Graves was holding me up now. I was trying to scream, but I couldn’t. My voice box had frozen up. Everything about me had frozen. One thought managed to escape the relentless, digging agony.
“please don’t please don’t not again please don’tdon’tdon’t”
But it came one more time, and this time was the worst because the digging, awful fingers weren’t pulling at anything physical. Instead they were scraping and burrowing and twisting into me. The part of me that wasn’t anything but me, the invisible core of what I was.
I’d call it the soul, but I don’t think the word fits. It’s as close as I can get.
Digging scraping pulling tearing ripping, invisible things inside me being pulled away, and something left me in a huge gush. My head tipped back, breath locked in my throat. Graves made another small horrified sound and tried to pull me away.
Christophe jerked his head back, fangs sliding free of my flesh, and something wrapped itself tightly around my wrist, below his bruising-hard grip on my forearm. He exhaled, shuddering, and Graves tried to pull me away again. My arm stretched like Silly Putty between them, my shoulder screaming, and I couldn’t make a sound.
The winter-blue of Christophe’s irises clouded, dark striations like food coloring dropped in water threading through the light. They still glowed even more intensely, in a way that shouldn’t have made sense. “Sweet,” he hissed, and made an odd hitching movement. His chin dipped, and his fingers tightened bruising-hard on my wrist, like he was going to do that again.
I wanted to scream, couldn’t. Nothing worked. My body just hung there, frozen and unresponsive.
“Christophe.” Shanks sounded nervous. “Um, Christophe?”
The world trembled on a knife edge. Blackness crowded in around the corners. My head tipped further back. Graves held me up, both arms around me now. I was so tired it was work to breathe.
In, out, in, out, my ribs almost refused to rise. There was air outside my face, but it was just so hard to bring it in. Instead, the sea of atmosphere pushed down on me, crushing.
“Jesus,” Graves whispered. “What did you do to her?”
Another gleam of teeth below Christophe’s darkened eyes. “I just borrowed her for a while, dogboy.” The casual, hurtful edge to the words abraded the inside of my head like an ice scraper against a windshield. I flinched. “Don’t worry. I’m not about to let one of them get their ugly fangs in moja ksi aniczko.”
Pain and dragging weariness pulled on every nerve and muscle in my body. Behind us, another chilling howl lifted into the night.
“We need cover,” Shanks said urgently. “And—”
“I know what you need. Shut up.” Christophe touched my face, stepping close and sliding his fingertips against my dirty cheek. I flinched. Graves dragged me back, and how weird was it that he stepped silently? All around us, the woods creaked and sighed in the darkness. The snarl running under the surface of Graves’ skin bounced around, echoing, inside my skull.
They faced each other, the two boys, and I was suddenly very sure something bad was about to happen. The moment hung, suspended in the cold night air.
“They’re getting closer,” someone whispered.
Christophe laughed. It was a bitter little sound, not unlike Graves’ sarcastic, pained bark. “I’m not saving you,” he said, very quietly. “I’m saving her. Remember that.”
He turned and literally vanished. The air made a weird popping sound, collapsing where he’d stood, and one of the wulfen sniffed deeply. Shanks cursed, but softly. Thick white wetness boiled in the air, rising from the ground where Christophe had stood. It rose in veiny, ropy fingers, curls of it touching my legs.
The touch made my skin crawl. It was exactly the kind of greasy fog the suckers had shown up in.
Wait a minute. What did he just do?
“Bloodfog,” one of them said. “It’ll cover us, and he’ll hunt them. Let’s go.”
At that point everything just turned weird and soupy gray. Dibs helped Graves heft me up on his back like I was a little kid getting piggybacks. I tried to say I was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come.
They started moving through the forest, everything blurring together. My head bobbled and joggled against Graves’ shoulder, and I heard him cursing steadily under his breath. The places inside me where everything had been ripped up twinged and settled, throbbing like a sore tooth. It was like a headache, only not in my head. In the invisible places where I lived that weren’t connected with any muscle or bone.
