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  Reckoning

  ( Strange Angels - 5 )

  Lili St Crow

  The electric finale in New York Times bestselling author Lili St. Crow's Strange Angels series!

  Nobody expected Dru Anderson to survive this long. Not Graves. Not Christophe. Not even Dru. She's battled killer zombies, jealous djamphirs, and bloodthirsty suckers straight out of her worst nightmares. But now that Dru has bloomed into a full-fledged svetocha—rare, beautiful, and toxic to all vampires-the worst is yet to come.

  Because getting out alive is going to cost more than she's ever imagined. And in the end, is survival really worth the sacrifice?

  DRU ANDERSON'S NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK.

  BUT SHE SHOULD BE.

  The Reckoning

  (The fifth book in the Strange Angels series)

  A novel by Lili St. Crow

  For Christa Hickey, true blue.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks again to Mel Sanders, Christa Hickey, Miriam Kriss, and Jessica Rothenberg. Special mention must go to Lea Day, Bookweasel and Research Helper extraordinaire as well as Hutch and Bogna. (Any errors are mine alone.) Last but not least: You, dear Reader. Let me, once again, thank you in the way we both like best.

  Let me tell you a story. . .

  People like us don’t give up.

  —Sixten Zeiss

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stealing a car was easy. The hard part was putting up with the whining.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Graves muttered for the fiftieth time. I kept the speed steady, an even fifty-five. It was an older red Subaru sedan, and I’d checked for insurance papers before we’d taken it. Someone would be inconvenienced, but not completely out of luck.

  When you’re running from the king of the vampires, you can’t afford to be too choosy. But I was glad I’d been able to avoid being a complete douche.

  “Well, if you’d like to hike out there on foot, be my guest.” I didn’t reach for the volume knob to drown him out, but it was close. Little Richard wailed softly from the speakers, robbed of all his sass. The all-wheel drive would be nice when we started to hit the hills. “Or if you want to be caught without wheels when the vampires find us.”

  When. Not if. Because they’re going to. After all, I’d stabbed the closest thing they had to a king through the heart and escaped. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that will piss a monster off.

  It was a partly sunny late-spring midafternoon and we were on the freeway. I actually missed the food back at the Schola Prima. At least it had been pretty fresh, and there’d been plenty of it, brought up on a tray each evening as the Schola woke and the djamphir started getting ready for another night of fun and games learning to hunt suckers.

  I would groan at having to get up, blue-eyed Nathalie would laugh, and the night would start with breakfast and a hot shower while she set my mother’s room to rights. And I would secretly feel glad not to be alone.

  Now I just felt empty and nauseated. Plus my head hurt, and even though I was exhausted, I hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a few broken hours. I’d been too busy jerking into wakefulness every time the cheap hotel room creaked, or a car backfired, or the boys’ breathing changed. It didn’t help that the motel’d had paperthin walls, either.

  But options are sometimes limited when you’re running for your life.

  Ash lay curled up in the backseat. He’d been asleep since we hit the city limits, snuggled up like he didn’t have a care in the world. I’d managed to get him mostly cleaned up, but he was still barefoot and greasy-haired. He’d put away even more food than Graves this morning, and that was saying something. We’d spent seventy bucks at a Denny’s off the freeway for breakfast, then stopped at a McDonald’s and loaded up. Cheap food, but both of them needed the calories. A werwulf and a loup-garou would heal up in a matter of hours, but only if they had enough food to fuel the metabolic burn. So both of them chowed down, and they were looking pretty pink by now.

  The greasy paper and wrappings went in an already-full rest-stop trash bin four hours ago, and I hoped we couldn’t be tracked from them.

  Neither Graves nor Ash knew how to drive, so it was all on me. Driving wears on a body, Dad always said. It was why he taught me to spell him as soon as my feet could reach the pedals.

  Silence, broken only by Little Richard going to town like he wanted to reach through the speakers and shake me for keeping him turned down. My hands ached, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel.

  “I didn’t mean that.” Graves hunched in the passenger seat, as far away from me as he could possibly get. He was pale under his half-Asian coloring. The dark brown roots of his hair showed as he ran a hand back through it, wincing as he hit tangles. “I just meant, shit. I can’t believe I’m out.”

  I can’t believe you got kidnapped in the first place. I sighed, easing off the gas to drift behind a red semi creeping in the right-hand lane. Big fluffy white clouds sailed across the sky, but the spring sunshine was enough to make it hot under the dome of the car. My window was half-open, and the roar of the slipstream sent me bullets of concentrated scent. Fresh-cut grass, car exhaust, blossoming things, tree pollen—you name it, I smelled it.

