Jealousy

by Lili St. Crow

  As soon as I said it, I knew it was a lie. Maybe it was tact that made Benjamin sigh. He didn’t roll his eyes or look pained, which was pretty damn magnanimous of him.

  Of course I needed a bodyguard. Now that the suckers knew I was alive, now that we knew there was a traitor in the Order, I needed bodyguards more than ever.

  I just wasn’t so sure I could trust anyone. Other than Graves, that is.

  And Christophe, a little voice inside me whispered. I ignored it.

  “Fine.” I eased up on Graves’s arm, figuring he wasn’t going to go postal and coldcock someone. He actually straightened, pulled on his sleeves like stopping had been his idea so he could adjust his coat, and gave me another one of those telling little glances. “Then I suppose we’d better get going. We’re probably already late.”

  “Not late enough,” Leon muttered, and gave a queer little laugh. “But they’ll wait for a svetocha.”

  I decided I didn’t like him much and pulled experimentally on Graves’s arm. He took a single step back, and as soon as I let go of him he whirled back to the front as if he was in a military parade. His chin was up, and a muscle in his cheek flickered.

  Benjamin led us through more sunlight-striped halls, and it wasn’t just the lack of breakfast that was giving me a bad feeling.

  “Through there.” Benjamin pointed at the huge double doors. They were massive oak affairs bound with iron, the wood deeply carved with slim lines. It took a moment for me to figure out the carvings formed a heavily stylized face with deep burning eyes. And a mouth open just far enough to show fangs. The tiny space between the doors ran down the bridge of the long hooked nose, and my temples throbbed for a moment. My mother’s locket was a warm reassuring weight against my breastbone.

  That face looked hungry, and I was suddenly very sure I didn’t want to go in there.

  But what do you do when there’s a bunch of boys looking expectantly at you? You can’t punk out. Graves had a faint line between his eyebrows, and I wished I had time to talk to him. Alone.

  “What are they like?” I tried not to sound like a scaredy-cat and tucked some of my hair nervously behind one ear.

  “Assholes,” Graves replied promptly. “They interrogated Bobby and Dibs together. Almost made Dibs cry. But they’re just assholes.”

  Benjamin coughed. He’d flushed a little. “They’re the Council. The heads of the Order, each one a warrior against the darkness. They won’t hurt you, Milady. You’re the most hopeful thing we’ve seen in twenty years.”

  Now there was an interesting statement. I opened my mouth, but he stepped back.

  “We’ll wait here for you.” He gave Graves a narrow-eyed, meaningful look. “Him too, if he wants.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Graves folded his arms and leaned against the wall between two empty marble pedestals. The velvet hangings framing him just made him look scruffier and more unshaven. He was starting to get a definite bloom of dark stubble on his cheeks now. I didn’t think half-Asians ever got stubble. It made his cheeks less babyish, and the new faintly mocking expression helped.

  Back in the Dakotas, he’d looked eager, or pained. With that edge of desperation that loners have—the black sheep, the ones cut out of the crowd. I think even normal people can smell that powdery bloom of not belonging. It’s all over the kids who get tripped, beat up, practical-joked, and just plain savaged all the time.

  Now he just looked unpleasantly amused and unsurprised. A big change.

  I swallowed hard. Approached the doors, one soft sneaker-clad step at a time.

  “Dru.” Graves clicked his lighter, and I heard the inhale of another cigarette starting up. Boy was gonna get lung cancer in no time. Did loup-garou get cancer?

  If I went to classes here, would I be able to ask?

  “What?” I stopped, but I didn’t turn around, watching the door. I’d heard a little about the Council. Not enough to know anything except Anna was one of them. Would she be in there? Graves hadn’t said anything about seeing another svetocha. She was supposed to be a secret.

  Anna. A shiver touched my back. She’d tried to make me believe Christophe killed my mother. I still couldn’t figure out why, unless she just plain hated him.

  Christophe had made it sound like it was the Order against the suckers. It looked like it was the Order against itself, too. You’d think people would band together, but if there’s one thing I’ve seen all over America, it’s people shooting themselves in the foot like this over and over again.

