chapter THIRTY
The tiny crimson drop was the only thing in the room that didn’t look washed-out. It was a rich ruby jewel, and my mouth actually watered. Which only made the thirsty worse.
Then the smell of it hit me. Copper, wildness, icy moonlight, and the strawberry-incense tang of him. It scraped across the bloodhunger and lit every vein in my body like a tangle of neon.
My fangs slid free, my jaw making little popping, shifting sounds. It hurt, like an overstressed muscle. Each individual tooth rooted in my jaw tingled, exquisitely sensitive.
“Graves,” I whispered. With a faint lisp, so I didn’t scrape my tongue on the sharp bits. It sounded ridiculous.
“Dru.” He slid his free fingers through my hair again and hugged me. My nose mashed against the underside of his jaw, a little bit of stubble roughening up, and my tight-closed lips met the beads of blood. The smell of it crawled through my nose and lit up everything inside my head, like a match flame touching gas fumes. “Just do it. Please. I . . . please, Dru. I want you to.”
Oh, God— My head twitched on my weak, aching neck. My lips skinned back from my teeth. I fought it, but my body knew better than I did. It pulled me forward . . . but oh, God.
I tried to be gentle.
My fangs knew just where to press. My tongue lapped once, gathering the trickle from the small cut, and a shiver went through him. His arm tightened under me, his leg tightened over both of mine, and he pulled me into his body like we were raindrops on a window, the moment before they slide together.
My fangs slid in. A burst of sweet, hot perfume filled my mouth, and I drew on it as gently as I could.
Graves’s head tipped back. But his arms and legs tensed, twining us together, tighter and tighter. I swallowed. It slid down my throat like silk and exploded in my stomach, and the touch came back to roaring life. My fangs drove in deeper, strength flooding my arms and legs again, and he made an odd sound, like all the air had been punched out of him.
It poured into my mouth again, heat and life and light. But with it came a flood of images, swirling through the touch and blasting straight into my brain.
. . . “Stupid little—” The words became a roar, the spilled paint bright blue against the garage floor as the fosterdaddy’s slap caught him right on the cheek. Red pain, falling, hitting the side of the car with a dead crack and the pain a red monster, swallowing him whole.
. . . crouching on the playground while the bigger kid swings his foot, kick catching right under the ribs, falling and hearing their laughter. The teachers were hurrying to bust it up, but he just hunched and sobbed, because it was too late.
. . . sobbing in the middle of the night, hearing the scream as Mom’s latest boyfriend took the belt to her, writhing in shame and pain because he was too little, too afraid. Never, he swears to himself, never be helpless again, never never never . . .
. . . the blue-eyed girl turned in a circle, and his heart was a stone in his chest. “It’s nice,” she said, looking at the posters and the books and the shabby little room he’d managed to cobble together. His hideaway, where he retreated to lick his wounds every day. “It’s cozy.” And just like that, she turned the whole place into a clubhouse, because he wasn’t in here alone.
. . . she was beautiful, even soaked and shivering, with the gun in her hand. Her eyes blazed, and the grinding in his shoulder from the thing that had bit him was a flaming brand. “Dru. Don’t leave me. Please.” Because she had that look, his mother’s look every time she vanished and the social workers came sniffing around. The look that said he was nothing but baggage, and she was better off without him, because he’d make her sink like a rock. So he pulled himself up, as tall as he could. Don’t care what I have to do. “Dru.” Trying not to sound like he was pleading. And when she nodded, the gun pointed at the floor and the tears sliding unnoticed down her cheeks, the relief in him was enough to make the hamburger mess of his shoulder suddenly inconsequential.
Because for the first time, someone didn’t shrug him off. She set her shoulders and nodded. “All right,” she said, and he suddenly understood everything had changed, that he wasn’t going to get left behind, that she was going to take him with her. He’d say anything, do whatever he had to—she asked questions, he answered. And finally she nodded again. “All right, Graves. You and me. Let’s go.”
And it was enough. More than he’d ever thought he’d get.
I swallowed again. The heat slammed through me, a good cracking-clean hit like a baseball against the sweet spot of a bat. They poured into me, the images, and seeing myself through his eyes was like vanishing. Because he hadn’t seen the frizzy-haired, scared-to-death, mousy Dru. No, to him I’d looked like a supernova, flaming and deadly beautiful, an escape from the dead-end world he’d been born into.
