Graves pushed past me, and I glanced out over the street. It was so quiet, a blanket of white over everything. The snow had come down hard and pebbled, a moaning wind flinging it everywhere, and the radio said ice was coming. The morning had dawned clear and sunny, but now the sky was overcast and lowering, striations of darker cloud like ink just dropped into water billowing under the higher cloud-cover.
Huh. I stepped out onto the porch, cupping my elbows in my palms. Hugging myself. It was dead quiet except for the uneasy sound of air moving, the porch posts and the corner of the house like a ship’s prow, slicing the waves and producing a low hum of torn air.
We could have been on the moon, I realized. The house set away from the other houses like that one kid at school who’s always dressed just a little bit wrong.
No wonder nobody’d come to greet us when we moved in, or heard the gunshots and screaming.
The street was an evenly frosted expanse of white. The two driveways that didn’t lead into a garage had car-sized lumps of unbroken snow, the paint jobs peeping out from underneath—the blue mini-van at the corner, the green, wallowing Ford across the street. And in front of the garages were wide, pristine ribbons of snow leading down to the street.
Why doesn’t this feel right? I had to look a little harder before the assumptions I made started crumbling and the wrong note in the orchestra jangled hard enough for me to catch it.
No tire tracks. There wasn’t a single break in the snow. The street looked as deserted as a Western town right before the bad guy rides in for the ultimate battle.
The sunlight dimmed, and a chill fiercer than the wind walked down my back. I was shivering, though I didn’t feel it, and Graves’s curly head popped out of the doorway. “What the hell are you doing, trying to freeze to death? You’re not even wearing a coat.”
I took my time, watching the street. Nothing felt hinky at all.
It just felt quiet. Empty.
Dead.
The snow must’ve cleared up sometime this morning when the sun rose, because we were all up having our hot chocolate and funny snakes with wings before dawn, and it was coming down hard then. What, everyone just decided to stay home today? Maybe. But. . .
The last piece of the puzzle slotted into place as Graves made a spitting sound of annoyance. “What the hell? Dru?”
I stepped back, shifting my weight uneasily, as if the porch might decide to fall apart at any second. “The porch lights.” I sounded queer even to myself. “They’re all on, and it’s the middle of the day.” It’s eleven, and it gets dark early this time of year. Real dark, real early.
“Yeah,” he said. “Christophe said that, too. What are you—”
“We have to go.” My teeth chopped the words into little bits, and I made it inside, pushing him down the hall and sweeping the door shut. Warmth closed around me. I locked the deadbolts and leaned against the door. How long until sundown? I don’t know, have to check. “Pack your stuff, okay? And help me with the ammo boxes, and—”
“Dru?” Christophe, from the kitchen. I didn’t know him at all, but I knew that tone.
The Oh shit there is serious trouble, honey, pack everything up again and let’s get movin’ tone. He appeared at the end of the hall, his sharp face suddenly graven with frowning lines that made him look a lot older.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve got to get the ammo packed.” He halted, regarding me, and I swallowed crow and a few lumps of my pride, too. “Will you . . . I mean, would you help us get the truck loaded?”
I had to keep leaning against the door because my knees were deciding again that they weren’t knees, they were actually noodles. Fully cooked noodles at that. And what I was really asking was something more like, Will you help me? Please?
Christophe’s blue, blue eyes flicked to Graves, and I was suddenly positive he was going to say, Sure I can, but we can’t take him. He’ll drag us down.
Oh, Christ. What was I going to do if he said that? Graves tensed, a movement I could feel even though all the starch had gone out of me, as Gran would have said. And I reached over, grabbed Goth Boy’s thin shoulder, and dug my fingers in.
Dad would never have left me behind. Not willingly. I was damned if I would leave someone else in the dust.
He bought me a cheeseburger. It was a ludicrous, laughable thought. But it was just the surface over a truckload of other things. I hadn’t heard a single word of complaint from Graves, not even over getting bit or having a gun held to his head. He’d done the best he could to help me, and that was something strangers rarely ever do. I was shipwrecked, and he’d been the only thing I could hang on to.
