Reckoning

by Lili St. Crow

  I knew that tinkling, sweet, girlish voice. It was Anna. A warm place dilated behind my breastbone, and I heard her laugh. Whispering, taunting, cajoling.

  I thought I’d gotten her out of my head, that I’d burned through the blood I’d taken from her.

  I was wrong. And what would Graves think of this, if he could see it?

  What would Dad think, if he was still alive and not just zombie dust? Or Gran?

  Time snapped, stinging, like a hard elastic band against flinching skin. I had the two plastic-and-paper grocery bags in my free hand. Threw them in the backseat as Ash cowered.

  Like he was afraid of me. Hunched down, his entire body the picture of submission.

  “Get in!” I yelled, the shotgun held loosely. Nobody in the parking lot. The rain began to slant down in earnest, dark drops on the dusty ground merging. It didn’t cut the smell of blood. My entire body shook, jitters racing through me.

  Ash scrambled into the car. I swept the parking lot again, shotgun held ready. Lightning sizzled overhead, photoflash-searing the entire scene into my head. I dropped into the driver’s seat, braced the shotgun. Sparked the car and laid rubber out of the parking lot.

  Some shopping trip.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The windows were all down, rain lashing through and thunder booming. Water smacked the side of my face, a welcome coolness. I kept us on the road, trying not to bend the steering wheel. Ash had slithered over into the front passenger seat and whimpered, crouching in the bucket seat and staring at me.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him to sit down and shut up. He shook and shivered every time thunder boomed. Spring storms are like that—they sneak up on a body. Gran said they hid on the ridges, and the only way to tell one was coming was to have a war wound or an old broken bone.

  Gran would have been horrified at what I’d just done. Not so much the busting up a couple of grown men, though that was plenty bad.

  No, it was the bloodhunger. If she was still alive to see me sucking blood, or even just wanting to suck blood, what would she think? She’d be disgusted, just like Graves. And angry.

  I didn’t do it, though. I didn’t!

  My conscience wasn’t having any of it. You wanted to. You know you did. I blinked furiously, the water in my eyes was making everything blur.

  Ash let out a yelp. I jerked the wheel, and we drifted out of the oncoming lane. There wasn’t another car on the road for miles, and my entire body was shaking with the hunger’s aftermath. Like little armored rabbits were running around under my skin. My veins throbbed dryly, and my eyes were smarting. A hot trickle slid down my left cheek.

  I wished I could stop to roll all the windows up. Ash twitched. He had his arms wrapped around himself, and the next glare of lightning made him flinch again.

  “It’s all right.” I had to work to make myself heard above the rain-noise. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault.”

  Except it kind of is. What the hell, stealing a two-bit piece of candy? But I couldn’t be too mad at him. He wasn’t even in his right mind. And I’ve dealt with guys like Piggy Eyes Lyle all over the country. It was a point of pride with me, knowing just how to slide out of Situations. Except I hadn’t slid out of this one. I’d acted just like a punk kid, and—

  But I am a punk kid, something inside me whined. I never asked for this!

  I kept checking the rearview mirror. No headlights, no sign of pursuit. If they had cameras at the supermarket we were probably hosed. We’d have to run anyway, ditch this car in the first city and grab another one. I’d done the planning, especially to get us liquid resources. But all that wood I’d chopped was going to be useless.

  Don’t worry about the firewood, for fuck’s sake. Worry about something useful.

  Like, how was I going to explain this to Graves? That was going to be all sorts of fun in a handbasket. I heaved in a breath, two, and more hot trickles slid out of my eyes.

  Cold rain smacking my face through my still-open window did a sucky-ass job of covering up the fact that I was sobbing. Great gulping heaves, tearing through me like a crowd of hobnailed boots against a street, beating out cadence.

  Did I kill him? Lyle’s head had been twisted so strangely. But I’d heard his pulse, faint and thready. Maybe he’d be okay. Someone would come out any moment and find him and the cop there, the sheriff’s car busted up and the shotgun gone. At least we had another gun, and a shotgun was far from the worst thing to have out in the hills or on the run.

