old Christophe really was.

The city spread out below him, jewels of light and concrete canyons, the exhaust-laden wind ruffling his slicked-back, darkened hair. The aspect flickered through him, his fangs sliding free and retreating as dull hopeless rage flitted over his features.

He’d never looked like this before.

“We need you,” someone said behind him. Bruce moved in the shadow of an HVAC vent, restlessly. The crisp British accent made every word a precise little bullet. “Don’t throw your life away, Reynard. It’s no way to honor her memory.”

Christophe actually flinched. Something I’d never seen him do before, something that seemed utterly alien to the maddeningly calm djamphir I knew. “She’s alive.”

“How could she have survived that? We found traces—you saw the blood. She wasn’t even half-trained, despite our best efforts. Sergej”—The name sent a glass spike of pain through my dreaming head, and both of them tensed—“took her because Leon betrayed her, and Anna probably helped.”

“So now you’re willing to impute blame to Milady.” Christophe’s shoulders straightened. He lifted his right hand. Something gleamed slightly in his palm, and my dreaming self’s gaze was riveted to it. “Really, ibn Allas. You never used to be this quick to call Anna’s behavior what it is.”

“Anna is a spoiled child. She’s never grown up.” Amazingly, Bruce almost snarled, his lip lifting and white fangs flashing for just a moment, the aspect curling through his hair. “But speaking of that doesn’t help this situation. We didn’t find her body, or Anna’s, but we’re still looking. The whole place is a mess.” He took a deep breath, shoving the aspect down. “If he had both of them, we would know. He would be walking in daylight and we would be under siege.” Bruce’s dark eyes glittered. He looked like a wreck, too—his clothes were singed and torn, one half of his face deeply bruised, and he slumped wearily. “Please, Reynard. The Order needs you.”

“My little bird needs me more. I told you, keep her safe and you have my allegiance. This? This is not safe.” Christophe straightened, and now I could see his clothes were in rags too. Vampire blood smoked on him, the steam rising hard to see because of the fume of rage covering him.

“We don’t even know—” Bruce began, helplessly, his hands spread. Trying to smooth the waters, like he always did.

Christophe rose with slow, dangerous grace, balanced on the very edge of the roof. “I know. If she was dead, ibn Allas, I would be, too. I would kill them all until they dragged me down. My heart is still beating, therefore, she is still alive.” The lines on his face smoothed out. The gleam closed itself up in his fist, fingers clenching, his face settling into chill certainty.

If he’d ever looked at me this way, I would’ve never let him touch me. I would have been too busy backpedaling and getting out of his way.

“Give us time. We’ll help, we’ll bargain with the Maharaj—”

“Don’t mention the djinni-children to me; they don’t care for our troubles.” Christophe laughed, a bitter little chuckle. “And your help gave Leontus the chance to betray her. I took you at your word, Bruce. I believed you when you said he would guard her all the more carefully because of Eleanor’s death. I believed him.”

“I believed him too!” Bruce yelled, but it was too late. Christophe had already leapt, straight off the ledge, plummeting into the screaming wind—

CHAPTER FOUR

I sat straight up on the loveseat, my fingers clawing at empty air like I was going to grab Christophe’s sweater and pull him back. One of Gran’s quilts slid to the floor in a heap. I did actually throw myself backward, hitting the high hard back of the loveseat and giving myself a good jolt.

Graves tore out of the sleeping bag and leapt to his feet. Sometime during the night he must’ve crept downstairs, because he was on the floor next to the loveseat. My heart hammered, pounding in my throat, and my fangs tingled. For one nightmarish moment I didn’t know where I was, and the scream caught in my throat.

The deep thrumming rattling everything not nailed down was a growl. It came from Graves’s chest, and his eyes were wide, green, and blank. The Other—the thing wulfen use to change and loup-garou use for mental dominance—rippled under his skin, his shoulders bulking up as he hunched them, ready for attack.

I clapped my hand over my mouth. The touch throbbed inside my head, little invisible fingers soaking in the anger radiating from him in red-violet waves. Beyond that, the glow of the wards sparked, bright blue. Out in the meadow, nothing. Just static, the formless buzz of the country before your ears adjust and start hearing the wind and the crick and the animals again. It’s like they have to shift between city and country tuning.

Morning sunlight filtered through the shutters, bars of gold with dust dancing in them. Graves’s growl petered out. He half-turned, glanced at me with that empty green-glowing gaze, and for the first time since I’d met him, Goth Boy looked completely dangerous.

I swallowed, hard. “I’m okay,” I managed through my clenching fingers. “I just . . . I had a dream.” About Christophe. The words stuck in my throat. “Jesus. What are you doing?”

He just stood there. The anger leaked away, bit by bit. Sense stole back into his mad green eyes, and for a moment I wondered why I wasn’t scared of him, especially since he looked ready to rumble.

I mean, I was apprehensive, yeah. But he hadn’t been fixing to hurt me. No, he’d been focused on the door.

In case something was coming through it.

Something like that makes you think. It really does. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to think about it.

Graves eyed me sidelong for a long while. Finally, the last of the anger died down. I saw it creep back into him, sinking under his caramel skin. You couldn’t see the marks of torture on him anymore, and the anger was something new.

Not anger. Rage. He didn’t have that before. I was the one who had that before.

I guess being tortured by vampires will do that to you. Guilt bit me hard, deep inside my chest, again. “Graves?” It was hard to talk, because my fangs were out and my hand was clapped so tight over my mouth I could barely move my lips.

I didn’t want him to see. To remember that he’d seen me with my face in Anna’s throat, drinking her blood.

He crouched, suddenly, and his hands moved. I almost flinched before I realized he was smoothing out the sleeping bag. “Nothing. Not doing nothing.”

A high dull flag of red stood up on each sculpted cheek under a screen of dark stubble. The stubble was pretty new; he’d been a smooth-cheeked boy when I’d met him. He still needed a few meals to replace muscle mass; wulfen metabolism burns pretty hot to fuel the change. It would burn in him to give him their strength and speed, even though he wouldn’t get hairy.

Not much, anyway. No more than any regular boy.

The tingling through my fangs receded. I finally peeled my hand away as he started rolling the bag up. My hair was probably sticking up all over, but I felt loads better. Not even stiff, but as if I’d taken a deep, refreshing nap. And there was the quilt—he must’ve brought it downstairs and covered me up. I searched for something to say. “You didn’t, um, want to sleep upstairs?”

Way to go, Dru. State the obvious.

“No.” The rage flushed through him again, retreated. “I didn’t.”

The touch was stronger now, and if it wasn’t for Gran’s training I probably would’ve been seriously disturbed by how strongly his anger rang in my skull. “Graves—”

Now why did I sound breathless?

“Look.” He finished rolling up the sleeping bag, snapped the elastic loops over it, and glared up at me. “I know I’m just a loup-garou, all right? I know. I’m just the deadweight holding you down. You dragged me along and I’m glad about that. I’m even glad I got bit by that thing up there. I handled everything they threw at me, and told him to go fuck himself more than once. Sergej.” He all but spat the name, and his face twisted up, bitterly. “So quit treating me like a little kid, Dru. I ain’t been a little kid for years. I’m not as Billy Badass as some of those stuck-up djamphir, but I’m learning and I’ll be hell on wheels when I’m done. You won’t ever have to worry again.”

Where did that come from? My jaw had dropped. I stared at him. What the hell?

“You don’t think I can hack it.” He leapt to his feet, carrying the sleeping bag with him. He’d slept in his coat, too, and it flapped as he moved. I’d stitched it up, clumsily, and now I was wishing I’d done a better job. “Well, I’ve got news for you. I already have. Whatever it takes to make you see, I’m gonna do it. You get me?”

Silence stretched between us. “Um.” I searched for something to say. I settled for the absolute truth. “What? No. I don’t get you. What the hell are you on about?”

I got one long, very green look, his eyebrows—eyebrow, actually, since nobody had held him down and plucked him up yet—drawn together and his mouth a bitter scowl. I was struck once again by how cute he’d gotten. Those cheekbones, and those eyes.

How had I ever thought, even back in the Dakotas, that he was dull? Or gawky?

I had the weird sinking feeling I was missing something important. What a thing to wake up to. And the dream was still filling my skull like cobwebs, something important glimmering in its depths.

He filled his lungs, his chest swelling as if he was growling again. When he opened his mouth, though, the only thing that came out was a yell. “I love you!” he shouted, his eyes glowing laser green. “I love you, okay? I’m not some hopeless retard you pull along behind you because you feel sorry for him! I love you and I’m going to prove it!”

I had the exquisitely weird sensation of being transported to a parallel universe. Or of waking up in a movie where everyone knew the script but me.

A different kind of silence, now. It was the kind where something you can’t take back is still vibrating in the air, all around you. We looked at each other for what felt like the first time, Graves and me, and in that moment the last bits of the kid he’d been completely fled inside my head.

This was a new animal. And he was looking at me like he expected me to say something.

“I never thought you were a hopeless retard.” I sounded very small, and very young. I found out I was hugging myself, too, scooted back on the loveseat like it was a raft and the water around it was full of sharks. “You just . . . I . . .” Every word I’d never been able to say to him backed up, crowding around me and squeezing all the air out of my chest. “I thought I disgusted you,” I said finally. It was hopelessly inadequate. As usual. But Jesus. Waking up from a dream about one guy and having another one yell something like that, it’s confusing.

To say the least.

He actually cocked his head and stared at me like I was speaking in Swahili. “What?” As if all the air had been punched out of him.

“The, um. Sucking blood thing. And . . . I can’t . . . sometimes I just can’t explain things to you. I can’t tell you. It all gets balled up and you get mad and stomp away and—” I was actually working up a good head of steam here.

“I’m sorry.” The words jumped out. He hugged the sleeping bag, hard, tendons standing out on the backs of his hands. The flush on his cheeks had died away, so that under his caramel coloring he was ashen. “I was angry. Didn’t want to hurt you.”

Well, thank you sonny Jesus, we’re getting somewhere. Finally. “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be in this.”

Bitterness, then. His shoulders hunched and his face turned old. A shadow passed through his eyes, turning them mossy instead of emerald. “Yeah. I’d still be cowering. Hiding in the fucking mall. I’m glad I got bit, Dru. If I coulda done it earlier, I would’ve.”

Jesus Christ. He’d seen the Real World by now. It wasn’t anything anyone sane wanted to be involved in. There’s a reason people run away from it. There’s a reason cops and governments sweep weird shit under the table. It’s because nobody wants to know. They don’t even have to work that hard; nobody goes looking for this sort of thing—the kind of weird where you can seriously die. They all go looking for the Saturday-trip, New Age, crystalgazing weird you can come back from.

Except Graves and me, we’d been stranded out in the black. Out in the place you can’t get back from and you just have to deal with. “You can’t mean that,” I whispered. My arms were around my knees. I was curling up into myself like a fern, or like he was shouting at me. My heart was triphammering. Wait. Let’s go back a couple seconds here. Did he really say what I thought he just said? “Graves—”

He flung out one hand, like he was blocking a dodgeball. “Bullshit. I do mean it. Best thing that ever happened to me, Dru. What was I gonna do—try to go to college with no money? Work my way through and hope someone would throw me a bone or two?” A swift snarl passed over his features, and his hair stood up in vital springing curls. “No way. This is my chance to be good enough. I’m taking it. You’ll see. You’ll just see.”

He dropped the sleeping bag. It hit the floor and keeled over, and he turned on his heel. Bare feet smacked the worn floorboards, and it took him less than a half second to undo the lock on the door. He plunged out into the morning, and the door slammed shut behind him. Shivers rolled through me, first hot, then cold.

What. The hell. Just happened?

A soft sound alerted me. I looked up, and there was Ash, crouched easily on the pulldown steps that led to the loft. He cocked his head, and greasy hair fell in his face. He was barefoot too, and he’d somehow lost his shirt. His narrow chest was dead pale, and muscle flickered under his skin.

Wait a second. Just hold on one goddamn second. Graves said he . . . did he actually say that? Did he say what I think he just said?

We looked at each other for a long time, the Broken and me. It occurred to me that he was waiting for something. For me to make the world settle down.

Except everything was still spinning around me, and if I didn’t hold on, I’d be flung off. I hate that feeling.

I’d been spinning since Dad died, in one way or another.

But Ash was counting on me. Examining me solemnly, his face like a child’s. Wide open, and scared, and utterly trusting all at the same time. You’re going to make the bad stop, right? That’s what was painted all over him, from the way he crouched to the wide eyes and his mouth just a little bit agape.

“It’s okay.” I tried to sound steady. “Everything’s all right.”

“Awwight.” His mouth worked loosely over the word. I’d shot him in the jaw with Dad’s silvergrain bullets, and some of the silver was probably still in there, buried in the bone and preventing everything from changing back and forth right. Or, even scarier, the silver had worked its way out and now I had the thought that he was free of Sergej’s hold but somehow still Broken, and I didn’t know enough about how to fix him.

Every single problem I’d forgotten about while sleeping came crowding back. First on the list was breakfast.

I felt like falling asleep on the loveseat had twisted the world off course again, just a fraction. I wasn’t complaining, but I wished Graves would’ve waited until I’d had some coffee and I could think before he laid that on me.

Did he just say what I think he just said?

Ash slid down a few more stairs, slinking bonelessly on his hands and feet like a cat. “Hongwee.” He nodded vigorously. “Hongwy.”

Great. He’ll have a three-year-old’s vocabulary by the end of the week. Stellar. “Yeah. I was just thinking about breakfast.”

It hit me sideways.

Graves. He’d really said that.

I love you. That was good, right? Good, hell. It was outright great.

Except every time things got better with him, I ended up even more hopelessly confused. I groaned, gingerly got up from the love seat in case I’d stiffened up overnight, and found out I hadn’t. “Outhouse first,” I amended. “Then breakfast.”

Ash actually let out a crow of delight. Then he was out the door too, quick as a flash. Which would leave me to make breakfast alone.

Did he really say he . . . loved me? Maybe it wasn’t hopeless. Maybe I could learn to say the right thing the next time he laid something like that on me. Maybe I had a chance.

Wouldn’t you know, I found out I was grinning. Ear to ear, despite every single problem crowding in around me.

Grinning. Like a total fool.

CHAPTER FIVE

I brought the ax down cleanly, with a terrific thwack. The log split. I didn’t even need a wedge; it was child’s play to get the freshly sharpened ax blade going fast enough. The wood was well seasoned, but it was the aspect flickering through me that did most of the work.

I was getting used to this new body. Hips a little bit wider, chest-works definitely a little bigger—the two sports bras I had were not going to cut it after a while; I had overflowing cleavage you could lose a quarter in. I’d managed to buy two pairs of jeans in a new size yesterday, T-shirts in medium instead of small, and every piece of clothing I’d ever owned before was so not going to fit me now.

But all that was kind of made up for by the fact that my hair was behaving, silky curls lying down—and the fact that I was now strong as any of the boy djamphir. Reliably strong, the aspect simply stepping in like clockwork instead of needing rage or bloodhunger to fuel it.

Hallelujah. I didn’t have to get mad or suck someone’s blood to use superstrength. It was a frigging miracle.

The only mirror in the house was a polished piece of metal hanging near the kitchen window, where Gran would check her hat before she went to town. It was enough to show me that I didn’t have anything huge stuck on my face, but the changes I’d seen in hotel bathrooms, thankfully, didn’t show up much.

Graves didn’t say anything else, but I caught him looking at me every once in a while. When he thought I didn’t notice.

Ash, of course, was oblivious. I don’t think how I looked mattered to him in the slightest. He darted in, scooped up one half of the log I’d just split, and balanced it on the ancient chopping block. Then he hightailed it back to the woodpile and watched.

I drew the ax up, smoothly, inhaling, and let out a sharp huff! as I brought it down. Got to do it with the breath, Dru. Ain’t no other way.

Gran’s voice was a thorny pleasure. Any moment I expected to see her striding into the meadow, clicking her tongue at the long grass she’d take a machete to every once in a while. She’d descend on all three of us and put everything to rights, toot-sweet, with not a second to spare or a long gray hair out of place.

Ash darted in again, put the unchopped half of the log up, and leapt back with an armful of stovewood. I brought the ax up and down again. Like riding a bike.

Bright mellow sunlight poured over the meadow, showing a sheen of sweat on Ash’s arms. He was bulking up a bit, the steady calories doing him a lot of good. Gran always said fresh air was good for anyone, too.

After we had enough wood to last a week, I set Ash to stacking it and stamped inside.

“You’re handy with an ax.” Graves was up to his elbows in soapsuds, scrubbing the dishes. I’ll clean, he’d said. You go out and get some sun.

I’d bit back the acid comment about Gran revolving in her grave to have a boy wulf cleaning her house, and just gone and done it. Right now, though, I was kind of wishing I’d stayed inside. Pumping bathwater was going to be a bitch.

“Got to be, in these parts.” I grabbed a bottle of distilled water and cracked it, took a long pull. “I’m going into town in a bit, now that we know the house is still sound and we can stay here a couple days. We need more supplies.” I waited for some sign that he was willing to talk about something else. Something a little more personal.

I know enough about boys to know that they get uncomfortable with that sort of thing. So I figured I’d just . . . let it rest. For a little while, at least.

And, well, discretion’s the better part of valor, right? Except I was pretty sure the word for waiting until he said something else wasn’t discretion or politeness. It was flat-out cowardice.

He hunched his shoulders. Worked at the cast-iron skillet like he wanted to scrub it into a wafer. I was going to have to season it again before I could use it.

“This is pretty cool.” He glanced out the window. “You could hide up here for a while.”

That’s the idea. “I guess.” I stalked over to Gran’s hassock, grabbed my black messenger bag. It still smelled like vampire blood, and I was damn lucky to have it. I’d hung the long slightly curving wooden swords—malaika—safe in their leather harness, on a peg by the front door. The funny thing was, that peg was just right.

The malaika had been my mother’s. They looked like they belonged there. I couldn’t remember what might’ve hung there before, and that bothered me. I thought I’d remember everything about Gran’s.

I settled down at the kitchen table with a fresh legal pad, the atlas I’d picked up, and Dad’s little black address book. All his contacts were in it. One of them at least had been djamphir. The rest, who knew?

I had Dad’s billfold, too. Mom’s picture was missing, but given recent events, I was lucky to have this much left from him. It made me wonder where the truck was. Christophe had told me it was in storage somewhere; I’d always figured I’d pick it up later, somehow. If I needed it.

I set the address book down precisely, looked at the legal pad, and uncapped a blue Bic.

“What are you up to?” Graves glanced back over his shoulder. I’d managed to get all of us some jeans and T-shirts, nothing fancy but serviceable. The dark blue shirt strained at his shoulders. Boy was no longer a medium, that was for damn sure.

We’d both changed so much.

“Planning. This is short-term. Anyone who goes digging through paper will find out Gran’s property’s in trust for me, with a couple investments paying the taxes. Someone will eventually track us, or figure out I’ve gone here to lick my wounds. We can’t stay here past fall, and that’s if they don’t find us first.”

“They. The vampires, and . . .”

And the Order. Staying with them is about as safe as a sack of snakes for you, and I’m not sure I like it much either. “And anyone else. So I need short, medium, long-range, and contingency plans. You think this stuff over before you have to.” I stared at the blank paper. “Dad used to say that.”

“Your accent’s getting thicker.” He rinsed the skillet, working the pump like he was born to it. “It’s cute.”

Did that count as being willing to talk about something emotional? A reluctant smile pulled at my lips. I ducked my head, letting my hair fall down. Awkward silence reigned in the kitchen. He kept washing, the white bar of a dish towel over one shoulder.

I flipped idly through the book. Dad’s crabbed, neat handwriting, in different pen colors. I found Augustine’s name and address and numbers, with the inked cross Dad used to mark a safe contact.

There were other hunters. How many of them were djamphir—or something else? Could I still trust them? Would they know what I was now that I’d bloomed? Would any of Dad’s friends or contacts sell me to Sergej if Dad wasn’t around?

It was a horrible thing to think.

There were a handful of people I could trust. Less than that, because the only ones among the living were up here with me. Christophe . . . maybe I could trust him, since Leon had been lying about him selling Graves to Sergej. But still, Christophe and Graves’d “had words,” Graves said.

Words about me.

I glanced up at Graves’s broad back as he finished rinsing a plate. Looked down again just as quickly, stared at the blank legal pad. “Can I ask you something?”

His shoulders stiffened. But he sounded easy, relaxed. “You bet.”

Chill, dude. I’m not going to ask you to repeat the L word. I know boys hate that. “Outside the gym. The night you disappeared. You and Christophe. What exactly did he say to you?” I had the Cliffs-Notes version, so to speak, but I wanted . . . more. “I mean, if you don’t mind telling me.”

“He had a group of djamphir buddies with him.” Graves set the plate in the rack, gently. Put his hands down on the lip of the utility sink, dropped his head forward. His hair curled over his nape, but you could still see the vulnerable-looking spot there. “He asked me if I thought I was any good for you. I said I knew I wasn’t, but I was all you got and I was stepping up. He laughed at that, and we got into it. Kind of . . . well, a shoving match. Guy stuff.” He let out a long, harsh sigh. “It ended up with things getting serious. He said I wasn’t doing you any good. That you deserved better.”

Oh, Jesus. I tasted burnt metal, swallowed hard. My fingers tightened on the blue Bic. “Graves—”

“I told him that you deserved better than a creepy little fuck like him, too. That was about it. I went for a run to cool off and the vampires nabbed me.” He pulled the plug on the sink; on either side, framing the window, were shelves holding the sum total of Gran’s china. There was a gleam on the windowsill, a random reflection of sunlight.

We’d have to keep washing like mad to make sure we had clean plates. All the pots and pans were hung around the stove, and Graves straightened. He started hanging things up, each in the correct place. Which meant he’d been watching me.

Soapy water slipped down the mouth of the drain. The gurgling was loud in the silence between us.

“You shouldn’t trust me,” he said finally, grabbing the edge of the sink again and holding on for dear life. Muscle stood out under his T-shirt. “He broke Ash. He could’ve broken me. I could be even more dangerous than that Anna chick. You shouldn’t have come to rescue me.”