“Graves…” I whispered against his shoulder. Then the darkness swallowed me, and everything inside me still hurt. I fell down into the hole where things had been ripped free, and small chill voices laughed while I did.
CHAPTER 22
I came back to myself slowly, in fits and starts. First there was gray light, coming through two horizontal cracks. A single spot of warmth against my chest, like someone had breathed on me.
Voices. Shanks and Graves, mostly.
“She still out?” Grudging concern. The tall werwulf didn’t sound happy.
“Like a light. I can’t believe you suggested that.” Graves, tired and unhappy too. The movement under me hadn’t stopped. Wind touched my hair. For the first time I smelled something other than smoke. Leaf sludge, fresh air, the iron smell of very early or very, very late.
“We had to. Jesus Christ.” Feet hitting the ground. “All right, everyone. Let’s get moving.”
The horizontal slices of light thinned and vanished. I drowned in blackness again. Something inside me felt different, but I couldn’t figure out what.
A sound like feathers surrounded me. I waited for the owl, but it didn’t show up. Its wings beat frantically, a muffled heartbeat. The horizontal bars of light dawned again, and I realized they were my eyelids opening a little to let in morning.
Voices, arguing. I felt like I’d been ripped apart and put back together wrong. My arms were around something, and a tree trunk was braced against my back. My feet dangled. I hitched in a breath. It was a relief to find that breathing wasn’t a huge struggle anymore. My lungs and ribs had decided to work together, and the air was no longer heavy as lead.
“The wampyr have gone to earth, if Reynard left any alive. We have to move now, and get to a safe place.”
“Like where? And Shanks is half-dead. We can’t leave him.”
“You’re not in charge. We’re already carrying her. You gonna carry him too?”
“Fuck you I’m not in charge. We’re not leaving anyone behind.” It was Graves, like I’d never heard him. Angry, determined, and with that growl under the edge of the words. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and he wasn’t about to take any shit.
I realized my mouth was open, dry, and tasted like something had died in it. I closed it and tried an experimental movement. The haze of light coming in through my eyelids sharpened.
“Please. Who do you think you’re kidding? The djamphir might think you’re gonna control us, but you’re not.”
Movement. I was shifted to the side. A small sound escaped me, like I was caught in a nightmare.
Go figure.
“Let’s get this figured out right now,” Graves said, quietly. The growl turned into a sharp crackling, as if bones under plastic wrap were snapping into dust.
Oh boy. The thought was sharp and clear, and it was another relief. A little bit of warmth stole back into me, the locket oddly heavy under my shirt. The ripped-up places inside me quivered like scabs. With thought came being again. I was.
Dru. I’m Dru. And that’s Graves.
Life, color, and sound all rushed back into me. I opened my eyes and found out I was slumped against Dibs, who had gone pale, his eyes wide. He stared at the clearing, which was ringed by wulfen in various hunching poses. Some of them even lay stretched flat on the forest floor.
Oily-white, almost-glowing fog drifted cotton-packed between the trees, and birds were calling uncertainly. It even smelled like d
awn, if you’ve ever been out when the sun comes up, you know what I mean. It’s the metallic scent of sunlight hitting the atmosphere and everyone needing a good shot of caffeine.
Graves and another black-haired boy were the only ones standing up in the middle of the clearing.
Beads of water touched Graves’ messy hair. The fog was so thick it was like being caught in a bubble, swallowing the rest of the world.
The shape at my feet was Shanks, stretched out at full-length, dried blood in a shocking spill down the side of his face. His clothes were ripped to shreds, and more blood, black and still-smoking as well as red and human, crusted him. He looked like he was in bad shape, cheese-pale and with his sides heaving as he breathed in shallow gasps.
Graves leaned forward. The other boy, slim, black hair cut short, big dark eyes almost glowing with anger, rocked back on his heels as if he’d been punched. The invisible tension between them boiled like heat-haze above pavement on a tar-melting-hot day.
