Defiance Read online

  And then I got out of there, feeling Christophe’s eyes on me all the way.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “The blood won’t come out of this.” Nathalie sighed, tilting her sleek dark head to the side. She held the silver dress up with delicate fingers, as if it was made of tissue paper. “We’ll have to go back to Nordy’s.”

  “Not again.” I groaned, dropping down in front of the vanity. A shower and half an hour of t’ai chi in the middle of the room had settled me down, kind of. I didn’t even mind Nat watching, since she very obviously didn’t look at me while I did the familiar movements. “I won’t do it, you can’t make me.”

  “You’d think I was taking you to an execution, not shopping. Jeez.” She grinned over my shoulder, the water-clear mirror holding our reflections. I was flushed and tangled, rangy like my dad, my blue Rolling Stones T-shirt torn but the hole-worn jeans I’d shimmied gratefully into mercifully hidden. Nathalie, on the other hand, looked like she belonged in a catalog. Curvy in all the right places, she wore a set of rosy-pink silk pajamas. You could tell she was werwulfen just by the way she moved and the supple grace of her shoulders as she flicked the dress again, laying it over a straight-backed wooden chair in front of the stripped-pine desk. “Really, Dru.”

  “It’s the same thing,” I muttered.

  She could even make a shoulder holster look like a planned part of her pajama outfit. The coffee-colored leather number carrying a 9mm that she had on today moved as she rolled her shoulders back once, settling them. She ghosted over the pale wooden flooring and picked up a silver-backed hairbrush. This was the part of the night I alternately dreaded and looked forward to most.

  “I can take care of—” I began. But she took a handful of my hair and started brushing, just the last few inches and working up.

  “It’s traditional. Before Anna, each svetocha had an honor guard of wulfen girls, too. Good way for us to get out of the compound, get to see a lot of boys, and you know . . . it’s bound to be lonely, being svetocha. I’m glad we like each other.”

  Yeah, well, the last girl that was around emptied an assault rifle at me. You could just open me up like a soda can. “So Anna changed all that?”

  A shrug. “Slowly but surely, yeah. I think my aunt was around when it happened. She never talks about it.”

  I sighed. Thin blue lines of warding slid over the walls, complex patterned knots over the windows and the door. Refreshed every night, trembling under the screen of the visible, the wards were at least one familiar thing. I never went to bed without redoing the warding, no sir. Gran would be proud.

  The fingers in my hair were soothing, and Nathalie could be trusted.

  Christophe told me so. So did Shanks and Augustine. I suppose I could trust them, right? At least, Christophe hadn’t been wrong yet.

  I just . . . I wasn’t as trusting as I used to be. I guess. Getting betrayed over and over will do that to you. Still, I liked Nat. She had her head screwed on straight, and—this was the important thing—she understood that I was gonna go mad if I stayed cooped up all the time. So she was teaching me how to play another “traditional” game, slipping out during the day and exploring. We’d started with little runs through the Schola grounds and graduated to shopping and sightseeing. With a wulfen around in broad daylight, I was as safe as possible, right?

  And every single time she threw a handful of gravel at my window, inviting me to come out and play, it was easier to trust her a little more.

  The brush slipped through my hair. Nat could take the curling mass and make it look elegant, put together an outfit that looked actually fashionable in seconds, and she was so damn organized she could have given any Marine sergeant a run for their money. And I had to admit, it was nice to have a girl around.

  One who wasn’t trying to kill me, that is. I’ve never had close girlfriends. Why bother, with Dad and me moving so much?

  Christophe had actually argued me into having someone else around. I would not choose one who couldn’t be trusted. You’ll enjoy it. It will help me worry less.

  That was the big argument, trotted out whenever he wanted to mushroom-cloud me into something. I let out another long heave of a sigh and felt the night’s tension slip away from me. It was in the long dead stretch between three and four a.m., quiet time. Just like the shoal between three and six in the afternoon, when everyone in the hot part of the world is taking a siesta.

  The Schola is oddly reversed. Nights were our days, because sunlight is safer to sleep in. My body clock was adjusting slowly. Sixteen and a half years of being diurnal is a hard habit to shake.