He meant Sergej, and I could see Graves’s point. But still. All the breath rushed out of me; I had a hard time finding enough to talk with. “I couldn’t leave you there.” If I let my head hang any further I’d snap my own neck. My mother’s locket was a cool weight against my breastbone. “You wouldn’t break, either.”

Why did that make his shoulders hunch even further? He balled up the towel and slung it in the sink. “Doesn’t matter. Christophe’s a bastard, but he’s right. I’m no good for you, not like this. And now you’re going to have to worry about whether or not I’m a traitor. Smart, isolating us all up here like this.”

Could this go any worse? “We’re safe, not isolated. And what the hell? Are you smoking crack? One minute you say you . . . I mean, one minute you’re fine, the next you’re telling me you’re a liability and not to trust you. Will you just pick hating me or being my boy-friend and get it over with? One or the other, jeez.” I couldn’t put all my aggravation into the last syllable, but I tried. My throat was dry and my palms were damp, and the Bic made a little screeching sound as my fist tightened and the plastic flexed.

He shrugged. Let go of the sink and turned on one heel, but didn’t look at me. His profile was sharp, the bones standing out under the skin, and for a moment he looked too exotic to be real. “Who’s on crack now? I don’t hate you, Dru. Jesus. That’s the problem.”

“Wait, we’ve gone from using the L word to me being a problem?” I’ll admit it. It was pretty much an undignified screech at the end. “Well, I’m sorrrrrr-ry!”

Yeah. When all else fails, take refuge in sarcasm. I could’ve slapped myself.

He just gave me a bright green glance and stamped away, out through the front door and into the sunlight. At least this time he was wearing shoes.

I sat there, breathing like I’d just run a four-minute mile, the pen making weird little sounds as I tried to get my fist to loosen up.

Serves me right for asking him, really. First he kissed me, then it was weeks with nothing but a peck on the cheek every evening, and then he loves me, then I should suspect him. I closed my eyes. Just when I thought everything had gotten just about as complex as it could, something new came along. I never knew where I was with Graves, in the friend zone or . . . somewhere else, somewhere I’d like better if he didn’t keep shoving me away.

At least with Christophe, I was only uncertain in the sparring room.

The dream rose up in front of me, Technicolor vivid. I could almost taste the night wind and smell the decaying vampire blood on them both. Bruce, the head of the Council, always trying to smooth everything over. And Christophe, certain I was still breathing.

My heart is still beating, therefore, she is still alive.

Funny, but I never even considered that he might’ve been talking about someone else.

Why was I even thinking about that? All the time Christophe had been hanging around, I’d felt like I was betraying Graves by even considering him as . . . well, as a serious prospect.

He’s old. He knew my mom, for Chrissake. And he’s . . . he’s . . .

I couldn’t find a word for what he was. A hot flush raced up from my throat, and my mother’s locket warmed. Something brushed my cheek when I lifted my head, and I found out I’d reached up, my fingertips following the familiar curves of Graves’s skull-and-crossbones earring.

I popped the back off, pulled the post out, and laid the earring on the table. I still had a diamond stud in my other ear, one of the ones Christophe had given me before I went into that rave and played bait for suckers. My first vampire kill that night, and Ash had been there too.

It felt like a million years ago, like another lifetime. How many times would I get that feeling, like I’d started out on a whole new life? How many times would I get comfortable just to have everything I depended on whacked away underneath me?

This sucks. It was weaksauce, sure. But I couldn’t come up with a better term.

I popped the back off the diamond too, laid it down. There. The two of them, side by side. Both gleaming in different ways.

To hell with them both. I should get a pair of earrings that said boys are stupid. Nat would’ve approved.

I angrily wiped at my face and stood up. I had to move, the itching in my bones demanded I move. I paced over to the sink and stood where he’d been, grabbed right where he’d grabbed. There were little indents in the utility sink’s sheet metal where his fingers had dug in.

Boy don’t know his own strength, Shanks had remarked once. Does anyone, really? Christophe had replied.

The window over the sink was dusty, a spring heat-haze making the tree shadows at the edge of the clearing run like ink on greased plastic. I shuddered, like a horse run too hard and stopped too quickly, and something brushed my hair. A warm, forgiving touch, like familiar work-worn fingers.

It’s all right, babygirl. Like I was five years old again, scared in the middle of the night, or seven and crying at the table because some kid at the valley school called me a bad word because my daddy was gone.

I whirled. The locket bounced against my chest, warm metal. The fingers patted the top of my head, a quiet, soothing movement.

There there, chile, babygirl. It’s all right. A breath of tobacco and baby powder, spice and stiff old-lady skirts.

“Gran?” I whispered.

There was no reply but the sough of wind against the roof and the grass, trees sighing, the burble of the creek down-away. I heard a high excited yip—Ash, delighted by something else.

I edged away from the sink like it had grown horns. Gooseflesh stood out all over me, hard little bumps, and the aspect smoothed down over me in waves of comforting, drenching heat.

If Gran was here, she’d set everything to rights. Some part of me had probably thought she would just appear, or that something would be here to save my bacon. I was always more comfortable with someone telling me what to do, so I could just follow the numbers and my training and . . .

But there was nobody and nothing left. Nothing to trust, nothing to depend on, and I couldn’t keep us here forever. Someone would find out about this house, probably sooner rather than later, and they would come riding in to yank it all away from me.

This ain’t gettin’ you nowhere, honeychile, Gran’s voice piped up, faraway and faint. I retreated to the table, turning to keep the windowsill in view like I expected something to move over there.

I grabbed the atlas. I needed to plan, not sit around whining or scaring myself. Thinking I heard her was like a dash of cold water, slapping me into functioning again.

If Graves couldn’t figure out if he loved me or hated me, maybe it was time for me to start fishing in a different pond. Except I didn’t have a different pond, since I’d pretty much accused Christophe of selling Graves out and told him I hated him.

Dadblastit, Dru girl, you’re woolgathering. Chop some wood, chase them chickens, or draw some water. Quit your mooning. Gran’s voice, sharp and clear, like she’d caught me hiding behind the coop. I flinched guiltily, because for a second I could’ve sworn she’d just waltzed in through the front door and took me to task.

God, I wish. I miss you so much. The dry rock in my throat wouldn’t budge.

Hell, I should have been worrying about hearing voices. That was the problem with the touch—you could go off the deep end and mistake shit for Shinola, as Dad would say. And maybe I should be worrying more about little things like keeping us alive and less about my seriously messed-up dating situation.

I hunched down in the rickety split-bottom chair, opened the atlas and propped up Dad’s contact book, and tried to do just that.

CHAPTER SIX

“I’ll be back in a couple hours,” I said an hour later, desperate, but Ash shook his head. He held onto the door handle, grimly, and there would be no way of getting into the car unless I crawled in through the other side. Then, if I tried to pull out, he’d either break the door handle, the door itself, or run after me. And he was wulfen. He could definitely keep up with the car unless we were on a straight shot of freeway, and he could find me in town if he really took a mind to. “Jesus, Ash, I’m just going into town! I won’t be gone long.”

Ash shook his head even more vigorously, greasy hair flying. Bits of leaves and twigs threaded through the dark matted strands, I still hadn’t found wherever he’d flung his shirt, and he was barefoot. Mud striped his chest. He’d seemed pretty happy, until I put my malaika in the back of the Subaru and my bag in the passenger seat. He’d let out a howl and bounded off the steps, nearly colliding with me, and grabbed the handle on the driver’s side.

Perfect. I wanted a hot shower, not just a sponge bath. Not to mention a club sandwich and some coffee that didn’t come from a percolator. I was pretty sure I could just be an object of gossip if I went into the diner in town, but Ash? He’d make me an object of outright speculation, no matter if I behaved correctly or not.

He inhaled, opened his mouth. “Noooooooo.” A long, drawn-out syllable. Then he changed it up. “Nonononono! Wif! Go wif!”

“For the love of Pete.” I put my hands on my hips, and for once I sounded like Dad when he was exasperated past bearing with a malfunctioning engine. Too exasperated even to swear, and that’s saying something. “You do not have to go with me. It’s just down to the two-bit town in the valley. I’ll be back in a couple hours, max. You stay here with Graves.” At least, I was thinking Graves was still around here. If he went wandering off in the woods and got lost, that would just put a capper on the whole day. I’d left his lunch under Saran wrap on the table, and the touch throbbed like a bad tooth inside my head, a feedback squeal from my own frustration.

The malaika were bulky, but I didn’t have a holster for either gun we had, and I didn’t have the patience to jury-rig something. Besides, during the day around here, I didn’t want a telltale bulge under my shirt. Country people understand guns, sure. But I wasn’t one of the locals anymore.

If I ever had been.

Ash dug his bare heels into the dirt and glared at me. Orange sparked in his irises. He set his chin and took a firmer grip on the door handle.

When he’d been almost-eight feet tall and all hairy, at least he’d been less trouble.

I tried for patience. “Look, you’re not even cleaned up. You’ve got dirt all over you. People will stare.” That’s a bad thing, in case you’re wondering.

His ruined chin thrust out further. Here in the sunlight, you could see the scars clearly. They were a reminder I could’ve done without. I remembered him trying to change back into a human shape, and the sobbing when he finally had a human throat again was the kind that will stick in your dreams. If I didn’t have so many other nightmares, it would’ve been a starring attraction.

Of course, I was dreaming other things nowadays. Things that might or might not have been happening. True-seeins, Gran called them, and I hadn’t been wrong yet.

If she was dead, ibn Allas, I would be, too. There was something in that scene I wasn’t getting, and I didn’t have time or energy for enough heavy brooding to figure it out. At the very least, Christophe suspected I wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t stupid. He’d found me before.

He would do it again. He’d probably also try to drag me back to the Order, where I was “safer.” No way, no day. I didn’t like the idea that someone in the Order could sell me—or, God forbid, sell Graves out—again.

And here I was wasting time arguing with a half-Broken werwulf who couldn’t even talk.

“Oh, what the hell.” I threw up my hands. “Get in, then. But don’t make any trouble, or I’ll . . .” I decided to leave the threat hanging. What could I do to him? A big fat pile of nothing, that’s what. At least when he was all tall and hairy, I didn’t feel so bad about locking him up somewhere safe and going about my business.

He didn’t waste any time. He was in the backseat in a trice, bouncing up and down so hard the springs groaned. “Settle down,” I told him. “We need this car.”

I opened the driver’s side door, did a sweep of the sun-drenched meadow. No sign of Graves, and the clouds stacking up to the west told me there would be rain before long. A spring storm, maybe. That would be all sorts of fun and mud. I could even smell it on the wind, grass and trees sensing a long drink coming and releasing their little perfumed cries of joy.

The touch throbbed uneasily inside my head. I tasted citrus, but only faintly, and it wasn’t wax-rotten. Trouble coming, but nothing specific enough for me to take any precautions. Best thing was to just get everything done as soon as possible, so we could leave in a hurry if we had to.

I’d left Graves a note under his plate. Went to town, be back in a bit. Keep the fire going. I thought of adding I’m sorry, but I didn’t. What did I have to be sorry for?

Other than getting him bit and dragged into this whole ungodly mess, that is. Still, he said he didn’t mind. Did that mean I only had to be sorry for liking him, or for getting him kidnapped and tortured by vampires, or what?

He liked being a part of the Real World. I don’t know if I exactly enjoyed it, but I knew I’d never want to be one of the oblivious. Did that make me an asshole?

I couldn’t even figure it out anymore, and it wasn’t the kind of problem I could do anything about. I sparked the car, the engine roused, and Ash made a little squeal of glee.

“You sit yourself down and put your seat belt on,” I barked, and he did. He rolled the window down, though, and spent the entire bumpy ride down the ridge and down the county highway with his face in the slipstream. Don’t ask me, I don’t know.

We would have been okay, except for the Charleston Chew.

I didn’t realize Ash had kiped it until we were outside the big wide Sav ’n’ Shop grocery store that used to be a Winn-Dixie when I was young, and I heard the man shout “Hey! Hey, you!”

I turned incuriously, and he was bearing down on us—the manager, a big potbellied good ol’ boy with furious little piggy blue eyes behind thick horn-rim glasses, pasty cheek flab under a greased dark comb-over. His polyester tie flapped and the wide yellow sweat stains under his armpits married the fussy shine on his wing tips to make the picture of what Gran would call “a bitty-ass man too big for his britches already.”

It wasn’t her most damning epithet, but it was close.

I looked at Ash. Who tore the wrapper open and made a small hmm of contentment. That was when it occurred to me. I didn’t pay for that. He must’ve just grabbed it.

“Oh Lord.” Give me strength. Jeez. I yanked the balky cart to a stop. It had a screechy wheel and wobbled alarmingly, but it was the best on offer. The clouds were coming up fast and the smell of rain was an overpowering, sweet green haze. Stormlight gathered, yellow–bruised in all the corners, making every edge stand out sharp. The shadows had turned to deep fuzzy wells. “Ash. Where the hell did that—”

“Stop right there!” Piggy Eyes was really worked up. He almost plowed into us. “You gonna pay for that? Huh?”

“I paid for everything else, sir,” I drawled, and Ash took a huge bite. He chewed sloppily, observing the scene with bright-eyed interest. I cursed inwardly. “I didn’t see he had that, sorry. Here.” I was already digging in my pockets for the change.

An ugly flush spread up Piggy Eye’s cheeks. He was obviously unmollified. “That yourn? He retarded or somethin’?”

Gran would’ve fixed him with a glare, so I did. “That’s my kin, sir.” It was like channeling her, and I had to try hard not to smile as I offered him two crumpled dollar bills. “He’s special. Here.”

I should’ve been aiming for a submissive tone, I guess. Or at least something conciliatory. Instead, I sounded like I was brushing him off, and—here’s the bad part—there were a couple of wide women in print shorts, locals by the look of them, passing by to head into the store’s air conditioning.

One of them laughed, her flip-flops making regular little smacking sounds against cracked pavement. Her shoulders were permanently sunburned, and her blouse had a tropical print way too bright green to do any good for her complexion in this lighting. “Lyle’s about to do a citizen’s arrest right there again.” She spat tobacco juice, a pungent brown streak, and the other woman chimed in with a cackle that would have done Witch Hazel proud. They swept on into the store, the automatic door wheezing tiredly shut behind them.

Petty tyrants don’t like being laughed at. Piggy Eyes Lyle flushed an even darker brick red, and his meaty paw shot out. The touch snapped inside my head like a wet sheet shaken before you put it on the line, and I realized he’d been following us through the store, watching us.

Watching me, in particular. And the things he was thinking squirmed inside my head like maggots. I actually flinched as his fingers closed around my upper arm.

“You’re comin’ with me.” He squeezed, hard. He had only human strength, but the aspect woke with a jolt, smoothing over my skin with oil-soft heat. My fangs tingled, and I clapped my lips shut over them. The thirst tingled in the back of my throat, bloodhunger waking up. It was weird—it was taking over that other place on the back of my tongue, the one that warned me of danger. It didn’t feel right, but I didn’t have time to think about it.

The sun dimmed. The clouds had found us.

Ash growled. The sound rumbled free, a warning I was used to from hanging out with wulfen. It deepened at the end, and anyone with any sense would’ve backed up in a hurry.

Lyle, however, had no common sense. He actually shook me, and tried to drag me off my feet. I planted myself, the grocery cart giving a screech, and was thinking furiously about how to defuse the situation when three things happened.

One, the sky darkening in the west rumbled. It was a long menacing roll of thunder, and it scraped along my nerve endings like a wire brush. Every hair on me tingled like the lightning was going to strike right at me. The second thing was pure bad luck—a county sheriff’s car bounced into the parking lot, its springs groaning. The man behind the wheel saw us just as Ash dropped his half-gone Charleston Chew and—this was the third thing—launched himself at Piggy Eyes Lyle so fast the pale streak in his hair seemed to stretch like taffy.

Ohshi—I dropped down, knees loosening and my free hand flashing out. I hit harder than I intended to, a flat-palm strike with almost every ounce of the aspect behind it. It sank into Lyle’s middle with a meaty crunch lost under the roll of thunder, and the fat man flew back. His fingers ripped my T-shirt as they tore free. Then I was airborne, springing like a jack-in-the-box and colliding with Ash just at the top of his leap. We hit the ground hard, pavement cracking as quarter-sized spatters of rain hit the dusty earth.

I found out I had my right hand clamped at Ash’s nape. He was growling and struggling, but I had a good grip, just like with a disobedient puppy.

“No,” I said sharply. “No. NO!” I braced my foot, my other knee grinding into a hollow in the pavement. No—not a hollow. It was the dent I’d made while landing. The aspect flooded me, smoothing down my skin in a wave of sweet heat. My fangs tingled, and the bloodhunger woke in a sheet of red. It pulled against every vein in my body, turned the entire back of my throat to a desert, and the anger woke up.

I didn’t need rage to trigger the aspect now. But it was kind of a habit, and besides, it felt so good. Like I was in control of the whole stupid, tangled situation.

Like I finally had a clear-cut problem with an easy solution in front of me.

Ash struggled. I was grinding him into the concrete, and I didn’t much care at the moment so long as he stayed still. I glanced up. The county sheriff’s car had jounced to a stop, and the man inside was staring so hard his eyes bugged out, visible even through the windshield and the gloom under his ten-gallon hat.

Uh-oh. Think fast, Dru.

Luckily, the Sav ’n’ Shop was our first stop. We could easily leave the two bags of groceries if we had to. I’d paid with cash; there was no trouble there. How to get out of here without John Law following in his car or calling in a plate number that wouldn’t match the Subaru because I’d switched them out . . . Christ.

The biggest problem, and the one I had to solve right now, was the werwulf growling and scrabbling, his bones crackling as the change tore through him.

If he goes into changeform, will he be able to come back? I didn’t know. Clear plastic goop started hardening over the world, which meant I was using superspeed even while standing still. Raindrops flashed, caught in stasis, and the sheriff’s car door made a groaning sound as it was slowly, slowly levered open. He’d grabbed a frigging shotgun, I could see the shape through the windshield, and things were about to go critical.

Think, Dru. What would Dad do?

Every muscle tensed. I dug into the pavement and pushed myself aside, whipping my right arm back. The aspect flared, my mother’s locket a spot of molten heat. Ash went flying, fur running up over his flesh in liquid black streams. The silvery stripe on his head flashed once before the darker clouds swallowed the sun completely. Thunder boomed again, distorted because I was already moving, flashing through space to slam into the cop car’s door. Pulled the force back at the last second, but I still heard snapping bone.

Gonna hurt someone if you’re not careful, Dru-girl. Dad’s voice, calm and clinical. Get that gun away from him. Make sure he’s down. Then get the hell out of here, and take your damn groceries with you.

The car door came off like peeling a strip of birch bark, hinges squealing, a fountain of sparks as the wiring for the windows and locks tore. I brought it up and spun, drove it through the windshield. Safety glass imploded. The cop was down—an older man with a high hard gut, his hat blown free and skipping across the parking lot in slow graceful arcs, his eyes bugging and his mouth wetly open. His left leg bent at a funny angle inside his regulation-issue pants. He was older than Dad, and the look on his face was pure terror.

He was afraid. Of me.

I bent and grabbed the shotgun, a flicker of my hand. It was so easy to bring it to my shoulder, brace it, and—

What am I DOING?

He was scrabbling away, too weak and slow to be a real threat. My head snapped up, scanning the parking lot. Not a soul to be seen. Ash lay on top of an old Buick, the hood dented and windshield cracked. I’d flung him pretty hard. He shook his head, melting back into boyform, and I pursed my lips, let out a high piercing whistle.

It was Gran’s “call the hounds” sound; it was instinct, and it worked. Ash’s chin came up, and he looked at me. His eyes glowed orange.

We need to get the hell out of here. Now. I jerked my head, the touch an invisible rope pulling at the meat inside my skull. He clambered down off the car in weird, stuttering fast-forward and bounded across the parking lot on all fours even though he was boy-shaped again. Toward the Subaru, thank God.

I hope they don’t have security cameras here. I glanced at the cop. The shotgun whirled in my grasp; he was raising his hands like he was going to plead with me not to hurt him. I socked him, once, with the shotgun’s butt, a nice clean hit gauged on the soft side. His head snapped back and he slumped, eyes fluttering closed. For a moment, standing outside myself, I was horrified.

The world jolted back up to normal speed, achingly slow. Ash skidded to a stop in front of the Subaru, looking at me. His irises were still orange, still glowing, and his gaze was utterly blank.

Waiting for the next command. My next command. Nausea rose deep and hot inside me. Had he looked at Sergej that way?

I am so not ready for this.

I snapped a glance at Piggy Eyes Lyle. He lay, head cocked at a weird angle, up against two dented, broken newspaper boxes. Bile rose in my throat. I’d hit him too hard.

Was he still alive?

Yes. I heard his pulse, faint and weak. A thin thread of blood slid down his chin, and as the wind veered, I could smell it.

It smelled good. The bloodhunger woke up, the dry spot at the back of my throat opening like a flower.

Walk across the pavement, step by step, bend down. Grab him, push his arm up to lock the joint so he can’t struggle, and tilt the head back. There will be a nice big throat, with a nice big jugular. Bury your fangs. And the moment his heart stops, you know he’ll never watch a teenage girl walk through the supermarket again. It’s yours. Your power. The blood will slide down your throat, it will be sweet and smoky, and—

I knew that tinkling, sweet, girlish voice. It was Anna. A warm place dilated behind my breastbone, and I heard her laugh. Whispering, taunting, cajoling.

I thought I’d gotten her out of my head, that I’d burned through the blood I’d taken from her.

I was wrong. And what would Graves think of this, if he could see it?

What would Dad think, if he was still alive and not just zombie dust? Or Gran?

Time snapped, stinging, like a hard elastic band against flinching skin. I had the two plastic-and-paper grocery bags in my free hand. Threw them in the backseat as Ash cowered.

Like he was afraid of me. Hunched down, his entire body the picture of submission.

“Get in!” I yelled, the shotgun held loosely. Nobody in the parking lot. The rain began to slant down in earnest, dark drops on the dusty ground merging. It didn’t cut the smell of blood. My entire body shook, jitters racing through me.

