Reckoning (30 page)

There were other things, too. Dibs, flinching and terrified, sobbing. Dylan from the first Schola I’d ever attended, probably dead because he’d been blown from the inside; August, showing up bloody and battered in the nick of time. Anna, who had tried to kill me in her own way, sure, but . . . she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

Nobody
deserved what this thing had done to them.

Sergej skidded back, one slim iron-hard hand flashing up. He hit Gran’s owl,
hard
, and the impact smashed through me, throwing me sideways. I went tumbling, splashing through the foulness, and before I slid to a stop Sergej was on me, his hands around my throat, and he
squeezed
.

My hands lay encased in cement. The
malaika
suddenly weighed a ton, and something crackled in my throat. Little black spots danced at the edges of my vision, and a shrill inner voice screamed at me to
do
something, to move—but the lump of heat in my stomach was fading, and the rage had deserted me.

Because the twisting hate in his face was what I felt. It was the rage, and it was
mine
, too.

It was how I was like him.

The
aspect
flamed, and he coughed. The purple mottling rose in his perfect, planed cheeks. But he laughed, a gleeful, hateful sound that exhaled rot in my face. “Stronger!” he chuckled. “Inoculated against your poison, little child-bird!” He braced himself, leaning close, and laughed in my face, rank breath filling the world. “There will be other
svetocha
. I will walk in the daylight. I will leave your body for the crows to—”

A meaty
thunk
interrupted. Sergej stiffened, and my
aspect
flared again. I got my right hand up, braced with
malaika
hilt, and clocked him a good one across the head.

He pitched to the side, and Christophe’s face rose over his shoulder.
Christophe was smeared with even more vampire blood, and the left side of his face looked smashed-wrong. He was oddly twisted, and I realized why—something in him had been crushed. By
something
I mean bones—the entire left side of his ribs was caved in. But he held onto the iron spike grimly and shoved it further into Sergej’s back, his lips skinning back from his teeth. In that one moment, he looked more like his father than I’d ever believed possible.

The sharp thin tip of the spike punched out through Sergej’s chest. The vampire king writhed, inhaling, the purple mottles sliding up his face with grasping, ugly fingers. He looked
ancient
now, not always-seventeen and too beautiful to be real.

No, this was the face of something old and terrible, something so far removed from human it wasn’t even related anymore. The bloody directionless light pulsed, stuttering, and I realized it was coming from
him
.

Oh, Jesus
. Nausea grabbed my entire body, a wracking spasm of revulsion. I was on my knees as Sergej scrabbled back. I’d stabbed him with an iron lamp-stand last time, and it had only put him down temporarily.

“No!” Christophe grabbed my arm. “Dru!
NO!
”

He shoved me, with more strength than I would’ve thought possible. I flew back, my left-hand
malaika
clattering free.
Shit, dropped my sword, junior move, can’t do that
—Then I hit the wall, hard enough to stun. Little stars danced in front of my eyes, and I whooped in a breath.

Christophe limped, dragging his left foot. It was a weird, snake-like motion, and Sergej was curling up like a bait worm on a hook. The king of the vampires was making a noise, a queer rattling that scraped against my skin, and the red light deepened. Instead of fresh blood, the light was clotting on every surface, fouling and streaking.

I whooped in another breath, coughed and retched. Still had my right-hand
malaika
. Dragged myself up the wall, the
aspect
’s strength a warm glow, but fading now. The voices eased, whispering instead of screaming inside my head, and the
touch
brushed over my skin with feather-soft caresses. It felt . . . clean.

Thank God. But I already felt filthy way down inside, where scrubbing wouldn’t reach.

Where the rage came from.

Christophe grabbed the cruel clawed end of the spike jutting up from his father’s back. “I warned you,” he rasped, and the
aspect
boiled free of him, waves of power visible now in the dull punky glow. “I told you if you touched her, you would die.”

He sounded so
calm
.

Sergej said something, the spiked consonants of a foreign language. Ragged, and full of so much fury, so much twisted hate, it turned my stomach all over again.

“Yes,” Christophe said. “You are my father.
And I hate you for it
.”

It happened so fast. One moment he was there, holding the iron spike. The next, he jammed the spike all the way through. It hit the stone with a screech, and sparks flew.

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was Sergej twisting, his feet flailing, an animal in a trap. And Christophe on him, the horrid sound of bones grinding as he grabbed his father, wrenched Sergej’s head aside, and buried his fangs right where the shoulder met the neck.

The red light flared. Then I was moving, every step taking a hundred years. “Christophe!” I was moving through syrup, through mud, through concrete.
“Christophe! No!
”

Sergej howled. The sound was immense, every key on an ancient bony organ hit at once, wheezing and screaming. It blew my
hair back, and the
touch
turned to acid inside my head. The cry cut short on a gurgle that stood a good chance of starring in every nightmare I’d have for the rest of my life, as if I didn’t already have so much nightmare material already.

I was on my knees, sliding, and it was a good thing I’d dropped my left-hand blade. Because my fingers curled in Christophe’s slicked-back hair, and I yanked his head back.

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.

He somehow found
both my
malaika
. Pressed them into my hands. The wooden hilts were warm and satiny. “Are you hurt? Anywhere?”

I shook my head, realized he probably couldn’t see. It was so dark it had actual physical
weight
. I had to cough twice before I could even think about talking. The bile in my throat burned, and the heat in my middle was fading. “N-no. I don’t th-think so.” Now I was stuttering, just like Dibs. If he felt anything like this, I didn’t blame him. “Tired, though.”

“Thank God.” He grabbed my shoulders, his fingers sinking in, and pulled me forward. This time he was smack-dab on the button, and I don’t know why I was surprised. If he could find my
malaika
, he could certainly find my mouth.

There was blood on his lips, but it tasted like spice. An apple pie just pulled from a hot oven, and a desert wind—sand and the windows down, right at dusk, when you’re out on those roads that arrow for the horizon and the city is behind you; you’re doing eighty
and you’re not going to stop anytime soon. The
touch
, bruised and aching, shivered as a bolt of feeling went through me—something hot, and scary, and wild. It poured a different kind of strength into me, and when he broke away I actually gasped.

He didn’t even pause. “Listen to me. That’s probably the Order. We might have to fight our way out to them. Don’t worry, the
nosferatu
will be weakened and confused now, with their king dead.” The businesslike, mocking tone was back, just like the old Christophe. But under it was a raw edge I wasn’t sure I liked.

I’d never heard him sound scared before. And the idea that some of Sergej’s blood might have been on his lips—

I didn’t want to think about that.

“The aura-dark may hit me. I don’t know how much I took before you . . . stopped me.” His tone gentled. “Dru?”

“What?” I swayed, he held me upright.

“Thank you. You . . . this is not the time. But I want you to know something.”

Oh, God, what now?
“Can’t it wait until we—”

“No. It can’t.” He eased up on my shoulders a little, and I suddenly wished I could see his face. “Dru. You make me want to be . . . better. Instead of what I . . . am.”

Better? You fought off your father. For me. Again
.

And then bit him and drank his blood. But if he hadn’t, what might’ve happened? Would I have been able to . . .

I didn’t want to think about that either. There was so much I didn’t want to think about, it wasn’t even funny.

“You saved me,” I whispered. “That’s enough.”

“Is it?” Now he sounded bitter. “Is it ever going to be enough?”

I swallowed hard. I could still taste him on my lips. And the fading heat of Graves’s blood was a stone in my lower belly. “Christophe . . .”

“The
loup-garou
. Graves.” Back to the businesslike mockery. “He bled for you, didn’t he.”

“That’s how I could come d-down here and r-rescue—”