Reckoning

High crystalline laughter, murmurings brushing the skin like razors, sobbing victims dragged across the floor and—

My head snapped to the side as if I’d been punched. The touch was much stronger than it had ever been, and it twisted inside me, the cathedral-space suddenly bursting with images. They roared through me in a torrent, and my left hand tingled with fresh hot pain.

That damn cinnamon-roll smell rose from my skin, and now it had a new tang. Warm perfume, a familiar smell.

Be brave, baby girl. A familiar voice. I could feel her breath against my cheek, could feel her arms around my small body as she lifted me. Be very brave now.

My mouth fell open. My fangs lengthened, scraping my lower lip. Mom? But I didn’t say it. I couldn’t.

Because Graves pushed me through the door, the wheelchair squeaked, and a vast space opened up around us. Circular, floored in white and black marble like a cross between an old-timey diner’s linoleum and a high-end hotel’s tiled lobby; tiers of seats rose in coliseum arcs to a stone-ribbed dome. The light was low and bloody, drenching every surface and making every edge weirdly sharp.

The seats were crowded with vampires. Bright eyes, fangs out, their young faces twisting up as they hissed and snarled. They were in every conceivable teenage shape and size, and they were all beautiful in a weird, stomach-clenching way.

I blinked furiously, their hatred scraping hard against the thin skin keeping me separate from the world. The bloodhunger rose, flooding my veins, and it took a second before the shapes I saw snapped into a picture behind my eyes.

At the far end of the circular space, a ragged human shape was spread-eagled, chained to the wall with familiar silvery metal. His head was down, dried blood stiffening his hair, and every inch of bare skin I could see on him—feet, hands, chest through the rips in his shirt, legs through the torn jeans—was battered and covered with tiny cuts. My heart leapt up into my throat, pounding thinly in my wrists and ankles, even behind my eyes.

It was Christophe.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I leaned over and retched, even though my stomach was empty. I couldn’t help myself. A swell of nasty laughter cut through the snarling.

In the exact middle of the circle, there was a table and a chair. The table had equipment stacked on it, tubes and glass canisters. The chair was a monstrosity of whipped and curlicued iron, spikes screaming up from its back.

On the other side of the table, a familiar golden head. Dibs crouched, pale and slack-jawed, bruised up one whole side of his face, his dark eyes terribly empty. He was barefoot too, but his blue polo shirt and jeans weren’t torn up. He rocked back and forth a little, his hands clapped to his ears, trying to shut out the din.

My heart squeezed itself up into a rock. Poor Dibs.

Sergej raised his hands, and the sound coming from him shocked everything into silence. It petered out, a high glassy scream that trembled in the ultrasonic and speared the tender meat inside my head. The cry drained away, leaving every surface quivering, and the assembled vampires—there were so many of them, my God—were still as statues.

Across the room, Christophe’s head lifted fractionally, dropped. A gleam of blue showed through his tangled, crusted, hanging hair. It was a shock to see him so dirty and battered. Yet another thing that made me feel like I’d stepped through a door and into an alternate universe, where nothing was right anymore.

I let out a tiny, sobbing sound. It shivered and died in that silence like a small animal crouched in a trap.

Sergej half-turned and grinned at me. Those black eyes sparkled on their surface, and it was then that I figured out what made him the closest thing to a king the vampires had. All the rest of them were made of hatred, true. But Sergej? He was hate boiled down to its bones. He didn’t need a reason. Christophe had told me something had happened on an old battlefield in Europe, and after that his father had . . . changed. Had drunk so much blood, maybe, that something in him swelled up and burst like a tick. Maybe it was the part of him that had stayed human enough to get close to someone and father a kid. Or maybe it was just the part that made every other vampire recognizably human, even if psychotic and killcrazy.

Most suckers were mad dogs. But Sergej was a foaming-at-the-mouth dog who liked it. Gloried in it, even.

“Children.” Sergej spread his fingers. The tips of his claws lengthened, elegantly. “My darlings. Look at what I bring. A svetocha who has eluded us all these years, the one we have been hunting, the scion of two great Houses. She is ours, and our plans are coming to fruition.” He paused, and a swell of murmuring delight went through them. They stared. Some of them whispered to their neighbors, their young- old faces incandescent with hurtful delight.

Dibs had raised his head. He stared at me, his jaw dropping further, and the naked horror on his face hit me right in the chest. Behind me, Graves was trembling again. The wheelchair’s handles groaned faintly as he gripped them.

Wait a minute. Two Houses? And years? What? Gran had to have suspected something was—or several somethings were—after me, the way she kept me scrubbed down and smelling like something else, all those floor washes and strings of wild onion and garlic all around the house. And Dad had kept us moving around, like in Florida before we went to the Dakotas. So something couldn’t get a lock on us, he said, and no more.

I hadn’t asked.

“I will walk in daylight,” Sergej announced. “And when I do, my children, so shall you.”

There used to be a djamphir, a long time ago when the vampires could go out in sunlight. He was called Scarabus, and he killed their king, making sure they could only come out at night. But the way he did it was by drinking a svetocha—his own sister—dry. The stuff in my blood that made me toxic and drove boy djamphir a little crazy was the same stuff that could give Sergej the power to go out in the sunshine.

That was why vampires hunted svetocha down so hard. Either they killed us before we bloomed and got toxic, or they wanted to empty us out like Capri Sun pouches and go wandering around during the day. And Jesus, that thought was enough to send anyone reasonable almost catatonic with fear.

Without the sun to help the Order hold them back, their hate could eat away at the regular world like a cancer.

Christophe’s chin came up. The mad blue gleams of his eyes shone in the dim ruddy light. His fangs were out, and the aspect moved over him in waves. But slowly, sluggish. I could smell how badly he was hurt. The chains holding him against the wall like a fly on a windshield rattled a little, a warning.

That attracted Sergej’s attention. He blurred across the intervening space, coming to a halt a bare three feet from Christophe. The nasty air-tearing sound, like little voices laughing, echoed in the cavernous space. It was the same sound as when a djamphir used more-than-human speed to vanish, and if I’d had anything to eat that would have brought it up in a tasteless rush again. As it was, I was working against the leather cuffs feverishly, my left wrist cold under the metal of the cuff and its length of chain.

“My son.” Sergej didn’t sound so happy now. “What will it take to break you?”

Christophe spat something. It sounded like Polish, and definitely didn’t sound like good morning. The words bruised his lips and turned the air darker. Or maybe it was just the helpless rage in them, beating a frantic consonant-laden tattoo before falling to the black and white marble.

Sergej leaned forward a little, on the balls of his feet. All the same, there was another tension in him, pulling back.