Ash scrambled into the car. I swept the parking lot again, shotgun held ready. Lightning sizzled overhead, photoflash-searing the entire scene into my head. I dropped into the driver’s seat, braced the shotgun. Sparked the car and laid rubber out of the parking lot.

Some shopping trip.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The windows were all down, rain lashing through and thunder booming. Water smacked the side of my face, a welcome coolness. I kept us on the road, trying not to bend the steering wheel. Ash had slithered over into the front passenger seat and whimpered, crouching in the bucket seat and staring at me.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him to sit down and shut up. He shook and shivered every time thunder boomed. Spring storms are like that—they sneak up on a body. Gran said they hid on the ridges, and the only way to tell one was coming was to have a war wound or an old broken bone.

Gran would have been horrified at what I’d just done. Not so much the busting up a couple of grown men, though that was plenty bad.

No, it was the bloodhunger. If she was still alive to see me sucking blood, or even just wanting to suck blood, what would she think? She’d be disgusted, just like Graves. And angry.

I didn’t do it, though. I didn’t!

My conscience wasn’t having any of it. You wanted to. You know you did. I blinked furiously, the water in my eyes was making everything blur.

Ash let out a yelp. I jerked the wheel, and we drifted out of the oncoming lane. There wasn’t another car on the road for miles, and my entire body was shaking with the hunger’s aftermath. Like little armored rabbits were running around under my skin. My veins throbbed dryly, and my eyes were smarting. A hot trickle slid down my left cheek.

I wished I could stop to roll all the windows up. Ash twitched. He had his arms wrapped around himself, and the next glare of lightning made him flinch again.

“It’s all right.” I had to work to make myself heard above the rain-noise. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

Except it kind of is. What the hell, stealing a two-bit piece of candy? But I couldn’t be too mad at him. He wasn’t even in his right mind. And I’ve dealt with guys like Piggy Eyes Lyle all over the country. It was a point of pride with me, knowing just how to slide out of Situations. Except I hadn’t slid out of this one. I’d acted just like a punk kid, and—

But I am a punk kid, something inside me whined. I never asked for this!

I kept checking the rearview mirror. No headlights, no sign of pursuit. If they had cameras at the supermarket we were probably hosed. We’d have to run anyway, ditch this car in the first city and grab another one. I’d done the planning, especially to get us liquid resources. But all that wood I’d chopped was going to be useless.

Don’t worry about the firewood, for fuck’s sake. Worry about something useful.

Like, how was I going to explain this to Graves? That was going to be all sorts of fun in a handbasket. I heaved in a breath, two, and more hot trickles slid out of my eyes.

Cold rain smacking my face through my still-open window did a sucky-ass job of covering up the fact that I was sobbing. Great gulping heaves, tearing through me like a crowd of hobnailed boots against a street, beating out cadence.

Did I kill him? Lyle’s head had been twisted so strangely. But I’d heard his pulse, faint and thready. Maybe he’d be okay. Someone would come out any moment and find him and the cop there, the sheriff’s car busted up and the shotgun gone. At least we had another gun, and a shotgun was far from the worst thing to have out in the hills or on the run.

I hope I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t like my first vampire kill. I’d felt sick over that, but in the end it was like cutting off the head of a poisonous snake with a shovel. It just had to be done, and thank God I wasn’t the snake.

Or was I?

Lyle had just been a garden-variety human jerkwad, not a bloodsucking fiend looking to kill me as messily as possible. Lyle didn’t even know nosferat existed, or djamphir or svetocha or werwulfen—

Ash whined again. He reached out, tentatively, and his pale slim fingers brushed my shoulder. He patted, again and again, like I was a dog that needed soothing. My shaking sobs were oddly unconnected, like my body didn’t even belong to me. The aspect was hot oil over my skin, smoothing down and getting rid of any hurt, filling me with a buzzing. My fangs poked at my lower lip, and the twin sharp pressures sent a fresh bolt of nausea through my growling stomach.

I was hungry. Not just hungry, ravenous. And thirsty, too. The bloodhunger taunted me, the entire inside of my throat on fire. Water wouldn’t help it. The only thing that would help was calming down and forcing myself to eat something human.

That’s the problem, Dru. You ain’t human anymore. You’re one of those things Dad would’ve hunted. You suck blood.

Human blood.

No wonder Graves is so disgusted all the time. Even if he says he ain’t.

That was the wrong thought. I let out another sob. I couldn’t seem to stop. It got darker, and thunder rumbled again. I realized we were coming up on our turn and hit the brakes hard. We slewed through standing water, bumped onto the indifferent paving, and kept going. The way everything was coming down, we were looking at a washed-out road damn soon, and a slog through the mud to get back up to the cabin to collect Graves and pack up if that happened. It was just too dangerous to stick around here now, and I had nobody to blame but myself.

I just kept driving. The all-wheel drive handled the transition to rutted washboard beautifully, and we were halfway up the side of the ridge before I realized it. Trees thrashed, lightning going off in waves and the thunder closer and closer.

This ain’t natural. Gran’s voice sounded worried inside my head, and that faint ghost of citrus on my tongue taunted me. I sniffed, wiped at my cheek with the back of one wet wrist. It didn’t do much, and the rain flooding in through my window didn’t help. I didn’t want to close it, though. I needed the air.

Another sob dry-barked out of me. I ignored it. The crying was just another storm. I could just hunker down until it passed, couldn’t I?

Ash whined again, the sound coming from way back in his throat. He kept frantically patting my shoulder, and when I snapped a glance at him I found he was visibly shaking and even whiter than usual. Bedraggled, covered in mud, and wet clear through, his eyes ran with orange light and fastened on me. He tilted his head, the silvery stripe in his hair gleaming with its own weird light. I snapped my nose back forward and stared at the road.

A flash of white drifted across my vision. It resolved with quick charcoal lines, as if someone was motion-capture sketching it on the air itself. It was an owl, and it slid through the heavy rain in merry defiance of normal owl behavior. The aspect spiked under my skin.

Turn left, Dru. Now.

I didn’t argue. Whenever Gran’s owl showed up, it was always best just to follow.

Only it wasn’t Gran’s owl. It was my aspect in animal form, and one more reminder of why I’d never be normal. Or strictly human.

I twisted the wheel. We jounced off the road just in time, avoiding a pretty bad deep-foaming washout. There was an alternate route, though, for just such an occasion. The turnoff was conveniently close, but immediately the Subaru started juddering and fighting. We had to slow down to a crawl, and I finally gathered myself enough to roll my window up and turn the defroster on max. Ash grabbed at the dashboard, riding the car’s shuddering like a surfer. He still whined, but instead of patting me he kept his hand on my shoulder, fingers tensing. Not driving in, thank God. He had wulfen claws, and I didn’t like the idea of having my shoulder ground up like meatloaf.

“We’ll be okay,” I said, shakily. Another sob came along; I bit it in half and swallowed it. Rain poured in through the other three windows. This was not going to do the upholstery any good at all. “We’ll take this route. It’ll—”

The car slid sideways. I turned into it, cursing a blue streak—Dad would’ve yelled at me for using That Language, and I never would’ve dared around Gran. But neither of them was here so it was just me, the touch filling my head and pouring out through my arms as I wrenched the steering wheel and goosed the accelerator instead of the brake. You never want to hit the brakes in a situation like that.

The tires bit; we made it through and bumped up into a pair of overgrown ruts that was the alternate path. It would take us longer, but on this part of the ridge there was less chance of washouts. The trees glowered, leaves falling like the monsoon rain, and I judged we were about a mile from the house. We’d have to cover three miles of rutted track to get there, though.

Good thing there’s moonshine runners in my family tree, right? Along with vampires.

Oh, God. I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, exhaled hard, and saw Gran’s owl again, flickering through falling water in a soft blur. It was dark, especially under the trees, and my head hurt. Whether it was from the crying or something else, I couldn’t tell. Glass spikes pressed in through my temples, and my nose was running so hard I had to root around for some damp fast-food napkins to wipe my top lip. I shivered, the trembling communicating itself to Ash.

“Bad,” he whispered, under the straining engine and the drumming of rain. Thunder drowned out most of what he said next. “—sowwy. Osh sowwy.”

My heart squeezed down on itself, hard. “It isn’t your fault.” I heaved a sigh, kept a sharp eye on the ruts ahead. The ghost of oranges on my tongue taunted me. “I could’ve just paid for it without getting mouthy. I screwed up, not you. It’s not your fault.”

I mean, what else could I say? It’s not like he did it on purpose. I was the responsible one. I’d just failed. Again.

He shut up, but he kept hold of me. Crouching on the seat like that probably wasn’t comfortable, but I had enough to worry about. The sobs juddered to a stop, and it took forever, but when we bumped out into the meadow I heaved a sigh of relief. Gran’s house stood on the far end, lit by garish flashes of lightning, and it took me halfway across the meadow to realize something was wrong.

The flickering orange light from inside wasn’t right. It was open flame, shining out through the windows and sending gushes of billowing black smoke up into the drenching blanket of water falling from the sky.

Gran’s house was burning. And my mother’s locket was a chip of ice against my chest. The owl turned in a tight, distressed circle in front of the car, veering sharply away just before it hit the windshield, and I began to get a very bad feeling.

Just then, slim black shapes boiled out of the undergrowth, and I reached for the shift lever as if in a slow terrible nightmare. The lightning showed their slicked-down hair and ivory-gleam teeth, the eerie quickness of their movements, and the hatred blurring around them made the touch ache like a sore tooth inside my head.

Vampires. They’d found us. But I didn’t taste the wax-orange foulness that usually warned me of them. Just that ghost of citrus, like orange juice you’ve forgotten you drank an hour ago.

There was no time. I couldn’t hope to get us down the ridge before they hit the car. I couldn’t even make the tree line.

Ash howled and pitched himself aside, fur rippling up over his dirty skin. The passenger window, only partly rolled up, shattered. Thank God he hit the ground outside before changing, because otherwise he’d’ve gotten stuck halfway through. Fur boiled up over him, his bones crackling as he swelled, his boy voice deepening and swelling into a wulfen’s roar.

I sat there, one hand numb on the wheel and the other in midair, and the only thing I could think of were the malaika in the cargo compartment. I popped my seat belt, grabbed the lever that would put my seat all the way back, and started scrambling for my life.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The rear hatch opened; I hopped out and my sneakers sank into mud. The rain was an immediate battering against every inch of me, and the malaika were heavy in my hands. The aspect poured over me in a wave of smooth-oil heat, fangs prickling my lower lip. I jerked the wooden swords free of the leather harness and pelted around the corner of the car.

Ash hunkered down in the rain, almost-eight feet of werwulf with huge shoulders under a mat of wiry fur. The streak on his head gleamed, rain slicking everything down and outlining muscle under his pelt. His claws dug into mud with tiny splorching sounds lost under a roll of thunder, and the vampires skidded to a stop, throwing up sheets of mudlaced water. The grass exploded like jackstraws, and they snarled.

Eight of them. All male, all burning with visible hatred under the lash of rain, hourglass-shaped pupils sending black threads out into their irises as the hunting-aura took them. It’s like the aspect, that aura, but it’s made of pure revulsion. They just loathe everything around them so much.

Or maybe it’s just the living they detest, even as they feed on them. Even though they’re, technically, living too. They’re the part of life that hates itself.

Why didn’t I sense them? The faint citrus taste sharpened, as if I was sucking on a piece of orange candy.

Danger candy, I’d called it, my warning taste. Why was it failing me now?

It didn’t matter. Eight against me and Ash were bad odds. But I’d bloomed, right? Not so bad now. Especially if my aspect held, spreading out in invisible lethal waves.

Where’s Graves? In the house? “Ash. Ash!” I had to shout over a long rattling roll of thunder. “Go find Graves! Find him now!”

Ash growled, his claws digging into mud, and I was afraid he wouldn’t listen. Time to think fast, only what could I do? If he decided not to do what I told him—

Silly, Anna’s voice whispered inside my head. Keep the Broken with you; he’s good cannon fodder. But if you really want him to obey, do this. And her ghostly, manicured fingers drummed against my skull.

The touch flexed inside my head, my will grinding down as the bloodhunger dilated in my throat. My mother’s locket burned with fierce cold, the silver stinging me.

I pulled the touch back, hurriedly, shaking my head. Water flew.

Ash let out a yelp and skipped sideways as if stung. I felt as if I’d just swallowed Anna’s blood again, and her training opened up inside me, ghostly silk-hung corridors stretching in every direction. Eight vampires, a storm that was certainly the work of a very old and powerful sucker, and the werwulf who’d saved my ass time and again whirled and pelted away with spooky blurring grace.

How did I do that?

Anna. Somehow, in drinking her blood, I’d taken more. Whether she’d intended it or it just happened because we were both svetocha was a question I’d worry about later.

If I survived this.

My grasp on the malaika firmed, became natural. The curved wooden swords whirled in circles, rain dripping down the back of my neck as my hair finished plastering itself to my head, my braid a heavy sopping rope. I should have been shivering and terrified out of my tiny little mind.

Instead, I dropped into first-guard, bent my knees, and had to control the urge to fling myself at them. They spread out, fangs bared, and the hiss-growl of pissed-off vampires turned the rain to trembling, flashing needles of ice. Which one’s the leader? Pick off the leader first. But they all feel the same age, which means—

I realized my mistake just as the rest of the vampires showed up. These eight weren’t the only ones. They were just the quickest on the scene, so to speak.

More deadly black shapes knifed out of the dark between the trees, lightning crackling as the sky overhead tore itself apart, and I braced myself. The malaika spun, and there was no more time for thinking.

I moved.

The first vampire fell, choking and clawing at his throat. The happy stuff in my blood that makes me svetocha also made me toxic to suckers now that I’d bloomed. The aspect flared, almost visible as it battered at the ice pellets now raining down on me. Stinging hail lashed and my right-hand malaika sheared half the sucker’s face off. Black blood exploded, hanging in a freezing arc before the hail scattered through it.

He didn’t look more than sixteen. None of them did, but the way their faces twisted into plum-colored evil was ageless. Their eyes were black from lid to lid now, and their cold hunting-auras hit the wall of heat that was my aspect. Traceries of steam exploded as I leapt, malaika whirling with a whistling sound over the crack of thunder. Landing, splorch of mud under my sneakers, skidding but that was all right, on my knees and tearing a long furrow across the meadow’s face as I slid, bending back under claw strikes as they tried to get through the shell of toxicity and tear my throat out. Vampire blood sprayed, acid-smoking as it hit chill-wet air. Steam twisted into sharptooth shapes and I gained my feet again with a lurch. Mud splattered and grass flew as I twisted aside, my foot flashing out and kicking another sucker with a crunch.

The world was slow, and I moved through it with whispering, eerie speed. It didn’t even feel abnormal to be sidestepping through time and space this way. It wasn’t the plastic goop slowing everything down—no, this was just me tearing through the snarled fabric of the normal. Bloodhunger flamed all the way down my throat, exploded in my stomach.

The malaika are meant for circles. This circle, here, is where you move. These circles are how the blades move to defend you. And this circle is how you attack against many opponents. Focus, now!

So long ago, Christophe teaching a svetocha how to fight. I couldn’t tell, now, if the memory was Anna’s or mine. Lightning crawled inside my head, bloodhunger turning the wide wet lake of the meadow into shutter-click images. Whirling, my left-hand blade a propeller, smoking vampire blood flung like a gauntlet, splashing the rest of them. They circled, and I didn’t have to worry about which direction to strike out. I’d hit a nosferat wherever I swung, and they were going to tighten the ring. I was toxic, yeah, but there were so many of them, and weight of numbers would tell on me.

“DRU!” he screamed, and lightning struck the top of the ridge. The blast of thunder hit at almost the same moment; I swear to God I felt the wall of air molecules cracking against each other press along my entire body as I leapt, spinning in midair and striking out with feet and blades. My heart hammered, because I knew who it was.

He’d come for me. Of course he had.

He always did.

He tore through the vampires, blue eyes alight with terrible fire and the rags of his black sweater melded to his body, his own malaika blurring as I landed and struck out again. They choked, their faces flushing as my aspect burned. It used to be that only terror or fury would make that oil-soft heat lay itself against my skin, and I still felt the rage, wine-red and perfume-sweet, curling through me. Nobody was bleeding here, yet. Nobody except the vampires, and the thought of sinking my fangs in them wasn’t appealing.

But if someone had been here, someone human and helpless, like Lyle—

It hit me from the side, a thunderbolt of force. I flew, oddly weightless, holding onto the malaika as if they’d somehow break my fall. The sucker died in midair, choking on his own blood, but I hit the ground hard, all my chimes ringing and my head full of a flash of brief starry nothingness. The vampire’s body rolled to the side, convulsing as it shredded itself, toxic dust runneling through its flesh.

My name, yelled hoarsely. Screaming, the glassy cries of furious nosferatu. Roaring, a werwulfen in full battlemode. It was a good thing there was so much thunder, I thought weakly, because otherwise we were making enough noise to be heard in the next county.

Bloodhunger pulsed against my palate, wiping away the trace of oranges. Consciousness returned in a rush. I struggled up, vampire blood smoking on my clothes, and heard someone else screaming. There was no pain in that cry. It was a long howl of absolute rage, and when I shook the daze out of my head and made it to my feet, shoving aside a heavy weight of swiftly decaying sucker bodies, I saw him.

Christophe bent back, his booted foot flashing up to strike the sucker on the chin. This was a female, her long hair matted with ice, hail suddenly pounding all the way across the violent shipwrecked mass of the torn-up meadow.

Gran’s house was still burning fiercely, and a lean dark shape bulleted across the clearing, the silvery streak on its low narrow head actually smearing on the air. Ash hit the girl vampire from behind, and I realized this was the sucker who had birthed the storm. She felt old, a terrible weight of hatred and cold spreading out from her in concentric waves. Not as ancient or as powerful as Sergej, but enough.

Ash’s hit jolted the girl vampire forward, but she half-turned with impossible quickness and one white hand flashed out. He tumbled away, hair melting and his boyshape rising for the surface, a supple white snake under curling darkness.

Christophe! I shook my head, trying to think. The entire meadow was littered with broken bodies. They twisted and jerked as decay claimed them—suckers rot fast when they’re bled out, especially when hawthorn wood or a svetocha’s nearness has poisoned them.

He drove her back, making a noise that was pure inhuman rage. It managed to drown out the thunder, and a draft of warm applepie scent hit me in the face. It had an undertone of copper, which meant he was bleeding, and oh God the smell of it stroked right across the bloodhunger with a cat’s-tongue rasp. It reached all the way down to the floor of me, jerking against my control and pulling on every vein in my body.

A hand closed around my arm. I let out a cry and recoiled, but it was Graves. Bruising crawled up his face, his lip was split, and his clothes were grimed with mud and more blood. The smell of him, strawberry incense and silvermoon wildness, the blood a bright copper-satin thread holding it all together, smashed into me. My fangs ached, a sweet tingle of pain. For a hideous half second I quivered, everything in me tensing, ready to knock him down and bury my teeth in him.

Graves was shouting something I couldn’t hear over the thunder. His mouth worked, and he tried to pull me toward the car. I dug in my heels, malaika dangling from my nerveless hands. Not just because he was bleeding, or because the bloodhunger was snarling all through me, but because I couldn’t look away from the fight in front of me.

Christophe closed with the girl vamp again. Ash flowed upward, melding back into changeform, his eyes alight with mad orange. Thunder roiled, and the remaining vampires were massing behind Ash. Not so many of them—a dozen at most. Still, enough to do some harm.

Ash and Christophe needed me. At least I wasn’t useless here, as long as my aspect held.

And now that I’d bloomed, it would.

Christophe blurred, striking at the girl vamp with inhuman speed and precision. But she was too fast, and he was flagging. I didn’t know how I knew, unless it was the touch tolling inside my head like a bell. I felt the sweat on his skin under the pouring icy water, felt the burning of his own aspect as if it was mine.

I tore away from Graves. My sneakers almost drowned in the mud; hail stung as it peppered down. My aspect turned scorch-hot, steam rising directly from my skin as I screamed, a falcon’s cry.

Gran’s owl appeared out of nowhere, filling itself in with swift strokes, and hit the girl vampire with a crunch I felt like my own bones breaking. A wingsnap, and it veered away, claws dripping. Her young-old face was a black-streaked mess now, her eyes black from lid to lid and spreading fine thin threads of gray out like crow’s-feet wrinkles.

Thunder shattered the sky overhead, four separate bolts of lightning slamming down at once, and the girl vampire choked. She was so fast, backpedaling as I drove onward, my malaika whirring. Ash let out a howl, leaping for her, but it was Christophe who flew past me, the aspect slicking down his hair and filling the air around him with crystalline crackling fury. He hit her like a freight train, and the tearing ripping sound of the malaika in vampire flesh cut the thunder short.

Black, acidic blood sprayed. Ash hunched even further, his warning growl taking the place of the storm. The hail turned to rain, a regular spring downer. The remaining vampires fell back, their unlined faces twisting with confusion as well as hatred now.

Christophe didn’t stop. The blades kept tearing at the body, and the hiss-growl that came from him was a djamphir’s scariest warning. His chest seemed too small to make such a sound.

Oh, God. I kept going past him, heading for the group of suckers clumping and backing away from Ash. Thunder receded, lightning striking other hills. The eerie storm-lit darkness began to seem less, well, dark. My malaika blurred in twin circles, vampire blood spattering away from the hawthorn, a preparatory move. Graves was suddenly beside me, his eyes burning green and his boots landing in the mud with sucking splashes that would have been funny if he hadn’t been making the same sound as Ash—a low thrumming that raises every hair on the body, because it reaches right into your bones and reminds you of a time when human beings huddled in dark caves and the things that ran by night had teeth and claws even fire wouldn’t scare away.

Even worse, it sinks its fingers into the low crouching thing in every human, the thing that lurks under civilization and socialization.

The thing that hunts.

The vampires broke and scattered. Ash twitched, his hide rippling in vital waves. The silver streak on his head glowed eerily.

