Lili St Crow - Defiance

He lay on the floor, the fur still reaching up in ropes and twists. His body was rigid, his eyes rolling and glowing glassy orange. Like they were on fire, molten something poured into his sockets.

Ash’s mouth opened, and he screamed.

It was a long, despairing cry, and it chilled me right down to the core. It blew my hair back, and the touch sparked into life inside my head. A cascade of horrific images, dead bodies and hot blood and despair, roared through my skull.

I dropped to my knees, the sudden impact jolting up through my thighs and jarring every bone in my body. It was agony , bones twisting and every inch of flesh crawling with jellied fire. It burned and it clung, but even worse than the burning and the breaking bone was the soft evil creeping inside my head, its clawed fingers digging at the very core of what made me, me .

It only lasted a few seconds, but those seconds were a lifetime. Something in me twisted, pulling . As if I had hold of an invisible rope and all Gran’s careful training from the time I was a toddler had hardened the invisible muscles I was using to pull. I hauled, a cry to match Ash’s rising out of me, and for a moment we were screaming in unison. I was on my knees, body tilted all the way back, my hands out and knotted into fists like I was pulling on something. It wasn’t a rope now; it was chains wrapped around my wrists. Cold metal chains that burned , and the force on the other end was a riptide of deep black hate.

I’d seen that black before in a sucker’s eyes. In a cold lifeless house in a snowstorm, where Sergej had expected to trap Christophe and got me instead. Slim handsome Sergej, with his teenage face and his honey-brown curls and those black eyes, their hourglass pupils tarns for wild creatures to sink and die in.

I pulled . My knees slipped, I was yanked forward, and suddenly something grabbed me from the other side. For a moment I was horribly stretched ; the thing on the other end of the chains had sunk its claws into me and was pulling me just like taffy. Someone else was yelling, and Ash’s howl broke on a high throat-cut gurgle as he ran out of breath. So did mine, and for a long horrible moment I couldn’t see anything but a deep velvet blackness starred with amazing little points of color. My lungs seized up, I couldn’t breathe, the thing pulling on Ash was going to win—every ounce of stubbornness I had crawled up inside me and I gave it one last lunging, tearing, hideously silent effort.

Something tore inside me. A veil made of wet paper, ripped right in half.

There was a wet crunching noise and a pop! The smell of wet salt showered over me, and the pressure retreated. I fell over backward onto Shanks, my elbow sinking into something soft, and he let out an actual squeal. My head rang like a gong and my arms felt like someone had tried to tear them off. I blinked, and for a second the hazy thought I shoulda stayed in bed occurred to me, like the world’s slowest genius moment.

My breath whooped back in again. I was too grateful for my lungs working to care that I was making coughing, gagging sounds.

Someone let out a small, sobbing noise. My head hurt viciously, and I smelled copper.

Blood. The hunger yawned inside me, opening its red eyes. Tugged on my veins, but faintly.

I got the retching under control. Lay there for a second. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed. “Ohshit,” I whispered, hoarse and rasping. “Nat?”

“Right here.” From the door, a shocked whisper.

“Shanks?” I had to know. I blinked the blood out of my eyes. Was that why my head hurt so bad? The torn thing inside me quivered, too. What had I just done?

Shanks moaned, stirring. “You broke my nuts .”

So that was what my elbow had hit. “Sorry.” My voice cracked. My throat was sore, too, and the bloodhunger rasped unhappily at the back of my throat. I knew I was lying on him, but I couldn’t get up the gumption to move.

“Mother Moon,” Nat whispered. I’d never heard her sound actually shocked before. It was a revelation. “Oh, Mother Moon .”

“And Father Fucking Sky, she broke my nuts .” Shanks curled up; I slid bonelessly down to the stone floor. The claw marks were sharp and fresh, one of them scratching against my wrist as I lay there. It took all the energy I had left to turn my head. My vision cleared. The blackness retreated, bit by bit, like a movie’s first scene opening up.

The long pale shape curled in on itself like Shanks. A muscled back, three jagged scars swiping down across the skin. He was fish-belly white, with a shock of dark hair. It looked like it hadn’t been cut for a while. He shuddered, naked on cold stone, and when his head moved, I saw the streak of white at his temple. It reached all the way back like a skunk stripe now, and the white hairs had a silvery cast.

Like moonlight.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

Muscle moved under that too-white skin as he shook. He coughed, a terrible wet retching sound, and I realized he was crying.

That somehow gave me the strength to move. I rolled, awkwardly, one of my sneaker soles skritching against the floor. Managed to make it to hands and knees. That was as far as I could get. I was shaking like I’d just run five miles without letup. My bladder was near to bursting, and I wished I’d taken the time to brush my teeth. Blood slicked the left side of my face, hot and maddening, I licked my lips and wished I hadn’t because I could taste it, a flood of red and jumbled images of my own face swirling through me.

Dammit. The torn-open spot inside of me quivered again, like it wasn’t quite sure what to do with itself. I had a hazy idea it was going to start hurting pretty soon, but I was too tired to care.

“Ash,” I croaked. “Ash.”

He twitched. The sobbing was like a toddler’s, messy and huge.

I couldn’t get up. So I crawled.

“ Dru! You’re bleeding—” Nat scrambled away from the door. Shanks let out another yelp; I heard her fall. She landed on him as well. He was really winning the lottery today.

“Ow w w W W W W!” Shanks yelled again, and I reached Ash.

His skin was so soft. I grabbed his shoulder, and he curled even tighter around himself, hugging his knees. I couldn’t get my arm under him, but I threw my left one over and hugged as hard as I could. He lay shivering, and the sobs were pouring out of him hard enough to hurt my ribs, but I held on. Graves’s earring, in my left ear, lay against my cheek. It was ice-cold, and so was my mother’s locket, but both rapidly warmed as I hugged him, breathing into his hair. He smelled like outside at midnight, one of those clear-cold nights with a full moon where ice makes every edge stand out razor sharp. Under that was the tang of boy, and dirt. He smelled a little . . . unwashed.

But he was human . He was boy-shaped again. I didn’t know what it meant, unless it meant something fantastic. All this time he’d been trying to change back, and he finally did it.

“Dru?” Nathalie sounded scared half to death. “Milady?”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I croaked through my rasping, bloodhunger-dry throat. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

I even believed it for a little while.

“There were reclamationteams in the twenties.” Shanks eased gingerly down on the satin window seat. “Casualties were high, prolly ’cause the djamphir wouldn’t lend support. It was just us. We thought that with enough food and quiet, we could maybe bring’em back.”

“Did it work?” I held the ice pack to the left side of my forehead. I didn’t even know what had opened up the gash on my head, just above my eyebrow. Midafternoon sun fell through the skylights, and I heard Nat’s murmur from the bathroom. She and Dibs were trying to coax a wild-eyed Ash into getting his blood pressure taken. Dibs insisted, right after he insisted on disinfecting the slice on my head and butterfly-bandaging it, then clapping the ice pack on.