Betrayals

by Lili St. Crow

  “His what? Slow down and speak English.” I pushed myself upright in the chair. I was tired and hungry, and I wanted to see Graves. And oh yeah, I wanted to curl up in bed and shake. I wanted to lock my door and the shutters over my window and spend a little time just trembling. It sure as hell sounded good.

  There was a slow, uncomfortable silence. “You might as well tell her,” Dylan said. “If you’re going to.”

  “I suppose so.” She fixed me with her limpid look, and I felt every pimple I’d ever had fighting toward the surface again. “Did Christophe tell you anything about his family?”

  “Just that his mom was dead too, I think.” It was hard to remember when I was thinking through soup. Come to think of it, he hadn’t told me much at all. “Other than that, nothing. What’s this all about? He didn’t tell me a goddamn thing, and nobody’s told me really anything since I got here.”

  “It would surprise you, then, to know that Christophe’s given name was Krystof Gogol?” A significant pause while I shook my head, mute, wondering where the hell she was going. “And the nosferat you escaped from two months ago, the acknowledged king of those who hunt the night, was born Sergej Gogol?”

  “Huh?” I was exhausted. That’s the only reason why it took ten full seconds for what she was really saying to trickle through the fog in my head. “You what?”

  Anna’s shoulders slumped. For the first time, she looked a little tired too. But it was just a gloss over her prettiness. “You didn’t know. Christophe is Sergej’s son. The eldest and, for a time, the most proud and wicked of his progeny. He saved you from his father and disappeared. But even before that, Reynard was interfering in your family.”

  My heart was beating very loudly. All the breath had whooshed out of me. “Say what?” It was a tiny little squeak from a dry throat.

  Anna hopped off the desk and faced me squarely, her hands clasped in front of her. She said what I was afraid she’d say. “We have reason to believe, Miss Anderson, that it was Reynard who gave away your mother’s location to Sergej. And we need your help to find out if he did.”

  She laid the manila folder on the desk’s cluttered surface. Her pink-lacquered fingernails scraped slightly. “This is what we think happened. Your mother was in a safe location.” The folder flipped open, and the world skidded to a halt underneath me.

  My teeth ground together behind the frozen lake of my face. They were tingling again, and the red sparkles at the corners of my vision were back. I swallowed harshly, tasting danger and rage.

  It was an eight-by-ten glossy in full color, and it showed a yellow house with an oak tree growing by the front steps. I stared at the picture and my skin went cold, then hot, then cold again. Every muscle ache twinged once, then hardened into nausea.

  Have you ever felt so sick your entire body feels like throwing up? Like that.

  The last time I’d seen that house was in a dream.

  Or was it a dream? Something I’d woken up from with Christophe and Graves both in the room, fighting off a dreamstealer, a winged serpent sucking at my breath, a thing that slunk away to lay eggs in my neighbors. Those eggs had hatched the next morning, and driving through a bunch of young wiggling dreamstealers to escape the wulfen attack on my house had been a nightmare.

  I’d thought maybe it was a hallucination, the impossibly clear and detailed vision of my mother hiding me in the middle of the night.

  It wasn’t a dream. A chill hard voice spoke up in the very middle of my head. It was memory.

  That was what happened when Mom died. This is the house she died in. She hid me in the closet and went out to fight. And she got killed.

  The svetocha next to me flipped the photo aside. Next was another glossy eight-by-ten. This time, the oak was in full summer leaf, except for the huge scorched half of it, twisted and blackened by some horrible thing still vibrating in the branches. The screen door was busted off its hinges, and the steps were shattered.

  There was something terrible caught in the tree’s clutching fingers. Something human-shaped, but agonizingly distorted. The image seared itself on my eyes, burrowed into my brain.

  “We think she died on the steps,” Anna said softly, “but Sergej hung her in the tree and… well. We didn’t get there in time. Your father was long gone, too, with you. We didn’t even know about you until years later.”

