Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
INTERMEZZO
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
TO GATES:
Still holding the line.
Jealousy
RAZORBILL
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
eISBN : 978-1-101-45767-2
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Copyright © 2010 Lili St. Crow
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to the usual suspects: Mel Stirling, Christa Hickey, Maddy and Nicky, Miriam Kriss and Jessica Rothenberg. This is getting to be a habit . . .
I am lying in a narrow single bed in a room no bigger than a closet, in a tiny apartment. The pad of paper I’ve been drawing on this trip is a collection of hard edges against my chest; I hug it harder. Outside the window, Brooklyn rumbles like a big sleeping beast. It’s the traffic in the distance, speaking in its own tongueless grumble. They’ve come back from cleaning out a rat spirit infestation, and they’re bushed. Outside the cracked-open door I hear the clink of glasses, liquid being poured, and my father speaks again.
“You have to, August. I can’t leave her anywhere else, and I’ve gotta—”
Augustine interrupts. “Jesus Christ, Dwight, you know how dangerous this is. And she’s just a kid. Why leave her with me?”
I snuggle into the pillow. It’s Augie’s pillow. He had made the bed up fresh for me, in the only bedroom in this crackerbox place. He and Dad thought I was asleep. I took a deep breath. It smelled like a place only a man cleans, frowsty and tainted with a breath of cigarette smoke.
The slam of a shot glass on the kitchen table. Dad was drinking Jim Beam, and if he was doing it in shots instead of sipping, it was going to be a long night. Augie stuck to vodka. “She’s safer here than anywhere else. I’ve got to do this. For . . . for reasons.”
“Elizabeth wouldn’t—”
My ears perked up a little, drowsily. Dad never talked about Mom much. And apparently he wasn’t going to tonight either.
“Don’t.” Glass clinked again—a bottle mouth against the shot glass. “Don’t you tell me what she would and wouldn’t do. She’s dead, Dobroslaw. My little girl is all what’s left. And she’s gonna be here. I think that bastard’s up Canada way, and when I come back—”
“What if you don’t, Dwight? What if I’m left with all this to deal with?”
“Then,” Dad said softly, “she’ll be the least of your worries. And you’ve got friends who know what to do.”
“Not any I can trust.” August sounded morose. “You have no idea what you’re up against. I suppose it would take tying you up and sitting on you to stop you.”
“You’d have to kill me, Augie. Let’s not push it, not with my little girl in there.” Raw bald anger under the edges of the words. If I’d been out there, I would have made myself scarce. When Dad sounded like that, it was best to just leave him alone. He never got violent, but the cold scaly quality of his silence when he was this pissed was never comfortable. “Besides, this could be another wild-goose chase. The bastard’s slippery.”
“Don’t we know it,” August muttered. It wasn’t a question. “A month. That’s as long as I can hold off telling anyone, Anderson. And I’m not doing it for you. That girl deserves to be with her own kind.”
Another silence, and I could almost see Dad’s eyes turn pale. All the depth would drain out of the blue and he’d look like he’d been bleached. “I’m her own kind. I’m her kin. I know what’s best for her.”
I wanted to get up, rub my eyes, and walk out into the kitchen. To demand to be told what they were talking around. But I was only a kid. What kid can get up and march out and demand to be told something? Besides, I didn’t know half of what I know now.
I still don’t know enough.
When I woke up in the morning, August greeted me with almost-burnt scrambled eggs, and by the look on his face I knew Dad was already gone. The kid I was just shrugged, knew he’d be back, and decided that I was going to be doing the cooking from now on. The kid I was then knew everything would be okay.
The kid I am now knows better.
CHAPTER ONE
A long despairing howl split the night.
It could have been mistaken for a siren in the distance, I suppose, if you ignored the way it burrowed in past your ears and pulled on the meat inside your head with glass-splinter fingers. The cry was full of blood and hot meat and cold air. I sat bolt-upright, pushing the heavy velvet covers aside. My left wrist ached, but I shook it out and hopped out of bed.
I grabbed my sweater from the floor and yanked it over my head, glad I hadn’t worn earrings in a dog’s age. The floor was hardwood and cold against bare feet; I was across the room and almost ran into the door. Threw the locks with fumbling fingers. A blue-glass night-light gave just enough illumination to allow me to avoid stubbing my toes on unfamiliar furniture. I hadn’t been here long enough to memorize anything.
I wasn’t sure I would be, either. Not with the way everyone keeps trying to kill me.
