Choices, choices.
“Shoot.”
“’Cause you know, you’re
svetocha
and I’m a lowly wulf fresh outta reform school. You shouldn’t even be talking to us, let alone acting like Dibs and me’s your best friends.”
“But you
are
my best friends. I can’t trust anyone else!” I actually pitched forward, throwing the words at him like a dodgeball.
“Like I said. But anyway . . . I don’t trust this. Something’s hinky. What with Red getting all aggro on you and someone scratching at your window, not to mention the fact that you shouldn’t’ve been sent to our backwoods Schola in the first place
and
more vampires than I’ve ever seen in my life chasing you down. And let’s not even talk about Reynard, okay?” He stopped, waited for my nod, and continued. “I’m saying it might not be so good an idea for you to sleep up here if someone you trust isn’t with you. So. Either we stash you someplace nobody knows about, or . . .” His face worked itself up a little, like he was sucking significantly on a lemon. Like I should know where he was going.
It took my poor busted brain a few seconds to figure out what he was suggesting. “Or you stay here. Um, I guess not, Shanks. I mean, I trust you and all, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
He looked almost green with relief. “Well, cool. Because Graves would have a fit. He’ll probably be back anytime now. He knows we can’t leave you alone. So—”
A lightbulb turned on inside my head. “I’ve got an idea,” I said, and I told him.
Like I expected, he didn’t think much of it. “You’ll end up with your guts for garters, Dru.”
I shook my head. “He hasn’t hurt me. Not yet. And can you think of a better place? Nobody would expect it.”
“Bad idea.” Shanks shook his head so hard his shoulders moved, too. “Jesus Christ. You’re nuts. Completely bazonko.”
“All you have to do is act like I’m in here.” I sounded perfectly reasonable, even to myself. “And for Christ’s sake, it’s not like I’m not down there every night
anyway
.”
“But . . . ” He stopped. “You know, it’s actually not such a bad idea. Completely crazy, but not such a bad idea.”
“Exactly.” I stuffed my hands gingerly in my hoodie pockets. The wrapping on my wrist helped. Once you get all bandaged up, the fight is really over. You can afford to relax a little bit.
Maybe. Until the next crisis comes along. And I was jumpy. Who wouldn’t be, after all this?
Shanks thought everything over. “But when Graves comes back . . .”
“He’s smart. He’ll figure out where I am.” He would, and he’d either be angry or . . . what? What would he be like when he came back?
I ran up against the wall of everything I didn’t know about him. The Council had never mentioned his file again, and I hadn’t even been tempted to ask. I figured he’d tell me what he wanted me to know, and—
Shanks made a restless motion, like a dog shaking away water. “If he can figure it out, someone else can too.”
Werwulfen function on consensus among themselves. Getting them to poop or get off the pot is pretty impossible sometimes. Don’t get me wrong—when you’ve got teeth and claws and superhuman reflexes, it’s a good thing to want everyone to agree without violence. I’ll be the first to admit that.
But sometimes it just drives me up the fricking wall. “Then they can all come down and we’ll have a coffee klatch.” I rolled my eyes. “He killed three suckers at the other Schola, Shanks. He’s good protection.”
“I’m not worried about suckers just yet. I’m worried about him going crazy and opening you up like a can of Pringles.”
I was getting to the point where that thought was losing its ability to scare me. “Well, then this will all be academic, won’t it? And everyone will be ever so much happier without the problem that is me hanging around.” I shuffled over to the side of the bed, picked up the sleeping bag and the pillow. “That’s what I’m doing. I’ll stash myself someplace nobody except Graves will think of to look for me. You just hang out by the door until Benjamin comes to check in on me, and pretend I’m in the room. And ta-da, tomorrow Graves should be back and calmed down enough to be reasonable and we’ll figure out . . . something else.”
Like getting the hell out of this place. Hey, you can even come along. The more the merrier.
I sounded hopeless even inside my own head.
Shanks was looking at me weird.“He’ll be back tonight. I’ll stick around and wait for him, I guess. You really want to do this, Dru-girl?”
