chapter TWENTY-EIGHT
Sometimes I have nightmares about what happened next. They always start out with the smile on my face, cracked and faded but plastered there, and my encouraging nods every time Dibs glanced worriedly at me. Then there’s the sting of the needle and the aspect flaming into life, every muscle in me tensing against the intrusion and my fangs tingling, crackling, aching. Then there’s a skip, like a jolted CD player, and a sound like rushing water all through me.
A horrible draining sensation. A deep bruising ache in my arm. The bloodhunger rasping against my veins, like sandpaper flooding my circulatory system. Merciful darkness covering my vision, everything in flashes—Sergej’s hiss as the needle slid in, Dibs’s quiet sobbing, Graves’s quick light breathing, the wheelchair rattling as he twitched, the rising hateful murmur through the assembled nosferat, a thin silvery rattle as Christophe’s chains moved again.
My head fell to the side, my neck turning to rubber. A thin stem to hold my pumpkin head up. I thought I heard my mother’s voice again—Be brave, sweetheart. Be very brave now.
The blood she’d given me was now sliding into her killer’s veins. No oxygen to make it liquid poison for him.
Everything spilled away on that dark rushing water. This wasn’t like Christophe’s fangs in my wrist and the terrible inward-ripping sensation as something was pulled out of me by the roots.
No. This was worse.
Because it was black, and cold, and I was trying to scream, and I was alone, and nobody would hear me. It was like sitting in an empty house and waiting for Dad to come back, or sitting by Gran’s hospital bed while her breathing got shallower and shallower. It was like my mother snuggling me into a hidey-hole in the bottom of a closet, closing me away in the safest place she could, and leaving me in the dark.
I was always being left behind. Like a piece of luggage. Like a toy, set down while a kid runs away to play with something else. Like trash.
Now I was left behind, again, and this time there would be nobody and nothing coming to pick me up.
This was the end of the line.
I heard a sound. I was making it. A chilling, breathless moan. Air escaping past slack lips, a drowning swimmer’s final bubbles rising for the surface like silvery fish while the rest . . . sinks.
Fingers against my face. Cold, with the prickle of claws behind them. He scraped at my skin gently, like he enjoyed the feel of it. Something in me roused, knowing I was in terrible danger. It struggled for the surface . . . and couldn’t make it.
“Take her away,” Sergej said, and giggled.
No chain cuffed to my wrist. No need for it now. I was as weak as a sick kitten. Dibs held the cup of water to my lips; half of it spilled down my T-shirt. Tears slicked his cheeks. I blinked at him. There was a buzzing in my ears, and everything looked two-dimensional.
The touch was weak, too. Contracting, like a slug with salt sprinkled on it. Thin and washed out, the world with most of its color removed, all its solidity evaporated. Just a television show, light played on a flat screen.
“Dru!” Dibs, sobbing now. “Dru, please, wake up. Wake up.”
I don’t think I want to. But I was doing this for him, wasn’t I? So I tried to focus through the haze. My mouth wouldn’t quite work right.
“Dibsh?” I slurred. Tried again. “Shamuel?”
Because I’d always thought it was kind of funny when Christophe called him Samuel. A weird, floaty laugh came out of me, my lips loose and numb. I sounded drunk.
He made a low hurt noise. That snapped me back into some kind of sense.
Buck up, Dru. You’re still breathing. Things could be worse.
As “comforting things to think” went, it kind of sucked.
I forced my eyes to open all the way. It wasn’t the cell. It was a bedroom. No windows, the blank stone walls faintly sheened with something like greasy sweat. But the bed was a four-poster, done in faded pink, hanging curtains fuzzed with what looked like a century’s worth of dust. A small brass lamp on a flimsy black-painted nightstand, its shade a bell of dark pink Tiffany glass, Art Deco and probably worth something. There was also a cut-crystal water pitcher. My left-hand fingers itched a little, and a terrible lassitude filled every inch of me.
A girl I’d hung out with in seventh grade had told me about having mono once. About being so tired she didn’t even want to get up to pee. About how her whole body didn’t even seem to belong to her. Just a lump I was hanging around in until a bus came, was the way she put it.
Sarah. Her name was Sarah Holmes. She had black hair.
I hadn’t thought about her in ages. We’d moved on after Dad and I cleared out a roach-spirit infestation and did a little hexbreaking on the side. But now I wanted to see her again and tell her that I understood. And to apologize for promising to be her friend, when I knew I was going to be leaving.
Dibs’s face loomed over mine. His eyes were red and inflamed, and his cheeks were chapped under the tearstains. He looked like he’d been crying for a long time.
Christ. Locked up in this room with me almost dead on the bed? No wonder.
“Hi,” I croaked. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.” For some reason that set him off again, but I didn’t worry about it. I was thinking through mud, each separate thought very slow and stretched out. “Dibs. Kiddo. Calm down.”
“I c-c-can’t s-s-smell you!” The water glass shook in his hands. “You were s-s-so still, and I—”
“Whooooaaaa.” I drew the word out. “Chill, Dibsie. Calm down. Nice and easy.” I am comforting a submissive werwulf. Wow. For some reason it seemed funny. Horribly, bleakly funny. It would take too much energy to laugh, though. “How . . .” I struggled to find the right question to ask. “How long? Have I been . . . out?”