  He hung her in the tree. Oh God. “You didn’t know about me?” I sounded breathless even to myself.

  When she answered, there was a faint tinge of something, bitterness? Anger? I couldn’t decide and didn’t care. “No. Your mother… left the Order for her own reasons. Nobody knows what those reasons were.”

  I don’t either. I blinked hard. Cleared my throat. “I thought svetocha were toxic to suckers. That’s what—” That’s what Christophe said.

  “We are. We poison them just by breathing, just by existing in their vicinity. But some, a very few, nosferatu are powerful enough to endure that toxicity for a short amount of time. And a short amount of time was all Sergej needed.” Her perfect eyebrows drew together. “There is a reason he is their leader.”

  It was weird. Nobody else would say his name. They said he or you-know-who. But Christophe, and this chick, said it quietly. Like they were talking about someone they knew.

  I didn’t want to think about it. My entire body, and everything inside my head, felt like throwing up, passing out, or just sinking down on the floor and trembling for a bit. “What does this have to do with Christophe?”

  She flipped that photo over too. The back of it had a scribble in blue pen, a streak like someone had slashed at it. More papers. “This is a transcript of a call between an unidentified member of the Order and a nosferat of Sergej’s line. In it, the unidentified Kouroi gives your mother’s location. Christophe is the only person who might have known, he trained your mother personally, and they were close.”

  He trained her? “Close? How old is he?”

  “Old enough to remember the last half of the First World War, Miss Anderson. We have no more proof, the recording is gone and the person who transcribed it died in battle. Rather suspiciously, I might add.” She was watching me very carefully, I realized. There’s a certain way people look when they’re not focusing forward, when they’re tracking you in their peripheral vision. “It is very likely Christophe will seek further contact with you. If and when he does, it is imperative that you notify an advisor and stand by for debriefing. Is that clear?”

  The tone of command was something new. I got the idea that when this lady said jump, everyone around her made like a basketball player going up for a dunk.

  The words hovered right on the tip of my tongue. He’s already been to see me. A few simple words, and I could stop feeling like there was a weight pressing against my heart. I could lay the problem in someone else’s lap and stop worrying about it. I could hand it over to an adult and be done.

  But I heard the sound of soft wings again, and feathers brushed my face. I almost flinched, the feeling was so real.

  Look what happened last time you tried to dump the problem in someone else’s lap, Dru. You called Augustine, and things seemed like they were going to get better, and now look at where you are.

  It was a warning, delivered just like all of Gran’s lessons. Simple and without a lot of bullshit messing it up. “Crystal,” I heard myself say. It was the first time I’d ever sounded as weary and adult as Graves sometimes did. Did he ever feel this weight pressing on him too?

  He probably did. I wanted to see him so bad my hands almost shook.

  “Then I shall be on my way.” She scooped the file together, and I glanced up. Dylan looked worried, as usual, and he was staring straight at me. It was like he was willing me to figure something out, his lips pressed together and his dark eyes beaming a message I couldn’t decode.

  “The transcript. Do I get to look at it?” I didn’t mean to sound stubborn, but I guess I did. Dylan actually flinched, and Anna drew herself up.

>   I finally figured out what bothered me about her face. She looked Popular. She’d never been an outcast; we all just existed to throw her own reflection back at her. There was the same unfinished, greedy kind of prettiness I’d seen on cheerleaders and female boa constrictors all over America. If she wasn’t djamphir, she’d probably have ended up as an obese, lacquered middle-aged woman with a turned-down, bitter mouth. The kind that makes a huge fuss in a grocery store over an expired coupon, or a can of corn costing fifteen cents more than she’d thought.

  The kind that always gets her way, because she’s shameless when it comes to wearing you down over it. Like that.

  “It’s classified, Miss Anderson. When Christophe contacts you, listen to what he has to say. Remember it, and be ready to repeat it.” She nodded brusquely and tucked the manila folder under her arm. Her silk swished as she headed for the door. “My bodyguard will see me out, Dylan. Thank you.”

