Lili St Crow - Defiance

It hadn’t been rifled. Thank God.

Silver-grain ammo and a spare gun—a serviceable 9mm, basic Schola armory issue.

Thought-provoking, but it was gear and I took it.

I took that and a clip-on holster, emptied the blue bag full of cash, and stowed it in my emergency bag—a canvas messenger number I’d managed to sew a false bottom into in between training these past weeks. Most of the cash went under the flap, but I did up a few rolls for stashing in pockets and in the top of the bag, too, my fingers moving with habitual ease.

I took as much ammo as I could carry without clinking, stuffing clips into the pockets of Graves’s long dark coat, too. There was a spare Medikit in there too, a homemade one that held penicillin and other stuff as well as a stack of hypodermic needles in shockfoam.

“Oh, Augie,” I whispered.

It’s bad manners to clean out another hunter’s cache, but I didn’t have a choice.

A sudden ringing made me jump. My heart leapt like a fish pulled from water, and one of my fangs pricked my lower lip. I tasted the copper sweetness of my own blood before swallowing, hard, and taking a deep breath.

It was the phone.

I went back to the cache. I took another city map and a couple glass ampoules of what had to be holy water. Hey, better safe than sorry. The phone shrilled four times, then I heard a click and a whir.

It was just like Augustine not to have voice mail. He had a great plasma TV and only watched black-and-white movies on it, too.

“Leave a message .” A thin growl, Augie sounding scary as possible. A long static-laden pause, and a beep.

I jumped again when he spoke.

“Dru, kochana , if you are there, pick up the phone.”

Christophe. I clipped the holster on with shaking hands. How much time did I have? God damn him being so smart. How would he guess?

“Dru. Pick up. You’re in terrible danger.” He sounded frantic, and I could hear a murmur behind him. A faint thopping, like a helicopter.

Oh, this is so not even funny. I loaded the gun, chambered a round. The sound was very loud in the hush. How had Augie’s neighbors not heard vampires in here? But maybe that’s the big city for you. Nobody in anyone else’s business, everyone taking care of himself, and devil take the hindmost.

“Whatever you think, whatever you’ve been told . . . Dru, please. Please. Pick up. Let me explain.”

Explain? Oh, yeah. Sure. “Not fucking likely, Christophe,” I muttered. Here I was like an idiot, talking to an answering machine that couldn’t even hear me. I slid the gun into the holster, checked the cache one more time. The touch tingled faintly inside my head.

“Please, Dru. Please. Pick up. Pick up the phone, kochana, milna, skowroneczko moja, little bird, please —”

The machine beeped and cut him off. I let out a shaky exhale, checked my watch. I had a whole night to keep everyone off my trail, find the mansion in Queens, and lay low until dawn. But first I had to get out of here.

I didn’t want to use the front door, and I didn’t want to use the roof again. You should never ever use the same exit as entrance path, especially if you’re visiting what is almost certainly what Dad would call a “compromised location.” His other term for it started with “cluster” and ended up rhyming with “duck.”

So it was up on the bed, sliding the window open—it looked down onto the street, and I’d spent so many mornings that whole month Dad was gone laying on the bed and craning to get a glimpse of the sky—while the phone rang again.

I checked the street—clear. Knocked the screen out with one well-placed kick.

“Dru!” Christophe was yelling into the phone now. “Dru, please, please pick up!”

Time to go. I launched myself feetfirst through the window as the ghost of wax-orange danger candy filled my mouth.

Iran until thedanger candy faded completely and I was just left with the copper taste of adrenaline. Then I hopped on the subway—no reason not to, now; they could start chasing me now that I was prepared—and rode toward Times Square until the crowd got thick. It was closer to the Schola Prima than I liked, but there was plenty of crowd cover and it was the last place they’d look for me.

Or so I hoped.

I surfaced, found an all-night diner, and ordered coffee and a club sandwich, keeping a watch out the window at the crowd flowing by while I bolted the food and looked over the printouts and maps.

I picked out the neighborhood on both Augie’s and Christophe’s maps, looked at likely ways in and out. I tried to consider the whole thing like Dad would. Angles of attack, the getaway—I’d have to find a car. Or something.

Worry about that when you get on-site. Can’t do nothin’ here, and if you steal a car now and take it there you’re askin for trouble. Calm and easy, Dru-girl, just like I taught you.

Had Dad ever guessed what he was training me for ? Or did he just not think much about it one way or the other? Yet another pile of questions I’d never get an answer to.

I found myself reaching up to touch Graves’s earring, fingering the skull, running the edge of a crossed bone under my thumbnail. Don’t worry , I’m on my way. I’m coming.

But then I worried, too, while I downed the last of the coffee and neatened everything up, stuffing it back in my bag with the ammo. What if they’d moved him? How old was the intel? If the place was crawling with vampires . . . Well, I was fast enough to kill one of them, wasn’t I?

But more than one? And Sergej, too?

You need a better plan, Dru.

One started to take shape as I paid the bill and hit the streets. I kept moving, and it evolved inside my aching head. Here I was, two malaika strapped to my back and a long black coat wandering around, and nobody paid any attention. True, it was night in the city, and there were weirder things than me on the street.

Most of them were even human.

Some of it could have been the touch throbbing inside my head, keeping me moving. I heard soft wingbeats through the crowd noise and sometimes caught a glimpse of the owl. Perched on a blinking Girls Girls Girls sign, circling at the end of a street, floating down to land on the hood of a parked car. I even caught it filling itself out like a charcoal sketch with quick strokes, leading me in a wandering zigzag pattern that kept me away from trouble, and also away from the green quiet of Central Park, vaguely north and east for a little while.

All this time I’d thought it was Gran’s owl. But now I felt the beat of its heart and the wind through its feathers, and I knew it was a part of me. Just like I’d known in the gym facing Anna. When the owl had hit her animal aspect, the tortoiseshell cat crouched at her feet, with the sick crunch of continents colliding.

So I’m an owl, Christophe is a fox, and Anna’s a cat. And Graves is loup-garou . Funny.

Only it wasn’t.

Sometimes flashes of that night come back to me, mostly when I’m trying to fall asleep and I get that weird sense of falling. I’ll jolt awake, expecting to be on the pavement again, sliding past groups of hard-faced young men on corners or melding with a flow of tired adults flooding down subway steps, seeing my reflection—pale cheeks, hair pulled back, the twin hilts of the malaika poking up over my slim shoulders, the coat flapping around my ankles. I hung around the edges of the Pier raves for a long time, moving in aimless circles as trance and electronica throbbed through the air, then sometime after three I slid through the quiet of Battery Park like a ghost and started working my way north and east, cutting around the Schola Prima’s slice of Manhattan like it had plague. Risky to stay this close, but again, the last place they’d look for me.