“Hours,” he whispered. “I was scared.” Half-defiant, his lower lip pooching a little. There was some grit in Dibs, even if he was sub. He certainly didn’t take any crap when it was time to bandage someone up.
“Me too, kid.” I tried to move, got pretty much nowhere. But I felt a little sharper now. The aspect’s warmth was gone; I never thought I’d miss it. It was freezing in here. The cold crept into my fingers and toes in a way that should have alarmed me. “Dibs. My hand. Left hand.”
“What?” As usual, once he got something to do, he calmed right down. The stutter eased up and the frantic jittering in his muscles settled into an occasional twitch. “Oh, yeah. Blisters and stuff. I b-bandaged it. Looked pretty rough, and not healing r-right. What is it?”
I don’t know. A hex so bad it burned me, but it’s turning out to be useful. I didn’t have the energy to explain. “Poke it.”
“What?” He stared at me like I’d lost my mind.
“Poke it. Squeeze it.” Give it a beat and dance to it, just make it hurt. I brought my attention back with a start. “Make it hurt.”
“But—” He set the water glass down. “Dru.”
“Make. It. Hurt.” I didn’t have any patience left, either. “Please.”
“Okay.” He leaned over me, grabbed my left hand, and squeezed with more than human strength.
A lightning bolt went up my arm, detonated in my shoulder. I yelped, Dibs yelped too and dropped my hand. He was all the way across the room before you could shout Dixie, pressed up against the dark, weeping stone wall. For just a moment the Other shone out through his wide fearful eyes, a flash of orange snarling, and fur rippled under his skin, not quite breaking free.
Even if he was shy and frightened, Dibs was still wulfen. He could kick some serious ass if he was motivated.
The trouble, I guess, was getting him motivated enough to forget he was scared.
The jolt of pain cleared my head. It also made the touch ring like a bell, expanding for a brief second before I dropped back into my tired aching body with a click, the exact same sound as Dad chambering a round.
Okay. I propped myself shakily on my elbows. Random curls fell in my face, and I tasted copper. My mouth was dry and aching. My teeth weren’t sensitive at all. Well, that was a relief—but there was none of the aspect, and the world looked dull. It could’ve been just the dim pinkish light.
Or maybe I was just seeing with normal eyes now.
If I was, how did people live like this? With shutters over their eyes and cotton wool in their ears? It was worse than being blind.
My arms gave out. I sank back down into the bed. It was chokingsoft, and my nose tickled from the dust. But I felt clear. Like I was made of glass, drained and wiped clean. At least I could think now.
I licked my lips, wished I hadn’t. My dry tongue rasped, and the bloodhunger at the back of my throat was a slow creeping burn. “Door. Locked?”
Dibs eased away from the wall. “Nothing to pick it with, either. I checked. I thought if I c-could g-get you o-out—”
“Calm down, Dibs.” I appreciate the thought. Really, I do. I focused on breathing. In, out, in, out. “Okay. Anything in here that can serve as a weapon? Is the bed breakable?”
“Wood. Not hawthorn. I could break it up, maybe make stakes, but they’ll just laugh at us before they take off our heads like Pez dispensers.” He swallowed hard, his chin lifting. His curls fell back, and for a moment I got a flash of what he’d look like if he ever got older, instead of being teenage all the time.
Pez dispensers? You’re gruesome. That’s good. “Good point. Can I have some more water?”
I didn’t really need it. I just wanted to give him something to do while I poked at the beehive inside my head and figured out something amazing that would get us out of this.
Unfortunately my beehive wasn’t producing much beyond a steady whispered oh my God we’re all gonna die and prolly me first, hooray and oh shit.
He was halfway across the room before he stopped, his head cocking. I strained my ears, heard nothing but my own pulse. “What is it?” I whispered. “Sucker?”
“N-no.” Dibs flushed, and his eyes turned orange. He half-turned and crouched, fluidly, his splayed hands gently touching the stone floor. He didn’t quite change, but the Other rippled under his skin and bulked his shoulders, and he exhaled, a growl thrumming out of his narrow chest before he went still and completely quiet, waiting.
Well, great. Then what the hell is it? I tried pitching from side to side, but my body wouldn’t obey me. A twitch or two was all I could manage. Dust puffed up from the velvet coverlet, and the urge to sneeze tickled me all the way down to my toes.
Great. Just great. I managed to hitch one hip up. I could think and I could send the signals, but they weren’t getting through to my arms and legs. It was like swimming in glue. I couldn’t hear a damn thing, and the touch was dead. It might as well have been dumb meat inside my skull, for all the good it did me. Even squeezing my left hand into a fist, concentrating like hell to make my fingers draw up clumsily, didn’t help. The pain just slid up my arm like swamp water, losing its insistent edge.
The door scraped. A key, turning in a rusty lock. How old was this room? Did I even want to know? The heavy bed and the lamp reminded me of the Schola Prima, and I suddenly wished I’d never left. Everything I did just made a bigger mess, and now things were as bad as they could get.
I winced inwardly. You’re never supposed to even think that. Because it’s just an invitation for the world, Real or otherwise, to throw something even more incredibly f*cked up at you.
The door squealed as it was pushed open. Dibs settled, bracing himself like a cat who sees the mouse but isn’t quite ready to spring.
Graves slipped through. I let out a blurt of sound, his eyes a green flash in the dimness, but it was too late.
Dibs leapt.