Lili St Crow: Defiance

For Christa Hickey, true blue.

Thanks again to Mel Sanders, Christa Hickey, Miriam Kriss, and Jessica Rothenberg. Special mention must go to Lea Day, Bookweasel and Research Helper extraordinaire. Last but not least: You, dear Reader. Let me, once again, thank you in the way we both like best.

Let me tell you a story…

Stick to theplan , Christophe had said. Stick to the plan and everything will be fine.

So I had.

I’d laced up my boots—knee-high red Doc Martens, good for everything from dancing to running to kicking ass—and put on the dress. It was a silvery baby doll number with spaghetti straps, and with my hair up my nape felt indecently bare. Even my knees felt naked. My mother’s locket felt naked, too, hanging out against my breastbone instead of tucked under my shirt. I was even wearing earrings , for God’s sake, cute little diamond studs Christophe had insisted I needed. I’d picked out a gauzy silver scarf sewn with little seed pearl things, hoping it would take the emphasis off my lack of cleavage.

Nathalie even managed to get me into a bra that didn’t have “sports” in front of its name. An actual underwire. With padding. Another case of someone insisting and me going along with it, but with Nat I didn’t mind. At least she took all of the mystery out of shopping for bras. I’d always wondered about that. Even though there was no real need, with my chesticles impersonating gnat bites.

I mean, seriously, is a baby doll dress for the breastless? I don’t know. I only ever wore a skirt when Gran made me dress up for church, and even she quit it the third or fourth time I left Sunday school and somehow got rolled in mud and whatever gingham or flowered cotton she’d put together for me was torn all to hell.

I never told her it was the other kids. I know she suspected, though.

Nathalie had actually got some foundation and powder on me too, high-end girltastic stuff she’d dragged me to some huge store downtown to buy on one of our sneakabout-during-the-day excursions. The effect was okay. My skin was pretty much behaving these days; any zit I felt pressing up under the surface never seemed to break free. I sometimes got a small red spot, but nothing like it used to be.

You’d think that would make me feel better.

It didn’t.

I hit the dance floor, wincing a little bit as the DJ looped feedback through the throbbing of a useless song about someone playing poker with his face or something. Sometimes hyperacute senses are so not worth it, even when you can concentrate and tone it down a bit. When I finally hit my blooming—the point where I got the speed and strength of a djamphir reliably, instead of in emotion-fueled bursts—I’d be able to tone it down as a matter of course. But for right now, I was stuck.

One good thing about this, though. I like dancing. Or at least, hopping up and down on a crowded floor, people hemming me in. I never thought it was anything I’d be happy about, especially since I’ve got the touch. You’d think that many people in one place thinking would drive me crazy. But when they’re all happy and sweating and dancing, it’s like white noise. It can help you relax.

When you’re not watching out for bloodsucking fiends who would just as soon kill you as look at you, that is.

I stayed on the periphery, far enough into the crowd to get some cover, close enough to the edge that I could get away in a hurry. This rave was being thrown in a huge weird building called Pier 57, full of chemical fog and cigarette smoke. And other kinds of smoke, too. Glow sticks and bare flesh and sweat, it smelled like menthol and cigarettes, the musk of weed, and an indefinable tang that’s all youth. Plus the smothered salt smell of sex in dark corners. There were enough hormones in here to fuel a rocket out to Orion.

I raised my arms when the crowd around me did, colored lights flashing. It was a migraine attack of red blue orange yellow, except for when they got fancy at certain points and made it all blue and green, or all orange and yellow. The music would crest, then whoever was doing lights would flick off everything but the mirrored ball, a tiny bit of spots to make everything glitter, and the black lights to make lipstick and synthetic fabrics glow oddly.

With the touch loose inside my head—just a little, not enough to drown me in a wash of sensation from every random stranger bumping against me—I drifted, letting my body slide through like a little fish in a bunch of water weeds. A minnow. Something too small to catch.

At least, I hoped I was too small.

Stick to the plan. Well, I was sticking to the plan.

The problem with vampires is that they don’t stick to plans.

The first shard of hate, sharp and bright as an icicle under full sunlight, jabbed into my head. I kept moving, edging for the outside of the crowd. If I timed it right, the wheeling movement of the dancers—because if you watch a time lapse of a dancing crowd, they do always go in a wagon wheel—would take me right to the best exit Christophe had shown me on the layouts, his arm warm and comforting over my shoulders and his voice just a murmur in my ear. Don’t worry. You’re fast enough and trained enough, or I wouldn’t send you in.

The thought made me flush all over, the healed fangmarks on my left wrist tingling slightly. At least he’d let me do something, not like some of the others on the Council. Hiro was having kittens about me being involved in an actual operation. Bruce just got That Look, the one that said I was Too Young and Too Irresponsible and Too Precious and the Hope of the Order.

It made me want to punch something.

If tonight went south, I might even get to.

The taste of rotting, waxen oranges slid across my tongue, paying no attention to the fact that I was chewing on a wad of spearmint gum. Gran called it an arrah —an aura. I was calling it danger candy nowadays. I always felt like spitting it out, but spitting would only make it worse.

Plus, spitting on a dance floor is damn rude. I was raised better.

I slipped my hand into the tiny net purse hanging at my side. Nathalie said it ruined the line of the dress, but I had to have someplace to stash lip gloss and the little thing I pulled out now, reaching up as if to brush a stray brown curl back and fitting it over my ear. It looked like a wireless headset for a cell phone, a sleek silver one. I pressed the button and let some of the curls hanging from my updo fall over it.

Noise-canceling earphones are a blessing. I just wished he’d given me two of them. Or earplugs. Earplugs would’ve been just jim-dandy.

“We read you, Dru.” Christophe’s voice, as crisp as if he was standing right next to me, overriding the attack of the music. Now it was some retro whitewashing of an eighties song, about a girl named Eileen and how she needed to come on, over thunking, thudding bass. “We have a visual. Primary team, move in.”

This was, he’d told me, the most dangerous part. Before the other djamphir infiltrated the building, while I was still dancing. I was just about to break free of the crowd and head for the exit when another bright shard of hate lanced through my head.

I drew back instinctively, and the exit I’d been planning to take suddenly had a flicker of movement around it. “Shit.” I wasn’t even aware I’d said it.