  It was distracting. Especially with the car full of the reek of wulf and loup-garou, neither of them too fresh and one of them, at least, nervous as hell. Next hotel we used would have to have a decent shower. I reeked of nosferat, fear, and cinnamon buns, not to mention old dried rusty blood.

  The fear and the blood, well, I could deal with that. But the spice scent was just a reminder of how much things had changed. I’d changed. I’d finally “bloomed” and become toxic to suckers.

  Not that anyone was noticing.

  I rolled my window down a little more. Suddenly remembered something. “You need smokes?”

  “Nah. Not yet.” Graves stared out his window, running his coppery fingers over the armrest like he was searching for a way out. “Come on, Dru. We can talk about it, right?”

  Talk about what? Where would I even begin? Hey, dude, sorry I didn’t come rescue you sooner. Sorry you got bit by the boy in the backseat when he was still a slavering wulfen broken to Sergej’s will and trying to kill me, back in the Dakotas when you were living in a mall and I had to shoot my dad because he was a zombie. Sorry I dragged you into this. Sorry I didn’t tell you what had happened in the gym with the Queen Bitch of the Schola; maybe if I had you might not have run off and got kidnapped. Oh, and while you were being tortured, I was kissing the guy who hates you most.

  Yeah. Where to begin?

  And I totally felt like an idiot for hoping he’d notice that I’d bloomed. I looked different now. Wider in the hips and a little bigger in the chest, and my face was heart–shaped like my mother’s instead of long like my father’s. My hair had streaked itself with blonde like I’d gotten a salon highlighting job, sleek curls instead of frizz—and the shape of my mouth had changed too.

  Seeing a stranger’s face in a mirror is like vanishing. For a moment you’re not sure who or what or where you really are. Maybe Graves just didn’t notice.

  How could you not notice, though? And if he did, he could’ve said something. Even hey, gee, nice hair.

  But me expecting him to pay attention to a little thing like that right after he’d escaped a hole where he was being tortured by vampires wasn’t exactly fair, was it.

  Yeah. Fair. Nothing about this is fair.

  No. There really wasn’t anything to talk about right now. Nothing I felt like saying, or things I felt like saying that wouldn’t be kosher.

  So I settled for prevarication. “I dunno.” I checked my blind spot, hit the blinker, and gave it some gas. We slid by the limping candyred semi like we were on rails
. The sun came out for a moment just as we crested a hill, and the scenery was breathtaking. Pleated green hills rolled away, Pennsylvania opening up with late-spring color. It was probably gorgeous around here in the fall, too. I eased the accelerator down another tick.

  Unfortunately, there was also a highway patrolman in front of the semi. We breezed by him; I swung back into the right lane and kept an eye on the rearview. Don’t act nervous. Not any more nervous than anyone else around a cop. You’ve got ID; you memorized the address on the paperwork. The touch throbbed inside my head, bruised and overworked, echoing like it was in a cathedral instead of a bedroom. The little tickle that warned me of danger was working overtime, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I was exhausted and hungry no matter how much fast food I took down, because I’d bloomed, or because we’d fought off Sergej and were still alive.

  The world just seemed so much bigger today. And to top it all off, my jeans weren’t fitting right. Because the shape of my hips had changed. If I crouched down, I’d have a plumber’s crack, dammit. I hoped my T-shirt was long enough to cover it until I could figure out what size I was now.

  My right hand played with my mother’s silver locket, picking it up and dropping it against my breastbone. The metal was only skinwarm. Not throbbing with heat or icy cold, thank God. Not warning me.

  Graves shifted restlessly. “Cop.” Oddly breathless. “If he—”

  “He’s not gonna.” I tried to sound sure. “We’re a touch under the speed limit; he’s got no reason to run our plate; we probably haven’t even been reported yet. Chillax.”

  “I can’t believe this.” He moved again, and I wanted to tell him to sit still. He was broadcasting “guilty” and “nervous.”

  But we pulled away from the fuzz; they weren’t interested in us. The patrolman seemed to be pacing the semi for some reason, and I forgot him as soon as he dropped out of sight behind us on the highway’s curves.

  I checked our gas. We had a full tank and no reason to stop until it was time to stuff more calories into the boys. Graves looked fine, if dark-eyed and a bit gaunt—the welts and cuts and bruises had vanished once he’d gotten some sleep. Ash, of course, was dead white, greasy-haired, barefoot, and completely feral. It was like having Tarzan on a leash. Between the two of them and my own dishevelment, we were going to cause comment unless I stuck to the bigger towns for stopping today. “We’ll stop in a few hours for clothes and more food. If you can hold out that long.”