“Get them!” Christophe screamed. Ash leapt forward, and so did Graves. I would have too, but something hit me from behind. I went down hard, mud splattering everywhere and pea-sized hail embedded in the meadow’s surface abrading my bare arms like the world’s biggest sandpaper belt.

Christophe had my wrists, holding the malaika down and pressing me into cold mud. “Stay here!” he yelled, over a last retreating peal of thunder. “Stay!” Then he was up and off me, scooping up his malaika and vanishing. Little whispering sounds chattered as he moved too quickly to be seen, streaking past the other two and plunging into the woods.

Oh, hell no. No way. But I just lay there for a moment, my ribs heaving with huge shuddering breaths. The rain poured down, but the whole house was blazing. Black smoke billowed. Why was it burning like that?

I managed to make it mostly upright. Cold mud closed around my knees with sucking fingers. I stared at Gran’s house, now an inferno. Orange flames, full of evil little yellow chuckling faces with leering mouths. All our supplies, gone. Gran’s spinning wheel, her pots and pans, everything. My only safe place, my last best card.

Gone.

My heart cracked. I hunched there on my knees, my mouth ajar, stunned.

I hadn’t been smart enough or fast enough. How had the vampires found me? How had Christophe found me?

And where had Graves been all this time?

I found out I was crying again. The bloodhunger curdled inside me, and thick, hot tears mixed with cold rain. I was covered in mud, and I’d just managed to lead the vampires to the only thing I had left.

Was there anything I wouldn’t destroy just by breathing near it?

I bent over, hugging myself, and sobbed while the storm retreated.

CHAPTER NINE

Christophe drove like he’d been born in the hills, blue eyes narrowed and the mud drying on him as the storm retreated. He worked the wheel, hit the brake as we bounced through a rill of runoff, the light now regular rainy-day gray filtering through the mud-spattered windshield. Graves lit a cigarette and coughed in the backseat. Ash hunched behind me, making a little whining noise every once in a while. At least he was having no trouble shifting back and forth between wulf and boy.

Hurrah for him.

Christophe swore passionlessly as the car skidded, twisted the wheel again. Pale skin showed beneath the rents in his jeans and sweater. I wiped at my cheeks with the flat of my muddy hand. The broken window let in a steady stream of cold wet air, and the rain was slowing. Soon it would stop altogether, the sun would come out, and steam would rise in white tendrils from every surface. The roads would look like streams of heavy fog. Juicy green pressed close against the car, no longer pale and leprous under queer yellowgreen stormlight.

“They broke right in,” Graves said again, exhaling hard. “Right in, and the place was burning. Jesus.” Cigarette smoke mixed with the reek of decaying vampire blood, the fresh copper of other blood, the gritty dark scent of mud. And thin threads of spice, both from Christophe and me.

I was smelling like that place in the mall with the big gooey cinnamon buns. The ones your blood sugar spikes just walking past. Christophe, as usual, smelled like pie filling. I suppose it might’ve been okay, because it calmed the bloodhunger down. How I could smell anything after so much wet and crying, I don’t even know.

But there was also the reek of unwashed werwulf and the thin colorless odor of rage seeping into every surface. The mixture was enough to give you a headache, and my temples throbbed.

Christophe stared through the windshield. A muscle in his cheek ticked steadily. I kept looking at him in little sips, stealing his face. Even covered in mud and blood and rotting black, he was beautiful. Not girl-pretty, or the type of boy-pretty that means a guy’s too busy checking his hair in the mirror to pay attention to anyone else. No, Christophe just . . . worked, the planes of his face coming together in a harmony that made him complex and wonderful all at once.

Like that old saying, a sight for sore eyes. My eyes were sore, from crying. Glancing at him made it better.

Right now he looked dangerous, too. He was pale, and his jaw was set so hard it wasn’t too big a stretch to imagine his teeth shattering.

He’d only said two things. Are you hurt?

And, when I’d stammered that I wasn’t, he’d looked right through me, his jaw working and his eyes cold. Get in the car.

Just as I thought about it, Christophe spoke. “Loup-garou.”

Graves exhaled hard, again. Another puff of cigarette smell. It made my nose and eyes water uselessly. “Yeah?”

“If you must smoke, hand me one.”

“Sure thing, man.” Graves’s hand came over my shoulder; Christophe took the cigarette without looking. He stuck one end in his mouth, cupped his palm around the other. A flick of something in his hand, and he inhaled smoothly. Exhaled a stream of smoke.

He’d just lit it without a lighter. Dad’s old friend Augie used to do something pretty much like that. It was a great trick. Maybe someday they’d teach it to me.

Ash whined deep in his throat.

“I know,” Christophe said. “Peace, Silverhead. All is well in hand.”

I swallowed. My dry throat clicked. “Christophe.”

He tilted his head, slightly. Under the mud and water, blond highlights slipped through his hair. His fangs had retreated. “Milady.” Quietly. He took another drag, twisted the wheel savagely as we bumped through a shallow stream. He looked like he knew where we were going.

I was glad someone did.

How did you find me? What’s going on? Where’s the rest of the Order? Are you still mad at me? First things first. “I’m sorry.”

He gave me one very blue, almost-startled glance. “For what, milna?”

Oh, Jesus Christ. “For . . . for telling you I hated you. For accusing you. For—”

“It is—” He swore again, breathlessly, and hit the gas. We bumped through a screen of underbrush and hit what looked like another overgrown rumrunner’s road, and immediately the car settled down. I had a deathgrip on the door, though, and didn’t loosen up. Tears still leaked down my cheeks. Wiping them did no good. My head ached, pounding dully, and my eyes burned. The aspect had settled into soothing warmth, spreading over my skin and working in layer by layer.

He paused, continued. “It is of no consequence.” He relaxed slightly. “You don’t smell like blood. Are you hurt?”

I told you I wasn’t. But I took stock, looked down at myself. I was covered in filth. The upholstery in here was never going to recover. Safety glass jolted free from my window, tinkling, as we hit a series of washboard ruts. “I’m okay. How did you find—”

“You can hide from the Order, moj maly ptaszku. You can even hide from my father, God willing. But me? No. Not from me.” Amazingly, he grinned. It was a fey expression, eyes glittering and lips pulled back; it was like he was sparring again. And enjoying himself. “Just glad I reached you in time.”

I tried loosening up on the door. No dice, my fingers didn’t want to let go. “The Order—”

“Would you like to call in? They will be overjoyed to hear from you.” Why did he sound so goddamn amused?

Everything I wanted to say rose up inside me, got tangled up, and settled in my throat like an acid-coated rock. Christophe gave me another glance. With the cigarette, he looked a little older, nineteen-twenty instead of a youngish eighteen. Djamphir are mostly too graceful and pretty to be believable. Even smeared with mud and guck, his clothes torn up and the rage burning in him, he looked great. He looked completely in control of the situation.

Thank God. Relief made every tight-strung nerve in me go loose, all at once. “What, so someone there can hand one of us over to the vampires again? No thanks.”

On the other hand, the Order was good protection. Mostly.

He shrugged, mud crackling as it dried on him. His hair dripped on his shoulders, the blond highlights slipping back through it as his aspect slowly retreated. “I shouldn’t have trusted Leontus. The fault is mine.”

Well, I wasn’t about to start throwing stones. “I trusted him too.” My voice caught. I decided to leave it at that.

“Where are we going?” Graves piped up.

Christophe shrugged. “To clean up and rest. Milady needs food, and—”

“Don’t call me that.” The words bolted out of me. I hung onto the door as if I was drowning. “Jesus, Christophe. Please.”

“What, no taste for formality?” We jolted over more washboard ruts, but the road was much drier. Of course, here on this side of the ridge the storm hadn’t fallen so hard. “As you like, moja ksiezniczko. There’s a decent-sized town not too far. We’ll acquire transport and supplies; this car won’t last long.”

Great. “All our supplies were in the house.” I sounded numb. The words wouldn’t go together quite right. “Gran’s house. They just . . . it’s burning. There was so much rain; why was it burning?”

“Either they thought you were still inside, or it was fired to deny you shelter.” His expression turned grim, no amusement remaining. He kept pulling at the cigarette, too, like it personally offended him. “Your loup-garou perhaps thought to hold them off by himself. Foolish.”

Graves took the bait. “Fuck off.” The command under the words—a loup-garou’s mental dominance—made all the space in the car shrink, hot and tight. I craned my neck, looking over my shoulder. He was sitting right behind Christophe, his cigarette held to his mouth and his other hand a fist against his tattered, mud-coated knee. “How do we know you didn’t lead them here, Reynard?”

Christophe was silent, but his hand tightened on the wheel.

“Quit it. Both of you.” I swallowed again. The tingling in my fangs was going down, thank God. I didn’t have to hold my tongue carefully or try to talk with my lips kept stiffly over my teeth. “Let’s just all get along, all right? And not do the vampires’ work for them.”

“Anything for you, Dru,” Christophe said, level and cold. “And I mean that. Now be quiet and let me concentrate.”

Graves stared at me, his eyes gone dark. He and Christophe were running neck and neck in the mad sweepstakes, it looked like. I’d never seen Goth Boy look so blackly furious.

“Hey.” I worked my left hand free, reached into the backseat. “Graves. Graves.”

He was shaking, I realized. His long black coat was gone—had it been inside the house? He looked odd without it, kind of. But the skull-and-crossbones earring glittered in his ear. It gave me a funny feeling, seeing that gleam.

Like I’d lost something.

His T-shirt was a mess of rips and tears, and the bruising on his face was going down. Werwulfen, even loup-garou who don’t get hairy, don’t wear the damage long. Not if they can rest and eat. The physical injuries healed right up.

Now I wondered about the hurts inside, where that healing wouldn’t reach.

Ash whined again, softly, in the back of his throat.

Before I knew it, I was up on my knees in the passenger seat, twisting around. “Graves. Look at me. Look.” He was looking at me, but I wanted him to see me. He looked . . .

Jesus. He looked angry, and scared, and like he was a short breath away from hurting someone. His irises were almost black, so dark I had trouble seeing what his pupils were doing.

“Dru.” He rolled his window down, chucked the still-fuming cigarette. “Don’t worry about me. Put your seat belt on.”

Say what? “You look—”

A shrug, his shoulders moving under the wet, filthy T-shirt. A faint gleam of green came back into his irises. He shook his head, hard, like he was dislodging a nasty thought. Water flew from the ends of his hair. “Sucker-boy up there pisses me off. Mellow down easy, everything’s copacetic.”

“Graves—”

“Sit down.” The rage faded. Now he just looked tired and irritated, and his eyes flushed with green glow again. His stubble had gotten thicker since this morning—I’d always thought half-Asians didn’t get much in the way of facial hair, but it looked like he was changing all that. “Put your seat belt on. Don’t make me worry about you while that asshole’s driving, okay?”

I was too tired to fight. I did it. Then I curled up against the door and shook while Christophe drove, Graves seethed, and Ash eventually stopped making that noise. When we broke out of the woods and bumped up onto the highway, the sun burst out from behind the clouds, and I closed my eyes.

CHAPTER TEN

The Holiday Inn shower was a little piece of heaven. And afterward, dry clothes were a luxury. Just a black T-shirt and jeans, no underthings, but I wasn’t complaining. You can always buy panties later, you just can’t buy them if you’re dead.

And Christophe had gotten the right sizes, too. That was food for thought, but I didn’t want to eat it. I had enough to chew.

As soon as I was out of the bathroom, Graves nipped in. Christophe was still rubbing at his hair with a hotel towel, standing by the room’s window and peering out through the small crack in the cheap curtains. A thin bar of sunlight striped his face, and he glanced at me. A faint smile touched his lips.

“You’ve bloomed.” He didn’t sound surprised. Just pleased, and congratulatory.

Well, hallelujah. At least someone noticed when my face changed and the rest of me did too.

Ash crouched in a corner. He was still covered in mud, and I had to figure out how to get him cleaned off just as soon as Graves was out. There was a stack of towels on one twin bed, I grabbed one and started working at my own hair. I had a comb in my bag, thank God.

“Yeah.” To be warm and dry was pretty much all I could ask for right now. “I know, I look different. It’s pretty weird.”

“Weird?” He let the towel drop, dangling from his hand. He’d taken care of everything, getting a room, cleaning up a little and vanishing for twenty minutes while Graves prowled the room and Ash crouched in the corner and I stared longingly at the bathroom, reappearing with a few crackling Walmart bags and a brand-new messenger bag slung across his new black V-neck T-shirt. One of the shopping bags he’d pushed into my hands and told me to wash up. We can wait. Go.

It hadn’t occurred to me to argue.

“You know, my face is all different. I look strange.” I dropped down on the bed closest the wall; I was betting Christophe had put my bag there so I would stay where he wanted me.

Away from the door and the windows.

It was a sobering thought. To add to all my other happy-dappy thinking.

“You’re beautiful.” He said it so flatly I almost missed the meaning of the words. “As always, kochana. Room service should be up soon.”

All the breath left me in a rush. “Christophe . . .”

He turned his back completely to the window. And even though he’d been working at his hair with a towel, he still looked impossibly finished, the blond highlights in his layered cut behaving perfectly. The faint traces of mud and damp still on him looked planned, too. “I’ll ask for an explanation once you’ve eaten. Just so I know what’s going on. But let’s get something straight, first.”

Mud still clung to his boots, and he paced across the room toward me, tossing the towel onto the other bed. Ash rocked back on his heels, watching carefully, his eyes flaring orange and his expression flickering between somber and . . . was it frightened?

I couldn’t tell.

Christophe bent down, his booted toes precisely placed in front of my bare feet. A warm draft of apple-pie scent drifted across me. It was so familiar I could’ve started crying again. I’d gotten so used to that smell over the past few months.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed him. Most of all, I missed the sense of someone watching, the sense that I could just relax and someone else would handle things. It’s not that I’m weak.

Okay, well, maybe I am. But I don’t think so. I just think, you know, I was Dad’s helper. He told me what to do, where to stand, how to act. I missed knowing my place in the world. With Christophe there, I had a little of that back.

Just enough to start feeling like I could relax, maybe. A little. “I, um . . .”

“I don’t like your loup-garou.” Even now he wouldn’t refer to Graves by name. Christophe’s nose was inches from mine, and his eyes were cold. Winter eyes, like Dad’s but without the faint lavender lines in the irises. His skin was flawless, very faint shadows of grass stain looking like decorations instead of dirt. You can’t really wash grass juice off without scrubbing. “He’s deadweight you’re better off without, and suspect besides. I envy him your loyalty. But I do not betray anyone to my father. When I want to kill someone, I kill directly. Do you understand?”

There wasn’t enough air in the room, what with him leaning in like that. “Christophe . . .” I tried for another word, but my brain just up and failed me. “Chris . . .”

He touched a wet curl that had fallen in my face, brushed it back. His skin was warm; I could tell just by the heat of it reaching my own. He very carefully did not touch my cheek.

Instead, I felt his fingers on my wrist. He lifted my right hand, dropped something very small into my palm, and closed my fingers around it. Two something smalls, with sharp edges.

“I don’t have to like your loup-garou for you to trust me, do I?” Whispered, his lips softly moving.

I wanted to nod, or shake my head, or something. Couldn’t move. Could barely even breathe. He was so close, and the pulse in his throat called out to me. If I got close enough, if I drove my fangs in and felt his blood scorching my tongue again, would I hear him in my head the same way I heard Anna? Why didn’t I now?

He leaned forward, and for one mad moment I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead, he pressed his lips to my forehead and inhaled. A shudder went through him.

“Moj boze,” he whispered, his lips moving against my skin. I was shaking too, now. “Thank God you are still breathing.”

Someone knocked at the door. I jumped, Ash twitched, and Christophe was across the room in a heartbeat. He was just so goddamn fast. “Relax.” And he was back to sounding amused. “It’s food.”

I opened my fingers while he unlocked the door.

There, in my palm, two diamond studs glittered. I’d left one in my room at the Schola. It must have been how he tracked me, somehow. The other one I’d left on the table in Gran’s house.

Gran’s burning house. Christophe had been inside when they attacked? With Graves, maybe?

I closed my fist up tight. Ash was on his feet now, nose lifted and his eyes settling down, and Graves was deathly quiet in the bathroom. He could probably hear everything Christophe said to me.

Great. Just . . . great.

I laid the legal pad on the table, suppressed a burp that reeked of bacon. Club sandwiches are pretty standard everywhere you go, and I’d wolfed this one so fast I’d barely tasted it. The french fries were all right, though, when doused with enough ketchup. “This is what I’ve got. Routes, alternate routes, stops to get liquid resources, the works.”

Christophe glanced over it, riffling the pages. “Good work. You’re heading to California?” He hadn’t eaten, but he’d gotten enough food for six people. The bill was going to be sky high.

It was a relief to find something that really wasn’t my problem. It was damn near Christmas, as a matter of fact.

Ash was busy demolishing the last plate of steak and eggs, crouched on the bed. Graves ate a bacon cheeseburger more slowly, each bite carefully chewed, watching us with narrowed eyes. He’d refused to sit at the table, folding himself down with his back braced against the bed closest the door.

I shrugged. “For now, yeah. I know how to run. There’s . . .” I hesitated. “I’m not going back to the Order.”

Christophe shrugged. He said nothing. Just watched me.

Oh, what the hell. I might as well tell him. “There’s a hunter in Carmel. One of Dad’s contacts. He hunts suckers with his gang. Figured he was the best choice out of all Dad’s friends. I can’t tell which of them were djamphir like August, or which would . . . well, I just figure Remy’s safest. Plus he’s all the way across the country, and we didn’t spend long in California any time we were there. We were mostly below the Mason-Dixon. Hell, we spent more time with August than we did . . .” I swallowed hard. Plus, if I have to, I can go over the border to Tijuana and points south. Chupacabras and cockroaches and nasty things, but at least it’ll be harder to track me there, and Juan-Raoul will help me.

It was an effort to keep my mouth shut. I was doing the nervoustalky thing, and that never works out well.

Christophe nodded. “Good thinking. By tomorrow I’ll have more cash and a car that won’t attract suspicion; I’ve already disposed of the other.”

I immediately fastened on that. “We’re without transport tonight? What if—”

“I have a backup plan.” He actually rolled his eyes, a very teenage movement. “Have a little faith in me. Besides, none of the nosferatu escaped yesterday. I’m fairly certain we have another night before we’re tracked here.” He flipped back to the beginning of the legal pad, drew the atlas over, and opened it to the page number I had listed next to our first stop.

“You’re sure none of them escaped?” My palms were suspiciously damp, and not just because it was eighty-eight degrees and a hundred percent humidity out there. I’d thought my hair would frizz, but no. The ringlets lay sleek and veined with blonde, though if I braided them back they would slip free. I didn’t even have a piece of string to tie them up with; the one I’d been using before was probably still up in the meadow, lying in the mud.

At least my hair covered up the diamond studs. Yes. I’d put them back in.

Why not? At least Christophe never wavered. He was always the same. Maddening, opaque, kind of creepy because he was so much older and stuck in a teenage body . . . but he never did a 180 on me. I never had to guess whether he liked me or not.

What are you thinking, Dru?

“I’m certain.” He sounded so absolute. What would it be like to be that sure of everything? He never seemed nervous or like he was going to change his mind about me.

“Thanks.” It sounded pale and inadequate even as soon as it left my mouth. “For everything.”

“An honor, and a pleasure.” He didn’t even look up. “How did you escape Sergej?”

I shivered at the name. Ash looked up, watchful. Graves’s shoulders hunched. He stared at his plate instead of me now.

Well, I guess Christophe had to ask. And an explanation was the least I owed him.

My mouth was dry. “Anna . . . she was there. And her Guard. They were all locked up. We . . . Leon was there too. I hit him pretty hard, I stabbed S-Ser—” I couldn’t say the name. Not after the warehouse and that dark little room, where he’d just appeared. “I stabbed him.”

“With a lamp,” Graves supplied helpfully. “Then we got the hell out of there.”

He didn’t mention me sucking Anna’s blood. He also didn’t mention coming back and shooting the king of the vampires.

Saving my life.

I found out I was twisting my hands together. My teeth tingled faintly, remembering, and I smelled smoke. “Graves came back for me. The whole place was burning. Anna and her Guard, well, they vanished. We were outside, and Ash found us.”

“I should have followed the Silverhead.” Christophe set the atlas down, flipped through the legal pad again. “God knows he can find you. Which is a mystery. And he is Broken no longer.”

“That happened before. At the Prima. Right before Leon . . . He showed me . . .” I ran out of words. Pulled my legs up, bracing my heels on the chair, and hugged my knees. He made me think you’d handed Graves over to Sergej. Because of me. And I believed it. “Anyway, I got off the Schola grounds and you know the rest.”

“Some of it.” He kept looking at my handwriting. The pages riffled a little, because a tremor had gone through him. “We’d gone to rescue the loup-garou, but it was one of the decoys. You were headed straight for another decoy. It was a neatly laid trap.”

Which brought up another question. “Did you find . . . Is Leon . . .” Yeah, Leon had handed me over to the king of the vampires, and I’d been pretty sure he was dead in that dark little room. So had Graves.

But still. He was djamphir, not sucker. I kind of hoped he’d made it out somehow.

“Dead. Or I would have finished him myself. My father fled, gravely wounded. I was convinced you were still alive. Perhaps the Order has finished searching the wreckage for your remains.”

He said it so calmly. The club sandwich was revolving in my stomach. I swallowed hard, trying to convince it to stay down. “Does Bruce think I’m dead too?”

Christophe shrugged. He set the pad down. “It’s almost sundown. I’m going to go make a few preparations. I trust I can ask you to remain here, and you’ll listen?”

I nodded. “Unless more vampires show up.” It tried to be a joke, fell flat. I hugged my knees even tighter. The T-shirt rode up. All my weight was distributed differently. I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

But Christophe looked at me, blue eyes soft and direct. I’d never seen him look at another person that way. Even in the true-seeins where he looked at my mother like he wanted to . . .

Kind of like he wanted to eat her. No, that’s the wrong word. Like he wanted to consume her, pull her in and just assimilate her somehow. But he looked at me like he was seeing me. Really, truly seeing Dru Anderson, not just the shell I put up for the world.

