“I got her out without anyone knowing.” Graves folded his arms. “She’ll keep up.”
“Please. She’s one of them.” Shanks said it like I had some sort of disease.
Graves’ upper lip lifted a fraction. “She’s with me. You got a problem? Want a girl to kick your ass again?”
I tried to look dangerous. I probably only succeeded in looking thoughtful. Or constipated. But Dibs caught my eye and actually, go figure, winked at me. Sunlight ran through his buttery hair, and I caught a flash of an encouraging smile before he looked down at the ground.
Nobody noticed. And I couldn’t see Dibs sneaking into my room to steal anything.
Shanks’ lip lifted in a silent snarl. “If she gets caught out with us, she’s not the one they’ll punish. You like detention that much? What is wrong with you?”
“It’s time she started knowing more about this place.” Graves didn’t look perturbed at all. “If she gets caught, they’ll punish me. It was my idea anyway, and whining about detention is for candyasses. Now are we gonna do this, or are you gonna stand around flapping your lips all day?”
“I don’t like it.” This was from a rangy blond werwulf next to Dibs, one with a thick, corn-fed face and a thatch of golden hair. Straight, not curly. “She’s not gonna be able to keep up.”
“She’ll keep up.” Graves sighed and rolled his eyes. “Are we gonna run or not?”
“Let her try.” A short, compact wulf with dark stubble all over his pale cheeks spoke up. “If somethin’ happens, she’s not going to tell on us. Not a squealer, that one.”
“That’s right.” Dibs nodded vigorously, still staring at the ground. “Dru wouldn’t squeal on us.
She’s nice. She’s not like them. They wouldn’t even wipe their boots on us.”
Silence. They all stood around, thinking it over. That’s the thing about werwulfen, it takes a while for them to do anything. They all have to agree before something happens. Once you think about the fact that they have those teeth and claws, it makes more sense. If they didn’t find ways to cooperate, they’d argue each other right into extinction.
Finally, a murmur went through them. I thought about trying to look trustworthy. Considering I was holding a couple of guilty secrets, I guess it was working.
Some essential tension leaked out of Graves. He gave me a sideways look, green eyes glinting. I straightened a little.
It was apparent they’d made their decision.
“Huh. Well.” Shanks shrugged. “Fine. It’s your ass, anyway. Think you can keep up, little girl?”
You know, I hate people calling me that. “I’ll do my best.” I tried not to sound sarcastic, failed miserably. Graves didn’t wince, but he was probably close.
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, an electric current ran through the assembled werwulfen. I glanced at Graves as everyone started getting up, dusting off their clothes, one or two of them bouncing in place. There was a lot of nervous energy in them, crackling just under their skins.
I am so not ready for this.
Graves cast me a single look. You know how when you know someone, sometimes all it takes is a meeting of eyes, a slight lift to the eyebrow, a tightening of the lips to speak volumes? It was like that. His green eyes said, Are you sure?
My face shifted. No, I’m not, it was saying, but I’m gonna do it.
He gave me a quirk of a smile, and Shanks rolled his shoulders in their sockets, tilted his head back, and inhaled for a long time, filling his lungs. A crackling, popping sound raced around the clearing, and I caught my own breathing speeding up.
Just listen for the howl, Graves had said. It’ll tell you all you need to know. Let it pull you along. I’ll be right beside you.
They began to growl, all of them, the sound rising like steam. Graves was a tense, hurtful silence next to me.
I was really hoping this would work. Then I thought, Well, if I could handle Christophe hugging me so tight my bones creaked, if I could handle climbing up on the Schola’s roof, and if I could handle being nose to nose with Ash, I can probably handle this too.
Probably.
Shanks’ head snapped back down, fur swirling up over his cheekbones, his eyes a hurtful gleam.
Seeing them change in full daylight was something else. I lost pretty much all my air as their familiar boy-forms ran like clay underwater, some of them crouched now, knees splayed and hands touching the leafy dirt.
Then, as if on some prearranged signal, they all tossed up their chins and howled.
