Lili St Crow - Defiance

“Oh.” I sounded just as mystified as I felt. But I seconded that part about not submitting.

“You with me, Dru?” Graves squared his shoulders. I tried not to look at his messed-up back.

Always. My fingers closed around the lamp stalk. “You better believe it.”

The footsteps drew closer still, tapping and sliding. That oddly thin wash of danger candy filled my mouth, I considered spitting. It could be a comment on the décor instead of a completely useless gesture, I supposed. I tried breathing deep and swearing internally at my legs to get them to starch up a bit. My bones ached, but all in all I felt better than Anna probably did.

Nobody had been sucking my blood lately. And yeah, she was a total bitch and had shot me.

But nobody deserves . . . that . I remembered the dragging weakness and the pain as something was torn out of me by invisible roots, something I wouldn’t hesitate to call my soul, the very core of what made me me . I got the idea Christophe had been as gentle as possible about it.

Something told me Sergej wouldn’t be. If he could get close enough to me. And he’d already gotten close enough to strangle me into unconsciousness.

The sounds rushed by outside the door in a tide. Little whispers, tittering laughter, tapping feet, a scraping like diamond claws on a sheet of glass. Pain speared through my head, twisting, and I pulled the touch back in a hurry. I hadn’t even known I was using it, or that it would spread so far. But contracting it like a fist inside my head took effort, and I was sweating and breathing fast, the world wavering in front of my still-smarting eyes.

“Dru?” Graves, his head half-turned. His eyes were dark now. “You okay?”

“I . . . I just . . .” The ache was back, spearing into my bones. “I hurt all over.”

“You’re cresting.” The contempt in Anna’s tone could have dripped out and splashed smoking on the floor. “You have picked the very worst time to bloom. Right now you’re at your most vulnerable, and of the most use to him . Not only can he drain me dry or keep me as a hostage, but he can drain you and possibly become the King in truth. He will walk in sunlight, and there’s not much we can do about it.”

Great. Blame me for it, sure. “Cresting? Like, the last step before I—”

“Before you become what everyone around you is waiting so breathlessly for. Fully bloomed and oh-so-ready to please.” She tilted her head, her tangle hair falling in a cascade of red-gold curls. “A nice tractable little svetocha so blinded by Reynard she’ll leave her own friends in the clutches of—”

“You want to shut your mouth.” Graves, but it was a new tone for him. Flat, terribly adult, and thrumming with a loup-garou ’s command-voice. I’d heard him hold a whole room of wulfen back with that voice, but he’d never sounded like this before.

Like he was two steps away from kicking the shit out of someone, and not caring how bad he hurt them.

I didn’t blame him, but it was a bad idea right now. I gathered myself. “Let’s not do Sergej’s work for him, okay?”

As soon as I said it, I knew I’d made a mistake. There’s a reason every hunter I’d ever known wouldn’t ever use a sucker’s name out loud. I’d said it before, usually when he was a safe distance away. But here?

Bad idea.

Anna whirled, her blue eyes wide, and a low evil laugh slid through the darkened room. My fingers cramped on the lamp, and he just resolved out of thin air in the darkness.

He wasn’t so tall, even if he was broad-shouldered. A little shorter than Christophe, but you wouldn’t dare call him small. The ice around him made him seem way bigger. Loose, artistically mussed honey-brown curls fell over his face.

He looked just the same as he had in the Dakotas, no older than me. Seventeen tops, old enough for a scruffy little beard but still smooth-cheeked. It was the eyes that gave him away, black spreading out from the hourglass-shaped pupils, threading in little vein-lines from lid to lid. It made the whites look filmed with gray, so you could maybe mistake them for cataracts if you didn’t know any better.

But those pupils could suck you down, leave you gasping for air on the floor while his fangs met in your throat. There was something hiding under the gelid darkness.

Something old. Something terrible.

Something hungry .

Sergej folded his arms. His watch, a huge chunky gold thing, was too horribly tasteless to be anything other than a genuine Rolex. He wore, of all things, a navy-blue Drunken Pixies T-shirt and jeans. And it was horrible, but now that I was looking for it, I saw how his face worked together, how beautiful he was. That face could have been taken from an old coin displayed in a museum or chipped from a statue found in a grotto somewhere, turned toward the wall because it was too . . . much. Too unreal-gorgeous.

Like Christophe’s, and unlike.

It was horrible . Perfect poreless skin with a hint of coppery color, those curls, and those eyes full of cold tar-oil that could make you slit your own wrists if you had to stare into them long enough. The tar would close over your head, and it would be a relief to feel the sting of a blade.

He just stood there, next to the wall, between two shrouded shapes that could have been couches but instead looked like beasts with their hindquarters raised, ready to spring. My breath plumed in suddenly-frozen air, and steam lifted from Graves’s shoulders in tiny finger curls.

Sergej examined all of us. When he opened his mouth, his pleasant tenor was even creepier than a horror-movie baritone would’ve been.

“The sweetest of all are the little birds. Hello again, Lefevre’s child.” He grinned, the spaces between his words just the same as Christophe’s. And faintly, a little bit like Augustine’s when he forgot his half-Brooklyn, half-Bronx Bugs Bunny and got a little tipsy, swearing in gutter Polish while he laughed with my father, bottles clinking against glasses and—

NO! The touch swelled inside my head, battering aside the pressure of his eyes. The place inside myself where the touch had been ripped loose echoed in a far bigger space than it usually did, a huge stone cathedral instead of the quiet little room where Gran’s spinning wheel sat by the stove.

I dragged the lamp base toward me, my stiff fingers creaking as the bar actually bent in my grasp. Shadows shifted crazily as the light and the shade both moved, and I swear to God Sergej actually leaned back a little on his heels, his hourglass pupils flaring and shrinking.

For half a second, he looked surprised. Anna shot me an indecipherable glance, and I knew what she was going to do before she did it. I opened my mouth to yell no, no don’t , but she didn’t listen. She launched herself at Sergej, screaming like a banshee, and Graves shoved me back against the wall.

Sergej just disappeared. Or, no. He moved so fast he literally blinked through space, one moment standing there, the next turned aside. One slim strong hand flashed out. A sharp high thwap smacked the walls, and Anna flew. She hit the paneling above the bed with a sickening crack and slid down, landed in a tangle of red silk and splayed pale limbs.

How did I hold him off before? I searched for the heat and balm of the aspect, but it was hard. What a time for it to get even more unreliable.

She lay slumped there, and I grabbed at Graves’s shoulder, my fingers sinking into bruised flesh. “Don’t. Don’t. ”

Because the growl was rippling out from him in concentric rings of bloodlust, and a crackle ran through him. Loup-garou don’t get hairy, but they do bulk up when they get angry. The bruises glared, and some of the marks on his back broke open. Blood slid down his skin, slipping between the flickers and valleys of muscle definition, and the hunger hit the map of veins inside my body hard , pulling like it intended to rip them free. My fangs slid out, my jaw aching, and that syrup-smell of baking cinnamon rolls drifted up, like those places in the mall that sell big sticky piles of sugar rush. They smell so good , but I can’t even go near them without my teeth aching and my blood sugar crashing in sympathy.