He pushed his chair back and rose in one fluid motion. “I’ll be back before dark.” He scooped his new bag up and brushed past me. But his hand came down, and he touched my shoulder as he passed.

It was like he’d poured something hot and strong into me. A flush that worked down to my bones instead of staying on my skin like the aspect.

He paused at the door. Looked back over his shoulder, and it was as if we were the only two people in the room. “Keep this locked.”

A blast of humid air, the sunlight flooding in as he stepped out onto the walkway, and he was gone. The air conditioning kicked up a notch. Down here in the valley with the concrete, it was approaching the hottest part of the afternoon-into-evening. Up on the ridges there would be some wind, at least, and the creek and the trees.

And a burned-out shell of a house. I now owned nothing but the land, and not even that until I was eighteen. I’d always had this thought of moving up there after I was finished with school or something, just retreating from everything. Maybe trading hexbreaking and stuff for food, like Gran had. You could just scrape by in that part of the country. Everyone up in the hills pretty much “just scraped by.”

As life dreams go, I know it sucks. But it was my little dream, and now it was a charred mess. Just like everything else.

A wave of shaking slid through my bones, jostling around like my body hadn’t decided whether or not it was going to pitch a fit.

Ash kept chewing, staring bright-eyed at me. He was still filthy, and I had to coax him into a shower somehow. Christophe had even brought clothes for him. He’d thought of everything.

“Dru?” Graves moved, like he was going to unfold himself from the side of the bed. “You okay?”

Don’t ask. “I . . .” My eyes prickled. “I don’t know.”

He stripped his hair back from his face with stiff fingers. But he wasn’t looking at me. “He was there. Right before the . . . the vampires hit.”

“You lost your coat.” I let my hair fall down, because the prickling turned to hot water and welled up. I couldn’t blink it back.

Jesus. The crying needed to stop, and now.

Graves coughed slightly. “It’s okay. It’s a thousand degrees out there; I don’t need it. Dru, we have to talk.”

Oh, Jesus. Every time we have to talk, I end up more confused than before. I can’t take this. “Not now.” I bounced up, swiping at my eyes. “Come on, Ash. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was another Subaru, but blue, and newer than the one we’d stolen. Power windows, power locks, plenty of cargo space, and it smelled faintly of vanilla from the air freshener hanging from the rearview. Dawn was gray in the east, the whole world was greenjuice fresh, and it was going to be another scorcher. You could just tell by the way your clothes stuck to you as soon as you stepped outside.

I didn’t know if Christophe had slept. I’d curled up in the bed furthest from the door and fell into a darkness so deep I couldn’t even remember any dreams. When I’d closed my eyes Christophe had been standing looking out the window; when I opened them he was in a chair at the table, writing on the legal pad. A chunky silver watch gleamed on his wrist, and the window was just graying up with the sunrise. He glanced up, and saw that I was awake.

We were out the door fifteen minutes later.

I folded my hands around the paper latte cup. Christophe turned the air conditioning up a bit. The tires made a low sweet sound on the road, and if I shut my eyes, I could almost pretend I was driving with Dad.

But the silence with Dad had never been this angry, or this dangerous.

Ash curled up on his half of the backseat, impossibly small. Graves hunched in his seat, holding an americano and staring out the window like the answer to world peace was in the passing scenery. I lasted about twenty minutes before flipping the radio on to fill up the silence, twisting the dial until I found an oldies station. Graves lasted about a half hour after that before he cracked the window and lit a cigarette. Christophe restrained himself, but I saw his jaw set.

It was a ways to California. Something told me this was gonna be a long trip.

“God,” I moaned, with feeling. “Not pizza. Please. I can’t take more fast food.”

“What’s wrong with pizza?” Graves wanted to know. “Lots of cheese, bubbling grease, pepperoni—”

“Ugh.” I laced my fingers over my stomach. “No pizza, Christophe. No burgers either. I want to eat somewhere nice.” My conscience pinched. “If we can afford it. Or hell, let’s get a place with a kitchenette and I’ll cook.”

Yeah, I was desperate.

Christophe squinted through the fall of afternoon sunlight. It was hotter than hell, and the air conditioning wasn’t helping as much as it could. Trapped in the car for ten hours with a few bathroom breaks, lunch had been McDonald’s, and I was about ready to go nuts. It would have been hilarious if I was watching it on TV.

“Don’t worry about that. We’ll go somewhere nice,” Christophe said wearily. “As soon as we find shelter for the night. We’ve made good time.”

“Thank God.” I realized I was sounding whiny, but right at that point I didn’t care. I wanted out of the car, and I wanted a real meal. I’d settle for something unfried, or something that bore a resemblance to actual food rather than hockey-puck patties on anemic buns paired with soggy-ass extruded potato starch.

“In fact . . .” Christophe checked the exit numbers and eased us off the highway. “We can arrange pizza for the wulfen and I can find you some decent Mexican food. At least, if my memory serves me.”

It sounded like heaven. “We can all do Mexican.” I wasn’t about to leave Ash somewhere he could get into mischief.

“Whatever you want.” He didn’t sound too thrilled with the notion, and he brought us to a stop at the light at the end of the ramp.

Graves coughed. “Pizza’s fine. I’ll run herd on Ash.”

Say what? I didn’t twist around in the seat to look at him, but it was close. “We should stick together. The vampires.”

“They won’t be after us. Besides, suckboy and I don’t get along. We might as well split up for a bit.” There was the click of a lighter.

How much was he going to smoke? I shifted in my seat again, all cooped up and itchy. “How much have you smoked today?”

“What are you, my mother?”

Well, if you’re going to be snide . . . “Do wulfen get lung cancer?” I addressed the question to the windshield. Tucked a curl behind my ear.

“Never.” Christophe stared at the stoplight, waiting for the left-turn arrow to change to green. “Most don’t like the smell of burning, though.”

“I wondered about that.” Now I could casually turn my head, glance in the backseat. But Graves was staring out the window, his chin set stubbornly. “Come on, Graves. Mexican. I bet Christophe can even get us margaritas if he smiles at the waitress.”

For some reason, that was the totally wrong thing to say.

“Underage drinking—” Christophe began.

“He makes my stomach hurt.” Graves interrupted flatly. “Jesus, Dru. Give me some space.”

“Space?” Fine. “I’ll give you all the space you want, Edgar.”

The instant it was out of my mouth I regretted it.

The arrow turned green, Christophe hit the gas. He was wearing a very slight smile. The golden light of late afternoon was kind to him.

Graves said nothing. I didn’t dare look back now. I was already kicking myself.

But the anger had my mouth, and it wasn’t backing down. “They had a file on you back at the Schola Prima.” There. An explanation, to smooth things over. Maybe.

He wasn’t looking for explanation. “Must’ve been good reading.”

“I didn’t read it. I just heard your first name.” I felt defensive, and I deserved it.

“You were at school with me, you must’ve heard it before then.”

It was official. He was looking for a fight. I was about half-tempted to give him one, too. “I didn’t pay attention.”

“Yeah.” Now he sounded vindicated. “I know. Still don’t.”

I pay attention when you say you love me. Then I pay attention when you get all rejective on me. I pay plenty of attention, Graves. You just can’t make up your stupid little mind. It took a monstrous effort to keep the words behind my teeth.

“Be the bigger person,” Gran was always saying. But she’d never had to put up with this.

“That’s enough.” Christophe slowed down, getting a little closer to the back bumper of the Ford Explorer in front of us than I liked. “There’s a good hotel around here. Be quiet so I can find it, children.”

“We’re not children.” Graves bristled.

“Compared to me, you might as well be, psychological standards for djamphir trapped in teenage bodies notwithstanding.” Christophe could’ve sounded more dismissive, maybe. If he tried. He glanced up at the signs around us, sighed.

Just like Graves could’ve sounded nastier, maybe. If he’d tried. “Including Dru?”

“Milady Dru is startlingly mature.” Christophe hung a right. Concrete rose up around us, and we slid into welcome shade. Air conditioning doesn’t help sometimes when it’s really humid. “And she has plenty of time.”

“What, to grow into dating you?” Graves actually laughed, a bitter little bark both like and unlike the sarcastic half-snort he’d used before. When he was a normal kid. Or at least a human kid.

Even I couldn’t believe he’d said it. I sucked in a breath. Christophe slowed down, changed lanes, and the air inside the car was even more tense. Ash was completely silent, and I would’ve bet anything he was watching Graves and Christophe with bright interest, tipping his head back and forth like he was observing a tennis match.

“I’m not—” I began.

“That’s really none of your business, loup-garou. Milady Dru does as she pleases, and owes us no explanation.”

I really wish you wouldn’t call me Milady. How the hell had this gotten so serious all of a sudden? “Look—” I began.

“I’d say it’s my business.” Graves exhaled smoke again. I smelled exhaust, concrete, and anger; my head began to hurt. “I’d say it’s most definitely my business.”

“And I would say you’re lucky to still be breathing, dog.” Christophe took another turn, left this time, stamping on the gas like it’d personally offended him. “After what I caught you doing.”

“What?” I twisted in my seat, stared at Christophe. “Come on, both of you. This isn’t the time—”

“Go ahead.” Graves’s cigarette was fuming and his eyes were dark again. Tension rippled under his skin, the Other shining through. “Tell her whatever you want. God knows half the shit that comes out of your mouth is a lie by omission anyway. Maybe I should tell her what I know, huh?”

“Certainly. Tell her what you think you know.” Christophe simply checked the street signs. Traffic started closing around us. The air conditioner blew a steady stream of chill at me, but it wasn’t helping with the hot tension in here. “And I shall tell her that you were preparing to leave her to the tender mercies of Sergej’s assassins. Running away with your tail between your legs—”

I lost my temper. “Both of you shut up!” The car actually rocked on its springs, as if Christophe had touched the brakes. Ash let out a whimper. My mother’s locket was a spot of soothing heat, and I found out I was outright clutching it. Like a maiden auntie with a string of pearls.

Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, they both shut their fool mouths. I couldn’t even feel good about it.

Tense-ticking silence. My stomach revolved, acid eating through me. We crept through traffic. “This has to stop,” I said, finally. “Or I’ll ditch both of you and go on the run alone.” Or with Ash. He shoplifts, but at least he keeps his mouth shut. “You’re making it easier for the vampires every goddamn time you do this. I’m tired of it. Both of you can just go to hell as far as I’m concerned.”

Something occurred to me just then. We had a whole continent to drive across. This was only the first day.

The Schola Prima was looking better and better all the time. At least there I had tutors and occasionally some time to myself. When I locked my door and hid under my bed, that is.

Of course, there I’d had to worry about who would sell me to the suckers next. And worry about Graves, missing and presumed tortured. And Christophe pushing me in the sparring room, and outside it shoving me in every direction except the one I wanted to go. Now Gran’s house was gone, my last best card gone up in smoke. Nowhere left to go, nowhere to hide, nothing even remotely approaching a safe harbor.

“Shit,” I muttered. I pulled my knees up onto the seat, hugged them. If I could just curl up small enough, maybe I could stop the feeling of the world spinning out from under me again. Since that cold Dakota night when I’d dreamed of Gran’s owl and didn’t tell Dad the next morning, the whole world had started whirling faster and faster. Every time I thought I found something solid, it was yanked away.

Time to grow up, Dru.

Except I’d never felt like a kid. Maybe with Gran, but she never believed in sugarcoating anything. I’d felt grown-up all this time, especially since she . . . died.

No matter how grown-up I felt, though, things kept knocking me around.

The rest of the world didn’t think I could drive, or drink anything stronger than a Shirley Temple, or even vote or run my own life. Even though I could canvass the occult network in pretty much any city in the US, take out a poltergeist . . . or be Dad’s backup in a house with bleeding walls and howling voices even he could hear, a house that was the haunted equivalent of a Venus flytrap.

We’d brought out the little boy who’d wandered in there and returned him to his family, and they’d paid Dad for it . . . but I’d still be treated like a criminal if the cops ever picked me up and found out I was under eighteen. Locked up or locked down, no matter that I was more capable than plenty of so-called adults.

I could face down the king of the vampires in a burning warehouse, but they’d stick me in high school. If I ever came to the attention of the authorities, juvie would be the only place they’d think of putting me.

But it wasn’t just that. No matter how grown-up I tried to be, there was a place inside me where being grown-up didn’t reach. That place was scared and cold and abandoned, and I didn’t have the energy to push it down or keep it locked away right now.

Gooseflesh rose all over me in big shivering bumps, and it wasn’t helping by the way I was sweating even under the blast of air conditioning.

Fear-sweat.

A draft of sticky cinnamon scent boiled up from my skin. Why was I smelling like them? Like Christophe, with his apple-pie cologne, and Anna, with her flowery reek of spoiled carnations.

And that was another thing. I’d heard Anna clearly, inside my head. She’d all but forced me to drink her blood. What the hell was that? Nothing Gran ever said prepared me for something like this. Not even drinking from Christophe’s wrist while I almost died from a gunshot wound had given me a clue.

“Dru.” Graves reached through the space between seats. His hand closed around my shoulder, gently enough I could ignore the iron strength running underneath his skin. “Hey. I’m sorry. It’s okay, all right? It’s okay. Don’t.”

Ash whined again, in the very back of his throat. He was depending on me, and I’d gotten Graves into this too. I was sucking at getting them out and keeping them safe, despite trying as hard as I could.

No matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried, it just wasn’t enough.

Christophe glanced at me. There was a faint sound—he’d swallowed, audibly. “Graves.” He shifted a little in the seat, took a left. “I apologize.”

I put my head down on my knees. Tried to breathe deeply.

“No problem.” At least Graves didn’t sound angry. Or grudging. “I, uh, well. We’ll get to a hotel soon, right?”

Christophe hit the brakes, eased up. The car crept forward. “Very soon.”

“I’ll keep track of Ash. We’ll get room service. You take Dru and get her something good. Something nice, you know?” Graves squeezed my shoulder, but gently. I guess he was trying to be comforting.

Too bad I was past being comforted.

“I think she needs to rest for a while,” Graves continued. “She’s, uh, pretty broken up. About the house. The fire.”

I’m right here, I wanted to yell. Don’t talk around me, for Christ’s sake.

But I didn’t care. They could do whatever they were going to do. I had enough to deal with, keeping my stomach from emptying itself all over the dash. Keeping the screaming inside me locked down in my throat where it couldn’t come out and break every window in the car.

“She . . . has had a difficult time of it.” Christophe spaced the words evenly. Neutral.

The space inside the car relaxed. I kept breathing into my knees, my eyes shut tight. The engine purred along, smoothly, carrying us all.

We finally made a sharp right, tires bouncing a little.

Christophe let out a long breath. “Here we are. Four Seasons, at your service.”

“Swank. Can we afford this?” Graves actually sounded grudgingly impressed.

“Of course. Nice rooms, discreet staff, quiet. Just the thing.” Christophe brought the car to a stop, nice and easy. “Let me do the talking. Just stay behind me, and try not to look . . . well, never mind.”

I made up my mind I wouldn’t care. Breathed into the comforting hollow between my jean-clad knees, wished the dark could last forever.

“Dru.” Mocking and businesslike, Christophe was back to his old self. It was almost a relief. “We’re going to have to check in, kochana.”

Graves’s hand fell away from my shoulder.

I braced myself and looked up, blinking furiously.

It was swank. Money breathed out of the fake adobe, and there were valets already perking up to attention. The doorman, a tall man with chocolate skin and a snappy dark blue suit jacket, eyed our car. His tie was a vivid flash of red. All the colors were too intense, crowding in through my eyes and pressing into my brain.

Dad would hardly ever have stayed in a place this nice. He had some ideas about the constitutionality and advisability of valet parking. But occasionally, he’d take me so I knew what to expect and how to get in and out of a nicer class of hotels.

My voice wouldn’t work quite right. My cheeks were wet. “I don’t think I’m dressed for this.” We’ll stick out. Oh, God, will we ever stick out here.

“Don’t worry.” Awkward for the first time, Christophe actually patted my elbow. The awkwardness passed, and his face smoothed. He actually looked ready to handle this. “You look lovely. Stay here, let me open your door.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Christophe took control, quietly and efficiently. One look from him and the doorman and bellhops snapped to attention, the valet took our car, and our luggage—such as it was—was unloaded with alacrity. The desk clerk had murmured something about a standing reservation, and we’d been whisked upstairs inside of two minutes. Christophe tipped the bellhop, saying something in a low voice, and pushed me gently toward the huge granite-tiled bathroom to freshen up. Clean clothes arrived like a genie had ordered them, so as soon as I got out of the shower there was a new pair of designer jeans and a navy-blue silk T-shirt. I used the hotel soap with abandon, scrubbing away the sweat-film, and tried not to cry. It didn’t work. I was leaking.

The restaurant was Italian, within walking distance, and the type of place Dad wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole. The kind where they have eight different sorts of forks ranked alongside your plate, sneering waiters, and a ties-are-not-optional dress code.

The “Italian” extended to a sort of indoor courtyard full of lush greenery. I guess you could even call it a grotto, what with the statues. Naked statues, in glaring white marble.

The expensively suited maitre d’ had held my seat and laid a green linen napkin decorously in my lap, discreetly not mentioning that I was on a slow leak. Christophe pretended not to notice, and as soon as he settled himself and the water glasses—actual goblets full of crushed ice and a paper-thin slice of lemon arranged just so—were filled, he picked up the menu and examined it critically.

I wiped at my cheeks. The tables were all screened off, either by potted plants or by trellises with climbing vines. All the trouble of air conditioning, and this place was still trying to coax plants to grow inside. I wondered who watered them, and a sharp high giggle died in my throat.

“The décor is awful,” Christophe finally said, evenly. “But the concierge swears the food is good. Do you want wine?”

I shook my head. My hair, still damp, slid against my shoulders. It wasn’t even worth tying back. The aspect was a warmth just under my skin, easing the cramping stiffness of sitting in a car all day.

I cleared my throat. The hum of conversation and clinking of forks against dishes was low music. “The clothes.” I sounded rusty. “Where did you—”

One corner of his mouth quirked up. “I have my methods. Hmm. A primavera for you, probably. Something light. Do you object if I order?”

Another shake of my head. Christophe was immaculate again, and the maitre d’ hadn’t blinked at what either of us were wearing. Then again, the jeans were designer, Christophe’s habitual paperthin black sweater was obviously expensive, and Christophe himself had the easy elegance of a fashion magazine come to earth.

I was distinctly outclassed. And how creepy was it that he’d figured out my new sizes? Did they teach that at the Schola? How to size up a girl’s hips with a glance?

Not that I was complaining, really. But still. It was another thing to try not to think about.

“I think I prefer steak. We’ll start with bruschetta, unless you’re a calamari fan . . . no? Very well. What do you want to drink, if not wine?”

“They won’t give me wine.” It was a scandalized whisper. I scrubbed at my cheeks with my fingers, trying to make the tears stop. Thankfully, they were drying up. “Jesus, Christophe!”

That earned me one amused glance. “They’ll give you whatever I say. You worry too much. No matter. What do you want?”

“Diet Coke. If they have it.” I didn’t mean to sound snide. It was actually a relief that he looked so unaffected. The tight ball of panic inside me eased a little. It smelled nice in here—green and fresh and garlicky. Expensive. Quiet, like there was no way a vampire would ever burst in and tear the place up.

He just shrugged, still staring at the menu. “Ruins the palate, but all right. Dru—”

I was saved by a quick little brown penguin of a waiter rolling up to the table. He reeled off the specials in heavily accented English, and Christophe’s eyes actually lit up. He laid the menu down, folded his hands, and busted out something that sounded like Italian.

The waiter looked shocked for a second, but then they started gabbling like old friends. A busboy in a snow-white jacket brought a plate of crusty, steaming bread slices and a little crock thing of butter, a decanter of olive oil and one of balsamic vinegar, as well as a small terra-cotta tub that reeked of heavenly roasted garlic. He also set down two wineglasses and vanished.

The table was going to get crowded if this kept up.

Christophe handed the menus back to the waiter, who actually bowed and backed away.

I grabbed for my water glass. It sloshed a little, because my hand was shaking. “What was all that?”

“He’s Neapolitan; I wanted to practice. Just relax.” Christophe glanced over my shoulder, and I realized he was sitting where Dad would’ve, if Dad could’ve been persuaded to set foot in here. I was tucked back out of sight behind a lattice full of what had to be grape leaves, but Christophe could see almost the whole restaurant, including the opening where the waiters and busboys flowed back and forth like minnows, with efficient little bustling movements. “Have some bread. They spread the garlic on it. Nosferat repellant.”

“Really?” I perked up a little at that.

His face changed slightly. “No. It was a joke. Although the Maharaj have a prohibition against eating garlic. And leeks. But only for their few women.”

I shivered. We hadn’t covered Maharaj very much at the Schola—they were a third-year-class item, like command-and-control systems and the really in-depth Paranormal Physiology courses. And that was when you started learning combat sorcery, too.

The Maharaj were great at sorcery.

For a moment I remembered my bedroom in the Dakotas and the dreamstealer hissing, and the seizures locking every muscle in my body until Christophe threw water over me. I’d found out enough from my tutors at the Schola Prima to shudder at just how much his quick thinking had saved my life.

“Moj boze.” Christophe sighed, laid his hands on the table. Nice, capable hands, his nails clean and the chunky silver watch on his wrist glittering sharply. That was pretty new—he usually didn’t wear jewelry. “I am clumsy today. Forgive me. I meant to make you smile.”

I wiped at my cheeks again with my free hand, took a gulp of cold water. At least the slow leaking from my eyes had stopped. I let out a long shaky breath. Wondered how Ash and Graves were getting on in the cold, palatial hotel room. “It’s not your fault. I just . . .”

I groped for words. He was quiet, head tilted, all his attention focused on me. I’d almost forgotten what that felt like, the way he leaned in and listened.

It was . . . comforting. I set the goblet down, condensation slippery against my tear-damp fingers. Reached for a piece of bread, even though my stomach was still a tight-clenched fist. “I wish you and Graves could get along.” There. We could talk about that. Why not? It couldn’t get any worse, could it?