Hearing wulfen howl is… well, it’s horrible. The sound is glassy, hovering at the upper ranges of hearing, and it’s full of paws on snow and running with the icy wind hitting the back of your throat like stars. Underneath that glassy edge is the song of flesh ripped apart, the sweetness of hot blood, and the savagery of crunching bones with sharp white teeth.
The worst part is how it climbs into your brain, pressing itself like a hard sharpness into the soft folds, and drags open the doors socialization slams shut to keep the howling ravening thing deep inside down and tame.
The thing on four clawed legs that lives in all of us.
A civilized person flinches away from that thing. At the Schola, they called it the Other.
Werwulfen use it to violate the laws of thermodynamics and physics, to set the inner beast free. And Graves, a loup-garou, uses it in a different way, for mental dominance instead of physical change. I wondered how, and why, and wished they would actually train me instead of dumping me in kindergarten classes.
It didn’t matter. I was leaving soon anyway.
Graves’ fingers slid through mine, hot and hard. He squeezed my hand, and I flinched. My initial panicked reaction was to curl up more tightly inside my head, squeezing out the little stroking fingers and paws gently tapping at that door in my brain. But the place at the back of my throat where the hunger had blazed through was still raw-sensitive, and the wulfen’s cry rasped against it like a cat’s tongue.
The cry modulated, ending on a low lonely sound, and the wulfen moved. Graves leapt forward, and I had to go along or get my arm torn off. My feet slipped in leaves and dirt, and the fear arrived, smashing through me and laying copper against my tongue.
Graves dragged me. I had enough to do keeping my feet on the ground. The other wulfen were leaping fluid forms, and I began to get a very, very bad feeling about all this.
We crested a high wooded hill, sloping down a pile of rocks and tree roots, leafless oaks and maples standing wet and secretive, clutching at the ground so they wouldn’t slide. Graves yanked me forward, and as we went over the side his fingers loosened and slipped free of mine.
I was falling. My foot hit a rock, the sneakers slipped, and I knew I was going to end up in a heap on the bottom. My heart leapt; I gave a short, blurting scream, and the world snapped again, hard. My other foot landed squarely on the top of a boulder I hadn’t even known was there, and my body woke up, tingling all over. The aspect flooded me like the heat of alcohol on an empty stomach, the Beam and Cokes I used to drink while waiting for Dad to come home and collect me. The heat burst through me, my teeth turned crackling-sensitive, and even my hair tingled as the aspect slid through it. Mom’s locket dilated into a point of heat, as if it were melting against my chest.
Have you ever run so hard you thought your heart would burst? There’s just you and your legs and the sound of wind in your ears mixing with the pounding of your pulse. The endorphins kick in if you can do it long enough, and all of a sudden you’re not thinking. Your body’s doing all the thinking for you. It leaps like a gazelle, it dances like a star, and the only thought on your mind is God, keep going, don’t let this slow down, don’t let it ever stop.
Running. With werwulfen. Their shapes blurred around me, the high unearthly howls distorted because of the speed, splashes of sunlight on fur and bright eyes as we moved in a mass. They spread out around me like a cat’s cradle, and if I’d had time I might’ve wondered who was
picking the direction. But it was enough to just run. If I just ran, nothing else mattered, and I didn’t have to think about Mom or Dad or Gran or Christophe or any other hundred things crawling through my cluttered head. I could just be. It was like that place in the middle of tai chi where the world faded and there was just the movement, force and reaction spilling through arms and legs, hands like birds and feet like horse’s hooves.
We crested another hill. The world was spinning underneath me, I didn’t even have to move forward, just put my feet down every now and again to touch it. I heard the muffled wingbeats of Gran’s owl, and a fierce joy flushed through me, a cleaner feeling than the rage of the bloodhunger. I was clear. I was see-through, I was a girl made of crystal, and this was the best thing in the world.
I don’t know how long it lasted, but the force bled away. It got harder and harder to keep up with the world, but I was doing my best when someone grabbed my arm and everything came to a tumbling, spinning halt.