  Graves exhaled, hard. “I’ll be right here. You yell; I’ll be in there.”

  “Thanks.” I bet he would, too. I tried not to let my face show how much I appreciated the thought. “Don’t worry.” I managed to sound like I wasn’t feeling a little light headed. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  I wondered how many times Dad used that phrase when he didn’t believe it, either. The thought was a pinch in a numb place under my heart, and when I stepped forward next, the line down the nose of the door-face widened. They swung inward soundlessly, and I saw a short red-carpeted hall with another, smaller door at the end.

  I stuck my hands in my jean pockets, touched the switchblade in my right. I’d slid it in while getting dressed in the bathroom and checked to make sure the bulge wouldn’t tell under the hem of the long gray hoodie.

  You never know. And after everything that had happened, I was damned if I was going anywhere unarmed.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I wasn’t sure what I expected. But four teenage-looking guys and two guys apparently in their mid twenties lounging on couches—one of them smoking a cigar thicker than two of his fingers—was so not it.

  The room was windowless, and a fire burned in the massive stone fireplace, crackling cheerily. Dark leather, shabby dark-red carpeting that looked Persian, crystal vases on the mantel holding white tulips. One of the djamphir looked twenty-five and Middle Eastern. He lowered the newspaper he was hiding behind and gave me a once-over with coal-black eyes. He wore jeans and a crisp blue dress shirt with creases that looked starched in.

  I remembered Dad being big on spray starch until I refused to touch the stuff anymore and he had to iron his own jeans. He decided pretty quick that it was more trouble than it was worth. For a moment I was twelve again, ironing and smelling spray starch and fabric softener while Dad played Twenty Real-World Questions with me and loaded up clips of ammo. How do you disrupt roach spirits? What’re the five signs of a Real World gathering-place? What are the rules in a good occult shop?

  I shoved the memory away with an almost physical shiver. You’d think that if I practiced long enough I could just stop thinking about painful things.

  The second door—mahogany, uncarved, and giving the impression of being plenty heavy despite soundless hinges—closed with a whisper behind me.

  “Dear God.” A redheaded djamphir with a flock of freckles that somehow avoided looking baked-on bolted to his feet. “Milady.”

  There was a rustle, and all of them were standing. I swallowed hard and wished I wasn’t in jeans and a gray hoodie that had definitely seen better days. My hair was actually behaving for once, falling in sleek curls. But this was just the sort of situation it would pick to start frizzing out on me. I also felt grainy-eyed and puffy-faced.

  “Milady,” two others echoed. I almost looked behind me to see who the hell they were talking to.

  Another hard swallow. It felt like I had a rock in my throat. “I’m here for debriefing.” Great, Dru. You sound like Minnie Mouse. “If I’m, uh, late, it’s because—”

  The one smoking a cigar swept me a bow I’d only seen before in midnight cable historical movies with really good costume budgets. “It is our pleasure to wait on you, not the other way around. Come in. Would you care for coffee? Have you had breakfast?”

  Or more like dinner, since the Schola runs at night. What the hell? I blinked. “Um. This is the Council, right? Formal, right?”

  “Dear child.” This fro
m the Arabic-looking one; he sounded vaguely British. “In here we don’t stand on ceremony much. And what have you been told of us?”

  “I thought . . .” The instinct of secrecy warred with curiosity, and curiosity won out just barely. “I thought the other svetocha—Anna—was on the Council?”

  Silence filled the room. Even the fire hushed itself. The redhead glanced significantly at a skinny blond in a charcoal-gray suit that looked like it would never even think of wrinkling. The one who looked Japanese, not just half-Asian like Graves, smoothed the front of his high-collared shirt gray silk.

  “Now, child.” The Arabic-looking one raised his eyebrows, and I had a sudden urge to punch him in the face if he called me child again. “Where did you hear of that?”

  I had to work to unclench my fists and push my shoulders down. Dad said you didn’t hunch while you were at attention; that was what attention meant. “I saw her. At the other Schola, the reform school. And Dylan . . .” It hit me again, gulleywide sideways. “Dylan’s probably dead.” I said it like I’d just figured it out. “They attacked the Schola. They had a Burner. That’s what everyone called it. A sucker who could set things on fire.”