“Don’t fucking mess with me right now, man.” Graves said every word very slowly and very clearly, his lips moving as he enunciated. He had to, because his jaw was shifting. Still, the command-voice came out clean and clear. The other boy rocked back even further on his heels, dropping his shoulders and dipping his chin.
“We’ll all die,” the other kid whined, but all the starch had gone out of him. “You’re not ready.”
“Not ready my ass,” Graves snapped. “I was born ready, dick-wipe. You want to test me now, you go ahead, but it’ll waste valuable time. We get caught, you’ll die just like the rest of us. So stop being an asshole and shut the fuck up.”
Silence, as ticking-tense as the moment between stepping off a diving board and the instant you hit the water. I leaned against Dibs and looked down at Shanks. His eyes were half-closed, little gleams peeking out from under the eyelids. There was no sign of iris or pupil, just blind white.
Something was wrong. The world looked flat, oddly two-dimensional. I tilted my head back, trying to hear something, anything, with the touch. Trying to unloose the fist and send little questing fingers out to take in the world.
My pulse leapt up, hard and high in my throat. There was nothing there.
Stop it. You’re just tired. God knew I was exhausted. But it was like being blind. I’d never realized before how the touch lay under every thought, bubbling and boiling and showing me the depths of things.
It was gone, and I was blind. I hated the feeling.
I found I could stand on my own two feet. Dibs still clutched at me, though. His skin was hot against mine, and he smelled just like a regular boy, without the undertone of cold fur and danger.
Is this what it’s like to be normal? Shaking spilled through me. The trees looked dead. The fog was flat. And Graves and the rest—
No, wait. Graves looked normal. He stared at the other boy, green eyes piercing and a high blush of color on his cheekbones, the slight suggestion of epicanthic folds vanishing as his face shifted to more hawklike than half-Asian. Other than that, he looked just the same as usual, except a little more unwashed. His coat was singed and plastered with mud up the side, his hair was wildly mussed, and a bolt of something hot and hard went through my chest as the other black-haired boy dropped his eyes. Graves kept staring until the kid actually crouched, as if the green gaze was a heavy weight.
It looked like a grainy color film I’d seen on late-night cable in a weird little motel outside a teensy town named Zavalla in Texas. It was a nature special on satellite cable about wolf packs, and all about how wolves will give in and give up so the more dominant wolf keeps his position and the less dominant one doesn’t get killed. There was a lot of snapping and snarling, but killing everyone who wanted to maybe get a little higher on the ladder was bad evolutionary logic.
I blinked. My eyes were full of crusty stuff. And Graves really did look like the only real 3-D human being standing there. Even with his hair in messy strings and his coat singed, he looked…
I don’t have a word for the way he looked. Solid. Comforting. Like he was the one piece of the world that was holding the whole damn thing up. I let out a small sipping breath, trying not to taste the smoke smell rising up all around me or the stink of danger in the air. And that was another thing too, everything smelled washed out. Insipid. Not as real and true as it should have.
There was that spot of warmth against my chest, though. That was comforting.
“Now,” Graves finally said, “anyone else want to piss me off? Anyone else think this is a goddamn democracy?”
I swallowed, hard. My throat clicked, but nobody paid any attention. He’d drawn himself up to his full height, and turned slowly in a circle, looking at everyone.
“We’re a pack.” He halted once he’d made a full circle, and looked down at the kid in front of him. It might’ve looked weird anywhere else, but here in the woods surrounded by fog it looked perfectly normal.
Well, not normal. But natural. It looked like he belonged here, splashed with mud and scorch, his eyes burning and his coat straining across shoulders that had grown broader. It was the loup-garou burning in him, turning him into something other than the weirdo bird-thin Goth Boy hiding in the corners of your average school.
His hands were whiteknuckle fists. “We don’t leave someone behind. We’ve all been left behind one way or another, we ain’t gonna do it to nobody else. Anyone got a problem with that?”
Seconds ticked away. The tension went out of the air, but Graves tilted his head. A few of the boys sat up, and the black-haired boy made a quick inquiring movement.