  “You have such beautiful hair.” Nathalie lifted a handful of it. “These highlights. My God. You’d look great with a shorter, layered cut . . .”

  I glanced up at the pair of maliaka hanging in a leather harness next to the vanity. They’d been my mother’s, and they were beautiful. I didn’t know where the ones Shanks had handed me had come from. “No way.” Gran would kill me. It was a habitual, instinctive thought. I hadn’t had more than a trim in years. “If it’s short, it ends up in my face all the time. Eating hair is so not cool.”

  She rolled her cat-tilted, beautifully expressive eyes. “That’s what product is for. You kill me, you really kill me. Hey, I think we should paint your nails. Not pink, though. I’m thinking a dark red, because your skin tone—”

  I shivered. “Not red. Besides, I don’t have time.” I glanced at the mirror. Her skin was perfect, poreless, and her sleek dark hair, parted on the side, looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon.

  I, on the other hand, was a mess of reddish-purple bruising, scrapes, tumbled tangled hair, and red spots high on my cheeks as if I had a fever. My eyes were shadowed, darker than their usual blue, as if I was thinking of something serious. And that line between my eyebrows was back. Gran would’ve called it an I-want line.

  I tried to make my face look like I wasn’t Thinking About Unpleasant Things.

  Her nose wrinkled. “You make time for self-care, Mil—ah, Dru. Jeez.” The brush worked through my hair, slipping through the curls as if they always behaved. They did for her. It was like my hair was a traitor. She’d worked all the way up to the roots, and now started on another section.

  I had to admit it was kind of nice. Like Gran brushing before she braided me up at night. Soothing.

  I held up my hand. The pavement had erased skin all the way up my forearm. I was lucky I’d stopped bleeding by the time the boy djamphir showed up to bundle me in an SUV and get me out of the way. I’d been scabbed over good by then, thank God. Once I bloomed, I’d heal like they do—on fast-forward, shaking off damage like a duck’s back sheds rainwater.

  Right now, though, I was stuck with sucky human healing times.

  “Ouch.” Nathalie was all sympathy. “Good thing you’re not going to scar.”

  Christophe has scars. Heat rose in my cheeks again. “Yeah, that’d be a bitch,” I mumbled.

  “It must burn them that the wulfen got there first. I hear the teams who managed to get inside the club were swarmed. Fifteen nosferat. Thank God the one after you was . . .”

  “Young and sloppy?” Fifteen of them? Christ. I shivered. I’d only seen six. “Christophe was too tactful to say it.”

  “It’d be the first time he’s been that.” She grinned. Flash of white teeth. “I heard it was a young one you got, but plenty vicious.”

  “How do you hear these things?” But I knew. Shanks liked her. He got all weird when she was around.

  Her face scrunched up. “The air itself brings me messages.” A low sepulchral moan. “Ooooooo-OOOO-oooh!”

  I snorted, laughing into my cupped hand. She kept brushing my hair, the strokes turning long once she had all the tangles out.

  “Now, a braid in this, and we’ll settle you down. I’ve sent for some hot milk. Just the thing to soothe the nerves.” Soft and pleasant, her fingers slipping through the curls just as the brush did. The brush was an antique. Silver-ba
cked, probably Victorian. I wondered if it had been my mother’s too, like the malaika.

  After dawn there would be a golden flood of sun through the skylights, spilling over the shelves and the mellow glow of the wood floor. The books were hers, and the bed had been hers, too.

  I didn’t mind. Sometimes I would take the books off the shelves and flip through them. Some had notations in the margins, faded schoolgirl’s handwriting in blue ink. They were textbooks and studies of Real World things, and all of them were mine now.

  After so many years of having nothing of Mom’s but a photograph in Dad’s wallet and a Holstein cow cookie jar, it was a little overwhelming. I was missing all Dad’s and my old stuff, but having my mother’s things . . . it was nice, and not so nice, all at the same time. Because it was like with all her things around me, I wasn’t the same girl who had traveled around with Dad. I was someone else. Maybe who I could have been if she hadn’t died.

  If she hadn’t been killed.

