Defiance Read online

  My fingers came up. I touched it, the skull and crossbones. “I . . . yeah. Thanks.”

  “Shhh!” Anna stopped rocking. “Shut up!”

  Graves flinched. We stared into each other’s eyes, those shadows gathering in the depths of the green, and for that one moment I saw right down to the bottom of him. He talked a good line, and he was really brave.

  But at bottom he was just as terrified as I was.

  Danger candy filled my mouth with thin, rotting, waxen citrus. The taste was oddly attenuated, fading. Feathers brushed my skin, and I heard wingbeats. “Vampires,” I whispered.

  Graves shook his head. He pulled back, his fingers sinking into my arm, and dragged me off the bed. My legs buckled, but he held me up. “Maybe,” he whispered back. “Maybe worse.”

  It was probably a mark of how screwed up my life was that I didn’t ask what could be worse than vampires. I didn’t want to know, so I let him pull me around. My legs trembled. The rest of me wasn’t too steady, either.

  He shoved me back into the corner next to the lamp. Then he turned around, and the cuts across his back made me feel sick all over again. The light was scorching, making my eyes water, which didn’t make sense. It was just a night-light-dim bulb shielded by a thick dusty shade; it shouldn’t have stung me so bad.

  I heard movement now. Stealthy little footsteps, taps, too fast or slow to be human, and something about them told me there was a hallway outside our door. A long one.

  “Shit,” Graves muttered. “Lot of them this time.” He propped me against the wall. “You okay?”

  My legs firmed up. I nodded, brushed hair out of my eyes. Blonde slid through the curls, and they clung to my fingers. What the hell?

  Anna rose slowly, as if her joints were resisting. If she felt anything like I did after Christophe had bit me, I could understand why. And Christophe hadn’t taken more than he absolutely needed, I guess.

  I only borrowed, little bird, I did not take. Remember that.

  I owed him an apology bigtime, but I didn’t want to think about that while I was propped against the wall behind Graves.

  Anna’s eyes glowed blue, her fangs peeping delicately out as she glanced at us. I leaned against the wall, the cold of it scorching through my T-shirt. The wood was slick and freezing, hard like it was glued over concrete and slightly sticky the way paneling in a long-empty room will get. I cast around for anything that might serve as a weapon, but there was nothing except the wrought-iron lamp base. Hitting a vampire with our only source of light didn’t seem like a good idea.

  But there was nothing else. All the other furniture was too heavy to lift, and if there’d been anything else in here, Graves probably would have already picked it up. I reached out, touched the lamp’s long slim length. Yup, it felt like iron.

  Anna’s lip curled. “You’re going to defend her, loup-garou? It’s a lost battle.”

  “You just do your part,” he returned, just as sarcastically. “I’d rather go down fighting.”

  “Wait, we have a plan?” This struck me as need-to-know information. “What’s the plan?”

  “There is no plan. There’s only improvisation.” Anna straightened, and I supposed now was not the time to tell her she sounded a little bit like Christophe. She put her shoulders back, lifted her chin, and turned on her heel to face to door. Swayed a little bit, but settled into a ramrod-stiff posture. She’d looked about ready to fall over before. What was this? “I am svetocha. I do not submit. Not if I can help it.”

  “Oh.” I sounded just as mystified as I felt. But I seconded that part about not submitting.

  “You with me, Dru?” Graves squared his shoulders. I tried not to look at his messed-up back.

  Always. My fingers closed around the lamp stalk. “You better believe it.”

  The footsteps drew closer still, tapping and sliding. That oddly thin wash of danger candy filled my mouth, I considered spitting. It could be a comment on the décor instead of a completely useless gesture, I supposed. I tried breathing deep and swearing internally at my legs to get them to starch up a bit. My bones ached, but all in all I felt better than Anna probably did.

  Nobody had been sucking my blood lately. And yeah, she was a total bitch and had shot me.

  But nobody deserves . . . that. I remembered the dragging weakness and the pain as something was torn out of me by invisible roots, something I wouldn’t hesitate to call my soul, the very core of what made me me. I got the idea Christophe had been as gentle as possible about it.

  Something told me Sergej wouldn’t be. If he could get close enough to me. And he’d already gotten close enough to strangle me into unconsciousness.

