Defiance

by Lili St. Crow

  “Jesus,” I whispered. Everything blurred. It wasn’t just dusk slipping across the sky, creeping in through the skylights. It was hot water in my eyes. My chest ached. I blinked furiously, and a hot drop fell on my hand, spattering. I was shaking.

  Pictures. A list of locations, crossed off. One circled. More pictures on copy paper, showing different angles. A mansion; the address was out in Queens. A folded city map, beat up and scuffed like it had been carried in a pocket for a long time. Notations in a thin calligraphic script, I’d seen Christophe’s handwriting on Council paperwork.

  This looked similar.

  “No.” It didn’t even sound like my voice. Ash reached across me, snagged another sandwich, and settled back on his haunches. At least someone would get the benefit of all that food. “Oh, hell no.”

  Everything clicked together inside my head, and my face settled against itself. It felt frozen, and heavy, and just a little bit like Dad’s face must have felt when he was wearing his stare-down look.

  “What are you going to do?” Leon took another two steps back. Like he was getting ready for an explosion.

  I looked up. Dibs stared at me, deathly pale. We watched each other for a few seconds, the blond wulf and me.

  He already looked hopeless. And I was just about to make it worse.

  “Get out,” I whispered.

  He stared at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I hoped like hell he couldn’t read my face. At least the skin lay stiff and masklike against my bones; maybe it would help keep what I was planning a secret.

  I slid off the bed. Swayed for a moment, and Nat reached forward as if she was going to help me. My hand flashed out, and I slapped hers away. The sound of the slap was like the last piece of my heart shivering into pieces.

  Dibs let out a small, soft, hurt sound. Leon was watching me very carefully, his odd-colored eyes narrowed.

  I found my voice again. “Get out. All of you, out.”

  “Milady—” Nat had gone white, and I didn’t want to see the flash of pain in her wide blue eyes, no trace of yellow glow left in the irises. I didn’t want to see the way she’d grabbed her hand, either, as if she’d touched a hot stove.

  Or as if I’d hurt her, with just my puny human strength.

  So I half-turned and pointed at Ash. “I said get out. And take him with you.” My hands turned into fists, and I dropped them.

  Ash looked at me gravely, his scarred boyface set and pale. His head was cocked just a little, and the way his hair fell in his scar-jawed face hurt me suddenly. Would Graves end up like this?

  Broken?

  Oh, hell no. Everything that had shattered came together inside me again, sharp edges sliding together like puzzle pieces.

  “Dru—” Leon, now. He stepped forward, but I rounded on him.

  “I am svetocha,” I said quietly. “And I want you all to get out of my goddamn bedroom. Right. Goddamn. Now.”

  The words rocked him back on his heels. Dibs let out a squeak and bolted for the door, fumbled with the locks, flung it open, and was gone. I pointed at Ash. “You. Down.”

  He hopped fluidly off the bed and crouched, hands and feet on the floor.

  “Take him, Nathalie. Ash, go with Nat. Don’t give her any trouble.” Who was the girl issuing orders in this crisp, cold voice? It couldn’t be me. My face was frozen, and the ice was starting to work down to the rest of me. I had to get them out of here. Because once dusk hit and Christophe got back, good luck doing any of what I had planned.

  “Milady—” Leon attempted, again. Maybe he thought he was going to calm me down.

  That was so not happening. The entire room flexed around me, a sudden drenching wash of spice exhaling from my skin, and an odd crackle ran along the surface of my skin.

  “Get. The. Fuck. OUT!” The last word was a yell, and Nat actually jumped out of her chair. She reached down, her fingers slipping through Ash’s greasy hair, and the two of them were suddenly at the door. Ash looked back, but Nat jerked on his hair like it was a leash, and he piled out into the hall with her.

  Leon and I faced each other. His shoulders were up, but high flags of color stood out on his cheeks, and he wore an odd, set little smile that was more like a grimace of pain.