  I hope I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t like my first vampire kill. I’d felt sick over that, but in the end it was like cutting off the head of a poisonous snake with a shovel. It just had to be done, and thank God I wasn’t the snake.

  Or was I?

  Lyle had just been a garden-variety human jerkwad, not a bloodsucking fiend looking to kill me as messily as possible. Lyle didn’t even know nosferat existed, or djamphir or svetocha or werwulfen—

  Ash whined again. He reached out, tentatively, and his pale slim fingers brushed my shoulder. He patted, again and again, like I was a dog that needed soothing. My shaking sobs were oddly unconnected, like my body didn’t even belong to me. The aspect was hot oil over my skin, smoothing down and getting rid of any hurt, filling me with a buzzing. My fangs poked at my lower lip, and the twin sharp pressures sent a fresh bolt of nausea through my growling stomach.

  I was hungry. Not just hungry, ravenous. And thirsty, too. The bloodhunger taunted me, the entire inside of my throat on fire. Water wouldn’t help it. The only thing that would help was calming down and forcing myself to eat something human.

  That’s the problem, Dru. You ain’t human anymore. You’re one of those things Dad would’ve hunted. You suck blood.

  Human blood.

  No wonder Graves is so disgusted all the time. Even if he says he ain’t.

  That was the wrong thought. I let out another sob. I couldn’t seem to stop. It got darker, and thunder rumbled again. I realized we were coming up on our turn and hit the brakes hard. We slewed through standing water, bumped onto the indifferent paving, and kept going. The way everything was coming down, we were looking at a washed-out road damn soon, and a slog through the mud to get back up to the cabin to collect Graves and pack up if that happened. It was just too dangerous to stick around here now, and I had nobody to blame but myself.

  I just kept driving. The all-wheel drive handled the transition to rutted washboard beautifully, and we were halfway up the side of the ridge before I realized it. Trees thrashed, lightning going off in waves and the thunder closer and closer.

  This ain’t natural. Gran’s voice sounded worried inside my head, and that faint ghost of citrus on my tongue taunted me. I sniffed, wiped at my cheek with the back of one wet wrist. It didn’t do much, and the rain flooding in through my window didn’t help. I didn’t want to close it, though. I needed the air.

  Another sob dry-barked out of me. I ignored it. The crying was just another storm. I could just hunker down until it passed, couldn’t I?

  Ash whined again, the sound coming from way back in his throat. He kept frantically patting my shoulder, and when I snapped a glance at him I found he was visibly shaking and even whiter than usual. Bedraggled, covered in mud, and wet clear through, his eyes ran with orange light and fastened on me. He tilted his head, the silvery stripe in his hair gleaming with its own weird light. I snapped my nose back forward and stared at the road.

  A flash of white drifted across my vision. It resolved with quick charcoal lines, as if someone was motion-capture sketching it on the air itself. It was an owl, and it slid through the heavy rain in merry defiance of normal owl behavior. The aspect spiked under my skin.

  Turn left, Dru. Now.

  I didn’t argue. Whenever Gran’s owl showed up, it was always best just to follow.

  Only it wasn’t Gran’s owl. It was my aspect in animal form, and one more reminder of why I’d never be normal. Or strictly human.

  I twisted the wheel
. We jounced off the road just in time, avoiding a pretty bad deep-foaming washout. There was an alternate route, though, for just such an occasion. The turnoff was conveniently close, but immediately the Subaru started juddering and fighting. We had to slow down to a crawl, and I finally gathered myself enough to roll my window up and turn the defroster on max. Ash grabbed at the dashboard, riding the car’s shuddering like a surfer. He still whined, but instead of patting me he kept his hand on my shoulder, fingers tensing. Not driving in, thank God. He had wulfen claws, and I didn’t like the idea of having my shoulder ground up like meatloaf.

  “We’ll be okay,” I said, shakily. Another sob came along; I bit it in half and swallowed it. Rain poured in through the other three windows. This was not going to do the upholstery any good at all. “We’ll take this route. It’ll—”

  The car slid sideways. I turned into it, cursing a blue streak—Dad would’ve yelled at me for using That Language, and I never would’ve dared around Gran. But neither of them was here so it was just me, the touch filling my head and pouring out through my arms as I wrenched the steering wheel and goosed the accelerator instead of the brake. You never want to hit the brakes in a situation like that.