  The sounds rushed by outside the door in a tide. Little whispers, tittering laughter, tapping feet, a scraping like diamond claws on a sheet of glass. Pain speared through my head, twisting, and I pulled the touch back in a hurry. I hadn’t even known I was using it, or that it would spread so far. But contracting it like a fist inside my head took effort, and I was sweating and breathing fast, the world wavering in front of my still-smarting eyes.

  “Dru?” Graves, his head half-turned. His eyes were dark now. “You okay?”

  “I . . . I just . . .” The ache was back, spearing into my bones. “I hurt all over.”

  “You’re cresting.” The contempt in Anna’s tone could have dripped out and splashed smoking on the floor. “You have picked the very worst time to bloom. Right now you’re at your most vulnerable, and of the most use to him. Not only can he drain me dry or keep me as a hostage, but he can drain you and possibly become the King in truth. He will walk in sunlight, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

  Great. Blame me for it, sure. “Cresting? Like, the last step before I—”

  “Before you become what everyone around you is waiting so breathlessly for. Fully bloomed and oh-so-ready to please.” She tilted her head, her tangle hair falling in a cascade of red-gold curls. “A nice tractable little svetocha so blinded by Reynard she’ll leave her own friends in the clutches of—”

  “You want to shut your mouth.” Graves, but it was a new tone for him. Flat, terribly adult, and thrumming with a loup-garou’s command-voice. I’d heard him hold a whole room of wulfen back with that voice, but he’d never sounded like this before.

  Like he was two steps away from kicking the shit out of someone, and not caring how bad he hurt them.

  I didn’t blame him, but it was a bad idea right now. I gathered myself. “Let’s not do Sergej’s work for him, okay?”

  As soon as I said it, I knew I’d made a mistake. There’s a reason every hunter I’d ever known wouldn’t ever use a sucker’s name out loud. I’d said it before, usually when he was a safe distance away. But here?

  Bad idea.

  Anna whirled, her blue eyes wide, and a low evil laugh slid through the darkened room. My fingers cramped on the lamp, and he just resolved out of thin air in the darkness.

  He wasn’t so tall, even if he was broad-shouldered. A little shorter than Christophe, but you wouldn’t dare call him small. The ice around him made him seem way bigger. Loose, artistically mussed honey-brown curls fell over his face.

  He looked just the same as he had in the Dakotas, no older than me. Seventeen tops, old enough for a scruffy little beard but still smooth-cheeked. It was the eyes that gave him away, black spreading out from the hourglass-shaped pupils, threading in little vein-lines from lid to lid. It made the whites look filmed with gray, so you could maybe mistake them for cataracts if you didn’t know any better.

  But those pupils could suck you down, leave you gasping for air on the floor while his fangs met in your throat. There was something hiding under the gelid darkness.

  Something old. Something terrible.

  Something hungry.

  Sergej folded his arms. His watch, a huge chunky gold thing, was too horribly tasteless to be anything other than a genuine Rolex. He wore, of all things, a navy-blue Drunken Pixies T-shirt and jeans. And it was
horrible, but now that I was looking for it, I saw how his face worked together, how beautiful he was. That face could have been taken from an old coin displayed in a museum or chipped from a statue found in a grotto somewhere, turned toward the wall because it was too . . . much. Too unreal-gorgeous.

  Like Christophe’s, and unlike.

  It was horrible. Perfect poreless skin with a hint of coppery color, those curls, and those eyes full of cold tar-oil that could make you slit your own wrists if you had to stare into them long enough. The tar would close over your head, and it would be a relief to feel the sting of a blade.

  He just stood there, next to the wall, between two shrouded shapes that could have been couches but instead looked like beasts with their hindquarters raised, ready to spring. My breath plumed in suddenly-frozen air, and steam lifted from Graves’s shoulders in tiny finger curls.

  Sergej examined all of us. When he opened his mouth, his pleasant tenor was even creepier than a horror-movie baritone would’ve been.