  “What are you going to—” he began, but I took two steps toward him. My hands were knotted up so tight they made little creaking sounds, and I felt little prickles in my palm that weren’t just fingernails. My wrists ached, twin fiery bracelets. The aspect slid over me, oil-hot and soothing, and for once I didn’t care that my teeth were tingling and he could almost certainly see the little fangs dimpling my lower lip.

  I held his gaze, and his pained expression grew deeper, like silt building in the bottom of a clear pond.

  I didn’t care. “Get. Out. Or I will hit you.”

  He backed up, watching me like you’d watch an angry rattler. For a single second I felt a flash of guilt. Nat and Dibs would probably never forgive me for losing my shit; I’d probably scared the hell out of both of them. Hurt their feelings big-time. And Leon?

  Who cares what they think? The cold was all the way inside me now, determination taking shape. It’s not important. The important thing is getting that door locked and getting your gear.

  Leon backed out the door. His hand flashed out, caught the knob, and drew it closed behind him. It closed with a definite snick, and before I knew it I was across the room, locking every single lock. I settled the iron bar in its brackets and saw the thread-thin lines of blue warding sizzling as they ran through the physical fabric of the walls and spun together in a complicated Celtic knot in the middle of the door. They were getting brighter, trembling on the edge of the visible, and that made it official. The touch was stronger. I was stronger.

  Something was happening to me, building inside me. Some change, like the tide shifting. Whatever it was, I didn’t care. If it was the blooming, finally, great.

  It would make it easier to kick some ass.

  I stood there for a couple seconds, my eyes suspiciously prickling.

  I won’t push, and I don’t pry . . . All I ask is a little attention, Dru.

  Christophe had laid right there on the bed. Held me while I cried. Kissed me, and all the while he knew where Graves was. He knew. And he hid it from me.

  From me, and because of me.

  Jesus.

  I swallowed the stone in my throat. Forced the hot prickles in my eyes away. My fangs pressed out, insistent and achingly tender. The bloodhunger quivered at the back of my throat, and that made me conscious of what, exactly, I was feeling. There was a whole complicated tangle, but the biggest dog in the pile was clear, cold anger.

  Not anger.

  Rage.

  I turned around and surveyed my room. I had my emergency bag, and there were my mother’s malaika hanging in a harness, on their peg next to the vanity. Dusk was gathering in the window, and Christophe and the Council would likely be back any moment now.

  Get going, Dru.

  I got going.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Getting off the Schola grounds without Nat was child’s play with the aspect so thick on me. It ran over my skin in intensifying waves, no longer warm but just on the verge of hot, like a good strong shower. I didn’t have the benefit of one of Nat’s braids. The curls occasionally slipping free of the sloppy ponytail were veined with gold, long and loose and silky.

  For once, my hair was behaving in a pinch. But I couldn’t even care.

  It was dusk, time for the changing over of the guards roaming the Schola grounds, and I’m sure that helped. I moved when I didn’t hear anyone, froze and faded into the walls or bushes when I did, and when I got to the wall I hopped up on top of it like it was a stepping stool. No Nat around to give me ten fingers, but with the aspect, I didn’t need it.

  Poor Nat.

  Once I got off the grounds it was time to worry about transportation. Ran into a problem there—with the malaika harness on, I couldn’t take a ca
b. Could I slide by on the subway?

  I thought about it, and I decided if I could take on a sucker in a moving subway car, I was probably able to handle some cops. At the very least I could get away, and that was good enough.

  When you’ve run with werwulfen, a human can’t hope to catch you.

  Still, it was probably best to stay below the radar. A cop would babble into a walkie-talkie, and if anyone was listening to cop chatter on a scanner they might catch wind of me. I couldn’t afford that right now; I couldn’t afford to let anyone know where I was until I wanted them to know. So I walked, and I tried to stay out of sight as much as possible. It was amazingly easy, with the aspect tingling every time someone glanced at me and instinct moving under my skin, telling me in clear radio bursts when to move and when to stop and wait.

  I walked the whole way to my first stop. I barely noticed the scenery, because the rage inside me made the twilight crowds smell like . . . Well, let’s just say the problem of keeping my mouth shut had never been so simple or complex all at the same time.

