Reckoning

me. Nobody was bleeding here, yet. Nobody except the vampires, and the thought of sinking my fangs in them wasn’t appealing.

But if someone had been here, someone human and helpless, like Lyle—

It hit me from the side, a thunderbolt of force. I flew, oddly weightless, holding onto the malaika as if they’d somehow break my fall. The sucker died in midair, choking on his own blood, but I hit the ground hard, all my chimes ringing and my head full of a flash of brief starry nothingness. The vampire’s body rolled to the side, convulsing as it shredded itself, toxic dust runneling through its flesh.

My name, yelled hoarsely. Screaming, the glassy cries of furious nosferatu. Roaring, a werwulfen in full battlemode. It was a good thing there was so much thunder, I thought weakly, because otherwise we were making enough noise to be heard in the next county.

Bloodhunger pulsed against my palate, wiping away the trace of oranges. Consciousness returned in a rush. I struggled up, vampire blood smoking on my clothes, and heard someone else screaming. There was no pain in that cry. It was a long howl of absolute rage, and when I shook the daze out of my head and made it to my feet, shoving aside a heavy weight of swiftly decaying sucker bodies, I saw him.

Christophe bent back, his booted foot flashing up to strike the sucker on the chin. This was a female, her long hair matted with ice, hail suddenly pounding all the way across the violent shipwrecked mass of the torn-up meadow.

Gran’s house was still burning fiercely, and a lean dark shape bulleted across the clearing, the silvery streak on its low narrow head actually smearing on the air. Ash hit the girl vampire from behind, and I realized this was the sucker who had birthed the storm. She felt old, a terrible weight of hatred and cold spreading out from her in concentric waves. Not as ancient or as powerful as Sergej, but enough.

Ash’s hit jolted the girl vampire forward, but she half-turned with impossible quickness and one white hand flashed out. He tumbled away, hair melting and his boyshape rising for the surface, a supple white snake under curling darkness.

Christophe! I shook my head, trying to think. The entire meadow was littered with broken bodies. They twisted and jerked as decay claimed them—suckers rot fast when they’re bled out, especially when hawthorn wood or a svetocha’s nearness has poisoned them.

He drove her back, making a noise that was pure inhuman rage. It managed to drown out the thunder, and a draft of warm applepie scent hit me in the face. It had an undertone of copper, which meant he was bleeding, and oh God the smell of it stroked right across the bloodhunger with a cat’s-tongue rasp. It reached all the way down to the floor of me, jerking against my control and pulling on every vein in my body.

A hand closed around my arm. I let out a cry and recoiled, but it was Graves. Bruising crawled up his face, his lip was split, and his clothes were grimed with mud and more blood. The smell of him, strawberry incense and silvermoon wildness, the blood a bright copper-satin thread holding it all together, smashed into me. My fangs ached, a sweet tingle of pain. For a hideous half second I quivered, everything in me tensing, ready to knock him down and bury my teeth in him.

Graves was shouting something I couldn’t hear over the thunder. His mouth worked, and he tried to pull me toward the car. I dug in my heels, malaika dangling from my nerveless hands. Not just because he was bleeding, or because the bloodhunger was snarling all through me, but because I couldn’t look away from the fight in front of me.

Christophe closed with the girl vamp again. Ash flowed upward, melding back into changeform, his eyes alight with mad orange. Thunder roiled, and the remaining vampires were massing behind Ash. Not so many of them—a dozen at most. Still, enough to do some harm.

Ash and Christophe needed me. At least I wasn’t useless here, as long as my aspect held.

And now that I’d bloomed, it would.

Christophe blurred, striking at the girl vamp with inhuman speed and precision. But she was too fast, and he was flagging. I didn’t know how I knew, unless it was the touch tolling inside my head like a bell. I felt the sweat on his skin under the pouring icy water, felt the burning of his own aspect as if it was mine.

I tore away from Graves. My sneakers almost drowned in the mud; hail stung as it peppered down. My aspect turned scorch-hot, steam rising directly from my skin as I screamed, a falcon’s cry.

Gran’s owl appeared out of nowhere, filling itself in with swift strokes, and hit the girl vampire with a crunch I felt like my own bones breaking. A wingsnap, and it veered away, claws dripping. Her young-old face was a black-streaked mess now, her eyes black from lid to lid and spreading fine thin threads of gray out like crow’s- feet wrinkles.

Thunder shattered the sky overhead, four separate bolts of lightning slamming down at once, and the girl vampire choked. She was so fast, backpedaling as I drove onward, my malaika whirring. Ash let out a howl, leaping for her, but it was Christophe who flew past me, the aspect slicking down his hair and filling the air around him with crystalline crackling fury. He hit her like a freight train, and the tearing ripping sound of the malaika in vampire flesh cut the thunder short.

Black, acidic blood sprayed. Ash hunched even further, his warning growl taking the place of the storm. The hail turned to rain, a regular spring downer. The remaining vampires fell back, their unlined faces twisting with confusion as well as hatred now.

Christophe didn’t stop. The blades kept tearing at the body, and the hiss-growl that came from him was a djamphir’s scariest warning. His chest seemed too small to make such a sound.

Oh, God. I kept going past him, heading for the group of suckers clumping and backing away from Ash. Thunder receded, lightning striking other hills. The eerie storm-lit darkness began to seem less, well, dark. My malaika blurred in twin circles, vampire blood spattering away from the hawthorn, a preparatory move. Graves was suddenly beside me, his eyes burning green and his boots landing in the mud with sucking splashes that would have been funny if he hadn’t been making the same sound as Ash—a low thrumming that raises every hair on the body, because it reaches right into your bones and reminds you of a time when human beings huddled in dark caves and the things that ran by night had teeth and claws even fire wouldn’t scare away.

Even worse, it sinks its fingers into the low crouching thing in every human, the thing that lurks under civilization and socialization.

The thing that hunts.

The vampires broke and scattered. Ash twitched, his hide rippling in vital waves. The silver streak on his head glowed eerily.

“Get them!” Christophe screamed. Ash leapt forward, and so did Graves. I would have too, but something hit me from behind. I went down hard, mud splattering everywhere and pea-sized hail embedded in the meadow’s surface abrading my bare arms like the world’s biggest sandpaper belt.

Christophe had my wrists, holding the malaika down and pressing me into cold mud. “Stay here!” he yelled, over a last retreating peal of thunder. “Stay!” Then he was up and off me, scooping up his malaika and vanishing. Little whispering sounds chattered as he moved too quickly to be seen, streaking past the other two and plunging into the woods.

Oh, hell no. No way. But I just lay there for a moment, my ribs heaving with huge shuddering breaths. The rain poured down, but the whole house was blazing. Black smoke billowed. Why was it burning like that?

I managed to make it mostly upright. Cold mud closed around my knees with sucking fingers. I stared at Gran’s house, now an inferno. Orange flames, full of evil little yellow chuckling faces with leering mouths. All our supplies, gone. Gran’s spinning wheel, her pots and pans, everything. My only safe place, my last best card.

Gone.