<
br /> Thin blue lines of warding sparked at the corner of my vision. I’d warded the walls my first night here, and the hair-thin lines of crackling blue light ran together in complex knots, flashing just on the edge of visibility. I woke the rest of the way and cursed roundly at the door, the howl still ringing inside my skull.
Gran would be proud. I was warding without her rowan wand or a candle, and it was getting easier. Of course, the practice of doing it over and over again was probably responsible. I wasn’t going to sleep anywhere without warding now. Hell, I probably wouldn’t even sit down without warding a chair, if I could.
I wrenched the door open just as another bloodcurdling howl split the air and shook the hallway outside. Hinges groaned—the door was solid steel, four locks and a chain, two of the locks with no outside keyhole. There was a bar, too, but I hadn’t dropped it in its brackets.
I’d kind of guessed I wasn’t going to be sleeping through the night without a fuss.
Light seared my eyes. I ran straight into Graves, who was fisting at his eyes as he stood in my door. We almost went down in a tangle of arms and legs. But his fingers closed around my right biceps, and he kept me upright, pointed me the right way down the hall, and gave me a push that got me going. His hair stuck up wildly, dyed-black curls with dark brown roots.
He was supposed to be down in the werwulfen dorms. His eyes flashed green, startling against the even caramel of his skin. He really rocked the ethnic look nowadays. Or maybe I was just seeing what had been there all along under his Goth Boy front.
We ran down the hall in weird tandem. My mother’s locket bounced against my breastbone. I hit the fire door at the end. It banged against the wall, and we spilled down the uncarpeted stairs.
That’s the thing about the Schola Prima dorms, even the cushy wing where svetocha are supposed to sleep. Behind the scenes it’s concrete industrial, just like every other school. Just because I had my own room didn’t make it any less, well, school-like.
And just because there was a whole wing for svetocha didn’t mean that there were any more. Just me. And one other, but I hadn’t seen her since the other Schola—the reform school someone had stashed me at—went down in flames.
Down two flights, a hard right, my shoulder banged into a door frame, but I just kept going. This hall wasn’t even carpeted, so everything echoed, and the doors on either side had barred observation slits.
There wasn’t a guard at his door. The whole hall shook as he threw himself against the walls and howled again.
I grabbed the knob; it refused to turn. “Shit!” I yelled, and Graves shouldered me aside. He’d thought to grab the key ring from the nail down the hall. The key went in, he twisted, the door opened, and I piled into the room, nearly colliding with almost seven and a half feet of very upset werwulf.
Ash hunched down, long clawed paw-fingers splayed as they touched bare concrete. The howl cut off in midstream, like he was surprised. The white streak on his lean narrow head glowed in the reflected fluorescent glare of the hall.
I sucked in a deep breath. My hair hung in my face, a wild curling mass, and I felt the same leap of irrational fear I did every time I came in this room. Or maybe it was totally rational fear. Someone could sweep the door shut and lock it, and then I’d be in here with a werwulf who’d tried to kill me the first time he met me.
And of course, he could always totally lose his shit and go all, well, crazyass werwulf on me again. But after he’d saved my life a few times, I was beginning to think maybe he wouldn’t.
“It’s okay,” I managed, though my lungs were on fire and my throat threatened to close up. I could still taste the peppermint toothpaste they’d given me. “It’s okay, Ash. It’s okay.”
The werwulf growled. His shoulders came up, corded with muscle, and the shifting textures of his pelt blurred. If I could capture that on paper, maybe with charcoal—but who was I kidding? Like I had time for recreational werwulf portraiture.
His claws made grooves in the concrete, the hard sharp edges screeching as they cut through stone-hard flooring. You could just imagine those claws cutting through flesh, like a hot knife through butter.
Gee, that’s great, Dru. Why don’t you meditate on that for awhile?
I put my hand down. It looked very small and very pale, and when my fingers touched the thick ruff at the back of his neck, they sank in. Heat poured off him, and the sound of bones crackling filled the room as he tried, again, to change back into human form.
My heart leapt up into my throat and made itself at home. “You can do it,” I whispered. Just like I did every time. “Come on.”
Shaking filled him in waves. Graves stood in the doorway, outlined in pale fluorescent glare. He tilted back, glanced down the hallway, stiffened like he saw trouble coming.
“You can do it.” I tried not to sound like I was pleading. Ash leaned against me, almost knocking me off my feet, the way a dog will lean into its master’s legs. He also whined, way back in his throat, and the crackling sound got louder.
