Defiance

by Lili St. Crow

  Nothing came even remotely close.

  The ghost of wax oranges lingered on the back of my tongue. Weird. Usually the aura was the first thing to warn me of the hinky going down, but it wasn’t spiking now. I firmed my grip on the switchblade, silver glinting as I jabbed forward experimentally.

  The crimson mist cringed a little, thickening. My mother’s locket was icy; it bounced as I retreated again. I reached up, twisted the shower knob with my free hand—running water’s a barrier to a lot of things. Couldn’t hurt.

  Then the smell hit me. Salt, and something rotting, the reek crawled down my throat and I retched, hot water welling in my eyes. I slashed again as the mist slid a tendril into the shower stall, and the blade passed through it, sparking. A thin spatter of red fluid hit the floor, washed away by the shower’s steady spray. It smelled like something dying in a dark wet corner, and I retched again, my breath still making a cloud even though the shower was scorch-hot, needles of spray hitting my hip.

  I’d seen that in the Real World before. Things that need to drain all the energy out of the air to hold themselves together, making the temperature go all wonky. Gran’s advice was to “disrupt” them—find the thing pulling all the energy together and short out its connection to the snarled, tangled fabric of the fleshly. It’s kind of like feeling around in a bathtub full of squirming maggots for a plug, and hoping it’d drain once you yanked it.

  Okay. So here I was, naked, with my mother’s locket, my switchblade, hot water, and my wits. Not to mention my Lefevre pride, dammit. Why wasn’t Benjamin breaking down the door? Could he not hear what was going on? Did he think the breaking glass was a weird girl ritual or something?

  Or could he not hear me at all? That was most likely. Anyway, I was on my own.

  Well, wasn’t that depressingly usual.

  The mist pressed closer. It was so thick I couldn’t see the rest of the locker room now, a solid wall of billowing crimson. The hot water was keeping it back, and I slashed again as it slid a tentacle finger into the shower stall. This time there was resistance against the blade, the silver sparked more definitely, and the tentacle actually plopped down before dissolving in the water.

  Great. I switched the knife to my right hand, the blade reversed flat along my forearm, and shook out my wet, prune-wrinkled left hand. Hit ’em where they hold themselves too tight, Gran would say. You can see it if you don’t look.

  Believe it or not, that’s not the most confusing thing she ever said to me. Not even close.

  It’s kind of hard to concentrate when a wall of red fog is pressing forward, trying to creep into a shower stall. I dropped back into a crouch, ribs heaving as I struggled not to hyperventilate or puke, trying to keep as much of the shower’s spray as possible between me and the thing. It was billowing up, too, trying to slide under the blue-tiled upper lip of the stall.

  Probably so it could get to the showerhead and Do Something Nasty to it. Don’t ask me how I knew.

  I tried to breathe more slowly. My heart pounded, and dark little spackles raced across my vision. Look, Dru. Look where you shouldn’t.

  It’s a kind of sideways-seeing, not quite focusing on the thing you’re seeking. You have to soften up your eyes and look without looking, without expecting. It’s damn hard to do. I had two things on my side, though. Gran had been a strict teacher who believed practice made perfect. And with Dad, I was used to performing under fire—meaning, when something from the Real World was trying to get at us—all the time.

  My teeth tingled. Under the running water and the weird scraping soft sounds the fog made, I heard an owl’s quiet passionless cry. Little feathers brushed my wet naked skin, and my breath turned into flashing ice crystals as soon as it left my mouth. The shower water cooled perceptibly. It was stealing heat from the shower itself now, which meant it was getting stronger. And it was resolving into a writhing mass of finger-thick tentacles, some of them wickedly clawed at the tip.

  My left hand jabbed forward, the hex flying like a flat blue star, not-quite-visible sparks pouring from its points. It was just like flicking a playing card, the way I learned to do down in Carmel with that hunter who went surfing every day. Dad had really liked him; he wasn’t half bad. Remy Gagnon had a lot of weird tics, but he could stand at the front door, fling a playing card all the way down the hallway in his shotgun shack and hit the back door hard enough to make a cracking sound. Sometimes he even swore in bayou Cajun while he did it, especially if he’d had a bad day.