I’d had about all I could take of boys looking at me funny, but I gave him a smile that hurt my face. My split lip cracked a little, and the bruises all twinged. “Yeah. What’s the worst that could happen?”
As soon as I said it I wished I hadn’t. But Shanks just shook his dark head, opened the door, and peered outside, sniffing. “It’s clear,” he finally muttered. “Come on, then.”
“Thanks. I mean it. For everything.” I shifted the sleeping bag around and winced when my arm almost cramped, the way bruises do when they settle down to the painful business of healing.
As usual when I thanked him, he shook it off and snorted. “Always was too curious for my own good. Be careful, okay?”
“I will be.” And I set off down the hall before either of us could get any more embarrassed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The metal shelf
was hard, and I probably should have brought my sneakers down here with me. And an extra blanket. But I just unrolled the sleeping bag and made sure the key was in my pocket for the fiftieth time.
You know that feeling—you’ve got your bus ticket or something important in your pocket, and you have to keep checking just to make sure it’s there? Like that. It’s like a nervous tic or something when you’re traveling or really, really bushed. Or maybe I’m the only person who does it, I don’t know.
Ash’s breathing was steady. He lay curled up under the shelf-bed, and there was another sticky tray in the corner. I’d gotten close enough to it to smell the red copper of blood, and the image of a brown Jersey cow popped up big as life inside my head, the
touch
throbbing. I’d retreated to the other side of the room in a hurry. At least he was being fed. I would have a crazy well-fed werwulf to contend with instead of a crazy hungry one.
You take what you can get, I suppose.
I plopped the pillow down, fluffed it up, then stood and stared at the sleeping bag. It smelled like Graves. Healthy teenage boy, his deodorant, and the cold moonlight tang of
loup-garou
.
I eased myself down cautiously, my knees complaining when they hit cold concrete. My wrapped wrist twinged, too. I peeked under the shelf.
There was a faint orange gleam of eyes in the deeper shadow. His breathing hadn’t changed, but he was awake. Every inhale ended on a slight bubbling sound through his ruined mouth.
“I’m sorry about shooting you.” The words surprised me. Even more than that, I was surprised to find out I really
was
sorry. Even if Benjamin was right and the only thing keeping him from doing what Sergej wanted and killing me was a faceful of silver grain, I still felt bad about shooting him. “It must hurt, huh?”
The shadow didn’t move, but I could tell he was paying attention by the way the silence in the room changed. Ordinary people can hear that, too—what happens when someone is suddenly paying attention.
“Go figure.” The cold of the floor grabbed the bruises on my legs with bony fingers. “This is about the only place I feel safe. And you could bite my head off without even thinking about it. Do I smell weird to you, too? I guess I must.”
No answer. Just the soft burble of his breath. The tiny glimmers of his eyes winked out, and he settled farther back, against the wall.
I didn’t zip the sleeping bag up, but I did tuck it all around me. The metal was hard and uncomfortable, but no worse than a motel-room floor. I just couldn’t get easy, especially with the bruises and muscle aches playing pinball all through me. Every time I shifted my weight the bag’s zipper would rub a little bit against the metal bed, or a bruise would set up a yell of pain, or some damn thing. But I was exhausted, and pretty soon I started to feel drowsy.
I woke with a start, hearing the deathly stillness of everyone in the Schola gone to their early-morning rest. It took me a few sleepy seconds to realize it was before Ash usually began his regular 3:00 a.m. yowling, and he wasn’t making a sound. Instead, I blinked fuzzily a few times, and in the faint illumination through the barred aperture in the door I saw a long furred shape with orange eyes.
He lay across the threshold, narrow head on his paws, and watched me.
That should really creep me out.
But I fell back asleep again. A long slow velvet time of dreamless darkness enfolded me.
And then . . .
The hall was long and narrow, and the door at the end of it glided open. I remembered this feeling—a buzzing cord tied around my waist, drawing me on. I should have been cold in my sock feet and T-shirt, and for a moment I wondered where my hoodie had gone. Then I realized I was dreaming, and the question fell away.