  The tires bit; we made it through and bumped up into a pair of overgrown ruts that was the alternate path. It would take us longer, but on this part of the ridge there was less chance of washouts. The trees glowered, leaves falling like the monsoon rain, and I judged we were about a mile from the house. We’d have to cover three miles of rutted track to get there, though.

  Good thing there’s moonshine runners in my family tree, right? Along with vampires.

  Oh, God. I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, exhaled hard, and saw Gran’s owl again, flickering through falling water in a soft blur. It was dark, especially under the trees, and my head hurt. Whether it was from the crying or something else, I couldn’t tell. Glass spikes pressed in through my temples, and my nose was running so hard I had to root around for some damp fast-food napkins to wipe my top lip. I shivered, the trembling communicating itself to Ash.

  “Bad,” he whispered, under the straining engine and the drumming of rain. Thunder drowned out most of what he said next. “—sowwy. Osh sowwy.”

  My heart squeezed down on itself, hard. “It isn’t your fault.” I heaved a sigh, kept a sharp eye on the ruts ahead. The ghost of oranges on my tongue taunted me. “I could’ve just paid for it without getting mouthy. I screwed up, not you. It’s not your fault.”

  I mean, what else could I say? It’s not like he did it on purpose. I was the responsible one. I’d just failed. Again.

  He shut up, but he kept hold of me. Crouching on the seat like that probably wasn’t comfortable, but I had enough to worry about. The sobs juddered to a stop, and it took forever, but when we bumped out into the meadow I heaved a sigh of relief. Gran’s house stood on the far end, lit by garish flashes of lightning, and it took me halfway across the meadow to realize something was wrong.

  The flickering orange light from inside wasn’t right. It was open flame, shining out through the windows and sending gushes of billowing black smoke up into the drenching blanket of water falling from the sky.

  Gran’s house was burning. And my mother’s locket was a chip of ice against my chest. The owl turned in a tight, distressed circle in front of the car, veering sharply away just before it hit the windshield, and I began to get a very bad feeling.

  Just then, slim black shapes boiled out of the undergrowth, and I reached for the shift lever as if in a slow terrible nightmare. The lightning showed their slicked-down hair and ivory-gleam teeth, the eerie quickness of their movements, and the hatred blurring around them made the touch ache like a sore tooth inside my head.

  Vampires. They’d found us. But I didn’t taste the wax-orange foulness that usually warned me of them. Just that ghost of citrus, like orange juice you’ve forgotten you drank an hour ago.

  There was no time. I couldn’t hope to get us down the ridge before they hit the car. I couldn’t even make the tree line.

  Ash howled and pitched himself aside, fur rippling up over his dirty skin. The passenger window, only partly rolled up, shattered. Thank God he hit the ground outside before changing, because otherwise he’d’ve gotten stuck halfway through. Fur boiled up over him, his bones crackling as he swelled, his boy voice deepening and swelling into a wulfen’s roar.

  I sat there, one hand numb on the wheel and the other in midair, and the only thing I could think of were the malaika in the cargo compartment. I popped my seat belt, grabbed the lever that would put my seat all the way back, and started scrambling for my life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The rear hatch opened; I hopped out and my sneakers sank into mud. The rain was an immediate battering against every inch of me, and the malaika were heavy in my hands. The aspect poured over me in a wave of smooth-oil heat, fangs prickling my lower lip. I jerked the wooden swords free of the leather harness and pelted around the corner of the car.

  Ash hunkered down in the rain, almost-eight feet of werwulf with huge shoulders under a mat of wiry fur. The streak on his head gleamed, rain slicking everything down and outlining muscle under his pelt. His claws dug into mud with tiny splorching sounds lost under a roll of thunder, and the vampires skidded to a stop, throwing up sheets of mudlaced water. The grass exploded like jackstraws, and they snarled.

  Eight of them. All male, all burning with visible hatred under the lash of rain, hourglass-shaped pupils sending black threads out into their irises as the hunting-aura took them. It’s like the aspect, that aura, but it’s made of pure revulsion. They just loathe everything around them so much.