I almost winced. It probably could.

Christophe looked down. Touched one of the heavy forks set at his place with a fingertip. “Why him?” He pushed the fork a quarter inch out of place, moved it back. The aspect slid through his hair, slicking it down and eating the blond highlights for just a moment before retreating. “Of all the creatures you could choose to have me vie for your affections with, why him?”

I really didn’t think I had affections to vie for, Chris. But I knew what he was asking. The wulfen were second-class citizens at best, according to the djamphir. It bothered me.

A lot.

What could I say? That I was miserably confused? That I felt safe when Graves was around, because it felt like there was nothing I couldn’t handle as long as he was there, steady as a rock? And that I also felt safe when Christophe was there, because he was scary—and completely on my side? That I’d wanted Graves so bad it hurt, and he’d backed off—and that my hormones staged a revolt and made me blush like an idiot whenever Christophe got close enough to touch me? They were oil and water, and I liked them both, but not together. Together they just messed me up even worse.

The waiter saved me by showing up with a bottle of red wine and pouring a ceremonial dollop for Christophe, who tasted it gravely and made a few comments. The waiter’s nose gleamed. He proceeded to pour both of us a glass, set the bottle in a little empty silver bucket on a pedestal near the table, and vanished again.

I stared at the glass of wine like it might bite me. I didn’t look anywhere near twenty-one. This was worlds away from jacking a bit of Dad’s Jim Beam on nights he was out hunting and I was at home wondering if anyone was going to come back to pick me up.

I’d always been so good at avoiding Boy Tangles. It’s easier when you move from place to place—you know not to get attached, and you slide away before a boy can really get his hands on you. But now . . .

Christophe picked up his wineglass. Took a sip like he’d been doing it all his life. Of course, he was older, right? A lot older. He set it down with a precise little movement. “I don’t want to distress you. I seem to do nothing but. So. I apologize—again. Let’s move to other things. Do you like the wine?”

I shrugged. My cheeks were hot. “I’m, uh. I don’t know. I’ve never had it.”

“No worries. They’ll bring you soda in a moment or two. Take what you like, Dru.” He lifted his gaze, and the piercing blue stare was uncomfortable. To say the least. “Take whatever you like. It’s all yours. You haven’t seen the good side of our world yet. You have time.”

What could I say to that? I did try a sip of the wine, but it tasted like paint thinner and I was glad when the Diet Coke showed up. By then, the appetizers had come, and Christophe was asking me about routes and highways. So things got to sounding a little more natural, and I didn’t feel like crying.

At least, not much.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I came back from the bathroom to find the table cleared, a fresh glass of Diet Coke, and Christophe gazing at another menu with a serious, critical expression. He didn’t look up as I lowered myself back onto my seat, praying I hadn’t committed any huge crimes against etiquette. They even had mints in the marble-and-wateredsilk bathroom, wrapped and gleaming in a fluted-glass dish.

We’d hashed out the next few days of travel and arrangements. If I thought about that—the next few steps—everything else seemed manageable. Especially since Christophe was like Dad. He asked questions without making me feel stupid, decided things pretty fairly but definitely, and listened to my objections and suggestions. There wasn’t a lot of waffle in either of them. Gran would’ve liked that about Christophe.

The thought pinched under my breastbone. I picked up the Coke in its tall, sweating glass and took a long, long gulp.

A funny metallic aftertaste lingered for a moment. Restaurants are like that; there’s always something that goes off, even at the most primo place.

“Have you ever had tiramisu? Or do you prefer chocolate?” Christophe lifted the dessert menu a little, offering it to me.

I flattened one hand on my stomach over the silk, as if I had an ache. “Nah, I think I overdid it on the bread. Good food. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, anyway.”

“Are you sure?” He looked so hopeful, eyebrows up and his sharply handsome face open and relaxed, that I actually grinned at him.

“All right, I’ll take a look. But no promises.” I took another few long swallows of Diet Coke, set the glass down. It was seriously metallic-tasting, and I made a face.

“Is something wrong?”

“Nah, it just tastes a little weird. They probably need to change the syrup in the machine.” I studied the menu. Half the stuff on it was described in terms that could’ve won an award for obfuscation. “Who writes this stuff? And what the hell is a compote? It sounds like a car part.”

Christophe actually laughed. “Fruit boiled down and sweetened, I believe.”

My eyebrows drew together. “And they do this to rhubarb and . . .” I blinked. The letters looked a little fuzzy. “They have chocolate cake.” My tongue felt a little fuzzy. Maybe it was the garlic.

“Are you all right?” Christophe tensed.

“Yeah, fine. I think I’m just tired. It’s been a long day.” I handed the menu back. “Go ahead and get what you want. I might steal a bite of whatever. Although I never did like rhubarb much. It’s stringy.”

“Very well.” He tilted his head, and the waiter reappeared. Christophe watched me while his mouth moved, liquid streams of words in another language. The waiter bobbed again, looking absolutely thrilled but strangely fuzzy too, like I was seeing him on a bad TV set.

I blinked again, furiously, trying to make sense of this. The metallic taste got stronger, breaking over my tongue, and a shiver went down my spine.

Something’s wrong.

Christophe didn’t seem to notice. He just kept talking to the waiter and finally handed the menu back. Then he folded his hands neatly on the table where his plate had rested, and watched me. Half his glass of wine was still there, and the surface of the liquid trembled.

“Dru?” Now he sounded concerned. “You’re pale.”

I slumped in the chair, my hands turned to gripping fists on the arms, and the metallic taste crawled down my throat.

Something moved behind me, in the trellis. Christophe said something very softly, but not in Italian. Sounded like Polish, but he pronounced things differently than Augustine. Augie always sounded like he was swearing, and Christophe sounded precise, even with his mouth handling the funny sounds.

I was too occupied trying to stay upright. Someone came around the trellis, stepped up to the table on my side. Someone tall, and slim. I caught a flash of red and my heart leapt into my throat.

It was a caramel-skinned boy with dark glossy hair and liquid dark eyes. He was sharply handsome, but not in the way that yells djamphir—the shape of his cheekbones was different, and he had a pointed chin and a proud beak of a nose. A thin gold hoop gleamed in one ear, nestling against the softness of his hair. He wore a loose red T-shirt and chinos, and he spoke in English.

“Slow and sloppy, old man.” His accent was different than Christophe’s, too. Indian, maybe. Subcontinent, not American, I realized through the fuzz my brain had become. “We have three or four minutes. Don’t worry. She’s just immobile for the moment. Be reasonable, and she’ll be none the worse for wear.”

“She” means me. Immobile? I tried to move, couldn’t. Every muscle had seized up. I could barely breathe.

Christophe’s eyes flamed with blue. The aspect slicked his hair back, and his fangs dimpled his lower lip. He stared at the boy next to me, and his left hand had suddenly tensed, cupped against the trembling table.

It wasn’t the table. My legs were shaking, and I had my foot braced against one of the table supports. The shaking communicated itself through the wood, the liquid in Christophe’s wineglass sloshing now.

“I came to warn you,” the boy continued. “Will you be reasonable?”

Christophe’s tone was low, even, and deadly. “If you’ve harmed her—”

“So it’s true, the monk has taken a fall.” The boy laughed. “As long as djrirosha is administered in the next ten minutes, she’ll be fine. Listen, Gogol, for I bear news. Take your svetocha and hide as deeply as you can. The Elders have made treaty with your father, and count it well worth the cost.”

Gogol? But I knew. That was Sergej’s last name. And Christophe’s. My heartbeat stuttered. Darkness crept into my peripheral vision.

“The Maharaj and . . .” Christophe actually looked stunned. Blond slipped back through his hair as the aspect retreated. “You’re mad. Or lying.”

Maharaj? A faint, dozy alarm spilled through me. Along with sorcery and breeding nasty things, the djinni-children go in for poison. In a big way. And I’d swallowed a bunch of the Coke.

“No, just a traitor to my own kind by telling you this. The Elders have decreed, so the rest of us are helpless. But I bethought myself to come warn you. There are those among us who believe the smaller viper is one we can live with.”

“The Maharaj’rai are breaking with the Order?” Christophe had gone a weird gray shade under his perfectly polished skin. He looked actually stunned. “You’re certain?”

The boy nodded. His earring winked at me. I strained against the cocoon of fuzz holding my arms and legs down. Sick heat began in my toes, rising up my calves an inch at a time. My fingers felt like sausages in a pan, swelling.

Now I knew what being paralyzed was like. My arms and legs were rigid, concrete instead of flesh. The table had stopped shaking. My breath came in short sipping bursts, my heart fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings, and sudden fear that whatever was keeping me from moving would stop me from being able to get any air in at all made me strain to move even harder.

The guy next to me leaned forward a little, and a draft washed over me. Sand, heavy clove spice, and burning. He smelled like he was going to burst into flame at any moment. The touch throbbed inside my head. A heavy, bright blue perfumed flame that would send up ribbons of heavy smoke. That smoke would creep into my lungs and shut them down, and it would turn into a green-glass snake with bright cruel eyes and feathery wings—

“One moment.” The boy made a quick gesture. There was a snap of glass breaking, and Christophe half-rose, the table jolting as he hit it. A cold wind blew over my face, brushing my hair, full of the smell of roses. The iron bands around my chest eased, snapping one by one, and the tingling in my fingers and toes washed away all at once. “Huh. Look at that, her lips are blue. And yet she’s still pretty. Pleasant travels, Gogol.”

Christophe swore, but the boy vanished on a draft of spice-laden wind. So it wasn’t just djamphir who could do that. I’d have bet money nobody in the restaurant had even noticed him.

I slumped in the chair, pins and needles ramming through my limbs. Then Christophe was on his knees, both my nerveless hands in his, his skin so warm it burned. I made an unhappy little sound, a kittenish mewling, had to stop halfway through because I didn’t have the air.

But I could breathe again. The back of my throat tasted like metal, and roses. The numb rigidity in my arms and legs started to drain.

Christophe’s lips moved, soundlessly. The world went away on a rush of gray tinted with rosy pink, and the touch tolled inside my head like a bell.

Maharaj. This is bad news. Seriously bad.

The world came back like a pancake flipped over on a griddle. Christophe, saying my name.

“Dru? Dru. Open your eyes. You can breathe; it’s all right.” He still had my hands, so hard my bones creaked. I coughed, weakly. Everything was too bright. I swayed a little in the chair.

“Whaaa—” My tongue wouldn’t quite obey me. I sounded drunk. Great. We were in a restaurant, I’d just been poisoned or something, and now I sounded three sheets to the wind. Dad would have a total cow.

The hard pinching sensation in my chest reminded me that I didn’t have to worry about that. Not right now. Not ever again.

And oh God but that was the wrong thing to think.

Something cool and damp touched my cheeks. I blinked. The penguin waiter was dabbing at me with a wet linen napkin, babbling something at Christophe, who gave short choppy answers. He watched me closely, and when I started pulling weakly at his hands, he finally relaxed a bit.

“There, kochana. All’s well.”

Oh, I don’t think so. I don’t think this is at all well. “I think I want to leave now.” It was a high breathy sentence, like a little girl savagely embarrassed at a party or something. “Before something else happens.”

“No dessert?” But one corner of his mouth lifted slightly. How he could make an almost smile look so grim was beyond me. “Very well. Come. You can stand. And if you can’t, I’ll help.”

“Will la signorina be—” The waiter was having some trouble with this. I didn’t blame him.

Christophe said something else, with a rueful expression.

Amazingly, the round brown man chuckled. “Amore!” He kissed his fingers and fluttered them in the air and rolled away, still laughing.

Christophe’s face fell. “Idiot.” He threw some money on the table and practically dragged me out of there.

I didn’t have a chance to protest—the ground was heaving underfoot, like a dog’s back trying to shake a flea. The wet sticky darkness outside enfolded us, and the jasmine bushes planted outside the restaurant threw their cloying all over me. My stomach revolved, settled unhappily. “Jesus,” I whispered. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him I’d proposed to you and you fainted.” Christophe sighed. “Moj boze. The Maharaj.”

“You what?” I almost fell over, but Christophe yanked me back onto my feet. Whatever the boy had sprayed in my face had taken care of the poison, I guess—but I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t like not being sure about something like that.

“It was all I could think of. Come, moj maly ptaszku, the open street is no place for you. I must think.”

“Who the—what the hell—” I couldn’t even frame a reasonable question.

“That was Levant. He wanted to be sure I wouldn’t attack him until he could give his tidings.” Christophe paused. “He is . . . a friend, in his way. As much as a Maharaj can befriend those not of their kind.”

“Some friend.” My arms and legs began to really work again. My brain kicked over into high gear. Every inch of me tingled unpleasantly, the aspect smoothing down over me and burning a little, like I was having a reaction to shellfish or something. “The Maharaj—the dreamstealer, back in—”

“Yes. Their ruling council has thrown in their lot with my father.” Christophe’s jaw was set. “I must think, Dru. Please.”

“I’m not stopping you.” I was soaked with sweat, I realized, and shivering uncontrollably despite the heat. Everything was too bright, the streetlamps miniature suns and the half-moon behind scudding clouds like a searchlight. My eyes watered; I kept blinking. “Wait, what? They . . . your father? King of the vampires? Don’t they—”

“The Maharaj hate us. As far as they are concerned, every scion of the nosferat, no matter how distant or how noble, is fit only for extermination. Bruce had convinced them we were the lesser evil, and the more likely to win the war.” He set me on my feet again as I stumbled. Breathed something in what I now guessed was Polish, something I was sure was a curse just from the way he said it. Then he put his arm over my shoulders and pulled me close. “God and Hell both damn it. This changes things.”

I began to get a bad feeling. Or, I guess, the bad feeling I already had got about ten times worse. “What? What does it change?”

He shook his head, sharply, as if dislodging something nasty. “I need to think, kochana, moja ksiezniczko. The Order must be warned. And . . .” Maddeningly, he stopped.

“And what? Christophe, come on! I just got poisoned!” By the fucking Maharaj! My first one I’ve ever seen, and he . . . oh, man. Man alive, that was something.

“Hush.” He stopped dead on the street corner. Cars crept by, gleaming, and the hotel rose like a huge white ship a block down. My teeth chattered, and he looked down at me. His face, half-shadowed, was drawn. “I may have to do things you will not like. Do you trust me?”

What a completely ridiculous question. But I guess it wasn’t so ridiculous. Less than a week ago I’d yelled that I hated him, and I’d been all ready to believe he’d handed Graves over to . . . to Sergej.

The name sent a glass spike of pain through my temples. Why hadn’t the touch warned me not to drink? I could usually pretty reliably tell if food was safe; there was that one time in Pensacola when Dad had been about to take some tea from a very nice old lady who ran a pretty good occult store. I’d knocked it out of his hand right before she’d started snarling and gibbering in a dead language that made the hair all over me stand up now just remembering it.

She’d thought we were from the Gator Dude—the guy she had a running feud with. We weren’t; we’d just been passing through. Now I sort of wondered if I’d made her think we meant bad business instead of just chalking it up to paranoia and the fact that Dad made a lot of people awful nervous.

The metal taste and the reek of roses faded; I turned my head and spat without thinking, to clear it. A shiver broke over me, and I felt the drug burn off. Sweat stood out on my skin, acrid as I metabolized whatever he’d dosed me with. Everything on me tingled even more fiercely.

Jesus.

Christophe’s arm tightened on my shoulders. “Never mind,” he said brusquely, and stepped out into the crosswalk just as the white walk sign flashed. My mother’s locket chilled against my chest. “It doesn’t matter. Come.”

I was exhausted, covered in sweat, and just happy to be breathing. My feet were like concrete blocks, and all I wanted to do was lie down.

Maybe I should’ve said something, I don’t know. But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The air conditioning was silent, and the room was an ice cube. I didn’t mind. Clean and dry, I snuggled under the comforter, crisp white sheets like a cloud, the pillow just right and my knees pulled up.

It felt great.

Graves sprawled in a chair near the window, his legs loose and easy, his head tipped back so far it looked like it might fall off. A glimmer of green showed between his eyelids every once in a while. Ash was curled up on the floor, under a comforter pulled from the other bed, the whole messy package wedged into the furthest corner from the door.

Christophe sat cross-legged and straight-backed on the floor at the foot of the bed closest the door, his head bowed as if he was meditating. The shotgun lay in front of him, its blued barrel gleaming slightly in the dark. His malaika were arranged, one on either side of him. It should’ve looked ridiculous.

It didn’t.

My tongue stole out, touched my lips. My right hand was curled around my mother’s locket. Every once in a while I would rub my thumb over the sharp etching on its back, the weird runic symbols I couldn’t decipher. It was usually soothing.

Right now, not so much.

A flash of green from beneath Graves’s eyelids. Like he was checking the room.

“Graves?” I whispered.

He didn’t move.

“I can tell you’re awake.” I moved a little bit. The pillow scrunched itself up even more perfectly. “Why don’t you lay down?”

He sighed. But quietly. Ash was breathing in deep soft swells, sometimes making a little murmuring sound like a kid in a dream.

“First place they’ll shoot if they come through the door,” Graves murmured. “Plus, I wanna think. Go to sleep.”

Great. The two boys who could talk to me both wanted to “think” and the one with the kindergarten vocab was dead asleep. I guess by the time I got changed and brushed my teeth they’d done all the talking; at least, it looked like Christophe had explained whatever he was going to. Because Graves’s face had set itself and his shoulders had come up, and he looked at me dark-eyed and sullen like I’d done something awful.

Again.

The only thing I’d done was go to dinner and get poisoned. Was he going to blame me for that?

The room was dark, but the bathroom light was on and the door pulled mostly to. So I could see Graves’s jawline, stubble showing up on his planed cheeks. He still looked a little gaunt; it pared his face down to the bone and showed his high cheekbones. The suggestion of epicanthic folds around his eyes made him exotic, and his hair was a wildly curling mess in the humidity. And the way his mouth turned down at the corners was just as grim as Christophe’s.

“Can’t you talk to me while you’re thinking?” I couldn’t help myself. “Please?”

He sighed again and shifted in the chair. “’Bout what?”

Abruptly I was conscious of Christophe, sitting so straight and still, facing the door. He was probably listening. What could I say to Graves with him there?

I rolled over onto my back, stared at the ceiling. The sprinklers were recessed, but you could still tell it was a hotel room. It was the way it smelled, mostly. And the give of the mattress underneath me, unfamiliar even if comfortable. “Never mind.” The words stuck in my throat. “Sorry.” I shut my eyes, hard, tried to count the tracers of color whirling in the dark.

Graves shifted in the chair, a whisper of cloth. “You know, I’d been waiting for a chance to talk to you. That day. When I saw you skipping.”

I threw my arm over my eyes. Mostly it was to hide the stupid smile that showed up, my lips stretching before I could stop them. “After Bletch nailed you to the wall in American History?”

He groaned, but softly. “Don’t remind me.” And there was my sarcastic Goth Boy. “Best day of my life was when you gave her a heart attack.”

That managed to kill the smile. I’d hexed that teacher and almost killed her. The touch thrummed softly inside my brain. I was getting used to it feeling so . . . big, like I could probably drop out of my body and see the whole city if I wanted to.

Why hadn’t it warned me about poison in my drink? Whatever the seal-sleek brown boy had sprayed in my face was probably an antidote. At least, if it was some other slow-acting thing . . . Christophe said it was okay, to quit worrying and rest.

Why hadn’t Christophe known something was off?

“I didn’t mean to.” Well, I had meant to hurt the teacher, but not the way it ended up. “So you’d been waiting? To talk about what?”

“Just to talk to you. You weren’t the usual sort of new girl, Miss Anderson.” Now he was smiling, I could tell. “Figured you’d be interesting. To say the least.”

I was now toasty warm all over. My arms and legs were heavy, relaxing. “I felt bad Bletch had picked on you.” A short silence. “That was the day Dad . . . disappeared.”

“No shit.” Now he sounded thoughtful. “So you just . . .”

“Waited for him to come back. When he did . . . he was a zombie.” I’d never said it quite so baldly before.

Like a kid, I hadn’t wanted to make it true by saying it out loud. Because if you don’t say it, there’s still a chance God, or someone, or anyone will notice the mistake and fix it.

“Goddamn. Now I feel stupid, offering you cheeseburgers.”

Oh, Lord. How could I explain? “You saved my life.” Quietly, as if it was a secret. “If I’d been at home when Ash showed up, and that burning thing . . . well.” I paused, but Ash didn’t stir. He just made another one of those soft sleepy-time noises. “It wasn’t just a cheeseburger.”

“Really?” Graves shifted in his chair again. “Good. I mean . . . good. That’s good.”

The tight knot inside my chest eased. As long as he was here, I could handle it. I could even handle the funny unsteady feeling all over me when I thought about sitting in that chair unable to breathe or move.

Maharaj. There’s bound to be a reason why they’re a third-year subject. That sort of stuff is seriously bad news. “I’m scared,” I whispered.

“We all are.” Graves sounded very sure. “Just go to sleep, Dru. We’re all together. It’ll be okay.”

I don’t know if he was lying, or just trying to soothe me, or what. But it worked. I rolled back onto my side, and before I could think of anything to say, darkness took me. I fell into a soft, restful sleep like a down blanket. Just before I tipped over the edge, though, I heard Christophe’s voice. But different, without the businesslike mockery.

“Loup-garou?”

“Yeah?” Graves replied.

“Thank you.”

The darkness, just then, was kind.

Ash’s growl dragged me up out of unconsciousness, just like a hook will drag a fish. I sat straight up, my right hand shot out, and I had both my mother’s malaika by the time my sock feet hit the floor.

“Quiet!” Christophe snapped, and wonder of wonders, the deep thrumming cut itself short. My heart hammered, and I began to wake up. Copper filled my mouth.

“What—” I began to whisper.

The phone, all the way across the room on a business table with a modem jack and a pile of stationery, not to mention a vase of silk irises, shrilled. I let out a shriek, Ash whirled—he was crouched in the corner, his irises glowing orange in the dim predawn gray—and leapt. He landed on the bed, the mattress groaning sharply, and hunched his thin shoulders. He’d wormed his way out of his T-shirt again, and his pallid narrow chest gleamed.

