Lili St Crow - Defiance

“It’s the same thing,” I muttered.

She could even make a shoulder holster look like a planned part of her pajama outfit. The coffee-colored leather number carrying a 9mm that she had on today moved as she rolled her shoulders back once, settling them. She ghosted over the pale wooden flooring and picked up a silver-backed hairbrush. This was the part of the night I alternately dreaded and looked forward to most.

“I can take care of—” I began. But she took a handful of my hair and started brushing, just the last few inches and working up.

“It’s traditional. Before Anna, each svetocha had an honor guard of wulfen girls, too. Good way for us to get out of the compound, get to see a lot of boys, and you know . . . it’s bound to be lonely, being svetocha . I’m glad we like each other.”

Yeah, well, the last girl that was around emptied an assault rifle at me. You could just open me up like a soda can. “So Anna changed all that?”

A shrug. “Slowly but surely, yeah. I think my aunt was around when it happened. She never talks about it.”

I sighed. Thin blue lines of warding slid over the walls, complex patterned knots over the windows and the door. Refreshed every night, trembling under the screen of the visible, the wards were at least one familiar thing. I never went to bed without redoing the warding, no sir. Gran would be proud.

The fingers in my hair were soothing, and Nathalie could be trusted.

Christophe told me so. So did Shanks and Augustine. I suppose I could trust them, right? At least, Christophe hadn’t been wrong yet.

I just . . . I wasn’t as trusting as I used to be. I guess. Getting betrayed over and over will do that to you. Still, I liked Nat. She had her head screwed on straight, and—this was the important thing—she understood that I was gonna go mad if I stayed cooped up all the time. So she was teaching me how to play another “traditional” game, slipping out during the day and exploring. We’d started with little runs through the Schola grounds and graduated to shopping and sightseeing. With a wulfen around in broad daylight, I was as safe as possible, right?

And every single time she threw a handful of gravel at my window, inviting me to come out and play, it was easier to trust her a little more.

The brush slipped through my hair. Nat could take the curling mass and make it look elegant, put together an outfit that looked actually fashionable in seconds, and she was so damn organized she could have given any Marine sergeant a run for their money. And I had to admit, it was nice to have a girl around.

One who wasn’t trying to kill me, that is. I’ve never had close girlfriends. Why bother, with Dad and me moving so much?

Christophe had actually argued me into having someone else around. I would not choose one who couldn’t be trusted. You’ll enjoy it. It will help me worry less.

That was the big argument, trotted out whenever he wanted to mushroom-cloud me into something. I let out another long heave of a sigh and felt the night’s tension slip away from me. It was in the long dead stretch between three and four a.m., quiet time. Just like the shoal between three and six in the afternoon, when everyone in the hot part of the world is taking a siesta.

The Schola is oddly reversed. Nights were our days, because sunlight is safer to sleep in. My body clock was adjusting slowly. Sixteen and a half years of being diurnal is a hard habit to shake.

“You have such beautiful hair.” Nathalie lifted a handful of it. “These highlights. My God. You’d look great with a shorter, layered cut . . .”

I glanced up at the pair of maliaka hanging in a leather harness next to the vanity. They’d been my mother’s, and they were beautiful. I didn’t know where the ones Shanks had handed me had come from. “No way.” Gran would kill me. It was a habitual, instinctive thought. I hadn’t had more than a trim in years . “If it’s short, it ends up in my face all the time. Eating hair is so not cool.”

She rolled her cat-tilted, beautifully expressive eyes. “That’s what product is for. You kill me, you really kill me. Hey, I think we should paint your nails. Not pink, though. I’m thinking a dark red, because your skin tone—”

I shivered. “Not red. Besides, I don’t have time.” I glanced at the mirror. Her skin was perfect, poreless, and her sleek dark hair, parted on the side, looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon.

I, on the other hand, was a mess of reddish-purple bruising, scrapes, tumbled tangled hair, and red spots high on my cheeks as if I had a fever. My eyes were shadowed, darker than their usual blue, as if I was thinking of something serious. And that line between my eyebrows was back. Gran would’ve called it an I-want line.

I tried to make my face look like I wasn’t Thinking About Unpleasant Things.

Her nose wrinkled. “You make time for self-care, Mil—ah, Dru. Jeez.” The brush worked through my hair, slipping through the curls as if they always behaved. They did for her. It was like my hair was a traitor. She’d worked all the way up to the roots, and now started on another section.

I had to admit it was kind of nice. Like Gran brushing before she braided me up at night. Soothing.

I held up my hand. The pavement had erased skin all the way up my forearm. I was lucky I’d stopped bleeding by the time the boy djamphir showed up to bundle me in an SUV and get me out of the way. I’d been scabbed over good by then, thank God. Once I bloomed, I’d heal like they do—on fast-forward, shaking off damage like a duck’s back sheds rainwater.

Right now, though, I was stuck with sucky human healing times.

“Ouch.” Nathalie was all sympathy. “Good thing you’re not going to scar.”

Christophe has scars. Heat rose in my cheeks again. “Yeah, that’d be a bitch,” I mumbled.

“It must burn them that the wulfen got there first. I hear the teams who managed to get inside the club were swarmed. Fifteen nosferat . Thank God the one after you was . . .”

“Young and sloppy?” Fifteen of them? Christ. I shivered. I’d only seen six. “Christophe was too tactful to say it.”

“It’d be the first time he’s been that.” She grinned. Flash of white teeth. “I heard it was a young one you got, but plenty vicious.”

“How do you hear these things?” But I knew. Shanks liked her. He got all weird when she was around.

Her face scrunched up. “The air itself brings me messages.” A low sepulchral moan. “Ooooooo-OOOO-oooh!”

I snorted, laughing into my cupped hand. She kept brushing my hair, the strokes turning long once she had all the tangles out.

“Now, a braid in this, and we’ll settle you down. I’ve sent for some hot milk. Just the thing to soothe the nerves.” Soft and pleasant, her fingers slipping through the curls just as the brush did. The brush was an antique. Silver-backed, probably Victorian. I wondered if it had been my mother’s too, like the malaika .

After dawn there would be a golden flood of sun through the skylights, spilling over the shelves and the mellow glow of the wood floor. The books were hers, and the bed had been hers, too.

I didn’t mind. Sometimes I would take the books off the shelves and flip through them. Some had notations in the margins, faded schoolgirl’s handwriting in blue ink. They were textbooks and studies of Real World things, and all of them were mine now.

After so many years of having nothing of Mom’s but a photograph in Dad’s wallet and a Holstein cow cookie jar, it was a little overwhelming. I was missing all Dad’s and my old stuff, but having my mother’s things . . . it was nice, and not so nice, all at the same time. Because it was like with all her things around me, I wasn’t the same girl who had traveled around with Dad. I was someone else. Maybe who I could have been if she hadn’t died.