“You hear that?” Dibs whispered. Either his skin was burning hot or mine was ice cold. I wasn’t sure which. “Choppers. Again.”
“What if it’s the Order?” someone wanted to know. “I mean, coming to get us?”
“Too fucking late,” the black-haired boy muttered. Peter, my weary brain finally whispered.
That’s his name.
Graves scrubbed at his chin with long fingers. “We’ll move as far as we can under the fog. We can’t trust that it might be the right kind of people up there looking for us.”
“Are we on our own, now? No more Order?” Dibs piped up. He was dirty and disheveled as the rest of us, his round blond face creased with worry. But he didn’t look as scared as he’d always looked in the cafeteria.
“Don’t know yet.” Graves sighed. “We’ll move as long as we have cover, then hide until nightfall. By then Christophe will be around again.”
“So will the nosferatu.” This boy, long and brown-haired, lay on his back with an arm over his face. He wore a flannel shirt that had seen better days and a messy bandage tied around his head, a dark bloody patch over his left temple. “I got an idea.”
“Shoot,” Graves said immediately.
“I’ve got family around here, not kincousins, my aunts married into them. Maybe we should go to ground. It’s a short shot from the last town we passed. We’re all exhausted, the girl don’t smell like herself, and if we dive now, we’ll have a better chance of running at full strength tonight, or even better, tomorrow when the sun rises.”
Graves half-turned and looked across the clearing, straight at me. I looked back, as steadily as I could while hanging onto Dibs and sandwiched against a tree trunk.
He was looking to me for direction, I realized. Back in his snow-piled hometown, I’d been the one who knew what to do when it all went sideways. At least, I’d known what to do when the burning dog and the streak-headed werwulf tried to kill us. I’d gotten Graves to my house. I’d been the one who had the books and the guns and the knowledge, however patchy.
We looked at each other. What the fuck do we do now? he was asking.
I tried to think. “What do we have?” My throat was sore, and the words didn’t have the weight I was used to hearing behind them. They were made of paper. “In the way of supplies.”
Because I knew how to do this. It didn’t depend on the touch or the aspect or anything
else. It was just doing what I’d been taught. We were in hostile territory, and we had an objective, the objective was not dying.
First you find out what you have, Dad would say. Then you figure out how to make it work for what you need, ’cause you don’t get what you want. You get just what you have and no more.
It turned out to be a load of cash, my bag, the clothes on our backs, some switchblades, the oxygen tank, a medikit Dibs was carrying as well, and two packs of cigarettes. Shanks lay on the ground, breathing shallowly. He didn’t look good.
It was a relief to have my brain working again. Every muscle I had hurt like hell, and the weird two-dimensionality of the world was new and awful. My head ached, but I’d done this sort of thing a lot with Dad, him throwing scenarios at me, teaching me how to plan.
“We didn’t have enough time to get to the armory.” Peter very carefully slid his switchblade back in his pocket. “They hit us so fast. And a Burner. Jesus.”
At least we’ve got money. I leaned against the tree instead of Dibs. My left wrist was wrapped in a very capable pressure bandage. Shut my eyes, squeezing out the light, and took a deep breath.
Come on, Dru. You know how to do this. “So our choices are to run on the money we’ve got and try to make the city tonight with the wounded, or hide at Andy’s family’s house until tomorrow.” I paused. “Do we even know where to go once we get to the city limits?”
“Shanks knows.” Andy had sat up, and he was looking at me like I’d grown a new head. “My aunts are loyal. They’d hide us even if it was the Dark Times.”
“I’m just not sure we won’t bring them trouble.” I blinked again, tried to focus. The world still didn’t look right, and a funny quivering feeling was pushing its way up through my chest. I didn’t need a dictionary to know it was called fear. A whole new brand of being afraid, an unsteady heat like indigestion underneath the warm spot of Mom’s locket. I was beginning to realize there were shades of fear just like on a color wheel, all of them slightly different but still awful. I looked up at Graves again. “You’re not going to like this.”
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