And he hadn’t let me down. Not once.
He was all I had. I wasn’t going to leave him here.
Christophe’s eyes fastened on my hand. He really did look old before his face smoothed out and he nodded, as if finishing a long conversation with himself. His shoulders went back and his chin came up. “You probably have a system,” he said, folding his arms. “What goes in first?”
“My bed—the mattresses. Everything else gets folded up and—” I stopped dead, as the next problem rose up and crashed into me. “Where are we going?”
“Don’t worry.” Christophe dropped his hands. “I’ll handle that. Start your packing, Dru. You, wulf-boy. Come with me.”
* * *
What does it say about your life when two hours of three teenagers working folds all of it up in the back of a Chevy half-ton’s camper?
I put Mom’s cookie jar in the top of the bathroom box and bit the packing tape, tore it deftly, and taped it down. “This one’s important,” I told Graves. “Pack the blankets around it.” Next to the fireproof box. The one with the ashes in it. God, Daddy, I wish you were here.
If wishes were fishes, even beggars would eat. Gran was fond of that saying, too.
“Got it.” Graves tramped out of the kitchen and toed open the door to the garage. Christophe had manhandled the garage door open, metal squealing in protest—the broken spring rubbing against itself with a sound like a lost tortured soul.
Well, maybe not exactly like that, but pretty damn close. Dad and I had both tried to get the garage open, knowing it was going to get cold, but in the end it was a lost cause.
But not, I guess, for a half-sucker. Djamphir.
Would I be as strong as that once I did that thing Christophe was talking about? Blooming? Would I smell like a bakery item? Or was that just him? Did he use pie filling for cologne?
But Mom had only smelled of fresh perfume and goodness.
Mom.
Too many questions. Not enough time to answer any of them.
“I know,” Christophe said into the phone. “Just send a pickup; I’ll get her to the rendezvous. Don’t worry about that.” A long pause while someone yakked on the other end. It sounded dire, especially with the way the wind was moaning a counterpoint; he’d been on the phone for ten minutes while I finished the last boxes and Graves carried them out to the truck.
He laughed, a sound twice as bitter as Graves’s little unamused bark. “Do you have to repeat yourself? She’s no good to us dead, and I’m the one who found her.” Another pause. “They can court-martial me later. Right now I need a pickup. I don’t care what the weather report—All right. Fine. Ciao.” He hung up, stared at the phone for a few moments, and turned sharply on his heel.
I was still on my knees, a roll of packing tape in my hands, watching him.
He took two steps to the sink, peered out the window. Eerie yellow-gray light slid through, touched his hair, and made the highlights livid. “Daylight’s going to fail before we’re out of town.”
I could only see a slice of sky through the window, cut off by an overhang and icicle-festooned gutters. It looked like the thunderstorm weather I’d seen a million times, only without the gasping-thick humidity you get below the Mason-Dixon. “It’s only—”
“Do you think this is natural weather, even for here?” He shrugged. “I sho
uld have made contact earlier. I was banking on being able to distract him. And I was banking on Sergej being certain your father wouldn’t be stupid enough to bring you here.”
You just shut up about my father. “Dad wasn’t stupid.” It came out a lot wearier and less sharp than I thought it would. “He had reasons for everything.”
“I don’t suppose you’d know how good those reasons were, would you? Never mind.” He waved his hand as if brushing away a fly. “We’ve got to get you out of here. I’ve got an extraction point. They’ll dock me for it later.” A tight, feral smile pulled up the corners of his lips, his blue eyes burning, and I watched an ink stain of sleek darkness slide through his hair and vanish, the highlights popping out like shafts of sun on a faraway horizon. “But bringing in a svetocha might balance that out.” He shrugged. “I’ll drive.”
Oh you will, will you? “Do you have your license?” I don’t know if I like the idea of you driving Dad’s truck. Or if I like how I’m suddenly some sort of good grade for you.
