chapter THIRTY-FOUR
Or at least, I tried to. I got exactly nowhere.
His shoulders hunched. Something ripped as he used his teeth, settling more firmly into his father’s neck. Blood sprayed, black and viscous, not thin like the other suckers’. It smoked, and the thought of that oozing down my throat was enough to make me feel even sicker.
I set my feet and yanked again, but it was as if he’d been turned to stone. He gulped, greedily, and the sound forced bile up into my throat. The thought that if I threw up, I’d be throwing up blood—Graves’s blood, at that—did not help.
“Christophe.” I swallowed hard. “Christophe, please. Listen to me. You’re not him. Don’t be him. Please. Please, Christophe, stop. Stop it. Please. I’m begging you, stop.”
Everything paused. I had my fingers in his blood-clotted hair, and a current roared through him and into me. The touch flamed into life, and I almost reeled. But I didn’t let go of Christophe’s head. I couldn’t.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please, Christophe. Don’t do this.”
He shuddered, his ribs popping out and mending with horrifying, meaty sounds.
Then Christophe threw his head back and screamed. It was a long, despairing cry, but at least it got him away from his father. Who twitched again, horribly vital, and I could feel him gathering himself. Like a tornado or a thunderstorm approaching.
I brought my right hand up, my knees dripping as I rose too, the perfect angle unreeling inside me. The malaika made its low sweet sound, but it was lost in the noise Christophe was making. I might have screamed too, but it was lost in Christophe’s cry as well. All the loneliness, all the pain, all the betrayal in the world was in that sound, and the wooden sword whooshed down.
I put everything into it. It wasn’t just me. The dead filled me, all of them, whispering and chattering in a vast silence wrapped around me.
This was the way to kill him. Not with hate, not with taking in his blood and everything about him. Instead, it was my mother’s hand on the malaika’s hilt, and my father’s. Even Gran’s ancient, liver-spotted hand, her fingers calloused from a lifetime of work and her eyes sharp with take-no-prisoners compassion. It was Graves’s hand, too—even though he wasn’t dead, it was the hand of the boy he could’ve been, tight against mine. And Anna’s, red nails gleaming, as I felt the tears slicking my cheeks and understood it was for her too. Even though she’d tried to kill me, I wept for the girl she could have been.
The person I would have to try to be, so I didn’t turn out like this horrible, twitching thing on the floor.
The blade carved cleanly, and Christophe’s cry cut off as if I’d sliced him. For a nightmarish moment I thought I had, and it was probably a mercy the dull reddish light failed completely then, snuffed out like a candle flame. The darkness that descended was absolute, the silence a ringing tone.
My knees hit the stone floor with a splashing thump. Another thump brought a hot wad of something up in my throat, because I could imagine Sergej’s head hitting the floor. It rolled away like a big granite ball, making more noise than it should, and I dropped my malaika.
I was sobbing. Little hitching gasps turned into spasms, racking convulsions, I wrapped my arms around myself and rocked back and forth. The silence was so immense, and the dark was so deep. It was like the needle in my arm and the cold again, and I curled in on myself.
“Dru.” A whisper. “Dru.”
He reached me in the darkness, and part of me wanted to scrabble back and away. My skin crawled when he touched me, but the rest of me fell into him. Something against my forehead, a soft pressure. His lips. He kissed my forehead, my cheeks, my bloody, tear-streaked, dirty face, everywhere he could reach. I didn’t care. The shakes had me now, like a vicious dog shaking a toy, stuffing flying everywhere. Everything inside me was shaking loose, shaking free; there was nothing to hold onto.
Nothing except Christophe, there in the dark.
He held me, murmuring my name, holding me bruising-tight. Kissed my hair, my forehead, again. He couldn’t reach the rest of me because I’d buried my face in his neck. We clung together like survivors of some huge natural disaster, and the sobs retreated like an ocean wave.
He was saying something else, over and over again, in between repeating my name.
“Thank you,” he would mutter, hoarsely, ragged, into my hair. “Dziekuje, Dru, milna. Thank you.”
Jesus Christ, for what? But then he stiffened, and his head came up. I felt the movement in the dark, and I swallowed the last of the sobs, folding my lips over my teeth and pushing them down.
We’d just killed the king of the vampires.
And in the distance, muffled but still distinct, I heard gunfire.