And Jesus, I’d known it had to have been bad for him—nobody with a well-adjusted family life lives in a forgotten office in a mall, for Chrissake—but I hadn’t known how bad. He’d never said anything about it. At least, nothing directly. And I hadn’t asked because, well, you don’t ask about shit like that. You just leave everything open in case they want to say something, and you try not to squeeze any raw parts.
When Ash’s teeth had ground in his flesh and the change agents worked in with Ash’s saliva, Graves had been born again. Dragged out of the dead end and plonked on the highway. He didn’t want to look back.
And now I could guess at all the broken places inside him, where Sergej had his claws. Except I had hold of everything else, and I pulled, the touch flexing as his blood filled my mouth again and he made another harsh grating noise. I wasn’t gentle this time, fangs sinking in deeper and my mouth sucking greedily, my arms suddenly around him and the hot sweet taste coating every inch of my mouth and throat and all the way down into my stomach. Summer heat-haze spread out, fighting back the cold swimming weakness.
He might have thrashed, but we were holding each other so tightly it didn’t do more than ripple through us both as the blood poured down my throat. I’d lost track of how many times I’d swallowed, and that was dangerous, wasn’t it? Djamphir never took more than a certain amount, I didn’t know why, but—
Wait, that’s three, it’s always three, why?
Everything else vanished. Red light blinded me, his pulse thudding frantically, a drumbeat my own heart struggled to match. I pulled again, something old and slow and black as an oily nighttime river sluggishly waking, rising through layers of sleep, its teeth ivory-sharp and champing with a sound like billiard balls hitting each other, bloody foam spattering thin cruel lips.
I swallowed again. Heat and strength poured into me, the touch roaring like ocean breakers, the world coming back. My eyes flew open; a tingling flood swept down my skin. Graves’s arms solid and real around me. His fingers wrapped in my hair, pulling hard enough to hurt as he pressed my head forward, and for a long moment we were those two raindrops again. Merged together, running down a window as a radio blared something with a driving beat and the wind roared through open windows, life returning in a green spring flood.
I jerked back, trying to free myself from his arms. He didn’t ease up, steel running through his muscles, locking down. He was still shaking, a jittering earthquake pouring through him as he made another hoarse dry sound. He was on the edge of the bed, dust rising in swirls, and something inside both of us stretched . . . and snapped, an almost-physical sound that blew more dust up. This time the cloud of particles made shapes, long elegant heads with sharp teeth, slim paws, and running fluid lines. I sensed more than saw them, and the old blind thing with its dark clawed fingers squeezing Graves’s brain howled in fruitless rage as I shredded at it, scrubbing with a brush made of the way I felt about him.
A bright, hot, clean feeling.
Another jet of bright hot life slid down my throat, hit my stomach, and exploded. This time the images were a kaleidoscope, color and motion unreeling under the touch, spinning so fast I couldn’t process them. They were all me, but me seen through his eyes. Me sleeping, me hunched over a lunch tray, me studying a book, me covered in mud and muck and gunk—all shot through with a rose-colored feeling, soft in some places, scary-hard and spiky in others. His heart in his throat and his pulse rising, and one more swallow would give me everything, would break all the walls between us and . . .
I tore away. The bloodhunger snarled, vibrating in my chest with that odd clear-crystal ringing sound, and a hot draft of sticky cinnamon and warm perfume drifted up.
It was like being reborn. The aspect smoothed over me, downy wings beating in time with my pulse, and I held Graves, my cheek against his shoulder. The hunger retreated, step by step.
You have control, Dru. Christophe’s voice, and why was I hearing him? I didn’t want to hear him while I was holding my Goth Boy.
Graves shook. For a moment I thought he was crying. But he was laughing, the kind of crazy-sane laughter that erupts when you find out you’re not dead after all. His arms had loosened a little, but he was still definitely holding me. He smelled of ashes now, curiously pale, the ghost of incense. Cold, and weak. But his pulse still thundered, and he didn’t let go of me.
For a long moment I struggled with the urge to bury my fangs in him again and drain every last drop. To not stop, because it was so good. And because I was in my own skin now, separate and oddly bereft.
The laughter shuddered to a stop. He exhaled, hard. Then, a quiet croak. “Do you need more?”
God. No. I want more, that’s the problem. I shook my head, clamping my lips shut. Buried my face in his shoulder and fought the hunger, step by step, back into its little box. His fingers slid free of my hair, and he stroked the tangled curls down.
And for just that moment, the darkness behind my eyelids held no danger. But there was no time. I knew, as surely as I knew my own name, that somewhere in the stone warren we were trapped in, Sergej was waking up.
And boy, was he going to be pissed.