Lili St Crow - Reckoning

Because the twisting hate in his face was what I felt. It was the rage, and it was mine , too.

It was how I was like him.

The aspect flamed, and he coughed. The purple mottling rose in his perfect, planed cheeks. But he laughed, a gleeful, hateful sound that exhaled rot in my face. “Stronger!” he chuckled. “Inoculated against your poison, little child-bird!” He braced himself, leaning close, and laughed in my face, rank breath filling the world. “There will be other svetocha . I will walk in the daylight. I will leave your body for the crows to—”

A meaty thunk interrupted. Sergej stiffened, and my aspect flared again. I got my right hand up, braced with malaika hilt, and clocked him a good one across the head.

He pitched to the side, and Christophe’s face rose over his shoulder. Christophe was smeared with even more vampire blood, and the left side of his face looked smashed-wrong. He was oddly twisted, and I realized why—something in him had been crushed. By something I mean bones—the entire left side of his ribs was caved in. But he held onto the iron spike grimly and shoved it further into Sergej’s back, his lips skinning back from his teeth. In that one moment, he looked more like his father than I’d ever believed possible.

The sharp thin tip of the spike punched out through Sergej’s chest. The vampire king writhed, inhaling, the purple mottles sliding up his face with grasping, ugly fingers. He looked ancient now, not always-seventeen and too beautiful to be real.

No, this was the face of something old and terrible, something so far removed from human it wasn’t even related anymore. The bloody directionless light pulsed, stuttering, and I realized it was coming from him .

Oh, Jesus . Nausea grabbed my entire body, a wracking spasm of revulsion. I was on my knees as Sergej scrabbled back. I’d stabbed him with an iron lamp-stand last time, and it had only put him down temporarily.

“No!” Christophe grabbed my arm. “Dru! NO! ”

He shoved me, with more strength than I would’ve thought possible. I flew back, my left-hand malaika clattering free. Shit, dropped my sword, junior move, can’t do that —Then I hit the wall, hard enough to stun. Little stars danced in front of my eyes, and I whooped in a breath.

Christophe limped, dragging his left foot. It was a weird, snake-like motion, and Sergej was curling up like a bait worm on a hook. The king of the vampires was making a noise, a queer rattling that scraped against my skin, and the red light deepened. Instead of fresh blood, the light was clotting on every surface, fouling and streaking.

I whooped in another breath, coughed and retched. Still had my right-hand malaika . Dragged myself up the wall, the aspect ’s strength a warm glow, but fading now. The voices eased, whispering instead of screaming inside my head, and the touch brushed over my skin with feather-soft caresses. It felt . . . clean.

Thank God. But I already felt filthy way down inside, where scrubbing wouldn’t reach.

Where the rage came from.

Christophe grabbed the cruel clawed end of the spike jutting up from his father’s back. “I warned you,” he rasped, and the aspect boiled free of him, waves of power visible now in the dull punky glow. “I told you if you touched her, you would die.”

He sounded so calm .

Sergej said something, the spiked consonants of a foreign language. Ragged, and full of so much fury, so much twisted hate, it turned my stomach all over again.

“Yes,” Christophe said. “You are my father. And I hate you for it .”

It happened so fast. One moment he was there, holding the iron spike. The next, he jammed the spike all the way through. It hit the stone with a screech, and sparks flew.

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was Sergej twisting, his feet flailing, an animal in a trap. And Christophe on him, the horrid sound of bones grinding as he grabbed his father, wrenched Sergej’s head aside, and buried his fangs right where the shoulder met the neck.

The red light flared. Then I was moving, every step taking a hundred years. “Christophe!” I was moving through syrup, through mud, through concrete. “Christophe! No! ”

Sergej howled. The sound was immense, every key on an ancient bony organ hit at once, wheezing and screaming. It blew my hair back, and the touch turned to acid inside my head. The cry cut short on a gurgle that stood a good chance of starring in every nightmare I’d have for the rest of my life, as if I didn’t already have so much nightmare material already.

I was on my knees, sliding, and it was a good thing I’d dropped my left-hand blade. Because my fingers curled in Christophe’s slicked-back hair, and I yanked his head back.

Or at least,I tried to. I got exactly nowhere.

His shoulders hunched. Something ripped as he used his teeth, settling more firmly into his father’s neck. Blood sprayed, black and viscous, not thin like the other suckers’. It smoked, and the thought of that oozing down my throat was enough to make me feel even sicker.

I set my feet and yanked again, but it was as if he’d been turned to stone. He gulped, greedily, and the sound forced bile up into my throat. The thought that if I threw up, I’d be throwing up blood— Graves’s blood, at that—did not help.

“Christophe.” I swallowed hard. “Christophe, please. Listen to me. You’re not him. Don’t be him . Please. Please, Christophe, stop . Stop it. Please. I’m begging you, stop.”

Everything paused. I had my fingers in his blood-clotted hair, and a current roared through him and into me. The touch flamed into life, and I almost reeled. But I didn’t let go of Christophe’s head. I couldn’t.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please, Christophe. Don’t do this.”

He shuddered, his ribs popping out and mending with horrifying, meaty sounds.

Then Christophe threw his head back and screamed. It was a long, despairing cry, but at least it got him away from his father. Who twitched again, horribly vital, and I could feel him gathering himself. Like a tornado or a thunderstorm approaching.

I brought my right hand up, my knees dripping as I rose too, the perfect angle unreeling inside me. The malaika made its low sweet sound, but it was lost in the noise Christophe was making. I might have screamed too, but it was lost in Christophe’s cry as well. All the loneliness, all the pain, all the betrayal in the world was in that sound, and the wooden sword whooshed down.

I put everything into it. It wasn’t just me. The dead filled me, all of them, whispering and chattering in a vast silence wrapped around me.

This was the way to kill him. Not with hate, not with taking in his blood and everything about him. Instead, it was my mother’s hand on the malaika ’s hilt, and my father’s. Even Gran’s ancient, liver-spotted hand, her fingers calloused from a lifetime of work and her eyes sharp with take-no-prisoners compassion. It was Graves’s hand, too—even though he wasn’t dead, it was the hand of the boy he could’ve been, tight against mine. And Anna’s, red nails gleaming, as I felt the tears slicking my cheeks and understood it was for her too. Even though she’d tried to kill me, I wept for the girl she could have been.

The person I would have to try to be, so I didn’t turn out like this horrible, twitching thing on the floor.

The blade carved cleanly, and Christophe’s cry cut off as if I’d sliced him . For a nightmarish moment I thought I had, and it was probably a mercy the dull reddish light failed completely then, snuffed out like a candle flame. The darkness that descended was absolute, the silence a ringing tone.