Bile crawled up in my throat. My hand turned into a fist in his fur, as if that would help. The marks on my left wrist twinged, sending a bolt of pain up my arm. Two little scabbed-over marks, where the fangs had gone in.
Another great thought. Jesus, Dru. Cut it out.
“It’s okay,” I coaxed. “It’s all right. Sooner or later it’ll happen. You can change back.”
I heard voices. Male, four or five of them. Boots hitting the ground, the clothwhisper of running. My fingers turned to wood, and Ash growled. The deep thrumming filled up the bare concrete cube, the shelf like bed with its thin mat he never slept on, the low wide toilet bowl, and the metal tray in the corner still sticky with blood—at least he’d been fed. The raw meat was all gone; he wasn’t hoarding it like he would if he was sick.
Well, sicker than he was already. There were marks on the walls where he’d flung himself.
A werwulf can dent stone or concrete. If he’s going fast enough, if he really wants to. The maybe-not-so-irrational fear returned. I pushed it away.
“Shhh.” I tried not to sound just-woke-up and scared. Probably failed miserably. “It’s okay. Everything’s all right.”
It was a lie. He probably knew it, too. His ruined mouth opened as he tilted his head up, inhaled as if he was going to howl again.
I flinched.
Graves half-turned, standing in the door. He drew himself up and dug in his pocket. Why he was wearing his familiar black coat even in the middle of the night was beyond me—he probably even slept in the thing. I was suddenly aware of my naked legs, and my boxers all twisted around. My feet were bare, and the chill from the floor bit them even though Ash pressed against me some more, the vital textures of shaggy pelt rasping against my skin, an unhealthy feverish heat dripping from him.
“She’s fine!” Graves’s yell cut through the sudden noise. “Calm down. Everything’s kosher.”
I hoped they’d listen to him. If they piled in here while Ash was still nervous, we’d have another Situation, and I was just too tired. We were at three nights in a row for Ash getting us out of bed, and I was starting to lose hope.
Starting? No, I was already there. It had seemed so simple while I was running for my life. Funny how getting to a safe place always complicates things.
Always assuming that the Schola Prima was a safe place. Safer than the little satellite school I’d been at. The one that had burned to the ground because of me.
If it was safe, Christophe would be here. Wouldn’t he?
I flinched again at the thought, and the two healing marks on the inside of my wrist twinged heatlessly. Ash made another whining noise. I tried to dredge up something more, something comforting, something that would help him. I knew he understood me talking to him, I just . . . I couldn’t find anything to say that seemed to help him.
Ash hunched, his ruined upper lip lifting. His jaw was still mangled from the silver-grain-loaded bullet I’d shot at him right after he b
it Graves. The current theory—Benjamin’s theory—was that the silver was at once preventing him from changing and interfering with his master’s call.
I didn’t know what to think about that.
Here I was in a cell, clutching a werwulf’s ruff like he was a naughty cocker spaniel instead of almost eight feet of lethal muscle and bone, not to mention razor teeth and bad attitude.
“Calm down.” I didn’t have to work to sound weary. “Please, Ash. Come on.”
His head dropped. I didn’t even know what time it was; my internal clock was all messed up. He leaned against me even harder, his shoulder dropping to rub above my knees. I was jerked forward, my fingers still tangled in his ruff.
“Milady?” Benjamin’s voice. “Dru, are you in there? Are you all right?”
Ash growled. The sound rattled my bones.
“Cut it out, you overgrown fur rug.” I hauled back on him, achieving exactly nothing—he was way heavier than me—but he did stop making that noise. “That’s better. Yes, I’m fine.”
“You need to come out of there.” Shadows in the door—one of them had to be Benjamin.
The rest were probably his crew. The djamphir who’d been stuck with the task of “guarding” me. Great.
Graves leaned back against the doorjamb. His eyes were incandescent. He lifted a cigarette to his lips, flicked the lighter, and inhaled.
Oh, goddammit. I sighed, tried not to roll my eyes.
“That stinks.” Benjamin took the bait. “Do you mind?”
Graves shrugged. Twin curls of smoke slid free of his nostrils. His silver skull-and-crossbones earring glinted in the dimness. “Nope. I sure don’t.”
Ash bumped against me. My feet were numb. Now came trying to get him up on the bed and not listening to the whining little noises he made when I closed the door and locked it so he couldn’t escape back to his master.
Jealousy Page 1