Christophe was suddenly there, right next to the phone, resolving out of thin air with a chittering sound. He scooped up the receiver before it could shrill again. Lifted it to his ear and waited, silently, a statue.

Graves was at the window, peering out through a slit in the heavy curtains. Both the shades and the curtains were mostly drawn, and now I knew why someone had left those two inches of space there. It meant you could look out without twitching the curtains and giving yourself away.

“Where?” Just the one word, clipped and short. Christophe held the shotgun loosely, pointed at the floor, and not a hair was out of place. Did he ever sleep?

Two knocks on the door. Crisp, authoritative, precisely placed. I actually gasped.

Christophe laid the phone down in its cradle. “All’s well,” he said over his shoulder. “Lights.”

I suppose he meant it to be a warning, but I still wasn’t ready when he flicked the switch by the door and undid the locks. I blinked, tasted morning in my mouth, and hoped I hadn’t been snoring.

The door opened. I tensed, and Ash growled again.

“Chain the dog, Dru-girl,” a familiar voice said. He sounded like Bugs Bunny—half Bronx, half Brooklyn, all New Yawk. “We come in peace.”

What the hell? “August?” I sounded squeaky. “Augustine?”

“In the weary flesh. We have to get her out of here, Reynard.”

Christophe didn’t stand aside, blocking the door. He still had the shotgun, and his shoulders were tense. “Who’s with you?”

“Hiro and some of the wulfen. We’re all that could be spared. We’re being hit on all fronts, and this entire area is crawling. Somehow they’re everywhere.”

“Augie?” I took two steps forward. How did they find us?

“Thank God,” Graves said, softly.

I glanced at him. He’d turned away from the window, and his entire face had relaxed. Why? Jesus, it was someone from the Order who’d turned him over to Sergej in the first place—

“Ah.” Christophe stepped back, opening the door. Ash was still growling, and everything in the room rattled. “Dru, calm the Broken down. Enter, Dobrowski. I presume the loup-garou was calling you, then?”

Golden-haired Augustine looked just the same as always—white wifebeater, red flannel overshirt, jeans and heavy engineer boots, and not a day over twenty-two. He’d hit the drift late and looked old for a djamphir. There were bruised-looking circles under his dark eyes, though, and that was new. “Calling us? We got wind of her through the wires. A cop and a grocery store manager—hey, Dru.” It would’ve been impossible for him to look any more relieved. He pushed past Christophe, who shook his head and swung the door closed. “You’ve bloomed. Thank God. Sweetie, can you get him to stop that? I don’t want to have to hurt him.”

I gathered myself. I couldn’t even feel gratified that Augie noticed I was different now. “Ash.” Just the one word, but it cut off the growl like flicking a switch. Then Christophe’s meaning caught up with me. “Wait, hang on. Graves?”

“I couldn’t think of anything else to do.” His shoulders sagged, and his eyes were so dark. “So I was going to call them.”

My brain froze. “Wait. When was this?”

“When you went to town. With Ash. I went down the road looking for a cell signal. Then, while you were at dinner, I called an Order drop-line.” Graves hunched his shoulders. He was shaking, actually, and I wondered why. “I’m sorry, Dru. I just . . . it’s best. They can protect—”

I stared at him. “You called them? Well, great. What the hell. Maybe that’s how the vampires found—”

“Dru.” Christophe’s voice cut across mine. “He did the right thing.”

“They found you?” August pushed past Christophe into the room, sweeping the door shut behind him. “When?”

Christophe had things he wanted to know, first. He locked the door, then slid past August and stalked into the room. “An incident with the police? Dru?”

I stopped dead. Stared at Graves.

You shouldn’t trust me.

No. I couldn’t think it. I just couldn’t. “Where did you get the cell phone? If you were looking for a signal, Graves, where did you get the phone from?”

His irises were black now, no trace of green. His hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped. “Stole it out of some lady’s purse. That WalMart in Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, so that’s where Ash learned to shoplift, I bet?” My hands curled into fists. “God damn it, Graves—”

“Dru.” Christophe was suddenly next to me, his hand curling around my shoulder. “Leave it. If he had not called the Order, I would have sooner or later. You must be protected.”

“Yeah, real bang-up job they’ve been doing of it so far.” I tore away from him. “Who died and left you in charge of me, huh? I’m not going back to the Order. I’m heading we—oh.” I shut up. Telling August where I was headed was not a good idea. Except I’d already spilled the beans to Christophe.

Christophe grabbed my arm again, his fingers sinking in. His eyes burned blue. “The Maharaj have decided to ally with my father instead of with us. For what reason I cannot guess, unless they know something we do not and wish to treat with the victor instead of the vanquished. The Order will have a difficult enough time fighting on two fronts, and if the djinni-ji are watching for you as well, I prefer you safe within the Order’s defenses. Gather your things.”

All this time I’d been wishing for someone else to show up and take charge, and now that he was doing it, I seriously wanted to smack him. “The Order’s not going to protect me.” I tried yanking away from him again, but his fingers bit down and I stopped, glared at him. “Or Graves. Look how well that turned out. Why should I give them another chance to screw up and make my life miserable, huh? At least out on my own I know who to depend on!”

“Oh, I don’t think you do.” The aspect settled over Christophe, his hair slicking down, the blond highlights eaten by darkness. He looked as grim as I’d ever seen him. “I think you trust entirely the wrong people, kochana. Now.” Either he was shaking or I was, I couldn’t tell. “If you do not pack your things, August will, and I will drag you to whatever extraction point they’ve managed to hold in this city. Do you understand me?”

I stared up at him for a long moment. Ash whined softly, deep in his throat. The entirely mad idea that I could use the touch to make him jump Christophe floated through my head, but that would be stupid.

Still . . . the thought had some merit.

“Dru.” Augustine stepped forward, avoiding Christophe’s malaika on the floor in front of the TV. “Dru-girl, princess, please. There’s me and Hiro. And your wulfen friends. Reynard’s right, if the Maharaj are playing fast and loose we need to get you under cover. I know you’re scared, but please. Listen to us. We’ve got to get you out of here. There are nosferat all over the city; they’ve been on your trail since the warehouse. I don’t know how you’ve stayed alive so far—”

I don’t know either, Augie. It’s been a hell of a ride. For the first time, August was talking to me like I was a fellow adult. I couldn’t even feel happy about it.

“Let go of me.” I didn’t sound like myself. Christophe eased up a little, and when I took my arm away from him I could feel the aspect smoothing over bruises his grip had left. “Thanks, Augie. You’re the one who asks me instead of tells me whatever-the-fuck to do.”

He actually looked shocked. “Language, kiddo.” It was the same thing he would have said during the month I spent with him while Dad was up hunting something out Canada way—hunting, probably, for Sergej. I’d figured out that much later, at least. “Come on. Please?”

“I think we ought to move it along.” Graves stood, his hands in his pockets and his head cocked. “Whatever we’re going to do.” He sounded . . . weird. Flat, monotone, and a little bored.

The words had a completely unexpected effect. Christophe tensed, raising his head and staring at him. August let out a long soft breath, the aspect flickering through him too and his fangs growing with a slight crackle, touching his lower lip.

“Bad.” Ash weighed in, a thin whisper. “Bad.”

I half-turned, and he was staring at Graves. Ash’s eyes glowed orange, and he braced himself, legs tensing and shoulders hulking up as he crouched on the bed.

“Because I am Broken,” Graves continued in a low uneven singsong, his eyes now black from lid to lid, “I can’t fight him much longer. He wants her captured, or dead.” His head tipped back, and the Other—the thing wulfen use to change and loup-garou use for dominance—swelled through him, a colorless tide that smelled of strawberry incense and smoky fury. “And if he has to use me to do it, he will.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It happened so fast.

Christophe shoved me, hard. My malaika flew out of my hands and I hit the bed, going down with Ash in a tangle of arms and legs. We spilled over the side, hitting the floor, Ash letting out an oof that would’ve been hilarious if I hadn’t clocked my head a good one and got an elbow deep in my ribs. We rolled, Ash supple as a writhing snake, and there was a sickening crunch. A couple of thumps, a shivering crash, and it was official: we were making a lot of noise.

“Don’t—” August sounded breathless. “Reynard—Christophe. No. She won’t thank you for it.” A low grunt of effort. “No.” Then a long string of foreign words, the k’s and z’s all sharp as a djamphir’s fangs.

I struggled. Ash flowed away and I leapt to my feet, my T-shirt flapping where it had torn along the collar. My boxers were all messed up too, and air conditioning lay cold and slick against my shivering skin. I was freezing, every inch of me coated with ice. Oh, Jesus, please—

I had no idea what I was about to ask for.

Graves lay, flung back under the window, his long frame curled up around an invisible beach ball. His eyes were closed, and he was deathly still. The paleness under his coloring turned him a weird chalky yellowish color, and I let out a half–sob.

The television’s screen was starred with breakage. August had Christophe’s arms pinned. He had a pretty good full nelson on him, and Christophe’s shotgun lay on the peach carpeting. August’s boots slipped as Christophe surged to the side, and that sound was Christophe’s voice cracking as he ranted in that odd, unlovely foreign language that colored all his words.

“No!” August yelled again. “Settle down, moj brat, killing him solves nothing!”

Killing? Everything snapped together behind my eyes, and I dove for the shotgun. Christophe’s voice broke as he kept raving, and the hiss-growl of a very pissed-off djamphir rattled everything in the room.

My fingers closed around the shotgun’s stock. I grabbed it and skidded aside, blinking through space. The carpet burned my bare feet; I racked the gun and put it to my shoulder.

Pointed right at Christophe. And August, I guess—you can’t hit just one person with a shotgun, not when the two you’re aiming at are holding onto each other.

Christophe froze. So did August. They both stared at me, Christophe craning his neck with an odd sideways movement that threatened to make my stomach unseat itself. They were both in the aspect, their eyes glowing, August’s hair streaked thickly with butter-yellow against the gold. For the first time since I’d known him, Christophe’s hair was wildly mussed, even slicked down with the aspect.

He didn’t look so perfect now.

My heart pounded like it wanted to bust out of my chest. I backed up a step, two, until my bare heel touched something soft. Graves’s hand, outflung on the carpet. I didn’t step on his fingers, but I carefully brushed my foot against them. His skin was warm, and the touch filled my head with the sound of muffled wings beating.

Christophe had hit him pretty hard, and he was unconscious. But he was alive; that was the main thing.

“Back up.” I was amazed at how steady I sounded. “Both of you. Back up.”

Christophe’s lips peeled back from his teeth. His fangs were out, and even though boy djamphir fangs aren’t as big as full-blown nosferat’s, they still mean business. Even with his face twisted up and those pearly-sharp gleaming canines out, he didn’t look ugly. No, he still looked beautiful. The way a tiger or a cobra looks beautiful—deadly, complex, and dangerous all at once. “Let me go,” he whispered fiercely. “August. Let go of me, or I will kill you.”

I shook my head before August could reply. “No way, no day, Christophe. Augie, you just keep hold of him. I’ll shoot you both, I swear to God I will.”

Christophe twitched; Augustine tightened up on him. They both stared at me. Christophe was breathing raggedly, his ribs flaring. Spots of ugly flush stood out high on his flour-pale cheeks.

He looked pretty uncomfortable. I was having trouble caring.

The hiss-growl in Christophe’s chest petered out. When he spoke, it was level and cold. “He is Broken, Dru.” He twitched again; August hauled him back. “Sergej is looking through his eyes—”

“Then we’ll take him along and un-Break him.” I swallowed hard, only tasted bitterness and the peculiar I’ve-slept-long-enough-to-have-bad-breath that tells you it’s early or late enough for no sane person to be awake and moving around. “I did it for Ash. I can do it for Graves.” It was pure bravado—I didn’t even know how I’d brought Ash back, but I was so not going to let Christophe do whatever it looked like he was fixing to do to my Goth Boy.

Don’t you point that gun if you ain’t prepared to shoot, Dru. Dad’s voice, steady inside my head, the first time he took me out to plink at cans with a .22 rifle.

Sweat stood out on August’s pale skin. “He’s not completely Broken. He’s fighting Sergej. And nasze ksizniczki will not thank you if you harm him. We have restraints. We’ll take him along. Put the gun down like a good girl, Dru. Longer we spend here, worse it gets.”

I shook my head. Curls fell in my face, but the gun was steady. An owl’s soft passionless call echoed in my head for a brief moment, and feathers touched my face and wrists. My aspect trembled over me like oil heated in a griddle, just before it starts smoking. Think fast, Dru. “You two are going to back up. You’re going to wait in the hall. I’ll get dressed and get us packed. Ash’ll help me. Then we’ll—”

“No.” Flat and final, from Christophe. “Let go of me, Dobrowski.”

I piped up in a hurry, just in case August decided to do as he said. “You are so not giving any orders right now, Chris. You’re gonna wait in the hall. I’m not letting you do anything to Graves.” Not if I can help it. And right now I’m the one with the gun.

But am I really going to shoot him?

I didn’t want to find out. Still, the longer I stood there, the more sure I was that if August let go of Christophe, things were going to get hell-in-a-handbasket in a helluva hurry.

Ash peeked up over the edge of the bed. “Bad,” he said softly. “Bad now.”

Well, at least he wasn’t trying to tell me what to do. “You just stay right where you are,” I told him. If he decided to go crazy, we were looking at a Situation. I gave Christophe my best level stare—Dad’s level staredown before the throwin’ down. I searched for something to say, settled on the absolute truth. “I am not going to let you hurt him.”

Christophe struggled once more, but August choked up on the chickenwing and held him. Just barely, though. Augie kept sweating, great beads of water standing out on his skin, but Christophe looked all too ready to keep going until he was free to tango.

And I didn’t want to shoot him. I didn’t.

But for Graves, I would. Certainty settled under my skin, and I hoped it showed on my face. I wanted Christophe to believe me and settle down.

Maybe it was Mom’s voice that came out of me next, I don’t know. Maybe I just decided to try another tack. Maybe the touch plucked it out of the air and laid it in my brain.

“Christophe. Please.” Very soft, very reasonable. Not even caring if I was begging. “Help me. If you care about me at all, help me.”

I stared into his mad, cold blue eyes, searching for the Christophe I knew. The one who held a knife to his own chest in a dilapidated old boathouse, his fingers scorch-hot against mine, and told me not to hesitate if I really thought he was a threat. The one who had leapt into a burning Schola for me and fought off the nosferat afterward in the bloodfog. The one who had been there, in one way or another, saving me in the nick of time over and over again. The Christophe who settled on my bed at the Schola Prima and talked to me for hours, who held me while I cried, who told me just to give him a chance. The djamphir who was completely scary and utterly maddening but was still—and here it was—the one person I always believed would come for me, no matter what.

I’ve been left behind like luggage so many times in my life, never really knowing if someone would return and collect me. I don’t know quite when it happened, but that part of me always left wondering had decided that Christophe would. I could rely on him.

I stared at him, and willed him to prove me right.

Tension leaked out of him. He blinked, twice. The skinned-back grimace eased. His breathing evened out. He coughed, once, as if something was stuck in his throat. Finally, a husky rasp of a sigh slid out of him. “Very well.”

I glanced up at August, who was looking at me like I’d grown another head. I nodded, but I kept the shotgun tight against my shoulder and my finger on the trigger. Accidents happen when you keep pressure on the trigger, yeah—but Christophe was fast, and I needed every split-second edge I could get on him.

August’s hold on him eased. Ash shifted slightly, making a little whistling sound as the crackle of the change touched him and retreated. Christophe straightened, tipped his head back, swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He rolled his shoulders back in their sockets precisely once, then his chin came down.

I braced myself for whatever he’d do next.

For a moment he just stood there and looked at me. When he spoke, it was with chill certainty. “Dobrowski. Fetch restraints, and whatever wulfen you have. Have Hiro clear an exit for us. I presume we have an extraction point?” He didn’t look away, and I could have sobbed with relief. Because he sounded like Dad, when Dad decided a situation had gone critical and the only thing left was to move as fast as we could.

“Ready and waiting.” August sounded as relieved as I felt.

“Go.”

Augustine backed up, avoiding the malaika in the floor with a djamphir’s eerie grace. He gave me a Significant Look, but whatever it meant was lost on me. I kept the gun pointed and steady. The door opened and closed, and he was gone.

The shaking began in my legs. I denied it.

Christophe’s hands hung loose and easy. “Ash. The loup-garou. Stand guard.”

“Do what he says,” I added. Probably unnecessarily, but better safe than sorry. I’m trusting you, Christophe. Come on. Please.

Ash scuffed against the carpet. He slunk over and crouched next to me, facing Graves’s unconscious body. I stepped forward, rolling through so I was balanced all through the motion, covering the angle.

Christophe took a step, too. Toward me. The shaking was all through me now, but the gun was steady. I was only shaking inside, where nobody could see.

Where I was flying apart, and someone new was rising through the pieces of the girl I thought I was.

Silence settled around us. My cheeks were flaming hot now. My mother’s locket warmed against my chest, but only faintly.

Christophe slowly, deliberately, took another step. His boots crushed the carpet, eerily soundless.

I couldn’t move.

“Tell me.” Another step, just as slow as the first. “If the loup-garou had me at his mercy, would you do the same for me?”

Well, first of all, I really doubt Graves would try to outright kill you. But there was no way I was going to say that out loud. The wooden grain of the stock was smooth and warm against my cheek. “Do you even have to ask?”

“I do.” Another step. He was so close, and if my finger slipped on the trigger . . .

“Yes.” What else could I say? “Yes. I would.”

He reached up, very slowly. I locked my fingers outside the trigger guard, let him pry the shotgun away from me. He lowered it, pointing the business end very carefully at the floor, and what he did next surprised me.

His free hand touched my shoulder. Slid under my hair, curled over the back of my neck. He pulled me forward, and I went gladly. The shaking turned outward, and when I laid my cheek against his sweater, he sighed, hard. His breath touched my hair, because he’d lowered his chin and was breathing on me.

“Dru,” he whispered. “Dru.”

I didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t. I shut my eyes and leaned into him, for just a few moments. Clinging to him, but I suppose it was okay. He was clinging to me too.

And right then, it was enough.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Less than ten minutes later, we were packed up and the room’s phone shrilled again. Christophe scooped it up before it got halfway through the first ring, held it to his ear. His face didn’t change.

Graves was still out cold, curled up next to the window. Ash rocked back and forth slightly, watching him.

Christophe laid the phone down gently. “They’ll bring him. We need to go.”

“I’m not—” I began, but he brushed past me and was suddenly at the door. The locks chucked aside and it opened, and a familiar pair of cat-tilted blue eyes peered past him.

Nathalie barely paused, barging straight in. Her sleek dark head bobbed, her blue eyes were spangled with little bits of yellow wulfen glow, and I braced myself for anger or worse—disappointment.

After all, I’d been a raving bitch to her the last time she’d seen me.

She threw her arms around me, and her odd musky perfume wrapped around me too. As usual, she looked impeccable, from the royal-blue scarf twisted around her neck to her long dangling key-shaped earrings, her jeans torn just right and her espadrilles fashionably frayed.

“Nat!” I almost got a mouthful of her hair. “I’m so sor—”

“You moron!” She hugged me so tight I could feel a wulfen’s strength in her. My bones creaked. “You’re an idiot! I would’ve come with you! Don’t ever do that again!” She eased up enough to hold me at arm’s length and shake me, three times, precisely, then grabbed me again and hugged me so hard the air whoofed out of me. “Moron! Dumbass! Jesus, Dru!”

“Skyrunner.” Christophe sounded grimly amused. “A little quieter, if you please.”

More familiar faces. Shanks slid by Christophe, his lean face set and his legs looking longer than ever. He pushed at the emo-boy swoop of dark hair over his forehead and glanced at me, then at the window, where Ash still crouched. “Sheeeee-yit,” he drawled.

“Is that Graves?” Blond, anxious Dibs crowded past him. “Is he hurt? I’ve got the restraints. What happened?”

“He’s Broken.” Christophe swept the door mostly closed. “Get him prepped for travel and be cautious. Milady Dru won’t leave here without him.”

Damn right I won’t. “Oh my God—” I almost got another mouthful of Nat’s hair. She was holding on for dear life. “Jesus, guys, it’s good to see you.”

“Hey, Dru.” Dibs shuffled past, carefully not looking at me. Clashing, jangling silver dripped from his hands, but I was too busy hugging Nat to really see what he carried. “We were worried. Bobby almost had a heart attack.”

“Not me.” Shanks hopped up on the bed I’d been sleeping in, folding down into an easy crouch. “Benjamin, though, he looked about ready to have kittens. You went right out the damn window and vanished, Dru. Congrats on never being boring.”

Which was as close as he’d ever get to telling me he was happy to see me.

Nat sniffed and let up on me, patting at her cheeks. “Crap. Now my eyeliner’s probably ruined. We were worried, Dru. Don’t ever pull a boner stunt like that again, you hear me?”

So she wasn’t mad. Thank God. The terrible knot inside my chest eased slightly. “I’m so sorry—”

“Can we move it along here?” Christophe’s tone could have sliced solid granite. “This is an emergency.”

Dibs crouched next to Graves. The silver turned out to be thread-thin glittering restraints, and I swallowed a sick feeling as he quickly, efficiently had Goth Boy trussed up like a Christmas goose. “These work on wulfen.” Dibs ducked his head, talking to the floor. “Should work on him, too. Unless he convinces someone to take them off.”

“Which is why Nat and me’re here.” Shanks cocked his head. “Dru, what the hell happened?”

“He saved my life.” It was suddenly important to get that out first. “Came back with a gun while I was fighting off S-S-Serg—” I couldn’t finish the name. “Him. While I was fighting him off.”

“Come, children, let’s move.” Christophe had the shotgun, the two malaika hilts poking up over his shoulders. Nat was already buckling me into my own malaika-harness, and I caught sight of a familiar shoulder holster peeping out from under her blue linen jacket. Shanks scooped up the two duffel bags of gear and clothes, Nat’s quick efficient fingers gave a yank at the strap of my messenger bag to make it lay right, and she gave me a little shove toward the door.

