Lili St Crow - Reckoning

One of the spikes from his father’s chair, held loosely by the thin end like a baseball bat, the blunt sharp-edged tip of it dripping as sucker blood ran down its length. He glanced up over my head, blue eyes colder than winter sky, and turned.

Broken bodies littered the bowl-shaped expanse. Two suckers left alive, crouching in front of Christophe. Both male, slight and dark, and terribly young-looking even while they snarled, their top and lower canines springing free.

Christophe laughed. A low, terrible sound. “Come, then,” he said, very softly. “Come and die.”

Silence, broken only by the drip, drip of thin liquid from the tip of the barbed spike he held. The suckers glanced at each other, their jaws crackling as they distended further, sharp ivory in the low bloody light.

They broke and ran, vanishing with that nasty laughing sound. Their tiptapping footsteps receded, and Christophe slumped. He let out a long breath, and Gran’s owl hooted softly. I could still feel it circling, but when I glanced up there was nothing. Just the directionless red glow, and the smell. The female vampire’s body slumped aside; I scrabbled away from it along the wall.

I actually gagged. Nausea twisted my stomach before the aspect rose again on a wave of heat, and I smelled cinnamon through the reek. That only made it worse. Christophe backed up toward me, and a thin thread of his apple-pie scent reached me too.

That helped. But still. So many of them. Had I done that?

We . We’d done it. Christophe and me.

Christophe turned on one bare heel. His feet were healing, bruises retreating as the aspect crackled over him, heat-lightning. His hair was slicked back, dark under the matted blood, and a muscle in his cheek flicked. A sudden graceful movement and he knelt, his free hand coming down. His fingers met my shoulder, and it was like a spark snapping. I almost twitched.

“Are you hurt?” Level and furious.

I took stock. I was alive. All my appendages. The rage had vanished, like water on hot pavement. The back of my throat was dry and rasping. “N-no.” I sounded hoarse, but the thread of silk in my tone wasn’t mine.

It was Anna’s, and it horrified me. Even my voice wasn’t my own anymore. I’d changed. All the broken bodies lying strewn on the floor told me how much. It was like vanishing. Again.

Who am I now?

“Come, then. We have to get you out of here.”

My chin set. I pressed back against the wall, and my legs took care of levering me up. His hand fell away. The aspect flowed up from my feet, working in, delicious oily warmth. A tremor slid through the center of my bones, but I ignored it. “I’m not leaving. I came down here to rescue you.”

“You succeeded admirably.” One corner of his mouth lifted a millimeter, but then he reached for me again with his free hand, aiming for my right wrist. I stepped aside, sliding along the wall. Nervously.

Like I didn’t want him to touch me.

I swallowed, hard. “Get out of here. Dibs and Graves are heading out, you should take care of them. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got things to do.”

“Dru.” Calm, quiet, and very cold. “You are coming with me.”

I shook my head. Everything I wanted to say boiled up inside me. Hit the wall of what I suspected about him, everything I knew, and how much I doubted everything he’d ever told me.

I’m a plague. Everything I care about gets hurt or dies. I’m here, and I’m going to stay here. I’m not leaving until I kill the thing that killed my parents . “Just go.” I couldn’t make the words any louder than a whisper, because my throat had closed up. “I want you to go . I can’t stand to lose you too.”

He opened his mouth, probably to argue, but a strange whooshing sound filled the auditorium like water poured into a cup. A spike of diamond pain speared my temples, and Sergej laughed.

“Oh, children.” His voice filled the entire vast space as well, and I slumped against the wall. “You make it so easy .”

Christophe spun, butSergej was already moving. I leapt, the world dragging at me with weird clear-plastic fingers, as if superspeed wouldn’t even be enough. My right-hand malaika flicked, and black blood flew.

I was too slow. He was already past me, my soles slipping in the foul-smelling guck, and Christophe screamed. It was a high despairing cry, with a djamphir ’s hiss-growl behind it. The crash of the two of them colliding shivered the air into fragments. The entire auditorium rocked, and a sheet of black blood splashed up. They hit the stone wall, and cracks radiated through the sheer, bloodred rock.

Christophe!

Slipping, scrabbling, wishing I had boots or real sneakers instead of these crap flimsy things, needed traction, I wrenched myself the opposite direction and Gran’s owl rocketed past me in living color, claws outstretched and wings glinting with sharp-edged metal. In the bloody glow it was a spot of clean white, banking sharply. I threw myself after it just as Sergej turned, blinking through space with the eerie stuttering speed of a badass sucker.

Fast, he’s fast, got to slow him down —Something in me stretched, instinctively, and I twisted again, my foot touching down lightly and sending up another spray of that black, thin, sickening fluid. They were just never going to get it clean in here. But I guess cleaning isn’t high on a vampire to-do list, really.

Gran’s owl arrowed down, and it hit Sergej’s head with a crunch much larger than a bird could produce. He went forward, tucking and rolling with jerky, weird precision, as if he was a clockwork instead of flesh and blood.

“ Coward! ” I yelled, pelting for him. “You fucking coward! ”

The words stung the air. He rose from the wash of rotting blood on the floor, chunks of decayed flesh clinging to him, his curls tumbled and that black, oily gaze striking like a snake.

I screamed, a hawk-cry of rising effort. There was finally enough air in my lungs—and Gran’s owl shot past me, claws out and its golden eyes a streak of brilliance. Hit him square, and it wasn’t just me hitting him.

It was the photograph I’d seen just once, the yellow house I found sometimes in my nightmares—the oak tree shading the front porch blasted by some terrible evil, a rag of flesh and bone hanging in its branches; my mother’s body hung there like a Christmas ornament. It was the long corridor my father had walked down, toward a slowly opening door that exhaled cold evil—and my father’s body standing at the back door of the house in the Dakotas, its blue eyes clouded with the film of death and its fleshless fingers tapping at the glass. It was Gran’s house burning and the dark pain in Graves’s eyes, the scars I’d seen on Christophe’s back and the cold nightmare of the blood drawn out of my veins while Sergej laughed.

There were other things, too. Dibs, flinching and terrified, sobbing. Dylan from the first Schola I’d ever attended, probably dead because he’d been blown from the inside; August, showing up bloody and battered in the nick of time. Anna, who had tried to kill me in her own way, sure, but . . . she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

Nobody deserved what this thing had done to them.

Sergej skidded back, one slim iron-hard hand flashing up. He hit Gran’s owl, hard , and the impact smashed through me, throwing me sideways. I went tumbling, splashing through the foulness, and before I slid to a stop Sergej was on me, his hands around my throat, and he squeezed .

My hands lay encased in cement. The malaika suddenly weighed a ton, and something crackled in my throat. Little black spots danced at the edges of my vision, and a shrill inner voice screamed at me to do something, to move—but the lump of heat in my stomach was fading, and the rage had deserted me.