Lili St Crow - Defiance

She had all sorts of ideas about blood. Nowadays I wondered about that.

My hands turned into fists. Long narrow fingers, thumb on the outside so it don’t get broken when you punch, the scar across my left-hand knuckles from that one time in Macon when Dad and I were taking care of a hotel that had a resident angry ghost. I could still smell the burning from that night sometimes, and hear the window shivering as I punched it, desperate for a way out with Dad right behind me and the holy water bubbling in its plastic container, reacting to the fury of a swollen, fiery thing that didn’t like being dead—and hated everything that had escaped death so far.

We’d gone back during daylight and kicked the ghost’s ass but good. Still, the whole place had burned down. It hadn’t been a win, more like a draw. On the other hand, we’d both survived.

I rubbed at the scar. When I bloomed, would it go away? Maybe. Maybe my hands would look different then, too. And maybe they’d all stop fussing over me and let me do something useful for once.

Not soon enough. “I hate this. I hate thinking of . . . What if he’s torturing him? Sergej.” The name sent a glass spike of hate through my head. Christophe didn’t flinch, but his jaw set.

It was my fault Graves was captured. If it hadn’t been for me, he’d still be living in the Dakotas. Sure, his life hadn’t been exactly normal, but at least he hadn’t been at risk of dying at the hands of a crazed king vampire, right?

Right.

Christophe took a deep breath. “It isn’t likely. The boy is loup-garou , not wulfen. He won’t be as easy to break as—”

“But all it takes is time, right? And it’s been weeks. He could be anywhere now. He could even be . . .”

Dead. With no heartbeat for the pendulum to lock onto at all. It curdled in my throat. I didn’t want to say it. Not here in this pretty white room.

Christophe uncurled from the bed. The aspect slid through him once as he approached me, disappeared. He leaned down over my shoulder, his face next to mine and his blue gaze holding mine in the mirror.

Seen this way, we had an odd similarity of bone structure. We didn’t quite look related, but certainly like we came from the same country, especially with my hair pulled back. What was gawky on me was spare angular beauty on him. He leaned in close enough that his cheek was next to mine. And that made the skin on that whole side of my body heat up. The flush went all the way through me.

His tone was just the same, low and even, every word chosen carefully and the spaces between them echoing with a foreign tongue. “If he is dead, you cannot help him. If he is still alive, you will do him exactly no good by haring off and getting caught by Sergej yourself.” His mouth turned down, briefly, before he continued. “Not to mention you could waste several of the Order in an assault to free you, because we would certainly throw everything we have into the attempt. Your task is the hardest, Dru. It is to wait and to train. I would change it if I could.”

My chin jutted stubbornly. He read the mutiny on my face, plain as a billboard.

“Don’t even think about it.” The aspect ruffled through him again, blond-streaked hair turning dark and sleek, laying flat against his skull. The whispering sound of its shifting was like the ocean far away. “If I had to come fetch you, Dru, I would be very displeased. And despite what you think, every time I’ve gone up against my father ”—his lip curled, fangs sliding free—“I’ve achieved no better than a draw.”

I was about to point out that he’d rescued me from his father, but then I thought of how close a thing it had been. The snow and the cold and the wulfen and Graves staring through the crack-starred windshield through a mask of bruising and bright blood.

There. I’d thought his name again. Graves. I winced.

The aspect retreated, and Christophe’s fangs disappeared. A djamphir ’s fangs are meant for puncturing flesh, but they have almost no growth in the lower fangs. A nosferat ’s are bigger yet, and ugly, and big on both upper and lower jaw. They deform the entire mouth, so that when suckers hiss, they look like a snake fixing to swallow an egg.

“I swear we will find him. But it takes time.” He straightened, apparently considering that to be that. “I’m on guard tonight. May I stay?”

I struggled with myself for a few seconds, gave up. “For a little while,” I said finally, and his whole face changed. It wasn’t the slow, dangerous grin he used when he wanted to scare someone. No, this was a genuine smile, ducking his head a little like he was pleased. And it warmed me right down to my bare toes.

Even if I didn’t really want it to. But some part of me did, right? Some part of me must, given the way I got all gooshy inside and how my internal thermostat went out of whack whenever he got close.

I couldn’t even figure out why . I mean, I didn’t like him that way, did I? I’d told Graves I didn’t. But here I was, and pretty much everything in me just wouldn’t listen. I kept doing weird things whenever I got a whiff of Apple Pie Boy.

Even though I knew he probably smelled like that because he fed from the vein. Like a sucker. A “glutter,” the wulfen called it—a djamphir that drank human blood.

They don’t have to. But it kickstarts them, gives them greater strength and speed and accelerated healing. The tradeoff is the risk of the aura-dark, an allergy to sunshine that can induce anaphylactic shock. Still, some djamphir do it. They aren’t supposed to . . . but they do, for that extra strength and speed. I hadn’t worked out if Christophe smelled like that because he drank, or because . . . I don’t know, some other reason. I couldn’t figure out where he’d find the time to bite someone, hanging around and training me all the livelong night, but still.

And was I a coward, because I didn’t ask? I had enough to worry about, right?

Right?

He stayed for a bit, and we talked about other things. Mostly about the paranormal biology textbook and where the tutor had left off, what the chemical processes were that allowed djamphir to sniff a victim’s or a nosferat ’s blood and tell things about them—age, sex, sometimes even hair color. And what was the standard method for taking down a well-organized hunting pack of older nosferat instead of a Master and acolytes. Equals don’t often pack up, because they’re jealous and nasty even to each other, but it had happened sometimes and the Order knew how to deal with it.

I swear, sometimes I learned more from him in the last few hours of my “day” than from all the tutors. He never acted like my questions were stupid, or like I should have known everything in the first place, the way some of the other djamphir did.

So it got harder and harder, each dawn, to watch him walk out into the hall. Then to shut the door and know he was leaning against it on the other side and wishing he could stay inside while he heard me flip the locks and settle the bar in its brackets, the warding strengthening as I touched it.

But I kept sending him out each night. Because when I crawled into bed and dragged the long black coat up from underneath the covers—Nathalie always replaced it when she changed the sheets, and she didn’t say a word—and hugged it, smelling the fading breath of cigarette smoke and healthy young loup-garou , I didn’t want Christophe to see.

In the longgolden time of afternoon, my window rattled. Tiny stones, flung with more-than-human accuracy, popping and pinging against the glass because the screen was gone. Later in the summer I’d figure out something to do with the screen, but for now it was sitting in a disused classroom a couple floors up, and I didn’t mention it to Christophe or Benjamin.