I landed hard on my knees, jarring, and retched. Someone dropped down beside me and patted my back. A couple other kids were coughing too.
“Jesus Christ,” someone gasped, a high boyish voice. Someone else laughed, a high, unsteady sound, and the hilarity spilled through the rest of them. It bubbled up in my own mouth between the retches, my stomach informing me that oh holy God, you should not have done that.
My legs were on fire. All of me was burning and my back was a solid bar of pain. But it didn’t matter.
What mattered was Graves next to me, also rubbing my back and laughing like he’d just found Christmas in his pants. Dibs was on my other side, on his knees and leaning against me, coughing.
His eyes were bright with the tears that trickled down his cheeks, but he didn’t look sad in the least.
Then Shanks squatted easily in front of me, flushed and wind-swept, leaves caught in his thick dark hair. “Well. You kept up.” For once, he didn’t sound supercilious. “Never had that happen before.”
“Told you.” Graves was breathless. A hiccupping laugh interrupted the words. “It’s in the books. Svetocha can keep up.”
“Huh.” The taller boy eyed me. I tried not to puke on him. No wonder Graves had told me not to eat anything beforehand.
But God. I managed to get some breath back. “When… can we… do that… again?”
At that, everyone burst into laughter. Some of us were still retching, but the merriment kind of canceled that out. It didn’t matter how much I hurt or how my heart felt like it was trying to climb out my windpipe. It didn’t matter that everything was fucked up beyond repair and I was stumbling blindly around in the middle of a game that was way too big for me.
All that mattered was the sun on my shoulders, the wulfen gathered around me, and the way every one of them suddenly looked like… yes. Like a friend. And Graves right beside me, his hand making little circles on my back, his face all alight. It was like standing on the Schola’s roof and seeing the world spread out underneath me, but not nearly so lonely.
It was the best I’d felt since my world fell apart and a zombie smashed through my kitchen door.
Hey, you take what you can get.
CHAPTER 17
The disused classroom was in the bowels of the Schola, and it had an empty chalkboard on the curved wall. When filled with wulfen, the entire room had a nervous, fidgeting feel to it.
“So they’re not teaching you anything.” Shanks nodded. “Yeah, we wondered about that.”
What else had they wondered about me? “I, uh, just don’t go. It’s all remedial shit I could get in normal high school.”
Graves shook his head. “Skipping isn’t allowed for anyone else. It’s a trip to detention, and who wants that? So why let you do it? I mean, you’re special and all,” he ignored Shanks’ snicker, “but it don’t make sense, and putting you in remedial classes doesn’t make sense either. Especially with the chance of you-know-who finding out you’re here, they should want you trained and trained hard, so you have a better chance of surviving.”
“And then there’s Christophe.” Shanks was settled on a dusty brown couch, taking up most of it with his long legs. A ripple ran through the rest of the wulfen at the name. “He hasn’t been around for years, but they’re scared of him.”
“Wouldn’t you be?” Dibs piped up. “He’s dangerous. Just look at his kill record. He’s never wanted to make himself liked, either.”
“Well, people have been calling him a traitor for a long time, but never to his face.” Shanks shrugged. He’d picked most of the leaves out of his hair. “And he did bring her in. I know Juan’s cousin, I talked to him last week during phonetime. When Christophe was tryin’ to save your asses, someone was tryin’ to kill him. The battle-group got a directive to kill a nosferat, and he didn’t realize it wasn’t a wampyr but Christophe until the guy had held off every one of them and had plenty of chances to kill “im but didn’t, and he was djamphir to boot. And he fucked up you-know-who but good, to rescue her.”
A hot flush went through me. Did they know about Christophe and Sergej? And now that I’d gotten some sleep and run until I was close to a cardiac arrest, I felt like I was thinking clearly. If Dylan thought Anna was right, why would he be telling me Christophe was going to train me? If he didn’t, why did he stay quiet when she accused him?
Why did he say he was on my side? And what was Anna’s whole game with the file and the pictures of the house my mother had died in front of?
