chapter EIGHT
The rear hatch opened; I hopped out and my sneakers sank into mud. The rain was an immediate battering against every inch of me, and the malaika were heavy in my hands. The aspect poured over me in a wave of smooth-oil heat, fangs prickling my lower lip. I jerked the wooden swords free of the leather harness and pelted around the corner of the car.
Ash hunkered down in the rain, almost-eight feet of werwulf with huge shoulders under a mat of wiry fur. The streak on his head gleamed, rain slicking everything down and outlining muscle under his pelt. His claws dug into mud with tiny splorching sounds lost under a roll of thunder, and the vampires skidded to a stop, throwing up sheets of mudlaced water. The grass exploded like jackstraws, and they snarled.
Eight of them. All male, all burning with visible hatred under the lash of rain, hourglass-shaped pupils sending black threads out into their irises as the hunting-aura took them. It’s like the aspect, that aura, but it’s made of pure revulsion. They just loathe everything around them so much.
Or maybe it’s just the living they detest, even as they feed on them. Even though they’re, technically, living too. They’re the part of life that hates itself.
Why didn’t I sense them? The faint citrus taste sharpened, as if I was sucking on a piece of orange candy.
Danger candy, I’d called it, my warning taste. Why was it failing me now?
It didn’t matter. Eight against me and Ash were bad odds. But I’d bloomed, right? Not so bad now. Especially if my aspect held, spreading out in invisible lethal waves.
Where’s Graves? In the house? “Ash. Ash!” I had to shout over a long rattling roll of thunder. “Go find Graves! Find him now!”
Ash growled, his claws digging into mud, and I was afraid he wouldn’t listen. Time to think fast, only what could I do? If he decided not to do what I told him—
Silly, Anna’s voice whispered inside my head. Keep the Broken with you; he’s good cannon fodder. But if you really want him to obey, do this. And her ghostly, manicured fingers drummed against my skull.
The touch flexed inside my head, my will grinding down as the bloodhunger dilated in my throat. My mother’s locket burned with fierce cold, the silver stinging me.
I pulled the touch back, hurriedly, shaking my head. Water flew.
Ash let out a yelp and skipped sideways as if stung. I felt as if I’d just swallowed Anna’s blood again, and her training opened up inside me, ghostly silk-hung corridors stretching in every direction. Eight vampires, a storm that was certainly the work of a very old and powerful sucker, and the werwulf who’d saved my ass time and again whirled and pelted away with spooky blurring grace.
How did I do that?
Anna. Somehow, in drinking her blood, I’d taken more. Whether she’d intended it or it just happened because we were both svetocha was a question I’d worry about later.
If I survived this.
My grasp on the malaika firmed, became natural. The curved wooden swords whirled in circles, rain dripping down the back of my neck as my hair finished plastering itself to my head, my braid a heavy sopping rope. I should have been shivering and terrified out of my tiny little mind.
Instead, I dropped into first-guard, bent my knees, and had to control the urge to fling myself at them. They spread out, fangs bared, and the hiss-growl of pissed-off vampires turned the rain to trembling, flashing needles of ice. Which one’s the leader? Pick off the leader first. But they all feel the same age, which means—
I realized my mistake just as the rest of the vampires showed up. These eight weren’t the only ones. They were just the quickest on the scene, so to speak.
More deadly black shapes knifed out of the dark between the trees, lightning crackling as the sky overhead tore itself apart, and I braced myself. The malaika spun, and there was no more time for thinking.
I moved.
The first vampire fell, choking and clawing at his throat. The happy stuff in my blood that makes me svetocha also made me toxic to suckers now that I’d bloomed. The aspect flared, almost visible as it battered at the ice pellets now raining down on me. Stinging hail lashed and my right-hand malaika sheared half the sucker’s face off. Black blood exploded, hanging in a freezing arc before the hail scattered through it.
He didn’t look more than sixteen. None of them did, but the way their faces twisted into plum-colored evil was ageless. Their eyes were black from lid to lid now, and their cold hunting-auras hit the wall of heat that was my aspect. Traceries of steam exploded as I leapt, malaika whirling with a whistling sound over the crack of thunder. Landing, splorch of mud under my sneakers, skidding but that was all right, on my knees and tearing a long furrow across the meadow’s face as I slid, bending back under claw strikes as they tried to get through the shell of toxicity and tear my throat out. Vampire blood sprayed, acid-smoking as it hit chill-wet air. Steam twisted into sharptooth shapes and I gained my feet again with a lurch. Mud splattered and grass flew as I twisted aside, my foot flashing out and kicking another sucker with a crunch.