  “The sweetest of all are the little birds. Hello again, Lefevre’s child.” He grinned, the spaces between his words just the same as Christophe’s. And faintly, a little bit like Augustine’s when he forgot his half-Brooklyn, half-Bronx Bugs Bunny and got a little tipsy, swearing in gutter Polish while he laughed with my father, bottles clinking against glasses and—

  NO! The touch swelled inside my head, battering aside the pressure of his eyes. The place inside myself where the touch had been ripped loose echoed in a far bigger space than it usually did, a huge stone cathedral instead of the quiet little room where Gran’s spinning wheel sat by the stove.

  I dragged the lamp base toward me, my stiff fingers creaking as the bar actually bent in my grasp. Shadows shifted crazily as the light and the shade both moved, and I swear to God Sergej actually leaned back a little on his heels, his hourglass pupils flaring and shrinking.

  For half a second, he looked surprised. Anna shot me an indecipherable glance, and I knew what she was going to do before she did it. I opened my mouth to yell no, no don’t, but she didn’t listen. She launched herself at Sergej, screaming like a banshee, and Graves shoved me back against the wall.

  Sergej just disappeared. Or, no. He moved so fast he literally blinked through space, one moment standing there, the next turned aside. One slim strong hand flashed out. A sharp high thwap smacked the walls, and Anna flew. She hit the paneling above the bed with a sickening crack and slid down, landed in a tangle of red silk and splayed pale limbs.

  How did I hold him off before? I searched for the heat and balm of the aspect, but it was hard. What a time for it to get even more unreliable.

  She lay slumped there, and I grabbed at Graves’s shoulder, my fingers sinking into bruised flesh. “Don’t. Don’t.”

  Because the growl was rippling out from him in concentric rings of bloodlust, and a crackle ran through him. Loup-garou don’t get hairy, but they do bulk up when they get angry. The bruises glared, and some of the marks on his back broke open. Blood slid down his skin, slipping between the flickers and valleys of muscle definition, and the hunger hit the map of veins inside my body hard, pulling like it intended to rip them free. My fangs slid out, my jaw aching, and that syrup-smell of baking cinnamon rolls drifted up, like those places in the mall that sell big sticky piles of sugar rush. They smell so good, but I can’t even go near them without my teeth aching and my blood sugar crashing in sympathy.

  The aspect blazed free, like all it needed was the bloodhunger to wake it up. I felt it move through me like a storm front on the plains, one you can maybe outrun if you keep the accelerator mashed down and the radio turned up.

  And Sergej backed up. Just a half step, but still. He cocked his head, those curls falling over his forehead and that proud nose wrinkling, and I wondered for a brief second how the hell Christophe’s mother—she had to have been human—had ever not noticed how utterly alien he looked. Especially when he snarled, his lip lifting and the fangs lengthening, upper ones touching his chin and the hiss filling his chest.

  The door creaked. I pulled Graves back, my fingers slipping in blood and sweat and whatever else was coating him. He leaned forward, tense, but didn’t shake me off. The thin tendrils of blood running down his back looked black in the uncertain light, and the lampshade swung as I dragged it. I couldn’t see where the cord ended, and if I yanked it out of the wall, we’d be in here.

  With Sergej.

  In the dark.

  The door swung inward, its hinges giving a squeal that belonged in a bad B movie. Still, it was a relief, because outside in the hall was bright electric light. It speared my eyes like a fork digging through jelly, but I saw a shadow. The touch rang like a gong inside my head, and I knew who it was.

  “You agreed,” Leon said quietly. Funny, he sounded just the same. Sarcastic, politely rude, and utterly normal.

  “Leon?” His name slipped out. I couldn’t help myself. “Leon, please—”

  Sergej’s head half-turned, and he stared at the door. Graves was still growling, and the unhealthy fever in him scorched my fingers. I blinked furiously, swallowing hard against the bloodhunger, its rasp like a cat’s tongue at the back of my throat. The hunger squirmed inside my veins, just looking for a way out, I shoved it down and clapped a lid on it.

  Or at least, tried to clap enough of a lid on it that the thin trickles down Graves’s back didn’t smell so goddamn good.

  Leon stared from the door. Now that my eyes were adjusted, I could see that even if he sounded okay, he looked like hell. Dark circles ringed his eyes, his fine lank hair was mussed, and he was in the same clothes he’d been wearing however long ago, when he’d waltzed into my room and started convincing me to leap into this trap. One sleeve of his T-shirt was torn, and dark stuff was splashed on his jeans.