  Night had fallen fully by the time I turned a Brooklyn corner and saw the suddenly–familiar) street brick apartment houses marching all the way down and the black bags of trash piled all along the curb. It looked just the same as it had years ago, and a moment of homesickness crawled up my throat, displacing the rage for a second.

  The little bodega on the corner looked the same, too. Red and yellow, packs of gum and cartons of cigarettes stacked neatly, crowding around a man with a shiny bald head and a red plaid shirt instead of the spare white-haired woman with a breath of weird on her who used to be in the window when I’d been here with Augie. The pizza place I’d been at with Nat and the wulfen just a short while ago wasn’t far from here, either. It was nice to find my navigation-fu was still strong.

  I ducked into the alley, took a deep breath, and stared at the blank brick walls. Trash drifted in corners, the Dumpsters were overflowing, and the reek almost choked me before I shut it away. Which was easy to do, with the aspect so close to the surface.

  The fire escape was no problem, and I even managed to do it quietly. The entire apartment building thrummed with sounds of habitation—everyone was home from work, and sleeping or doing whatever it is people do in apartments at night. I reached the roof and hopped down, taking my bearings even before my sneakers hit the weird, gritty surface.

  A cool spring breeze skimmed across the rooftop, other buildings clustering around bouncing the wind in odd directions. It lifted one of my curls, brushed it against my cheek, and I caught a fading, flaring drift of familiar scent. The touch woke up inside my head again, a sudden vivid mental image of Augustine slipping across this same rooftop, his yellow hair combed back and his jacket open, sliding a gun back into its holster. Moving too swift and sure to be anything but djamphir.

  I found myself silently stepping across the roof, too, until I reached the weird three-sided gap between buildings. Augie’s kitchen window only looked out on blank brick in this triangle of forgotten city space, and he’d made me look out the window so I could see the hand- and footholds. It was ridiculously easy to climb down and jimmy the window open—I knew just where to press.

  Oh, e w w w. Augie, yuck. Something smelled. Like rotting food, and a particular sharpish undertone. I almost got hung up in the window, the twin hilts of the malaika awkward while I was crouching, but then I slid inside and hopped down from the counter.

  His kitchen was an unholy mess. I’ve seen vampire destruction before, but each time it’s . . . well, incredible. The cabinet doors were busted, the fridge blown open like someone had stuffed dynamite in it, and the smell of rotting exhaled from both there and the kitchen garbage, which had been upended. The dishes were all broken.

  Jesus. I wrinkled my nose, peeked out into the living room. His plasma TV was busted all to hell, the couch was shredded, but the wall with the front door was curiously unharmed. Had they come in through the window? Had he been attacked after I called him from the Dakotas? He hadn’t said anything about his apartment being busted.

  The cache was in the bedroom, which wasn’t damaged much. The narrow single bed I’d slept on was ripped up, the antique dresser sledgehammered to bits and vomiting up clothes, and the closet door reduced to matchsticks. Fortunately I could get one of the wrecked closet doors aside, and I pulled out some of Augie’s familiar plaid shirts and found bare carpet. I pressed in the right place; there was a click! and a square of carpeted floor rose.

  It hadn’t been rifled. Thank God.

  Silver-grain ammo and a spare gun—a serviceable 9mm, basic Schola armory issue.

  Thought-provoking, but it was gear and I took it.

  I took that and a clip-on holster, emptied the blue bag full of cash, and stowed it in my emergency bag—a canvas messenger number I’d managed to sew a false bottom into in between training these past weeks. Most of the cash went under the flap, but I did up a few rolls for stashing in pockets and in the top of the bag, too, my fingers moving with habitual ease.

  I took as much ammo as I could carry without clinking, stuffing clips into the pockets of Graves’s long dark coat, too. There was a spare Medikit in there too, a homemade one that held penicillin and other stuff as well as a stack of hypodermic needles in shockfoam.

  “Oh, Augie,” I whispered.

  It’s bad manners to clean out another hunter’s cache, but I didn’t have a choice.