  “Milady.” How he managed to say the word without choking, I don’t know. She swept away, her heels tapping with little sharp sounds.

  The door swung shut. Cobwebs up at the top of the tall bookcases made little shushing movements. The ceiling tiles in here were rotting too.

  This place was really falling apart in more ways than one.

  Dylan tilted his head, one eyebrow raised. I stood there, aching and wet with sweat. I didn’t realize I was shaking until I sat back down in the chair, hard. Every part of me was quivering like electrified Jell-O. Her smell left reluctantly, heaviness coating the back of my throat, especially that place on the palate normal people don’t have, the place where I taste danger.

  It’s like the pickled ginger you get with sushi. That always tastes like perfume to me. This was heavy, oily perfume too.

  What does that remind me of? I swear to God it reminds me of something. But the little spring that wheels memories out of their slots and throws them into the soup of your brain was busted in my head. I just couldn’t come up with anything coherent.

  Climbing up the stairs to my room seemed like an awfully huge task. But the thought of hiding under the bed with the dust kitties, the malaika, and Dad’s billfold more than made up for it. I was glad, for no reason that I could name, that Mom’s locket was tucked safely under my T-shirt. The idea of Anna seeing it made my heart feel cold.

  Dylan’s shoulders slumped. “They’re gone,” he said quietly. “Are you all right?”

  What a question. “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “Peachy. Perfect. Not.”

  “I’m sorry.” He really did sound sorry. But then, he always did. “She insisted on seeing you, and…”

  And what? What the fuck was that? I stared at the space on his cluttered desk where the file had rested. I knew it existed now. I’d seen where my mother died.

  He hung her in the tree. Her sweet little voice, saying it like it was nothing when it wasn’t. It wasn’t nothing. It was my mother, and she—

  “Have you seen Christophe, Dru?” His jacket creaked as he leaned away from the wall. “I don’t think I have to tell you he’s in deep shit. And it’s getting deeper.”

  I was trying to think, but he was making it harder by talking to me. “I want to go to my room.” I sounded about five years old. “Please.”

  “All right.” But he just couldn’t let it be. “Dru—”

  “Who was supposed to be watching me?” The space where the file had been was a hole in the world, and I wasn’t sure I liked the way the wind was whistling over it. I hate that empty sound, like a storm rasping against the edges of an empty house while you’re waiting for your dad to come home and collect you. That low, impatient moaning. “Who was supposed to take me up to my room when the bell went off? it’s the only time someone hasn’t come to get me.”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t get a chance to check the schedule. And now the duty roster’s disappeared.” He moved again, restlessly, leather creaking. I coughed once more, a deep hacking sound. “I was called to greet Anna’s transport. We never receive any warnings for her visits, so—”

  “She doesn’t live here?” But I didn’t care. My legs felt like they would work now. Kind of.

  Something else he said seemed important, but I couldn’t make my brain work.

  “No, she doesn’t.” He stopped short again, and I was getting really tired of the feeling that he wasn’t telling me everything. Or even anything.

  I braced myself on the chair, pushed. Failed the first time. Dylan stepped forward like he wanted to help.

  I leapt up as if burned, put the chair between us, and stared at him.

  “Dru—” He stopped dead. We watched each other over a couple yards of traitorous air. There didn’t seem to be enough of it to breathe, but there was sure enough to press down on me from all sides. Had anyone ever drowned on air?

  I sidled toward the door. He kept very still, like he wasn’t sure which way I was going to jump.

  The aspect folded over him, retreated, his fangs sliding under his lips.

  “I’m on your side,” he said, when I was almost at the door. “I wish—”

  “I don’t have a side,” I informed him, found the doorknob with one numb hand and fled. All the halls were empty, and I managed to make it to my room without anything else happening.

  It was a completely unexpected gift. I half-expected there to be a fire, or another attack, or some other damn thing.