  Or maybe it’s just the living they detest, even as they feed on them. Even though they’re, technically, living too. They’re the part of life that hates itself.

  Why didn’t I sense them? The faint citrus taste sharpened, as if I was sucking on a piece of orange candy.

  Danger candy, I’d called it, my warning taste. Why was it failing me now?

  It didn’t matter. Eight against me and Ash were bad odds. But I’d bloomed, right? Not so bad now. Especially if my aspect held, spreading out in invisible lethal waves.

  Where’s Graves? In the house? “Ash. Ash!” I had to shout over a long rattling roll of thunder. “Go find Graves! Find him now!”

  Ash growled, his claws digging into mud, and I was afraid he wouldn’t listen. Time to think fast, only what could I do? If he decided not to do what I told him—

  Silly, Anna’s voice whispered inside my head. Keep the Broken with you; he’s good cannon fodder. But if you really want him to obey, do this. And her ghostly, manicured fingers drummed against my skull.

  The touch flexed inside my head, my will grinding down as the bloodhunger dilated in my throat. My mother’s locket burned with fierce cold, the silver stinging me.

  I pulled the touch back, hurriedly, shaking my head. Water flew.

  Ash let out a yelp and skipped sideways as if stung. I felt as if I’d just swallowed Anna’s blood again, and her training opened up inside me, ghostly silk-hung corridors stretching in every direction. Eight vampires, a storm that was certainly the work of a very old and powerful sucker, and the werwulf who’d saved my ass time and again whirled and pelted away with spooky blurring grace.

  How did I do that?

  Anna. Somehow, in drinking her blood, I’d taken more. Whether she’d intended it or it just happened because we were both svetocha was a question I’d worry about later.

  If I survived this.

  My grasp on the malaika firmed, became natural. The curved wooden swords whirled in circles, rain dripping down the back of my neck as my hair finished plastering itself to my head, my braid a heavy sopping rope. I should have been shivering and terrified out of my tiny little mind.

  Instead, I dropped into first-guard, bent my knees, and had to control the urge to fling myself at them. They spread out, fangs bared, and the hiss-growl of pissed-off vampir
es turned the rain to trembling, flashing needles of ice. Which one’s the leader? Pick off the leader first. But they all feel the same age, which means—

  I realized my mistake just as the rest of the vampires showed up. These eight weren’t the only ones. They were just the quickest on the scene, so to speak.

  More deadly black shapes knifed out of the dark between the trees, lightning crackling as the sky overhead tore itself apart, and I braced myself. The malaika spun, and there was no more time for thinking.

  I moved.

  The first vampire fell, choking and clawing at his throat. The happy stuff in my blood that makes me svetocha also made me toxic to suckers now that I’d bloomed. The aspect flared, almost visible as it battered at the ice pellets now raining down on me. Stinging hail lashed and my right-hand malaika sheared half the sucker’s face off. Black blood exploded, hanging in a freezing arc before the hail scattered through it.

  He didn’t look more than sixteen. None of them did, but the way their faces twisted into plum-colored evil was ageless. Their eyes were black from lid to lid now, and their cold hunting-auras hit the wall of heat that was my aspect. Traceries of steam exploded as I leapt, malaika whirling with a whistling sound over the crack of thunder. Landing, splorch of mud under my sneakers, skidding but that was all right, on my knees and tearing a long furrow across the meadow’s face as I slid, bending back under claw strikes as they tried to get through the shell of toxicity and tear my throat out. Vampire blood sprayed, acid-smoking as it hit chill-wet air. Steam twisted into sharptooth shapes and I gained my feet again with a lurch. Mud splattered and grass flew as I twisted aside, my foot flashing out and kicking another sucker with a crunch.

  The world was slow, and I moved through it with whispering, eerie speed. It didn’t even feel abnormal to be sidestepping through time and space this way. It wasn’t the plastic goop slowing everything down—no, this was just me tearing through the snarled fabric of the normal. Bloodhunger flamed all the way down my throat, exploded in my stomach.