Lili St Crow - Defiance

His lips moved again. I waited. His shoulders came up, and a hiss of air escaped him. It mutated into a word, one I knew.

“Sssssssvedosha.” His chin dipped. He nodded at me, his greasy hair falling over his face.

“That’s me. Your friendly neighborhood girl djamphir .” It felt odd to say it out loud. I made sure the blanket was wrapped nice and tight, and guided him down to sit on the toilet. Wished I could sit instead, told myself not to be such a wuss. “I’m Dru. You’re Ash, right? Can you say that? Can you say your name?”

“Shhhhh.” Frustration turned his mouth into a downward curve. “Osh. Osh. ”

My heart squeezed painfully down on itself, adding to all the other pain. But I put on a bright face. “Yep. Ash. Now look, Dibs has to take your blood pressure. I don’t know why, but he’s got a good reason.” I pulled the blanket aside, making sure it was bunched up securely at his waist but loosening it at his shoulder. “All right? Give me your arm.”

He did. He kept staring at me while Dibs messed around with the stethoscope and the blood-pressure cuff. Ash’s mouth worked silently, but at least we knew he could talk now. The light was starting to get glaring, and the inside of my head felt scoured clean. I swayed a little bit, but made my knees stiffen up each time.

“I don’t think he’ll regress,” Dibs finally said. He glanced at me, stopped, looked again. “Dru?”

“So he’s okay? He’s going to be okay?” I couldn’t believe it. For months I’d been looking forward to this. Now he was crouched on the toilet, thin and white and blinking furiously like a newborn. It had actually happened. Score one for the good guys, and all that. “Really okay?”

“He’s shifted back. That’s all I can say.” Dibs was looking at me now, steady and worried. “You don’t look so good. Let’s sit you down.”

It was a great plan, except for the most obvious flaw in it. My mouth felt funny, loose and awkward like it wasn’t really part of me. “There’s no place to sit.”

That was all I remember saying, because the white glare took over inside my head and I keeled right over. I’d’ve hit my head on the sink if Dibs hadn’t caught me, and the next few minutes are kind of confused. I could hear myself from a very long way away, saying I’m okay, I’m okay, over and over again, in a breathless funny little whisper. Benjamin, almost screaming. Ash growling. Dibs, his voice breaking as he cried out, miserably.

I came to about a minute later with my head in Dibs’s lap, lying over the bathroom threshold. He looked scared to death, his eyes wide and his mouth wetly open like a little kid’s during a horror movie. My teeth were chattering, and for a moment I couldn’t figure out why.

Then it occurred to me: I was cold. So cold. My body was leaden; I couldn’t even lift my arms. The torn-open spot inside me was getting bigger, and I suddenly understood it was a mouth , and it was going to swallow me whole. What the—

“Do you smell that?” Dibs whispered, and for a mad second I was thinking I’d puked or something when I passed out. But the taste in my mouth was blood, not acid bile. The copper in it whispered to me, and a shiver went through the center of my bones. I caught a breath of spice, but it wasn’t Christophe and it wasn’t Anna. It was the heavy aroma of cinnamon buns boiled down to its essence, and it was bubbling up from my skin in waves.

“I think I pulled something,” I whispered. Everything slurred inside my mouth, and the reality of what I’d done caught up with me.

Ash was human again. He was going to be okay. Great. Except something inside me was torn up now.

“No shit.” Dibs clicked over into “bandage it up” mode. “You need food and rest. I don’t—”

“He’s going to kill me,” Benjamin muttered darkly. “Just kill me.”

And right on cue, someone hammered at the door.

Leon’s eyebrows nestedin his hairline. He’d just swept the door open and stalked in, pretty as you please. Seen in full sun, his hair became a mass of fine golden threads over a well of rich fine brown, not mouse-colored at all. “What the hell —” he began, and caught sight of Ash crouching by my feet, still cocooned in a blanket and the bathroom’s white-tile glare. “ Gott im Himmel. That’s the Broken.”

Ash’s ruined lip lifted, but he didn’t snarl. He just went very still, looking up at Leon, muscles slowly tensing. Orange flashed in his eyes.

“What’s going—” Benjamin had his hand halfway to his shoulder holster.

“Milady.” Leon folded his arms, looking down at me. “I have executed your commission. Shall I report now, or when we have privacy?”

I lay there blinking for a few seconds. Nothing made any sense. “Um.”

“I rather think privacy would be a good thing. But it’s also something you’ll want to hear soon.” A significant pause. “ Very soon.”

I am lying on the floor, Leon. Obviously this has not been a good day. “Uh-huh,” I managed.

“You have to smell that.” Dibs bent over me, his thumb peeling my right eyelid up. I wanted to shove his hand away—it was my eye , dammit—but I couldn’t muster up the moxie to move. “Right? Tell me I’m not the only one.”

“Oh yes. She’s cresting and will bloom soon, the primary changes have started.” Leon stared down at me. A curious expression drifted over his face, part bitterness, part something I couldn’t define. “What happened?”

Oh, so now he wanted to know what happened. “Ash,” I whispered, and the world turned into shutterclicks of light as my eyelids fluttered.

The werwulf boy crouching at my feet made a low, unhappy sound.

“Help me get her on the bed,” Dibs said, and the shutterclicks turned into a dozy bruised darkness.

I was pretty out of it for most of that day, and even now I can’t tell what I really saw and what was . . . well, fever dreams. Or nightmares, as my body struggled to cope.

The visions were odd—brightly colored fragments, each with their own static buzz around them, like and unlike what Gran called “true-seein’s.” Clear, so clear. Technicolor bright and sharp-crisp. They had weight. The touch echoed inside my head, showing me maybe-was, is, and will-be, like it was suddenly in a space much too big for it, spinning like a mad carnival ride through time.

Christophe, leaning against a tree in a shadowed clearing. His eyes turned blowtorch-blue as he watched, and the expression on his face was chilling. Because under the set grim look of a guy watching something distasteful, there was faint, scary amusement. He watched as the struggle took place, and when it was over, his smile was a ghost of itself.

“Just get it out of my sight,” he said, and their narrow white hands lifted the other boy, his long dark coat flapping as he struggled uselessly.

Blackness, cutting between the scenes like a knife blade.

The naked boy crouched in the stone cell, his fingertips resting against the weeping wall. He coughed, his ribs heaving, and the faint shine on his skin told me he was sweating in the damp. That wasn’t a good sign. He turned his head, sharply, as if he heard something, and I saw the flash of paleness at his temple.

His eyes fired green, and Graves sniffed suspiciously. That set off another round of coughing; he spat something into a corner of the cell. I lunged forward, trying to reach him.

Another knife blade, this one loaded with static. Chop.

The white bedroom was full of golden afternoon light, and there was a body on the bed, a mess of curled hair. Dibs paced, nervously watching the Broken. The mirror watched it all, a blind eye. I was inside the reflection, screaming and pounding my fists on its slick clearness, as Nathalie leaned over the too-still body and glanced up at Ash.