  A sudden ringing made me jump. My heart leapt like a fish pulled from water, and one of my fangs pricked my lower lip. I tasted the copper sweetness of my own blood before swallowing, hard, and taking a deep breath.

  It was the phone.

  I went back to the cache. I took another city map and a couple glass ampoules of what had to be holy water. Hey, better safe than sorry. The phone shrilled four times, then I heard a click and a whir.

  It was just like Augustine not to have voice mail. He had a great plasma TV and only watched black-and-white movies on it, too.

  “Leave a message.” A thin growl, Augie sounding scary as possible. A long static-laden pause, and a beep.

  I jumped again when he spoke.

  “Dru, kochana, if you are there, pick up the phone.”

  Christophe. I clipped the holster on with shaking hands. How much time did I have? Goddamn him being so smart. How would he guess?

  “Dru. Pick up. You’re in terrible danger.” He sounded frantic, and I could hear a murmur behind him. A faint thopping, like a helicopter.

  Oh, this is so not even funny. I loaded the gun, chambered a round. The sound was very loud in the hush. How had Augie’s neighbors not heard vampires in here? But maybe that’s the big city for you. Nobody in anyone else’s business, everyone taking care of himself, and devil take the hindmost.

  “Whatever you think, whatever you’ve been told . . . Dru, please. Please. Pick up. Let me explain.”

  Explain? Oh, yeah. Sure. “Not fucking likely, Christophe,” I muttered. Here I was like an idiot, talking to an answering machine that couldn’t even hear me. I slid the gun into the holster, checked the cache one more time. The touch tingled faintly inside my head.

  “Please, Dru. Please. Pick up. Pick up the phone, kochana, milna, skowroneczko moja, little bird, please—”

  The machine beeped and cut him off. I let out a shaky exhale, checked my watch. I had a whole night to keep everyone off my trail, find the mansion in Queens, and lay low until dawn. But first I had to get out of here.

  I didn’t want to use the front door, and I didn’t want to use the roof again. You should never ever use the same exit as entrance path, especially if you’re visiting what is almost certainly what Dad would call a “compromised location.” His other term for it started with “cluster” and ended up rhyming with “duck.”

  So it was up on the bed, sliding the window open—it looked down onto the street, and I’d spent so many mornings that whole month Dad was gone laying on the bed and craning to get a glimpse of the sky—while th
e phone rang again.

  I checked the street—clear. Knocked the screen out with one well-placed kick.

  “Dru!” Christophe was yelling into the phone now. “Dru, please, please pick up!”

  Time to go. I launched myself feetfirst through the window as the ghost of wax-orange danger candy filled my mouth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Iran until the danger candy faded completely and I was just left with the copper taste of adrenaline. Then I hopped on the subway—no reason not to, now; they could start chasing me now that I was prepared—and rode toward Times Square until the crowd got thick. It was closer to the Schola Prima than I liked, but there was plenty of crowd cover and it was the last place they’d look for me.

  Or so I hoped.

  I surfaced, found an all-night diner, and ordered coffee and a club sandwich, keeping a watch out the window at the crowd flowing by while I bolted the food and looked over the printouts and maps.

  I picked out the neighborhood on both Augie’s and Christophe’s maps, looked at likely ways in and out. I tried to consider the whole thing like Dad would. Angles of attack, the getaway—I’d have to find a car. Or something.

  Worry about that when you get on-site. Can’t do nothin’ here, and if you steal a car now and take it there you’re askin for trouble. Calm and easy, Dru-girl, just like I taught you.

  Had Dad ever guessed what he was training me for? Or did he just not think much about it one way or the other? Yet another pile of questions I’d never get an answer to.

  I found myself reaching up to touch Graves’s earring, fingering the skull, running the edge of a crossed bone under my thumbnail. Don’t worry, I’m on my way. I’m coming.

  But then I worried, too, while I downed the last of the coffee and neatened everything up, stuffing it back in my bag with the ammo. What if they’d moved him? How old was the intel? If the place was crawling with vampires . . . Well, I was fast enough to kill one of them, wasn’t I?

  But more than one? And Sergej, too?