“What are you, a cop?” He held out his hand, and I automatically went to give him the packing tape.
Instead, Christophe’s fingers closed around my wrist, warm and hard. His eyes met mine, and I didn’t know what to think about what I saw burning in their depths. His smell shifted, somehow. Like the wind veering and bringing you a breath of honeysuckle on a summer’s day.
I stared up at him.
The garage door opened and Graves hopped in. “It’s getting colder,” he announced. “And I’ve got the last boxes in. Have to hand it to you, Dru, it’s packed tighter than Bletch’s . . .” The words died.
Christophe pulled. I came up in a rush—he was strong. Not regular wiry-strong, or even as thoughtlessly twitchy-strong as Graves had been with the werwulf imprint burning in him. He pulled me up as if I was a piece of paper, and the only thing scarier than the strength was the sense of restraint, like he could crush my wrist if he chose to. I ended up too close to him, and he pulled again, as if he wanted me even closer.
I stepped away and twisted my hand, breaking toward his thumb. That’s the weakest part of any grip. My shoulder protested, and so did my back. I was going to have to find some aspirin or something.
He did let me go—but I wasn’t sure, suddenly, that I could have pulled away if he hadn’t let me.
He wasn’t that strong before. Or was he, and just not showing it?
Graves stood stock-still, watching us both.
“Keys, Dru.” Christophe’s teeth gleamed in the weird stormlight, one of his wide feral smiles. “The sun’s fading, and if I can feel it, we can bet Sergej can too.”
I struggled with this, briefly. I drove when Dad got tired, so I knew the truck better than anyone else right now. I knew how it shimmied when it hit a certain number of miles per hour and how to tap the brakes in snow; I knew how it was likely to wriggle its butt when it was packed to the gills and a whole host of other little things. I also really didn’t like the idea of handing over my keys to this kid, no matter how much August vouched for him.
But August had. And I’d wanted someone to take care of me, hadn’t I?
I just hadn’t thought it would be some kid my own age, no matter how mature he seemed. If this was the “best” the Order had . . .
And I didn’t trust him enough. He was just too . . . dangerous. “Where are we going?” I finally said.
“The extraction point’s in the southeast section of town. Burke and 72nd. If you’d have come down there when I invited you, before Sergej knew for certain you even existed, I could have gotten you out of town and safe in the Schola in a trice.” Another easy shrug. “But we have to work with what we’ve got, now. Give me the keys, Dru.”
My bag lay on the counter. I dug in it for a moment, and my keychain jangled as I finally fished it out. “It handles weird when it’s loaded. I should drive.”
“Dru.” Christophe’s tone was icy. “If you want to get out of this alive, you’d best do as I say.”
Well, gee, when you put it like that . . .
“Wait a second.” Graves took two long swinging steps forward. His hair all but snapped and crackled with electricity. “She’s driven the thing before, all the way across town in a whiteout. And it’s her truck.”
“I didn’t ask you to yap, dog-boy.” Christophe made a sudden swift movement, but I saw him coming and yanked the keys back.
It was a close thing—his fingers grazed mine and I skipped nervously to the side, clearing the breakfast bar and dragging my bag with me. It fell, the strap fetching up against my free hand, and everything inside it shifted. That put me between the two of them, and right in the cold draft from the garage.
Get the situation under control, Dru. “Let’s get this straight.” I had to clear my throat, because the look on Christophe’s face—eyebrows drawn together a fraction, eyes burning, mouth in a tight line with no hint of a smile—made him look twice as dangerous.
And, I had to admit, very pretty, especially with his hair shifting back and forth. That smell of his should have been ludicrous, but it just made me hungry.
I wet my lips with my tongue, a quick nervous flick. “It’s my truck, I’ll drive. You’ll stop making nasty comments to my friend. We’ll all get along until we get out of town, and when we do that you can go back to your Order and Graves and I will be on our way.” The wind shifted again outside, its moan veering toward a crescendo. The yellow-green light made everything look bruised, and a queer ringing under the sound of the wind threatened to fill my ears.