The buzzing started, vibrating through my fingers and toes. It was like static between channels in the back ends of America, the ancient televisions in fly-spotted, grease-carpeted motel rooms all tuned to blank snow. Some of those places advertise cable, but good luck coaxing the TV to home in on anything resembling a signal.
I remembered this feeling, like pins and needles crawling through numb flesh. I held up a hand and wasn’t surprised to see translucent copies of my nail-chewed fingers. They wiggled when I wiggled them, obediently, and I put my hand down. My feet just brushed the floor. I was moving slowly. Like waterskiing but only at about quarter-speed, leaning back against the pull.
Up the stairs, past the hall that held my room, and the pull intensified. The Schola’s stone walls wavered like seaweed. A soft thunder of wingbeats surrounded me, insulating me from the prickling buzz.
The Schola flickered, came back with the colors bled out. Everything was shifting, like really old movies where the grainy color has faded. Or like those painted photographs you see in antique stores—black-and-white portraits with weird blushes over the cheeks and eyes, caught in dusty frames and staring out past speckled, dirty glass.
The voices faded in through the static. I recognized one of them, and the walls of the Schola pulled away. I was outside, the trees shimmering—one moment fully-leafed, the next bare grasping branches.
The voices came back as the trees burst into full summer green again, their shadows turning everything around them to liquid even as color flooded my sight. Sound wavered, but then it was like finding the radio station you want, a chance bump in the road moving your finger on the dial just that perfect amount so the song comes in clear and loud.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It will get better.”
“She hates me.” There was a clack of wood hitting wood, and a short sharp sound of frustration. “I want to go home.”
“She can’t do anything to you. Not with me here. First form, Elizabeth.”
A heatless pang went through me.
It was a half-ruined chapel, vines growing up the stone walls. It was vaguely familiar, and I realized why in a dreamy sort of way. I’d been drawing it for weeks now. There was a wide grassy center and a stone altar, and she appeared between the veils of mist. Her achingly beautiful heart-shaped face, a few long ringlets escaping to bob against her cheeks. She wore black capris and a white button-down, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back. The cut of the clothes somehow said “old.” You could just tell she wanted to iron her hair flat and do some macramé.
She held
malaika
, the slightly curving wooden swords, with sweet natural grace. One of them made a half-circle, so sharp you could hear the air being cut. Perched atop the altar, her Keds shuffling as she stepped back and the swords made a complicated pattern, she was a deadly beautiful bird mantling its wings.
“Straighten your leg,” Christophe said from the shadow under the wall on the right. The sunlight was a physical weight, golden-grainy like old honey. His eyes burned blue, and he watched her critically, his eyebrows pulled together.
Each time I saw him, it was as if I’d forgotten how well his face worked together, every angle and line fitting just so. He was in jeans and a black T-shirt, his hair pure Liverpool mod touched with blond highlights. “Wrist,” he said mildly, and my mother stopped. She half-turned and gave him a Look.
Oh but I recognized that; it was the way she’d look at Dad when he was late for dinner, or when he said something joking about her washing dishes. It was the mock-glare of a pretty woman looking at a man she knows very well. Half-teasing, almost angry, and very aware of him looking at her.
The wingbeats of my pulse paused. The pins and needles stabbing static fuzzed through the scene, but I focused, just like holding the pendulum over Gran’s kitchen table and searching for the little internal tickle that would make it answer questions.
I couldn’t get enough of seeing her again. She was breathing easily, and she pushed away a stray curl with the back of her hand, the
malaika
held as easily as a butter knife. She was so graceful. I saw, as if I had a pair of binoculars, that her fingernails were bitten down, too.
Just like mine.
She looked so young. In the picture Dad carried in his wallet, the shadows in her eyes were darker, and she seemed older. Right now she looked, well, like a teenager.
Every little girl thinks her mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. But my mother was. She really
was
.
Her mock-glare turned into a set expression, mouth firm and eyebrows drawn together a little. “I feel like an idiot, stuck up on here. Why can’t we practice inside?”