“Dibs’ll handle the loup-garou,” she said. “Come on, you go right after Reynard. Hey, you know, he’s cute.”

“What?”

“Graves.” She fell into step behind me. “He’s cute. You didn’t mention that.”

“For Christ’s sake, Nat, he’s unconscious.” Something bitter crawled up into my throat. Was it . . . yeah, maybe a little. It was jealousy. I mean, Nat was so pretty.

Jeez. So not the time to be worrying about this, Dru.

Christophe checked the hall. “Stay close, milna.”

“No worries about that.” I wished for a gun, but if we ran across vampires the malaika were the better bet. Plus the fact that I was toxic now. That would help.

But Sergej had gotten close enough to Anna to get his fangs in. She was svetocha too. He got close enough to my mother to kill her, despite her toxicity to suckers. Still, I’d tangoed with the king of the vampires a couple of times now and came out ahead.

That doesn’t mean your chances are good next time. Don’t get cocky.

The hall was eerily silent, directionless lighting and a leggy expensive table with a flower arrangement down at the end. I wondered if anyone in the rooms around us had called down to the front desk because of the ruckus.

I glanced back over my shoulder. Shanks hefted the duffels easily, and blond little Dibs had Graves’s lanky form over his shoulder. Wulfen are way stronger than human beings, but it was still thought-provoking to see slim Dibs carrying Goth Boy like it was no big deal. Just a bulky package. Ash followed, padding silently in Dibs’s wake, his eyes still fixed on Graves.

Christophe headed away from the elevators, toward the service stairs. His shoulders were set, and the aspect flickered over him in deep swells like ocean waves.

“Christophe?” I whispered.

He tilted his head slightly, letting me know he was listening.

“Shouldn’t we wait for August?”

“He’ll be around. Quiet, kochana, let me work.”

Well, all right. Just because I wouldn’t see Augie didn’t mean he wasn’t around. Got it. Felt like an idiot. Great.

The stairs were like every other set of industrial stairs all over—concrete, layers of chipped yellow paint on the handrails, every sound magnified. The touch shifted uneasily inside my head, but whether it was everyone’s uneasiness, or the nervous adrenaline rabbiting under my heartbeat, or actual danger, I couldn’t tell. There was too much static. It was as if all the filters that had been on the touch before had been stripped away, and I couldn’t get a clear signal.

Was that why I hadn’t sensed the vampires before? I wished Gran was alive to tell me. Except she’d probably be pissed as hell about her house burning down, and . . .

My mother’s locket cooled, metal suddenly icy against my chest. I stopped dead on the stairs, head cocked. What was that?

A faint scratching, claws against concrete. But stealthy; they didn’t want to be heard.

Christophe had halted, too. His head was tilted, probably at the same angle mine was.

“Did you hear that?” Nat, whispering. There was a sound—she’d drawn her Sig Sauer.

Christophe muttered something, but so softly even I couldn’t hear him. Then, “Up. Go up. Robert?”

“Shit,” Shanks breathed. “You’re kidding.” But he turned sharply, pushed against Dibs. “You okay, Dibsie?” Ash hopped back two steps, staring.

“He’s too thin.” Dibs was careful not to bang Graves’s hanging head on the yellow-painted handrail; Ash somehow slid aside so he was behind Dibs. “I could carry him all day.”

“Don’t say that,” Nat chided, around a half-swallowed laugh. “Come on, boys. Less talk, more move.”

“Ash?” I whispered.

“Bad,” Ash whispered back.

Christophe almost ran into me. “Dru.” A fierce hot whisper in my ear. I was trying to focus past the sound of their movements. There was another sound—skitterings, and feather-brushings, and tiny little tapping. “We must move. Now.”

“I hear it,” I whispered back. “What—”

“Maharaj, most likely.” He pushed against me; the contact made my legs work again. He was always herding me around. “Don’t worry. I won’t let them near you.”

Gee, that’s comforting. I opened my mouth to whisper something, God alone knows what, because just then the lights died. The blackness was a wet towel against my eyes, and the scraping little slithers crested like a wave, a few floors down.

“Move!” Christophe whisper-yelled, and I grabbed for the railing. Judged where Nat was by the soundless warmth in front of me, matched her step for step. Christophe managed to be right behind me without tripping me, and when his hand touched my back, I didn’t jump. Flat-palmed, his fingertips just below my bra strap, the warmth from it flushed all through me and made my cheeks burn. He didn’t push, just kept his hand there, and I wondered how he was hanging onto the shotgun and negotiating the stairs at the same time with one hand off the rail, and—

The whispering slithers drew closer. Ash and Dibs both made small sounds, and I knew without being able to see that Shanks had transferred the duffels to one hand and moved up to help Dibs. A door banged open and suddenly it was just me and Nat and Christophe.

“Graves—” I didn’t have enough breath to yell.

“They’ll take care of him!” Nat tossed over her shoulder. “Move!”

Christophe was now swearing. At least that’s what it sounded like, a steady stream of filthy-sounding words in a foreign language. A chill moved along my skin, and I tasted that faint maddening ghost of citrus.

Vampires. Or just something big and dangerous.

Go figure—all I had to do was get scared enough running up a dark staircase and the touch came through loud, if not clear. Why was the danger candy failing me? Because I’d bloomed.

Great.

My sneakered feet slapped the concrete, and I gave up trying to be quiet. It didn’t matter now. Still, it was hushed, and I realized there had been no slice of light through a door when Dibs and Shanks peeled off.

Where are they taking him? Oh, God, take care of him, please. I know I’ve been sucking at the praying lately, but please, dear God, please—

“Next floor!” Christophe sounded only faintly out of breath. How fast were we going, anyway?

“Got it,” Nat barked back, and the tiptapping scraping behind us became a rumble. The handrail vibrated under my skating fingertips; Christophe pushed and I found a fresh burst of speed. We clambered around a tight turn, then Christophe shoved me across the landing, Nat hit the door like a bomb, and we burst out into dimness that seemed scorch–bright after the absolute black of the stairs. Emergency lighting glowed, and Nat skipped aside, gun up and braced, pointed behind us. Christophe shoved me again, so hard I almost lost my footing, and whirled. He tossed something small and gleaming metallic through the door behind us, just before it whomped back closed. A shower of metal from the hydraulic overhead hit the carpet in a patter—Nat had busted it off its hinges.

“Fire in the hole!” Christophe yelled, and tackled me. Nat hit the floor at the same moment, rolling with sweet natural wulfen grace. My head bounced against carpet, all the breath knocked out of me, and there was a massive, grinding explosion.

What the hell? But I knew that sound even as I curled up and clapped my hands over my ears. Grenade.

Jesus. Where had he pulled that out from?

My ears rang, I shook my head. Choking smoke billowed; the door listed on its hinges. Then Nat was pulling me up, Christophe flowing to his feet with djamphir grace, his eyes burning blue in the gloom. He said something I couldn’t hear; I shook my head. My hair had gone all crazy.

My ears cleared all at once with a pop, as if I’d just come up out of the pool. “—fine,” Nat said. “No bleeding. Dru? You okay?”

I coughed, the acrid smoke tearing at my throat. “That was a grenade!”

“Pays to be prepared.” Christophe was actually grinning, a fey smile. “Come, that won’t hold them long. End of the hall, ladies. We’re going to fly.”

I had a sinking sensation he wasn’t kidding. Nat brushed at me, quick swipes like Gran when I’d come home dusty. “You all right? Dizzy?”

I managed to shake my head. “That was a grenade!” I repeated, like an idiot, and Nat grinned. The yellow in her irises glowed too, and I wondered what my own eyes were doing.

Come on, Dru. Do you really want to know?

I found out I didn’t. Nat got me going; we set off for the end of the hall. There was a window there, its curtains moving slightly on a breeze from nowhere. I smelled a sudden mineral tang, right before the sprinklers burst into cold drenching life.

“Oh, shit!” I half-yelped, and Nat laughed.

“This is going to ruin my outfit!” she yelled, and Christophe leveled the shotgun at the window. The door behind us creaked, and I snapped a glance over my shoulder.

Little dried husks of things were shoving themselves through the broken door. Smoke roiled. The things had long scuttling insect legs, hard shiny carapaces, and little red pinprick eyes.

The touch flexed inside my head. The things were a hex all right, but one so delicately built and so massively powered it was leagues beyond anything Gran had ever managed to teach me. I saw the thin blue and red lines holding it together, complex knots cradling threads of force growing like a living thing, self-referential and hungry. Like a virus, or a geometric cancer in the messy fabric of the physical world.

It was beautiful.

Cold water sprayed from the sprinklers, hissing as it met the insects. They swelled in a steaming wave, and the door crumbled. Nat dragged me along, laughing like she was having a great time. The shotgun’s roar was tiny compared to the massive noise of the grenade’s explosion, and the window shivered into a glittering fall of safety glass. The flower arrangement on the table underneath it exploded.

Nat let go of me. She screamed, the change rippling through her, and bulleted forward. She took the window and a good chunk of the wall on either side with her, flying out into the night. I dug in my heels.

Oh, hell no. No way!

Christophe pivoted. He glanced behind me and his face changed. His free hand jerked, and he lobbed another silvery thing underhand. I was trying to slow down, skidding against wet carpeting. But Christophe grabbed me, completing a full 360, and headed for the window. His arm was around me, he grabbed the waistband of my jeans, and I got a good faceful of his apple-pie smell. The blood-hunger woke, every vein in me lighting up like a marquee, and we hit the hole in the wall at warp speed.

Falling, weightless, I expected us to fall a lot longer but the jolt came before I was ready. Christophe took most of it, the aspect snapping over both of us like a stinging rubber band—djamphir can land very lightly, but I wasn’t ready. There was just so much I wasn’t ready for.

A huge grinding noise burst above us. We rolled, Christophe taking most of the momentum, and he might have been screaming. Or I might’ve. I don’t know, because the wall around the window twenty floors above us was a blossom of greasy orange flame. We fetched up against something, hard enough to jolt the breath out of me, and I walloped in a deep lungful of clean night air. The screaming stopped, my ears popped again, and I just lay there for a second.

It was a roof. We hadn’t fallen far—I mean, not far for a djamphir. Still, I could’ve killed us both by not being ready. I stared up at the fireball as it belched up, smoke streaming, and thought, That’s a helluva lot of noise.

Christophe, yelling something. He braced himself, and I realized I was staring over his shoulder because he was flat on top of me. For once, the thought didn’t make me blush. I was too busy looking at the fireball and the plume of black oily smoke.

He levered his weight aside, yelled again. “Are you hurt?”

I couldn’t find my voice. Shook my head, my hair moving against concrete. He grabbed the straps of my malaika harness and pulled me up, I kept staring, goggle-eyed. Fine thin threads of hexing unraveled, seeking hungrily, digging into cracks along the wall like veins. “Jesus,” I finally whispered, my lips shaping the sound, my fangs tingling as they lengthened, delicate little points.

He actually shook me. My head bobbled. “Dru.”

The snap of command pulled my chin down. He looked worried for a half-second before I blinked. The world came back into focus. Nat melted out of the shadows, her sleek hair ruffled and her linen jacket torn. The aspect smoothed down over me, an oil-balm working in through my skin, easing away hurts. Erasing the bruises.

“What?”

“She’s fine,” Nat snapped. “Let’s move.”

But Christophe paused. He still had his shotgun, for crying out loud, but his free right hand smoothed my hair back, tucking curls behind my ears. “All’s well, skowroneczko moja. I won’t let them catch you.”

That’s awful nice. I couldn’t make any words come. I just stared like an idiot. But he seemed okay with that. He touched my forehead, brushing lightly with the pads of his fingertips. Then a trailing down my cheek, very soft, infinitely . . . tender.

Yeah. Like he hadn’t just thrown us both out a window.

“Come now,” he said quietly, under the noise. I heard sirens, the whooping of a fire klaxon, and the rushing suck of flame devouring oxygen through every hole it could find, like a kid sucking on a straw. “We must move quickly.”

I found myself nodding. “No kidding.” I sounded calm and businesslike. It was a surprise, but I was imitating Dad. Had he ever felt this unsteady, this lost?

You’re not lost. Christophe’s right here.

It was more comforting than maybe it should’ve been. I grabbed Christophe’s hand, squeezed hard. His eyebrows came up, but he immediately looked away, scanning the rooftop. “Let’s go.”

And not a moment too soon, because a high chill hateful cry rose in the distance, slicing through all the other noise. It dug into my brain with sharp glass spikes, and I flinched. Nat inhaled sharply, her head upflung, and she actually sniffed.

Testing the air.

“Nosferatu,” she breathed.

Yeah.

Christophe pulled me across the rooftop, my fingers linked in his. His skin was warm, and the touch drank in the fierce calm surrounding him. There was a fire escape and a breath of roasted garlic—the restaurant was around here somewhere. Nat was right behind me, crowding close.

Thank God Graves is out of this, I thought, and then I was too busy to think anymore. There was a fire escape going down into an alley, and as soon as we hit the alley we began to run.

Because another high, nasty whistling screech-cry echoed from far closer—the hotel’s roof, I was guessing. Christophe swore softly, and I put my head down and concentrated on keeping up.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The rest of that run is a patchwork of confusion in my memory. Bolting across streets, into alleys, up fire escapes, rooftops blurring underfoot, Christophe more often than not hauling me along because I wasn’t moving fast enough to suit him. I wasn’t about to complain.

It wasn’t dark, but it wasn’t light either. We stuck to pools of shadow, flitting from cover to cover, streetlights and city glow suddenly enemies instead of friends. The suckers wouldn’t use guns—not likely, Christophe said, but the Maharaj were another proposition. Once someone opened up on us with an assault rifle, and the sound of the bullets chewing into the street behind me still sometimes shows up in my dreams.

Christophe hanging and twisting to kick in a window, Nat blurring between changeform and girlshape as she ran, random reflections of light picking out iron grillwork on a balcony or the pattern of bricks on a restaurant’s facade. The moon, behind low scudding clouds and smiling like a diseased coin. The glow of Christophe’s eyes as he scanned a rooftop, Nat crouching and panting a little while she rested for ten seconds before we were off again, her hair ruffling in the breeze. A car’s headlights throwing our shadows against a graffiti-tangled concrete wall.

“Got any more grenades?” Nat yelled merrily, and Christophe swore in reply, with breathtaking inventiveness. I levered myself up over the roof’s edge like I was muscling out of a swimming pool. My hair fell in my face and the bloodhunger burned all through me. The fangs dug into my lower lip; I had to be careful or I’d bite out a chunk of myself and they’d have a blood trail.

I was so glad, for once, that svetocha only have teensy top fangs; boy djamphir’s are larger and only on the top too. Sucker fangs are top and bottom, and they are serious business. I’d seen pictures of what those teeth could do. The jaw distends like a snake fixing to take down a huge egg, and sometimes they tear flesh to get at the liquid inside.

“Door,” Christophe said, as close to short of breath as I’d ever heard him. Nat’s boot had already thudded onto the metal door’s surface; it crumpled like paper. “Could you be any louder, Skyrunner?”

“I could,” she shot back cheerfully. “Would you like me to? Up. We’re almost there.”

I was glad. My ribs heaved; sweat stood out on my skin. We were just a jump ahead of the nosferat. There were so many of them, no time to take a breath, just the running and Christophe and Nat bantering back and forth like they were at a party or something. I’d heard Dad use that sort of humor before, with other human hunters.

I was too occupied running and not doing anything stupid to contribute. Plus, I couldn’t find anything witty to say.

I mean, oh God oh God we’re all gonna die doesn’t really fit the definition of banter, now does it.

The suckers kept screaming, hunting-cries echoing all over the city. I wondered what normal people were thinking of this, if they’d even hear, if they’d blame it on a neighbor’s television or something. There were sirens everywhere too, and fires. I wasn’t sure how much of it was just big-city warfare that happens on any normal night, and how much was suckers torching places where maybe djamphir or wulfen were fleeing—or trying to buy us some time to escape.

I didn’t know how many of the Order were in the city. Things sounded bad, and the terse questions Christophe threw at Nat when we weren’t scrambling were thought-provoking and terrifying all at once.

Inside, there were more stairs. I actually groaned before I could help myself, and Nat laughed. “Good for your ass!” she barked, and took them two at a time. Christophe’s hand closed around my arm. I didn’t need it—the aspect was still reliably doing its job. I’d been weaker and slower for so long, though, that I was kind of afraid of going all out. I couldn’t pace myself.

“Just a little further.” He’d gained his breath back, even though I could see the sweat drying in his hair. The soot and grime striping him looked like it was placed for maximum effect. “Extraction point’s on the roof. We’ll be safe in ten.”

I found enough breath for a single word. “Okay.” Then I concentrated on not being a hindrance. Our footsteps were in such close tandem they sounded like a single pair.

“Clear of the zone we’ll get a plane; we’ll land in Houston. There’s a Schola there—hot food and a good bed. Protection for you. They’ll have the loup-garou there, under restraint.” Christophe pushed me in front of him. “Keep going.”

I did. Nat sometimes leaned forward, her palms slapping the stairs as she flowed through changeform and back, stretching and leaping so gracefully it was enough to make the heart hurt. She was down to her last clip of ammo; I knew because she’d merrily informed Christophe of the fact three and a half minutes ago.

Up, and up, and up, breath tearing in my lungs and the aspect blurring everything around me. When Nat gathered herself in the middle of the last flight, I barely slowed. She extended in a fluid leap; another metal door crumpled and she rode it down. Leapt free, twisting in midair to land on her boots and skid to a perfectly-controlled stop.

“Ta-da!” she cried, and the helicopter crouching on the rooftop, in absolute defiance of any codes or regulations, whined as its motor started. It looked vaguely military, dull black and huge, and there, in the opening on the side, was a familiar face.

Hiro crouched, his lean caramel-colored face set as it usually was. He half-rose, fluid djamphir grace evident in every line of him, his black hair writhing in spikes as the aspect poured over him like a river. He was on the Council, and he was scary—but he was also the most patient and approachable out of any of them except maybe Bruce. His winged eyebrows rose slightly, and if he was surprised to see us it didn’t show.

His hand shot out, bracing him as he half-stepped down and stretched his other hand toward me.

We were so close.

The glare was sudden and immediate, klieg lights switching on. Nat whirled, snarling, the white light tearing through my dark-adapted eyes. I flung up a hand, and there was a whining roar.

Hiro leapt, a small black shadow. The helicopter made a grinding noise, and the missile hit it squarely.

“Get down!” Christophe shoved me, hard. I fell, losing skin on my palms as I tried to catch myself, skidding across the rough pebbled surface of the rooftop. Then the world turned white and rolled over, lifting up away from me. Every other massive noise that night paled in comparison. A giant warm hand scooped me up and flung me, air suddenly hard as concrete, and I skidded right off the edge of the roof. Somehow my body twisted, saving me without thought, claws dug into the side of the building with a terrific jolt almost breaking my wrists, my shoulders grating with pain. I hung, and it was a good thing, because flames belched over the lip of the roof and my hands let out another agonizing shriek of pain.

The touch swelled, a pipe organ of agony as nosferat shrieks cut through the din like hot knives through soft butter. The aspect was scorching, flowing over me, and my toes scrabbled against the side of the building, seeking purchase. Nothing, they just slipped, my arms tensed. My wrists and shoulders shrieked as I tried to haul myself up, but even with superstrength the angle was wrong. I smelled copper—thin rivulets of heat slid down my arms, soaking into my T-shirt.

Blood. My blood. The hunger woke up, fueling a burst of unhealthy strength. I let out a huuungh of effort, lost but still embarrassing under all the other racket. Managed a couple of inches, but my arms were shaking. My claws were ripping, little bit by bit, out of my fingertips.

Have you ever had your fingernails slowly torn off? It’s not fun.

I tensed again, everything focused on bending my arms. But I was tired, we’d run a long way, and the smell of blood wasn’t just taunting me. It was filling my head with smoky rage, hard to think, and my strength was bleeding away too.

I felt instead of heard the skkkkritch! as my claws slipped, and then I was plummeting like a star, eight stories passing in an eyeblink. Spinning catlike in midair, got my feet under me, and the aspect flexed, snapping like a rubber band over every inch of skin I owned.

Landed hard enough to jolt the breath out of me, but nothing broke. My hands were raw pieces of meatpain; I lifted them both to my mouth and got a faceful of bloodscent. It sent me to my knees on a drift of garbage, and I spun aside instinctively as flaming wreckage began drifting down into the alley.

What the hell? But it was obvious. Someone had blown up the helicopter. With a rocket, no less. Just waiting for us to get there before they opened fire.

Hiro. Christophe. Nat. Oh, God.

Nosferatu hunting-screams rose like bright ribbons in the night. They jabbed through my head, iceglass spikes, and my back hit the brick wall of the alley. It was filthy down here, and the heat and humidity just made it worse. I heard muffled wingbeats, and Gran’s owl filled itself in. It soared down, dodging falling bits of fiery refuse as they cartwheeled silently into the alley. The bird was a charcoal sketch, its feathers just suggestions of paleness. It made a tight circle over me, kept gliding.

Can’t go back up there; they could have other guns to pick everyone off. Think, Dru!

My thinker sputtered like an old engine. Houston. He said Houston. You’re in enemy territory, there’s mad hexers and a bunch of nosferatu roaming around, and you’re bleeding. You’ve just run halfway across the city and anyone who might help you is probably running for their life too right now.

Yep. It was official. I ruined everything, I was a disease. No matter how bad shit got, there was always worse coming down the pike.

I braced myself against the wall. I didn’t have much time—the suckers were going to get here any second to mop up whatever was left. Going up to rescue anyone was impossible, and idiotic too. But Christophe. And Nat . . .

Get the hell away from here. That’s the first step.

I coughed, hard. Cleared my lungs. My hands were moving, flipping up the flap of my messenger bag. The aspect burned against my fingertips, soothing and repairing. I found the switchblade by touch and fished it out. It snicked open, and I suddenly felt much calmer.

This is a test, Dru. You don’t have anyone else to take care of now.

Gran’s owl zoomed away. I bolted for the mouth of the alley, following it and dodging flaming wreckage.

And I vanished into the night.