  I locked the door, put my back against it, and held up my hand. It was shaking like a windblown leaf. The room was dead silent, the curtains askew just a little bit, and a square of white paper against the blue of the quilt cover.

  Hot and cold swept over me in alternating waves. I set out across the acres of blue carpet. My socks whispered, and could anyone else see the faint marks where Christophe’s wet feet had rested?

  Even though I was jolting from the fading adrenaline overload and seriously busted up, I am not stupid. It was too wrong. Two photos of the house I’d lived in before, before Mom died and the world changed, didn’t make a case against Christophe. If the information was so secret and classified, Anna shouldn’t have brought the file out at all. And ordering me around is exactly the wrong way to make me do what you want.

  Yeah, I mean, I understand about obeying orders when you’re under fire. That’s totally different.

  But Dad hadn’t raised a blindly obedient idiot. I don’t think he was capable of it.

  The paper was crisp, heavy, and expensive. The writing was careful copperplate script.

  Svetocha, Be careful. Nothing here is what it appears to be.

  Meet me at the boathouse.

  Your Friend

  I collapsed on the bed. If it was a code, the message was lost on me. What the fuck?

  And what was someone, maybe Christophe, doing leaving messages on my pillow when vampires were trying to kill me? While Ash, of all people (was people even the right word for a werwulf?) was rescuing me?

  Had Ash been trying to rescue me?

  My brain finally kicked in, far too late. And now the duty roster’s gone. Which meant whoever was supposed to be watching me had taken it, because they knew I’d be attacked.

  Killed. Not just attacked, but killed. Call it what it is, Dru.

  I let out a long, shuddering breath. Christophe. Sergej’s son. He was right, someone was trying to kill him. But he wasn’t telling the whole truth either. All these lies, crowding all around me, hemming me in. Dangerous lies.

  Deadly lies. What happened tonight could have easily ended with me murdered out in the woods.

  I could end up dead tomorrow. In my sleep, even. I shivered, hugging myself for warmth. The room was cold, and it wasn’t mine.

  The one person I could have talked to, the one person who could have helped me make sense of this madness, was down in the dorms. I didn’t feel up to going down there. Not now.

  I huddled on the bed. Outside, it was night, and the Schola was awake and alive. The not-noise of people living in a space, filling it up with their brea
thing and heartbeats, quivered in the air. I still felt completely, utterly alone. More alone than I’d ever felt in a house waiting for Dad to come back, and that’s saying something.

  CHAPTER 12

  The cold front coming down from Canada finally broke two days later. Ice melted, the river became a supple silver snake instead of a flat gray ribbon. Everything turned soggy instead of hard-frozen.

  Thundering storms blew in, dumped a load of rain every night, and blew out. The daylight came through a filter of overcast and dry white fog. It was like being in a glass globe, because I only saw the weather through barred windows.

  I couldn’t stay cooped up in the room. It was like sitting in a prison cell. So I would go to class.

  Classes were a special kind of hell. I’d sit there and think, He lied to me. Or even better, Someone here wants to kill me. It would knock every other thought out of my head, stamp on it a few times, and I’d lose track of everything the teacher was saying. Dibs hung out with me at breakfast and lunch, but he didn’t say much. He had all he could handle just sitting still and sometimes forcing out a hello. The kid’s shyness was just short of terminal.

  Nobody else talked to me except Graves. And he hardly talked at all. At least, not about anything important. It was all, We went running through the park this or Shanks took us shopping that or I heard about this guy in sparring, guess what he did? the other.

  I made noises, nodded, and tried to look interested. Then the gong would go off inside my head.

  He lied to me. Or Someone here wants to kill me. Maybe in this very room. And I would stare off into the distance, because I was afraid to start examining everyone around for signs of murderous intent. It wasn’t like I could even tell how old any of them were. They could have all been ancient and I wouldn’t know, would I?

  I don’t know why I felt so betrayed, really. Christophe was part vampire, after all. Like everyone else here who might want me dead.