Lili St Crow - Defiance

Nosferat go fast, when they go. This one was just a bubbling mass of stuff that would vaporize into ash when the sun came up. He hadn’t been particularly old, either. Just under a hundred years, if his corpse was reacting like that. All wet rot instead of dry-dusty.

I just killed him. Or I helped kill him, it’s the same thing. The shaking was new. He would’ve killed me. I just killed him first.

I reached down, wrapped my fingers in Ash’s fur. Braced myself. “Jesus.”

“You gonna throw up?” Shanks looked down at me, his lean face shadowed. One corner of his thin mouth quirked up again. He looked just about too pleased with himself. “That’s real common the first time.”

Ash growled, but softly.

Now I was cold. My legs were naked, and the dress didn’t cover much. Sweat on bare skin cooled in the faint night breeze. At least the dress was pretty okay—I hadn’t bled on it.

Much.

My mother’s locket was skin-warm now, resting against my breastbone and suddenly heavy.

I shivered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Sure. Wanna take the subway?” He laughed, a sarcastic little bark. “Kidding, kidding! Let’s get you home.”

The Schola Primamasquerades as a hoity-toity New York all-boy private school, but you’ll never find the students slumming with their crested blazers thrown over a shoulder. I mean, sure, you’ll see them, but you won’t know they’re from the Schola because they just look like attractive teenage boys in civvies, doing whatever mysterious things teenage boys do. If you ask them where they go to school—nobody asks, but if you did —they’d lie. And if you ever saw them taking on the suckers or anything else that goes bump in the night, well . . . you’d either be dead or traumatized by the experience, and you’d know to keep your mouth shut. Or you’d end up in a loony bin or something. That’s not New York, that’s universal. People just don’t want to see, and the people in power collude.

Still, I think only in the Big Apple could you drop a huge white-pillared school for the half-vampire and werwulf hunters of the dark forces onto a big piece of prime parklike Manhattan real estate and have nobody even care .

I dropped down in the red-cushioned chair. To be properly insouciant, I should’ve put my feet up on the glossy conference table, but the skirt was short enough I didn’t want to. Even if every guy on the Council was old enough to be my grandfather. Or older.

And none of them look a day over twenty-five. Most of them look about seventeen. Christophe muttered sometimes about being trapped in a teenage body, but I hadn’t had the courage to ask him the million questions that brought up. It’s just one of those things.

I wondered what I’d end up looking like once I bloomed. I couldn’t even guess. If I had to be stuck in my own skinny, gawky, coltish body forever . . . well. It probably wouldn’t be so bad.

I wouldn’t mind a little more in the chest, though. But wild horses wouldn’t drag that out of me. Ever.

“Unacceptable,” Hiro said quietly. The word bounced off the table’s shiny surface. His long caramel-colored fingers were wrapped tightly around a white coffee mug, knuckles whitening a little. He was pale under his coloring, and his mouth was set. He looked like a disapproving samurai. “If the wulfen hadn’t been there—”

“They were there.” I leaned my head back against the chair’s high carved back. My hair was falling down, and my arm and leg were both scabbed over so the happy stuff in my blood wouldn’t drive them all nuts. “Shanks isn’t about to let me go out alone. Just like you guys.”

Bruce sat ramrod straight in the chair to my left, his proud beaky nose lifted just a little. “How did they lose you? How did Reynard—”

“It wasn’t his fault. I bolted because the suckers were covering both entrances, and they’d marked me before the combat units could do any penetration. I had to improvise.” I wished I’d had a chance to change, but debriefing came first. And it was looking like they were calling the operation a failure, even though we’d lured the suckers in that slice of the rave scene out and killed them. “I lost my earpiece while busting out of the cellar, and—”

Hiro set his cup down and said something quietly that sounded like a curse. He leaned forward, setting his elbows against the table, and dropped his head into his hands. His shoulders actually shook under his gray silk shirt.

It was amazing. He was always so calm.

The coffee smelled good, but I didn’t want it. I kept going. “—and I escaped. I was only followed by one sucker; stayed ahead of him long enough for Shanks and the others to move in. Ash was there, and Shanks brought my malaika . It actually went really well. And we’re not going to have any more kids going down under sucker attacks from that bunch, too.” Which was the important thing, right?

I mean, it was to me.

The Council room was long and windowless, the buffet up along one wall empty except for the silver samovar and a carafe of hot water for tea. It was always the same in here, right down to the uncomfortable, highly carved, thronelike wooden chairs. Bruce steepled his fingers in front of his chest. The sharply handsome lines of his dark face all conspired to make him a picture of disappointment. How he could look so official, even wearing blue jeans, was beyond me.

“You are far too precious to risk yourself in this manner,” he said, for the fiftieth time. “You are the only svetocha we—”

Oh, Lord. Not this again. “I didn’t risk myself. The operation went off successfully, at least as far as my part. I got my first kill. Aren’t you even going to congratulate me?” I managed to sound like I was proud of killing, instead of half sick with a stomach full of nervous bile.

Hiro stood up, scraping his chair back and tugging at his cuffs to make his sleeves fall right. He must buy those shirts in job lots, because they’re all he wears. Sometimes, if he’s getting really American, he’ll wear dark-wash jeans instead of the loose black trousers. But it’s always a high-collared gray silk shirt and those weird black shoes, with the big toe separated from the rest of the toes and the grippy soles. I was working up the courage to ask him where he got them, Chinatown or something?

So far, there hadn’t been a good time for that little conversation.

I was saved further lecturing by the door at the far end of the room opening. Christophe stalked in, his aspect sleeking his hair back and a colorless fume of rage boiling off him like heat-haze above pavement.

Blue eyes, burning like they were going to set fire to the rest of him. His face worked together well, every line perfectly proportioned to give him just enough handsomeness without going over the top into “too pretty to take seriously.” When he was under the aspect, his hair was dark, lying close to the skull; when he relaxed, it sprang up and the blond streaks came through. I caught my breath.

Black sweater, a pair of jeans—no sucker blood on him. He was completely clean.

Good. My shoulders relaxed a little.

He didn’t even break stride. “Bruce, Hiro. We have confirmed kills.”

“Including mine?” I tried to find a more comfortable way to slouch in the chair, but nothing worked.

He brushed past Hiro, the aspect boiling between the two of them and Hiro’s head jerking aside like he smelled something bad. Christophe descended on me, grabbed my shoulders, and hauled me out of the chair. It went over backward and landed with a gun-crack sound, and Bruce let out a yell and shot to his feet.