  His idea of bad day? It involves sucker nests, flamethrowers, support just short of heavy artillery, and usually a lot of screaming. Or, you know, Sunday at about eleven at the health-food store, when the church crowd gets out and he’s there looking for colloidal silver.

  I wasn’t swearing. I was screaming as the hex hit the thing, the feathers turned to scraping little wires all over my body, and the shower coughed. Water sprayed in every direction, and I heard shouting. Boy voices, oddly muffled and far away.

  So someone had noticed I was getting eaten by tentacles and red fog in here. That was good. But I was naked.

  The fog swirled. The hex struck true, tearing away a bit of it I hadn’t exactly seen. It looked like a fist-sized blood clot, turning and splattering in midair. More warm water gushed everywhere, including in my face. My fingers snapped back, yanking the hex at the last moment like flicking a wet towel to snap someone’s unsuspecting backside, and the clot was whipped smartly aside. It screamed as it tore away, like a rabbit under the claws of a hawk, and the sound drilled through my head until I thought my teeth would shatter.

  My knees slipped on tile. The water was a couple inches deep and rising, and little bits of the fog-thing rained down with sickening wet thumps. Tentacles plopped free, bleeding fog and thin red fluid. It sounded like wet hamburger being dropped onto sheet metal and smelled like the worst garbage dump in the world. I actually considered throwing up as I slumped, trembling, in the corner. The showerhead was sputtering, twisted and eaten as if it’d been sprayed with acid and blowtorched.

  The little bits of fog-thing were a lot more substantial than they should have been. Ivory teeth clinked down, and tentacles I hadn’t seen. I’d hit it just right, thank God.

  I huddled there with the knife, shaking, and waited for whatever came next.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Drbarnak,” Hiro’s voice bounced oddly off the tiles. “The larval form could have been in here for up to a month, gathering strength. A parting gift from our Red Queen, perhaps?”

  Red Queen. He meant Anna. It didn’t seem her style, though.

  “Perhaps.” Christophe shifted his weight. I could see his boots as he leaned back against the door of a changing stall in the girls’ locker room. They’d handed dry clothing over the top of the door while they cleaned everything up out there. I heard murmurs, someone muttering a sharp command. “Or an opportunist. Impossible to tell.”

  Hiro had about as many questions as I did. “How did she fight it off?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Finely leashed impatience. I knew Christophe well enough to hear it, if not in his tone, then in the way he moved against the stall door. “She was . . . upset.”

  Upset? I’d been about ready to stab whoever came for me. It took Christophe two towels and a few minutes of gentle talking to get me out of my crouch in the stall, and I refused to give up the knife.

  He looked like he understood. Wrapped me in the towels, sent someone for dry clothes, and whisked me off to a changing stall to dry off and calm down.

  All this, after I’d been a total ass to him. It kind of made me like him more. But it was confusing.

  Hiro wasn’t taking the understatement as a hint. “As well she should be. This makes ten attempts on her li—”

  “Shut up.” Christophe actually jerked away from the door, all his weight on the balls of his feet like he was going to throw a punch.

  I pulled my damp hair out from the T-shirt’s collar. It was hard to get dressed
with my hands shaking like I had the palsy, like old Mrs. Hatfield—Gran’s closest neighbor, back in the long ago. “Ten what?” The words echoed, a little more shrill than I intended. “Hiro? Ten what?”

  “Attempts on your life, Milady. Since the unpleasantness with . . . Milady.” True to form, he loaded up the last word with such sarcastic spite that there was no question who he was talking about. He used the same word for me and for Anna, but he actually sounded respectful when he referred to me.

  I was taking notes on how he did that.

  “Hiro.” Christophe, all the warning in the world in that one simple word. “There’s no need to—”

  Oh, hell no. “I’ll say there’s a need.” It was kind of a relief to feel something other than queasy, shaky terror. Irritation felt like I had some sort of control over the situation. “What kind of attempts are we talking about here?”