  Nathalie’s fingers were quick and deft. She had the whole mess braided in a minute and a half, and her braids didn’t come out the way mine did. No, when she did it, it stayed. Just one of her many talents. I could almost hate her for it, if she wasn’t so cool otherwise.

  There was a knock at the door. Nathalie let the braid fall. On the way across the room she drew her nice little baby Glock, keeping it low and ready. She sniffed, too, audibly, as she glided on soft bare feet.

  Even when she opened the door, her shoulders didn’t relax.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Room service,” Christophe said pleasantly. “You take good care of her, Skyrunner.”

  “It’s what I’m here for.” Nathalie slid the gun back in its holster and took the tray. “Do you seek admittance to the lady’s presence, Reynard?”

  “Do I dare?” He grinned, rueful, and I touched the vanity’s painted surface. Ran my fingers over the heavy silver comb, the wooden box holding tissues. It felt like sacrilege to set any of my stuff on here. “If the lady is so disposed, mademoiselle.”

  “That’s right, you mind your manners.” Nathalie turned smartly on her heel and marched away. “Lock the door, will you? Here, Dru. Your hot milk. And look, sugar cookies. The kitchen thinks you deserve a treat.”

  “Sugar cookies?” That perked me right up. Milk and cookies, like I was five years old again. I didn’t mind, tonight. It was actually . . . soothing. To think I was safe here, finally. At last.

  “I think chocolate chip might’ve been a better choice, but the kitchen apparently had other ideas.” Nat grinned, a flash of white teeth.

  “I’m not even going to ask who does the cooking.” I always wondered, though. What was behind that mask of billowing steam that hid the kitchen’s interior?

  “You don’t want to know.” Christophe slid the door shut. “The Broken is bedded down for the night. He’s amazingly amenable. All Robert has to do is invoke your name, and he follows like a lamb.”

  Shanks had been slowly getting to know Ash, and they seemed to get along. Kind of. Dibs still refused to go anywhere near Ash if he wasn’t wounded, and a lot of the other wulfen seemed to feel pretty much the same way.

  Everyone was waiting for him to go mad and start killing people. Or run back to Sergej.

  Nathalie actually shivered. The vanity had plenty of room, so she slid the tray onto it, bumping aside the brush and comb and silver-backed mirror. “Jesus.”

  “Quite.” But Christophe was looking at me in the mirror. “How are you?”

  I shrugged. It was like he just forgot about Nathalie standing there when he looked at me. I can’t explain it, but if you’ve ever had it happen to you, you know. It’s like someone is trying to look under your skin, like you’re all alone with them no matter who else is in the room.

  Like they’re seeing nobody but you, even in a crowd.

  I reached for the embossed teapot on the tray, but Nathalie got there first. She poured, taking a long deep surreptitious sniff.

  Because wulfen can smell poison. Most of the time.

  I rolled my eyes. There were three little porcelain cups on the tray, but I could bet Christophe wouldn’t be taking a little warm milk.

  He surprised me, though, by leaning over my shoulder to snatch a cookie. The draft of his apple pie smell was actually soothing. If he was here, nothing could get to me. “No weeping. If you’ve thrown up, you’ve done it privately. You’re a little pale, and you smell of old blood and resignation instead of fresh spill and fear. All in all, you’re taking this quite well.”

  Is that a compliment? What do I say? “Gee, thanks”? I picked up a cookie. Perfectly round, perfectly golden, perfectly browned on the bottom. It was kind of nice to bite into it and destroy the perfection. No shortening in these; I could taste real butter and crunch the sugar crystals. “Yeah.” My stomach tried to close up, but now I was damned if I would let anyone know I felt like heaving. “I guess.”

  “Jesus, Reynard, how gruesome can you get?” Nathalie made little shooing motions with both cups. “Go away. Go sit over there and let her have a cup of milk.”

  That was another reason to like her. Christophe wasn’t so intense when she was around. She was a layer of insulation, and she ordered him around with such cocky self-assurance I kind of envied her.

  Christophe grinned, movie-worthy teeth glinting, and ruffled his fingers across the top of my head before grabbing another cookie and retreating to the bed. Where he dropped down, as if the whole place belonged to him, and proceeded to keep watching me.

