Reckoning

by Lili St. Crow

  Silence, broken only by the drip, drip of thin liquid from the tip of the barbed spike he held. The suckers glanced at each other, their jaws crackling as they distended further, sharp ivory in the low bloody light.

  They broke and ran, vanishing with that nasty laughing sound. Their tiptapping footsteps receded, and Christophe slumped. He let out a long breath, and Gran’s owl hooted softly. I could still feel it circling, but when I glanced up there was nothing. Just the directionless red glow, and the smell. The female vampire’s body slumped aside; I scrabbled away from it along the wall.

  I actually gagged. Nausea twisted my stomach before the aspect rose again on a wave of heat, and I smelled cinnamon through the reek. That only made it worse. Christophe backed up toward me, and a thin thread of his apple-pie scent reached me too.

  That helped. But still. So many of them. Had I done that?

  We. We’d done it. Christophe and me.

  Christophe turned on one bare heel. His feet were healing, bruises retreating as the aspect crackled over him, heat-lightning. His hair was slicked back, dark under the matted blood, and a muscle in his cheek flicked. A sudden graceful movement and he knelt, his free hand coming down. His fingers met my shoulder, and it was like a spark snapping. I almost twitched.

  “Are you hurt?” Level and furious.

  I took stock. I was alive. All my appendages. The rage had vanished, like water on hot pavement. The back of my throat was dry and rasping. “N-no.” I sounded hoarse, but the thread of silk in my tone wasn’t mine.

  It was Anna’s, and it horrified me. Even my voice wasn’t my own anymore. I’d changed. All the broken bodies lying strewn on the floor told me how much. It was like vanishing. Again.

  Who am I now?

  “Come, then. We have to get you out of here.”

  My chin set. I pressed back against the wall, and my legs took care of levering me up. His hand fell away. The aspect flowed up from my feet, working in, delicious oily warmth. A tremor slid through the center of my bones, but I ignored it. “I’m not leaving. I came down here to rescue you.”

  “You succeeded admirably.” One corner of his mouth lifted a millimeter, but then he reached for me again with his free hand, aiming for my right wrist. I stepped aside, sliding along the wall. Nervously.

  Like I didn’t want him to touch me.

  I swallowed, hard. “Get out of here. Dibs and Graves are heading out, you should take care of them. Don’t worry about me. I’ve got things to do.”

  “Dru.” Calm, quiet, and very cold. “You are coming with me.”

  I shook my head. Everything I wanted to say boiled up inside me. Hit the wall of what I suspected about him, everything I knew, and how much I doubted everything he’d ever told me.

  I’m a plague. Everything I care about gets hurt or dies. I’m here, and I’m going to stay here. I’m not leaving until I kill the thing that killed my parents. “Just go.” I couldn’t make the words any louder than a whisper, because my throat had closed up. “I want you to go. I can’t stand to lose you too.”

  He opened his mouth, probably to argue, but a strange whooshing sound filled the auditorium like water poured into a cup. A spike of diamond pain speared my temples, and Sergej laughed.

  “Oh, children.” His voice filled the entire vast space as well, and I slumped against the wall. “You make it so easy.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Christophe spun, but Sergej was already moving. I leapt, the world dragging at me with weird clear-plastic fingers, as if superspeed wouldn’t even be enough. My right-hand malaika flicked, and black blood flew.

  I was too slow. He was already past me, my soles slipping in the foul-smelling guck, and Christophe screamed. It was a high despairing cry, with a djamphir’s hiss-growl behind it. The crash of the two of them colliding shivered the air into fragments. The entire auditorium rocked, and a sheet of black blood splashed up. They hit the stone wall, and cracks radiated through the sheer, bloodred rock.

  Christophe!

  Slipping, scrabbling, wishing I had boots or real sneakers instead of these crap flimsy things, needed traction, I wrenched myself the opposite direction and Gran’s owl rocketed past me in living color, claws outstretched and wings glinting with sharp-edged metal. In the bloody glow it was a spot of clean white, banking sharply. I threw myself after it just as Sergej turned, blinking through space with the eerie stuttering speed of a badass sucker.

  Fast, he’s fast, got to slow him down—Something in me stretched, instinctively, and I twisted again, my foot touching down lightly and sending up another spray of that black, thin, sickening fluid. They were just never going to get it clean in here. But I guess cleaning isn’t high on a vampire to-do list, really.

  Gran’s owl arrowed down, and it hit Sergej’s head with a crunch much larger than a bird could produce. He went forward, tucking and rolling with jerky, weird precision, as if he was a clockwork instead of flesh and blood.

  “Coward!” I yelled, pelting for him. “You fucking coward!”

  The words stung the air. He rose from the wash of rotting blood on the floor, chunks of decayed flesh clinging to him, his curls tumbled and that black, oily gaze striking like a snake.

  I screamed, a hawk-cry of rising effort. There was finally enough air in my lungs—and Gran’s owl shot past me, claws out and its golden eyes a streak of brilliance. Hit him square, and it wasn’t just me hitting him.

  It was the photograph I’d seen just once, the yellow house I found sometimes in my nightmares—the oak tree shading the front porch blasted by some terrible evil, a rag of flesh and bone hanging in its branches; my mother’s body hung there like a Christmas ornament. It was the long corridor my father had walked down, toward a slowly opening door that exhaled cold evil—and my father’s body standing at the back door of the house in the Dakotas, its blue eyes clouded with the film of death and its fleshless fingers tapping at the glass. It was Gran’s house burning and the dark pain in Graves’s eyes, the scars I’d seen on Christophe’s back and the cold nightmare of the blood drawn out of my veins while Sergej laughed.

  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 crush
ed. 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  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.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  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.