Lili St Crow - Defiance

More gunfire, but I didn’t worry about it. What I worried about was the knot of five nosferat in front of me, all male, Anna’s training ringing inside my head recognizing a standard attack pattern in confined spaces. Two blond, two dark-haired, all black-eyed with the hunting aura and brimful of raging hate; the first two crouched and sprang as a second pair gained altitude, leaping and hanging in the air as the muscle inside my head flexed.

It was so easy now.

I skipped back two paces, wanting the extra room to build up speed. Behind me, screams slowed down to distorted mumbles; particles of smoke hung in the air, tiny crystalline flakes. Sneakers digging in, vaguely aware of my breath coming tearing-hard, the lump of heat in my stomach glowing red, I realized what I was about to do and almost, almost paused.

But you can’t stop in the middle of a fight. You move, and you’re either standing at the end of it, or on the dirt. If you’re on the dirt you might as well be under it. That’s why fights don’t have rules.

My feet slapped, I lunged and left the ground. Gran’s owl called softly through the slowed-down mishmash of confusion around me. For a few brief seconds I knew what it was to have hollow bones and feathers, to fly on silent wings, wind slipping past your ears with a low sweet sound like riding a bike down a long hill. Twisting, one foot flashing out to crack against the skull of the first sucker. Another half twist, malaika sweeping up as my wrist flexed, and it went through the second sucker’s neck with a tchuk like Gran thopping her ax through a bit of dry-seasoned cordwood. An arterial spray of rotting acid described a perfect curve, but I was already up and over, my left foot kissing the wall to push me sideways again, shoulder dipping and my other malaika whistling until it carved through the third sucker’s face at full extension. The third sucker went slack, body tumbling, and my right foot touched his back, neat as could be, as I pivoted and brought both blades across en parallel . They both bit deep on the fourth nosferat as he was in midair, one almost severing his hand and the other tearing out his throat with a flick of the wrist.

I wasn’t done yet. Landing, the body under me absorbing rib-snapping shock, knees loose, my left-hand malaika stabbing down through his back. Another meaty thud, had to pull back at the last second so as not to splinter the blade or break the point. A blurted sound behind me, but I was already whirling, and the first sucker—the one I’d just kicked in the head—ran onto my blade at full tilt. He started choking, too, his face congesting and runneling with dark ash as hair-fine cracks ate through his skin.

Hawthorn poisons them fast. So does a svetocha once she’s bloomed. Or maybe it was Anna’s ability added to mine, a calculus of toxicity?

But maybe she wasn’t very toxic to suckers, just to other svetocha .

My mouth filled with bitterness. The malaika jerked free, my hand twisting it precisely to break the suction of muscle against the blade. It gave with a wet splorching sound under the all the noise around us, and I winced.

I looked up, and there was Graves, his irises gone black for a moment before sparks of green struggled in their depths.

Behind him, the twins held Anna, who didn’t even look alive. She just . . . hung there. I could still hear her pulse, thudding sluggishly and pausing like a train heaving uphill. Blaine’s jaw had dropped. Kip leaned against the wall, clutching at his bloody shoulder, his jaw set and his dark eyes alight as he stared at me.

I hate being stared at. I realized what I’d just done.

That wasn’t the worst, though. The worst was seeing Graves’s mouth pulled down like he was disgusted. He was looking at me like I was a new sort of bug that had skittered out from under a rock.

One he wasn’t sure was poisonous or not. Except I was . To suckers, at least. I was a murderous thing. A killer with fangs.

Like something Dad would have hunted.

I’m still me, I wanted to yell. Smoke poured down the hall from the direction we’d come, and I could hear shouts and screams—the glassy cries of nosferat , drilling against the brain; wulfen howls high and chill and silver; and djamphir battle cries. There was one hell of a pitched action going on down there, but they were working this way.

Graves opened his mouth to say something, but I saw everything right there in his pain-darkened gaze. He was disgusted. He’d seen me suck Anna’s blood, and seen me do . . .

. . . this. The sucker bodies were rotting fast, and the smell was massive. Nausea hit me like a dodgeball in the stomach; I clamped my lips together and felt my fangs scraping lightly.

A svetocha ’s fangs are relatively dainty, yeah. But they’re meant for the same thing a sucker’s are, and I’d just used them.

Graves inhaled. He’d gone completely white, and his mouth dropped open. Blaine’s eyebrows went up, his entire face a comic illustration of surprise. Kip raised his 9mm slowly, like a boy in a nightmare.

My body was wiser than I was. It dropped into a crouch, but too late. Graves’s warning was wasted.

CRUNCH.

He hit me from behind, flinging me forward, and I felt bones break. My bones.

Sergej had gotten the lampstand out somehow, after all.

Tucking. Rolling. Greatgouging pain in my side. The aspect burned, and I stopped short, lying against the wall. The malaika clattered, both my fists clutching reflexively. I hadn’t lost them.

Which was good, because Sergej, a huge hole in his flapping T-shirt, drenched in black blood and with his face a purple-red, hateful leer, was already on me. I jerked, my right-hand blade blurring up and missing him by a fraction as he bent back. He looked like he was about to do an overenthusiastic back walkover, spine creaking and crackling, the tip of the blade whispering past his chin.

I was somehow on my feet now, the wall at my back and red agony jolting up and down my left-hand side as broken bits of rib grated together. The aspect turned to liquid fire, peeling back my skin and grinding in as each break in my bones sang a hallelujah chorus of pain.

Sergej spun the length of iron lamppost, its end making a low hard sound as it tore through air. His mouth opened, but a roaring covered any sound he might’ve made—it was the sound of fire as a cool draft slid past us.

There was an open door somewhere, and the fire down the hall was sucking at it like a calf at a mama cow’s teat.

Sergej snarled, his face turning even more alarmingly purple. I didn’t dare glance past him, but I’d guess the boys had gotten Anna out of here. Graves was probably gone, too, thank God. At least I’d done what I’d set out to do.

Now I just had to face down the king of vampires, the one who had killed my mother. Kill him, if I could.

Yeah. Right. I’d settle for just escaping.

Screaming and gunfire through the roaring noise. Sergej choked, but he scuttled in quick, swinging the length of iron still dripping with thin black fluid. My right arm still worked; the malaika flicked out like a snake’s tongue, deflecting the are of his attack and slicing inward. If I’d been just a little faster it would’ve opened up his belly, but my left side seized up with a mother of all cramps, bones grinding together, and I screamed.

The sound cut through all the other chaos. The draft of cooler air coming from behind Sergej—he was between me and escape, just great—swirled and flirted uneasily. Heat touched my back.