The world was slow, and I moved through it with whispering, eerie speed. It didn’t even feel abnormal to be sidestepping through time and space this way. It wasn’t the plastic goop slowing everything down—no, this was just me tearing through the snarled fabric of the normal. Bloodhunger flamed all the way down my throat, exploded in my stomach.
The malaika are meant for circles. This circle, here, is where you move. These circles are how the blades move to defend you. And this circle is how you attack against many opponents. Focus, now!
So long ago, Christophe teaching a svetocha how to fight. I couldn’t tell, now, if the memory was Anna’s or mine. Lightning crawled inside my head, bloodhunger turning the wide wet lake of the meadow into shutter-click images. Whirling, my left-hand blade a propeller, smoking vampire blood flung like a gauntlet, splashing the rest of them. They circled, and I didn’t have to worry about which direction to strike out. I’d hit a nosferat wherever I swung, and they were going to tighten the ring. I was toxic, yeah, but there were so many of them, and weight of numbers would tell on me.
“DRU!” he screamed, and lightning struck the top of the ridge. The blast of thunder hit at almost the same moment; I swear to God I felt the wall of air molecules cracking against each other press along my entire body as I leapt, spinning in midair and striking out with feet and blades. My heart hammered, because I knew who it was.
He’d come for me. Of course he had.
He always did.
He tore through the vampires, blue eyes alight with terrible fire and the rags of his black sweater melded to his body, his own malaika blurring as I landed and struck out again. They choked, their faces flushing as my aspect burned. It used to be that only terror or fury would make that oil-soft heat lay itself against my skin, and I still felt the rage, wine-red and perfume-sweet, curling through me. Nobody was bleeding here, yet. Nobody except the vampires, and the thought of sinking my fangs in them wasn’t appealing.
But if someone had been here, someone human and helpless, like Lyle—
It hit me from the side, a thunderbolt of force. I flew, oddly weightless, holding onto the malaika as if they’d somehow break my fall. The sucker died in midair, choking on his own blood, but I hit the ground hard, all my chimes ringing and my head full of a flash of brief starry nothingness. The vampire’s body rolled to the side, convulsing as it shredded itself, toxic dust runneling through its flesh.
My name, yelled hoarsely. Screaming, the glassy cries of furious nosferatu. Roaring, a werwulfen in full battlemode. It was a good thing there was so much thunder, I thought weakly, because otherwise we were making enough noise to be heard in the next county.
Bloodhunger pulsed against my palate, wiping away the trace of oranges. Consciousness returned in a rush. I struggled up, vampire blood smoking on my clothes, and heard someone else screaming. There was no pain in that cry. It was a long howl of absolute rage, and when I shook the daze out of my head and made it to my feet, shoving aside a heavy weight of swiftly decaying sucker bodies, I saw him.
Christophe bent back, his booted foot flashing up to strike the sucker on the chin. This was a female, her long hair matted with ice, hail suddenly pounding all the way across the violent shipwrecked mass of the torn-up meadow.
Gran’s house was still burning fiercely, and a lean dark shape bulleted across the clearing, the silvery streak on its low narrow head actually smearing on the air. Ash hit the girl vampire from behind, and I realized this was the sucker who had birthed the storm. She felt old, a terrible weight of hatred and cold spreading out from her in concentric waves. Not as ancient or as powerful as Sergej, but enough.
Ash’s hit jolted the girl vampire forward, but she half-turned with impossible quickness and one white hand flashed out. He tumbled away, hair melting and his boyshape rising for the surface, a supple white snake under curling darkness.
Christophe! I shook my head, trying to think. The entire meadow was littered with broken bodies. They twisted and jerked as decay claimed them—suckers rot fast when they’re bled out, especially when hawthorn wood or a svetocha’s nearness has poisoned them.
He drove her back, making a noise that was pure inhuman rage. It managed to drown out the thunder, and a draft of warm applepie scent hit me in the face. It had an undertone of copper, which meant he was bleeding, and oh God the smell of it stroked right across the bloodhunger with a cat’s-tongue rasp. It reached all the way down to the floor of me, jerking against my control and pulling on every vein in my body.
A hand closed around my arm. I let out a cry and recoiled, but it was Graves. Bruising crawled up his face, his lip was split, and his clothes were grimed with mud and more blood. The smell of him, strawberry incense and silvermoon wildness, the blood a bright copper-satin thread holding it all together, smashed into me. My fangs ached, a sweet tingle of pain. For a hideous half second I quivered, everything in me tensing, ready to knock him down and bury my teeth in him.