  They were still silent, all staring at me. I kept my hands in my pockets, the switchblade’s hilt slippery from my sweating fingers. The empty place in the middle of my chest was where a ball of unsteady painful rage had been burning for weeks, ever since Dad hadn’t come home that night.

  The last night anything was normal for me. Which has never been really what you’d call “normal.” But it was good enough for me, and right now I was missing it big-time.

  Now that hole in my chest was suddenly just that—a hole. Nothing in it but numb darkness. Which was a relief. “She had red hair,” I offered awkwardly. “The sucker, I mean. The Burner. We only just got away.”

  A ripple ran through them. It was the aspect, the vampire in them coming out. Fangs peeped out from under top lips, their hair ran with highlights or darkened, and I was suddenly uncomfortably reminded of how strong, fast, and dangerous these guys were.

  And here I was with only a silver-loaded switchblade. But I’d come this far; I wasn’t about to let a bunch of half-vampires scare me.

  Well, not much anyway.

  Not so you could see it.

  “Let me see if I understand you correctly,” the Arab said. His eyes now burned like live coals, and his hair rippled with a slight wave, inky black streaks slipping through the very dark brown. “You have seen the Lady Anna? At a . . . satellite Schola? Where you were until a very few days ago?”

  I nodded. “Christophe meant for me to come here. I don’t know how I ended up there, but they seemed to have been expecting me. But then Dylan found out nobody knew I was there—he said something about a blackout node—and the . . . the . . .” I ran out of words. Regained them. “Haven’t you heard all this before?”

  “Not precisely. The wulfen knew very little, and the Broken could not be questioned.” Arabian Boy glanced at the others. “And Reynard is, as is his custom, nowhere to be found when questions are asked. So. Come and be seated. Would you care for breakfast?”

  My stomach growled at the notion. “No thanks. I’ll catch something in the caf later.” I figured that was polite enough.

  “Are you certain?” The aspect retreated, turning him into a very handsome guy in his early twenties, but with very old eyes. I was suddenly very sure this guy was even older than Christophe. It shows somewhere back in the pupils, and all of them had that uncanny stillness I’d only seen in older djamphir.

  And in Christophe. Jesus. I was trying not to think about him because each time I did it either sent a flood of heat or a bucket of ice through me. My internal thermostat was wiggy in a big way. And the marks on my wrist were scabbed over and healing, but they had some funny ideas of their own.

  At least when I thought about Christophe, the hole in my chest seemed manageable. Not smaller, but easier to deal with. Like being with Graves made all this seem like something I could possibly handle, as long as he was standing there giving me that whatcha gonna do, Dru? look.

  I caught the way they were all looking at me, and a childhood spent with Gran’s strict rules about “bein’ neighborlike” rose up inside me. When you dirt poor, manners is what you got, she would always say. So use ’em. “If you’re all eating, I wouldn’t mind a bite.” I almost cringed as soon as I said it. I mean, in a room with a bunch of half-vampires and I say bite?

  But then again, I was part vampire, too, wasn’t I? A sixteenth, Christophe said. We were all sixteenths. Something about genetics.

  God, Dad, why didn’t you tell me? But I could never ask him that even if he was still alive. A splinter of ice lodged itself in my throat. He’d never even said a single word about it. Nothing except warning me about suckers, and I picked up most of that listening around the corners, listening to other hunters. Like his friend Augustine, who’d turned out to be djamphir too, and part of the Order.

  And who was missing as well. I was thinking an awful lot about Augie lately.

  “We would be honored.” Arab Boy bowed again, a little less stiffly. “I’m Bruce. Provisional head of the Council.”

  Bruce? No way. The mad urge to giggle rose up in my throat, met the rock sitting there, and died with a burning, acid like reflux. “Provisional?” It slipped out.

  “Provisional, you see, when our head, the Lady Anna, is not with us.” He straightened, and the rest of them relaxed a little.

  Well. That’s good to know. Come to think of it, Anna certainly did have the Head-Bitch-in-Charge vibe.