  “The standard. Anything you might expect, given a svetocha to protect. Assassins, traps, one particularly inelegant attempt by a team of strictly human mercenaries—” There was a scraping sound, and Hiro stopped talking. Christophe’s feet hadn’t moved, but I could just see him staring down the other djamphir, one elegant hand closing into a fist.

  I hastily buttoned up my jeans and unlocked the door. My hands had stopped shaking, but I still felt a little weird. It had taken four towels to scrub myself dry, mostly because I kept seeing traces of red on me and rubbing hard until my skin hurt. “Wait a second—wait. Jesus, Christophe. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “There was no need to worry you.” He gave me a once-over, blue eyes dark and thoughtful. “Most of them were of little account. And you are well-watched now.”

  Yeah, if you’re following me even when I run with the wulfen, maybe. I guess. Something inside me was trying to tell me to calm down. It didn’t sound like Dad’s voice, which was probably good.

  I didn’t think I could stand that, even inside my own head.

  Behind him, a group of older djamphir students were mopping up the flooded locker room. It looked like someone had set off an M80 full of red food coloring. Some of the tiles were cracked as well as discolored, and one of the tubs—the one closest the door, the one I never used—was draining. It looked like an almighty-big thing had busted out of it, breaking tile and shattering its edges, bleeding red everywhere. Another group, this one of wulfen students, had shovels and wheelbarrows and were carting Jell-O-like red tentacles out. Their faces were all set in that particular way that tells you someone’s smelling something nasty. I didn’t blame them. The thing reeked like old copper and something I’d only smelled in one or two places along the Gulf—when the sea itself starts to rot offshore and mist rolls in. A salty, decomposing reek that crawls into your clothes after a few hours and is damn hard to wash out even with hot water and borax.

  I pinched my nose shut before I could help it. Christophe looked amused, a corner of his mouth lifting. It was better than that slightly mocking face he gave everyone else, but not by much. It wasn’t the face I would consider drawing.

  I’d been too busy to draw for ages. I missed it, too. Sometimes my fingers would itch and tingle . . . but I was afraid of whatever I would draw now, with the touch so much stronger.

  I considered flinging the handful of wet towels I was carrying at him, decided it would be childish of me.

  Benjamin was by the door, his dark emo-boy fringe—it was a popular style this year—plastered to his pale forehead. He looked okay, but anger radiated from him in colorless waves and he was splattered with the red stuff. It was all over his jeans and T-shirt. The aspect slipped through him, ruffling his wet hair and making his fangs come out and recede. They gleamed, and when he saw I was looking he straightened, self-consciously.

  “I’d say this is something I should be worried about.” I started rolling up the towels together, both to hide how I was shaking again and to stop myself from actually throwing them. “So I’ve been bopping along all this time, not knowing? And people . . . things . . . whatever, have been trying to kill me? And you haven’t told me?”

  Christophe brushed it aside, one elegant hand waving like I shouldn’t bother him with this. His watch, a chunky silver thing that looked like a Rolex, glittered. That was new—he’d never worn anything even close to jewelry before. And he hadn’t had it during sparring. “You have other things to worry about. Dealing with assassins is my job. It’s traditional.”

  A little voice inside my head was trying to tell me to calm down. “What’s my job, then? Being happily oblivious to things trying to kill me? Why are they even . . .” I didn’t have to go any further. I knew.

  Sergej. He wanted me dead. Christophe said he was scared of me. That was a laugh—king of the vampires, or the closest thing to a king they had anymore, scared of me.

  Because of what I was, or what I’d be when I finished blooming.

  But I’d been thinking about it lately. A lot. The Real World was bigger and badder than I’d ever guessed, and I was thinking maybe it wasn’t just the vampires who would want me dead. Especially after Dad and I went on a sixteen-state odyssey of getting rid of things that go bump in the night after Gran died.