Graves was shouting something I couldn’t hear over the thunder. His mouth worked, and he tried to pull me toward the car. I dug in my heels, malaika dangling from my nerveless hands. Not just because he was bleeding, or because the bloodhunger was snarling all through me, but because I couldn’t look away from the fight in front of me.
Christophe closed with the girl vamp again. Ash flowed upward, melding back into changeform, his eyes alight with mad orange. Thunder roiled, and the remaining vampires were massing behind Ash. Not so many of them—a dozen at most. Still, enough to do some harm.
Ash and Christophe needed me. At least I wasn’t useless here, as long as my aspect held.
And now that I’d bloomed, it would.
Christophe blurred, striking at the girl vamp with inhuman speed and precision. But she was too fast, and he was flagging. I didn’t know how I knew, unless it was the touch tolling inside my head like a bell. I felt the sweat on his skin under the pouring icy water, felt the burning of his own aspect as if it was mine.
I tore away from Graves. My sneakers almost drowned in the mud; hail stung as it peppered down. My aspect turned scorch-hot, steam rising directly from my skin as I screamed, a falcon’s cry.
Gran’s owl appeared out of nowhere, filling itself in with swift strokes, and hit the girl vampire with a crunch I felt like my own bones breaking. A wingsnap, and it veered away, claws dripping. Her young-old face was a black-streaked mess now, her eyes black from lid to lid and spreading fine thin threads of gray out like crow’s-feet wrinkles.
Thunder shattered the sky overhead, four separate bolts of lightning slamming down at once, and the girl vampire choked. She was so fast, backpedaling as I drove onward, my malaika whirring. Ash let out a howl, leaping for her, but it was Christophe who flew past me, the aspect slicking down his hair and filling the air around him with crystalline crackling fury. He hit her like a freight train, and the tearing ripping sound of the malaika in vampire flesh cut the thunder short.
Black, acidic blood sprayed. Ash hunched even further, his warning growl taking the place of the storm. The hail turned to rain, a regular spring downer. The remaining vampires fell back, their unlined faces twisting with confusion as well as hatred now.
Christophe didn’t stop. The blades kept tearing at the body, and the hiss-growl that came from him was a djamphir’s scariest warning. His chest seemed too small to make such a sound.
Oh, God. I kept going past him, heading for the group of suckers clumping and backing away from Ash. Thunder receded, lightning striking other hills. The eerie storm-lit darkness began to seem less, well, dark. My malaika blurred in twin circles, vampire blood spattering away from the hawthorn, a preparatory move. Graves was suddenly beside me, his eyes burning green and his boots landing in the mud with sucking splashes that would have been funny if he hadn’t been making the same sound as Ash—a low thrumming that raises every hair on the body, because it reaches right into your bones and reminds you of a time when human beings huddled in dark caves and the things that ran by night had teeth and claws even fire wouldn’t scare away.
Even worse, it sinks its fingers into the low crouching thing in every human, the thing that lurks under civilization and socialization.
The thing that hunts.
The vampires broke and scattered. Ash twitched, his hide rippling in vital waves. The silver streak on his head glowed eerily.
“Get them!” Christophe screamed. Ash leapt forward, and so did Graves. I would have too, but something hit me from behind. I went down hard, mud splattering everywhere and pea-sized hail embedded in the meadow’s surface abrading my bare arms like the world’s biggest sandpaper belt.
Christophe had my wrists, holding the malaika down and pressing me into cold mud. “Stay here!” he yelled, over a last retreating peal of thunder. “Stay!” Then he was up and off me, scooping up his malaika and vanishing. Little whispering sounds chattered as he moved too quickly to be seen, streaking past the other two and plunging into the woods.
Oh, hell no. No way. But I just lay there for a moment, my ribs heaving with huge shuddering breaths. The rain poured down, but the whole house was blazing. Black smoke billowed. Why was it burning like that?
I managed to make it mostly upright. Cold mud closed around my knees with sucking fingers. I stared at Gran’s house, now an inferno. Orange flames, full of evil little yellow chuckling faces with leering mouths. All our supplies, gone. Gran’s spinning wheel, her pots and pans, everything. My only safe place, my last best card.
Gone.
My heart cracked. I hunched there on my knees, my mouth ajar, stunned.
I hadn’t been smart enough or fast enough. How had the vampires found me? How had Christophe found me?
And where had Graves been all this time?
I found out I was crying again. The bloodhunger curdled inside me, and thick, hot tears mixed with cold rain. I was covered in mud, and I’d just managed to lead the vampires to the only thing I had left.
Was there anything I wouldn’t destroy just by breathing near it?
I bent over, hugging myself, and sobbed while the storm retreated.