  I rolled my eyes. Nathalie fussed over me until I ate a few cookies and drank off enough milk to satisfy her. She roamed around unnecessarily putting the room to rights while I sat and ran my fingers over the vanity’s edge, and when she came back to collect the tray I tried not to look relieved.

  Sometimes when she pampered me I felt even more like I didn’t belong here. Like someone was going to come in and tell me there had been a mistake and would I please leave now? And I’d find myself on the street outside the Schola, or sitting in that food court in the mall back in the Dakotas, shivering and trying to think of what to do next.

  “I’ll be back at five sharp this evening.” She cast a significant glance at Christophe, winked at me. “Behave yourself.”

  He waved languidly. Nathalie retreated, the silver dress over her arm and the heavy tray balanced on one spread hand as if it was made of paper. I finished off the last cookie and moved the brush and comb around.

  Nat swept the door closed. Christophe slid off the bed and padded across hardwood. He threw the locks, stood for a moment, and nodded. Didn’t put the heavy iron bar in its brackets, though, just retreated to the bed and sank down again with a slight but very satisfied sigh.

  I gathered myself up, as Gran would have said. Come on. Ask. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore. “So has anyone found—”

  He beat me to the punch. “If I had any news about the loup-garou’s whereabouts, Dru, I would have given it to you immediately. We’re still looking.”

  “You wouldn’t think the king of the vampires would be that hard to find.” It was bad-tempered of me, I knew it. I just couldn’t stop myself. “If Ash could find me, he could find Graves—”

  “You seem to be the only person Ash is interested in finding.” He didn’t visibly hold on to his temper, but it was close. “America is a big place; he could have your friend hidden in Canada or Mexico, for all we know. Or even further afield. It’s not beyond his power, and we don’t even know that he would keep the loup-garou with him. We’re looking. Finding Anna is challenge enough, but once we find her, we’ll have more of an idea where your friend is likely to be.” He let the sentence die. It was the same thing, said the same way almost every night.

  I’d already tried tracking with a map of the US and a pendulum. Even with Graves’s coat—I’d mended the rips and tears in it, sewn up the torn-loose sleeve—spread out under the map, it was no good. There was static interference, the to
uch just echoing inside my head and the pendulum moving erratically instead of swinging out and locking onto his heartbeat.

  I should have known Sergej would have ways of keeping even someone with the touch from finding him, or finding someone he didn’t want found. Of course he would. I hadn’t quite worked up to using my own blood in a finding yet.

  That kind of magic leaves traces someone could use to hex you right back. If things kept on like this, though, I might get the courage to even do that. Even if Gran had warned me to never, ever use the red stuff unless someone was gonna die for real, no foolin’, you mind me now Dru.

  She had all sorts of ideas about blood. Nowadays I wondered about that.

  My hands turned into fists. Long narrow fingers, thumb on the outside so it don’t get broken when you punch, the scar across my left-hand knuckles from that one time in Macon when Dad and I were taking care of a hotel that had a resident angry ghost. I could still smell the burning from that night sometimes, and hear the window shivering as I punched it, desperate for a way out with Dad right behind me and the holy water bubbling in its plastic container, reacting to the fury of a swollen, fiery thing that didn’t like being dead—and hated everything that had escaped death so far.

  We’d gone back during daylight and kicked the ghost’s ass but good. Still, the whole place had burned down. It hadn’t been a win, more like a draw. On the other hand, we’d both survived.

  I rubbed at the scar. When I bloomed, would it go away? Maybe. Maybe my hands would look different then, too. And maybe they’d all stop fussing over me and let me do something useful for once.

  Not soon enough. “I hate this. I hate thinking of . . . What if he’s torturing him? Sergej.” The name sent a glass spike of hate through my head. Christophe didn’t flinch, but his jaw set.

  It was my fault Graves was captured. If it hadn’t been for me, he’d still be living in the Dakotas. Sure, his life hadn’t been exactly normal, but at least he hadn’t been at risk of dying at the hands of a crazed king vampire, right?