I tasted wax oranges, and my vision wavered for a bare half-second.
Not now, dammit. This is important. I pushed it aside and kept my gaze locked with Christophe’s, daring him.
Once, in this little podunk outside St. Petersburg, we’d run across a huge beast of a dog guarding a place we really needed to get into. Dad didn’t have the touch, but he showed me something else that day. He called it “starin’ down, before the throwin’ down, honey.” It meant just looking at the thing in your way as if it was no bigger than a pea, making up your mind that it wasn’t going to scare you or move you.
Dogs can smell fear, and sometimes people—or things from the Real World—are the same way. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a dog can also smell when you’re the alpha. It takes the same kind of flat look and decision to be fearless as facing down a bunch of jocks bent on harassing someone.
Shoulders square. Heart thumping, but not too hard. Eyes glazed with dust and buzzing with what I hoped was power. I gave him the look I’d practiced in the mirror so many times, and pretended I was Dad, grinning easily in a bar frequented by the Real World, hands loose and easy, one of them resting on a gun butt and the other just touching a shot glass, while I sipped at a Coke and pretended not to notice.
It should have been Dad there. He would have sorted Christophe right out.
“Where do you think you’re going to go that Sergej can’t find you?” He made another grab for the keys, but the world slowed down and I was quicker again—just by a fraction, but still. Graves sucked in a breath and I skipped backward again, hoping he had the sense to move.
“I’m not so sure he’s the problem, Chris.” I ducked through my bag’s strap and backed up again. Another few steps would get me to the door to the garage, and if I took my eyes off him I wasn’t so sure he would stay put, either.
There were a whole lot of things I wasn’t sure of anymore.
The djamphir’s hand made another swift move; my eyes darted instinctively, and things got very confused. I heard a snarl and a clatter, my feet shot out from under me, and the keys were ripped out of my hand. Something very warm and hard clamped around my throat, and Graves let out a high, yipping yell. Glass shattered.
Christophe’s hand tightened just a little, and I choked, staring up at his three-quarter profile as he looked toward the other window, the one that looked at the bit of greenbelt running at an angle beside the house.
The windo
w he’d just thrown Graves against. Right over the spindly little kitchen table that had been here when we moved in.
He looked down at me, fangs sliding beneath his upper lip, his eyes burning. The highlights had bled out of his hair, slicking it back against his head, and his eyes were actually glowing in the bruised, ugly light slanting through the kitchen.
“I’m being patient,” he hissed, the t’s lisping slightly because of the fangs. “I’ll get you and your pet through this alive, but you have to do what I say. Got me?”
How did he do that? And the other thought, so loud I could have sworn I said it out loud. Could he teach me that?
“Sonofabitch,” Graves growled, and the obscenity shaded into a low sound that rattled broken glass as cold wind spilled into the room, laden with the flat iron tang of snow and violence. “Dru? Dru?”
He didn’t even sound human, though it was recognizably my name.
“As soon as the sun fails out here, all your neighbors will wake up.” Christophe’s fingers weren’t cutting off my air, but there wasn’t any space to wriggle, either. “I only wounded the dreamstealer; it probably crept through every window on the block and laid eggs in their sleeping bodies before dawn rose. When those young hatch, they’ll be hungry, and here you are. Such a nice little morsel.” He cocked his head slightly. “On the good side, Sergej probably doesn’t know you’re alive, but he’s suspecting, since his expensive little assassin didn’t come back, and as soon as the sun fails he’ll—Stay where you are, dog-boy!” He lifted his free hand and pointed, probably at Graves. The growling subsided a little, but it was the sound of a wolf getting ready to spring, not a teenage kid who had just been thrown into a window. “Are you going to behave, little bird?”
I might have even agreed with him, at least long enough to get his hands off my throat, but the wind rose to a shriek and I realized two things.
The light was really bleeding away fast, no longer bruised but dying, my ears popping under a sudden shift in air pressure.
And the growling wasn’t just coming from Graves.
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