  Another shrug. “Little hungry. But still. We need distance, right? And you know where we’re going.”

  “I do.” Of all the places I knew, this was the one I’d held like a secret, just in case. “Somewhere safe.” Nobody will think to look for us there. And if they do, it’s home ground. Gran’s folk could fight a guerrilla war up there. Done it before.

  That wasn’t comforting. We had no supplies to fight with yet. And digging in your heels against the damnyankees wasn’t like fighting off suckers. Nosferatu were an entirely different ball of wax.

  Just maybe I could figure out a better plan once I got there and could think. Right now I was running on nerves, a latte from McDonald’s, and a steady lump of odd warmth right behind my breastbone that made me sick to even think about because of what it contained.

  Blood. Anna’s blood.

  My lips, smashed against Anna’s cold neck, opened, and the fangs slipped free.

  I tried to rip myself away. Her fingers closed on my nape, iron hard. “God damn you,” she whispered. “Drink. Drink so you can save them.”

  I wasn’t listening. It was like someone holding a kitten’s nose in a dish of milk. A hungry kitten.

  No. Not hungry.

  A thirsty kitten.

  My fangs slid into her skin so easily, and a gush of hot perfume filled my mouth. Anna was saying something, whispering in some foreign language, and the touch turned it into words inside my head.

  “Hate you,” she was saying. “Hate you, Reynard, and you deserve it . . .”

  Her whispering in my head had gone down, but I could feel it—something in me had been pulled around. Twisted, or just turned, torn open and strained. Either Anna’s blood or the blooming had done it, and if I moved the wrong way I might sprain myself.

  “You care to share, or you want to keep me in suspense?” A sarcastic bite to the words. So Goth Boy was feeling better.

  Hurrah.

  I grabbed my temper with both hands. Gran would’ve been proud of me. “We’re heading to the hills. Once we’re there, I’ll figure out what to do next. When I’ve got a plan, you’ll be the first one to know.”

  “The hills? Like, banjos and toothless dudes? Yeah. We’ll blend there.”

  I almost snapped. “What’s your idea, Goth Boy? Whatever it is, it better be good and it better involve money. My stash isn’t going to last forever, and getting more isn’t a huge trick, but it takes planning. I know what I’m doing, I’ve done this before, stop riding me!”

  I didn’t realize how sharp my tone was until Ash’s head poked up in back. He stared at me, warily, little orange sparks threading through his irises. I let out a long sharp breath.

  Calming down was not going so well.

  “Sorry.” I continued. My voice was very small. “Go back to sleep, Ash. I’m just tired.”

  Ash tilted his head and settled back down. I could tell just from the staticky silence that he was awake, and watchful.

  “We could stop and rest.” Graves actually relaxed a little, settling into the seat. “Wish I could drive. I just . . . I wanna help, Dru. I wanna do something.”

  I nodded. My jaw hurt, because I was clenching my teeth. Yeah. I wish you could help me too. There’s no help for this, Graves. I’m all we’ve got right now, and I got to start thinking. But I’m so goddamn tired. I unfroze my jaw. “There’s a map in the glove box. Open it up and find where we are, then I’ll ask questions.”

  I didn’t really need to; I’d planned out our route at the rest stop while Graves took Ash into the little boys’. Now there was something I could be grateful that I didn’t have to do.

  “You got it.” He looked happy to be given a task, the green glow coming back into his eyes, and when he had the map out he dug in the pocket of his long black coat and fished out a pack of Winstons. I glanced at him, my eyebrows raised.

  He actually smiled. It was a thin bitter grimace, but better than nothing. “Swiped ’em from the rest-stop vending machine. You mind?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Goddamn. It’ll be my first since they . . . you know. Can’t wait.” His eyes lit up, and for the first time he actually looked . . . well, like himself. Instead of a thin wounded shadow of the boy I . . . liked? Loved? Didn’t know what the hell to do with?

  Yeah. Graves was full of surprises. I don’t know why I always felt it right under my ribs, high up on the left side, every damn time he pulled one out.

  But my shoulders went down, I took a deep breath, and by the time the cigarette lighter popped out I could actually lighten up on the wheel a bit. My fingers were no longer white-knuckled, and after another ten miles Ash actually started to wheeze-snore a little. I tacked our speed on up to seventy and settled in.

  PART ONE

  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.”