I didn’t remember enough about the night Mom died. I didn’t want to remember about that night. I was five years old, for chrissake.
I tried working it out again inside my head. Christophe said Dylan was loyal. I’d carried that note between them like a message, and Dylan was supposed to find me if there was another vampire attack. But I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, even Dylan, that I’d seen Christophe.
That didn’t make sense either. But I’d been so confused from the heat of Christophe’s body against mine….
Don’t think about that, Dru. Jesus. But what else was there to think of? The single blond hair caught on my nightstand? Other secrets, other lies, all pressing down on me?
“Something’s off,” another wulfen said. “They just watch her. And then there was the other night.”
“Yeah.” Graves leaned forward next to me. He still hadn’t taken his coat off, and I understood why. It was chilly in the classroom, especially with sweat drying on my skin. “Nobody came to pick her up from the classroom and get her to her room. Isn’t that a little suspicious, given how they’re watching her?”
I stared at the cracked chalkboard. How long had it been since I’d seen an actual chalkboard?
Most schools had whiteboards nowadays. “Dylan said he didn’t know who was supposed to be watching me. The duty roster disappeared, and—” I stopped short. I could have gone on, but I was taking Dylan’s word for an awful lot, and I couldn’t say any more without explaining the whole Anna thing.
I was pretty sure talking about another svetocha wasn’t a good idea, if she was supposed to be a big secret.
But it didn’t look like I was such a big secret, maybe. Had Ash killed every sucker there? If they were from Sergej and none of them came back, he wouldn’t know for sure I was here, unless the traitor, whoever it was, could manage to tell him. Or a sucker could survive the next attack and go tell him.
The pieces fit together inside my head. Christophe must have realized this, it was why he was coming back to get me out.
It was anyone’s guess whether he’d get back in time. My mouth was dry and my heart was still thumping along.
“Shit.” Shanks rubbed at his chin. “I didn’t know that.” His dark eyes rested on me for a long moment. “That true?”
I nodded. “Someone was supposed to come and get me, or the teacher’s supposed to take me to my room. That’s what happened every other time. But that time Blondie vanished as soon as class was out. And nobody else came.”
“Blon
die?” Someone chuckled. “Oh wow.”
“Kruger.” Shanks didn’t look amused. “And his helpful lectures. So how did you get out of there?”
“I saw…” The usual habit of keeping the woo-woo a secret made me pause. I plunged ahead.
This, at least, was one secret I could get off my chest. “I saw an owl. My grandmother’s owl. Whenever there’s trouble, it shows up and tells me to get out.” I took a deep breath. “And so I ran. But when I was outside… I saw a wulfen.”
“Who?” Shanks could really bore a hole in someone with those eyes. He leaned forward, tense and expectant, like I was going to produce something he could chase down and bite.
“His name’s Ash. He’s got a streak on his head—”
“He’s a Broken,” someone supplied. “The last Silverhead. You-know-who’s wulf.”
Shanks waved a hand. “Yeah, I know about the Silverhead. You saw him?”
“I didn’t just see him. He killed the suckers chasing me. He was pretty beat up afterward. He sniffed me, but he didn’t hurt me.” It wasn’t coming out right. “I mean—”
“He sniffed you?” They were peppering me with questions now, one after another.
“How did he sniff you?”
“How close was he?”
“Was he bleeding?”
Shanks held up a hand. “Slow down, everyone. Jesus. First things first, okay?” He looked at me speculatively for a long, tense-ticking twenty seconds. “Dru.” It was the first time he’d said my name without sneering. “Do you have any idea why you’re here and not at the main Schola? Or even a big Schola?”
“The main…” I sounded as blank as I must’ve looked. “Isn’t this, like, a main Schola? A big one?”
“Shit, no.” He laughed, and some of the other older boys did too. It wasn’t nice laughter, but it wasn’t pointed at me, either. “This is like reform school. We’re the troublemakers, the retards. The actual Schola for this district, the first Schola ever made, is in the Big Apple. Down over the state line. I wondered why you were way the hell out here.”
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