  I didn’t let go of the switchblade.

  “And especially since,” the redhead piped up, “the Lady Anna has been on vacation for two weeks.”

  The other room opening off the windowless sort-of-study was a long one, with a mirror-polished table down the middle that would have looked right at home in Camelot, except it was a rectangle. Another table—no more than a shelf—ran along the left-hand side, full of steam dishes exhaling the smell of food. A silver urn and another massive silver thing sat at the end, and three wine bottles stood at attention, one in a silver container of crushed ice. The second massive silver thing on the table was a samovar, I was sure of it.

  I wouldn’t even know what a samovar was, except for once Dad and I had come across this coven of Russian witches in Louisiana. No, really. They ran a patisserie in New Orleans. With a sideline in hexes, cures, potions, and fortune-telling with weird greasy playing cards decorated in gold leaf.

  They’d wanted me to stay with them. To learn, they said. But Dad just shook his head, and I held onto his arm the entire time we were in there. I didn’t take the petits fours they kept offering me. Gran had taught me all about food being a trap sometimes.

  It’s woman’s power, food is. You be sure you know where’n the hook is before swallerin’ it, Dru. You mind me, now.

  You’d think I’d get used to hearing dead people’s voices in my head. Memory is like that sometimes—it takes you by surprise, leaps on you with a roach spirit’s scuttling speed, and then you’re left shaking your head and trying to figure out where you are here and now.

  The chairs were all heavily carved wooden thrones with worn red horsehair cushions. Stone walls, hardwood floor, and a smell like a lot of late nights and cigar smoke fighting with the heavenly aromas of food and coffee. There were no dusty cobwebs in the corners, like at the other Schola. This whole building was spic-and-span in a way that made me a little nervous.

  Check that. Everything about this place was hinky as hell. If this was where I was supposed to be sent when that helicopter lifted me out of the snowy hell of the Dakotas, I didn’t know if I should feel relieved.

  Bruce pointed me toward the head of the table, like I was a visiting dignitary. “Please. Coffee? And what do you prefer for breakfast? Or dinner, given our schedule.”

  They were all looking at me. New-girl-in-school time again, only I was here with the teachers
. “Coffee, yeah. And, um, food. Look, I thought I was going to be—”

  “All in good time.” Bruce was utterly imperturbable. “We don’t believe in hurrying.”

  “Yeah, I kind of got that. I was stuck for weeks out in the back end of beyond with vampires attacking all the time.” I didn’t have to work to sound sarcastic. “I’m not so sure I’m safe anywhere, unless it’s on my own. So I’m wanting to get this over with.” And get back to Graves.

  Because the emptiness inside me did get smaller when Graves was around. Still, I didn’t want to think about how safe I felt with Christophe. It wasn’t applicable, was it? Not when he kept disappearing on me.

  I was getting to hate people disappearing on me.

  The fang marks in my left wrist twinged again, but faintly. I was glad my sleeves were pulled down. The memory rose unbidden, of Christophe’s fangs in my flesh. He’d had to do it, to save us—but it hadn’t been comfortable. And I was damned if I’d tell any of these blow-dried boys about it.

  My voice box had frozen up. Everything about me had frozen. One thought managed to escape the relentless, digging agony.

  —please don’t please don’t not again please don’t don’t don’t—

  But it came one more time, and this time was the worst because the digging, awful fingers weren’t pulling at anything physical. Instead they were scraping and burrowing and twisting into me. The part of me that wasn’t anything but me, the invisible core of what I was.

  I’d call it the soul, but I don’t think the word fits. It’s as close as I can get.

  Digging scraping pulling tearing ripping, invisible things inside me being pulled away, and something left me in a huge gush. My head tipped back, breath locked in my throat. Graves made another small horrified sound and tried to pull me away.

  Christophe jerked his head back, fangs sliding free of my flesh, and something wrapped itself tightly around my wrist, below his bruising-hard grip on my forearm. He exhaled, shuddering, and Graves tried to pull me away again. My arm stretched like Silly Putty between them, my shoulder screaming, and I couldn’t make a sound.