  It looked like dried blood.

  “Our agreement,” Sergej said, enunciating with precision but lisping a little around his fangs, “was provisional.”

  Leon smiled. It was a rather gentle smile, and it bared his own fangs. He wasn’t looking at Sergej. He was staring directly at me, his eyes grieving holes. They darkened even through the aspect on him, and Graves’s growl dropped another octave as his shoulders hunched in front of me. More blood slid down his back, and I could tell from the shaking in him that he was working up to something big.

  “I delivered, didn’t I?” Leon’s hands curled into fists.

  “Any ephialtes could have done the same,” Sergej hissed.

  “There’s just one problem.” Leon stared at me, like he was willing me to figure something out. My fingers sank into Graves’s skin, the prickle along my fingertips and the fierce pain in my wrists telling me the claws were sliding free. I didn’t want to make him bleed more, but I was powerless to stop it.

  “Problem?” Sergej laughed. It was a horrible sound, wrongly musical, lisping distilled hatred. His tar-black eyes shone. “I see no problem, Leontus Iulius. I see everything as it should be, the disobedient children brought to heel.”

  Keep him talking, for Christ’s sake keep him talking! I ran through everything I could possibly do in this situation, came up with nothing that didn’t involve my own gruesome demise. Tried again.

  “Except Reynard.” Leon’s smile widened a trifle.

  Sergej’s face congested. That’s the only word for it, the twisting up and the color rising from his neck, an ugly flush. I guess vampires can blush; you’d think the way the hemoglobin strips out of their blood would kind of preclude that. Maybe that’s why he looked purplish instead of red.

  It was damn ugly.

  The touch tingled inside my skull. A fresh wave of bloodhunger pulled on all my veins, and my heart gave a funny leap before starting to pound. Sergej’s purple deepened, if that was possible, and he began to choke.

  “Oh, Eleanor,” Leon whispered. “Forgive me.”

  And he leapt straight for me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Things got confused.


  I remember jerking on the lamp, metal shrieking as my fingers bit down hard enough to bend it. The plug left the wall with a pop, sparks showered, and the lightbulb shattered as the sudden motion ripped the shade free. A photographer’s flash, then leaping shadows. The lamp actually whistled as I spun it, a sound like a train in the distance, soupy through the clear plastic goop hardening over the world.

  The heavy, flared base hit Leon squarely in the face with a sickening crunch. I wanted to yell I’m sorry! And maybe I did. Someone was screaming, Graves let out a roar, and Leon pitched across the room in slo-mo, curling up like a bug, his lank hair flying and flashing gold for a moment. That dart of golden light hit the wall, a single clean spot of color in all this murk, and I shoved Graves aside through the hardening air. My fingers slipped against the gunk on his skin, my nails slicing hair-fine cuts across his skin, just like hatpin scratches on Gran’s kitchen table. The lamp base flew off, describing a high perfect are, and Leon’s body hit Sergej right in the middle of his leap with a sound like a good clean break on a pool table. The sucker’s face was still plummy and distorted, a mask of grinning hate, and I was already moving.

  Faster, faster, but with precision! Christophe yelled inside my head. My grasp firmed on the lamp’s post, the electric cord whipping off with a small cracking sound, also drawn out and weird since I was going so fast.

  Graves folded down, tucking and rolling, and Anna was suddenly there, bouncing up off the bed like a jack-in-the-box. She alone seemed to be moving at normal speed; she was heading for Sergej—and right into my line of attack.

  My left hand snapped forward, the hex building and tearing free of my fingers in a blue flash that lit the entire room like a camera, freezing time. It hit her square in the solar plexus, stopping her dead, and the woof! sound she made as she tumbled down to the floor in a heap would have been funny if I hadn’t been so goddamn busy.

  The ground spun away from under me and the lamp flicked down, hitting the floor and striking up more blue sparks as the force of the hex snapped back along my fingers. The bar spun up after giving me additional lift, I could feel the metal flex as I pole-vaulted, and the instinct that had taken me over was clear and cold as the look in Christophe’s eyes sometimes.