  Dad was bound to have made some enemies other than the king of the vampires, right? Which meant they were my enemies now. And here I was, just going along fat dumb and happy, danger lurking around every corner. If I would’ve known, I would’ve been more cautious, for Christ’s sake.

  Like, hide under my bed and cower kind of cautious. The idea had a certain appeal right now.

  “We don’t just hunt the nosferat.” Hiro, as usual, didn’t sound like I was being stupid. He just sounded . . . thoughtful. His face was set, and I could almost see the aspect crackling around his edges, just waiting to break loose. “Although they have apparently spread word of your existence. The attempts we’re experiencing now are proof.”

  Well, wasn’t that just peachy-keen terrific. “Dad kept me a secret for sixteen years.” I couldn’t help it, I was yelling by now. I jabbed an accusing finger at Christophe. “Then you show up, and all of a sudden everyone knows about me. Great job, Chris. Thanks. Marvelous work.”

  It wasn’t fair, because I knew he’d had zero to do with my father’s death or Sergej finding out about me. But neither was it fair for him to beat on me with the sticks and look all smug. None of this was fair.

  I hated being left in the dark. I hated all of this.

  Christophe tilted his head slightly, studying me. Hiro took a half step back, and I could’ve sworn he looked like he was enjoying himself. His face settled into its usual impassivity when he noticed I was staring at him, short spiky black hair beaded with drops of moisture and his gray silk beginning to droop ever so slightly from the humidity.

  I dropped the towels. They hit with a wet plop that would have been funny if it hadn’t made me want to throw up. It wasn’t any fun yelling at Christophe; all he did was look at me that way. Like it was kind of interesting that I was losing my shit, but in the end, not very important.

  That just made it worse.

  Finally, after a long pause that made me feel like I was five years old and throwing a tantrum, Christophe folded his arms. His absolutely perfect face was set and white, and even though the aspect wasn’t on him I swear I saw his eyes glow.

  He spoke through gritted teeth, each word a dagger. “I am sorry to have displeased you, Dru.”

  There’s a certain way of apologizing that isn’t an apology. It’s more like a slap to the face. You hear a lot of that below the Mason-Dixon, especially if you hang out with the girls.

  Christophe, however, could have given even the parlor princesses down there some lessons.

  “That’s even worse!” I exploded. “You could at least mean it when you say you’re sorry!”

  His eyes flared. “When have I not?” Sharply now, a teacher taking a student to task. At least I’d rattled him. That was something.

  That’s the thing about irrational, boiling rage, especially ri
ght after you’ve been hunching naked in a shower, afraid for your life. Nothing anyone says will make it better. “You never say you’re really sorry!” I didn’t even care that I was shouting at him in front of a bunch of boys. “Ever!”

  A muscle flicked in Christophe’s cheek. That was all.

  I let out a short, frustrated scream and stamped past him. It was hard to do in bare feet, and I had to splash through puddles full of ick to get to the door. At least everyone else got out of my way. The twitching bits in the wheelbarrows were enough to make me glad I hadn’t eaten lunch yet.

  Benjamin’s mouth had fallen open. He looked at me like I’d grown another head or something. But he didn’t say a damn word, just hurried away from the wall and fell into step behind me as I made my grand exit, barefoot and looking totally ridiculous.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Sure we knew.” Benjamin set his tray down. “Christophe said to let you adjust, to not worry you. It seemed like a good idea when he said it. Plus, it’s trad, you know. The Kouroi do the protecting. It’s our job.”

  The cafeteria was empty since it wasn’t quite lunchtime. But that’s one of the good things about being at a Schola—when you show up in the caf, there’s always food. Some of the teachers keep pretty irregular hours. And you try being around hungry werwulfen for very long. I guarantee you’ll see the wisdom of having munchies on tap.

  “This is so not cool.” My feet were cold, but that was the least of my problems. I glared at my own tray—heavy varnished wood instead of the plastic kind they’d had at the reform Schola. “When was I going to be let in on it?”