Reckoning

Dibs was shaking even harder. The shudders went through him in waves. Sub, they called it. Submissive. He wasn’t built for this.

Give him something to focus on. “Dibs.” I wished I could snap my right-hand fingers. “Ash? Shanks? Do you know where they are? And Nat?”

His arms dropped, his hands curling into fists before releasing. The change rippled through him, wiry golden hair moving in fluid streams . . . and retracting. The fang marks on his throat glared. So did the huge circles under his eyes. He looked awful tired. “I . . . Alive. Last I saw.”

I almost sagged with relief. “Then they’re going to bust the doors down soon. Don’t worry. Just do what you have to, right now. Don’t worry about anything else.”

“Are you . . .” He didn’t glance at Sergej. Great pearls of sweat stood out on his pale skin. But the shaking was going down in him. Thank God.

The king of the vampires tapped his claws against the arm of his iron chair. The reptilian clicking turned my stomach into a bowling ball.

I summoned a grin. It felt tight and unnatural, like the skin on my face was cracking. “I’m sure, Dibs. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

I was lying to him, I knew. But he dropped his eyes and took a sliding sideways step toward the table. There were even little packets of alcohol wipes set out, and things in sterile packages.

Sterile. Like I might get infected. The thought called up another screaming lunatic giggle that died in my throat.

I wasn’t going to make it out of this. I was pretty damn sure of that. You’d think it would be the sort of thing that would reduce a girl to the screaming meemies.

But for Dibs’s sake, I was going to be brave. I was going to lose a little blood here.

I just hoped I had enough in me to buy the rest of them some more time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Sometimes I have nightmares about what happened next. They always start out with the smile on my face, cracked and faded but plastered there, and my encouraging nods every time Dibs glanced worriedly at me. Then there’s the sting of the needle and the aspect flaming into life, every muscle in me tensing against the intrusion and my fangs tingling, crackling, aching. Then there’s a skip, like a jolted CD player, and a sound like rushing water all through me.

A horrible draining sensation. A deep bruising ache in my arm. The bloodhunger rasping against my veins, like sandpaper flooding my circulatory system. Merciful darkness covering my vision, everything in flashes—Sergej’s hiss as the needle slid in, Dibs’s quiet sobbing, Graves’s quick light breathing, the wheelchair rattling as he twitched, the rising hateful murmur through the assembled nosferat, a thin silvery rattle as Christophe’s chains moved again.

My head fell to the side, my neck turning to rubber. A thin stem to hold my pumpkin head up. I thought I heard my mother’s voice again—Be brave, sweetheart. Be very brave now.

The blood she’d given me was now sliding into her killer’s veins. No oxygen to make it liquid poison for him.

Everything spilled away on that dark rushing water. This wasn’t like Christophe’s fangs in my wrist and the terrible inward-ripping sensation as something was pulled out of me by the roots.

No. This was worse.

Because it was black, and cold, and I was trying to scream, and I was alone, and nobody would hear me. It was like sitting in an empty house and waiting for Dad to come back, or sitting by Gran’s hospital bed while her breathing got shallower and shallower. It was like my mother snuggling me into a hidey-hole in the bottom of a closet, closing me away in the safest place she could, and leaving me in the dark.

I was always being left behind. Like a piece of luggage. Like a toy, set down while a kid runs away to play with something else. Like trash.

Now I was left behind, again, and this time there would be nobody and nothing coming to pick me up.

This was the end of the line.

I heard a sound. I was making it. A chilling, breathless moan. Air escaping past slack lips, a drowning swimmer’s final bubbles rising for the surface like silvery fish while the rest . . . sinks.

Fingers against my face. Cold, with the prickle of claws behind them. He scraped at my skin gently, like he enjoyed the feel of it. Something in me roused, knowing I was in terrible danger. It struggled for the surface . . . and couldn’t make it.

“Take her away,” Sergej said, and giggled.

* * *

No chain cuffed to my wrist. No need for it now. I was as weak as a sick kitten. Dibs held the cup of water to my lips; half of it spilled down my T-shirt. Tears slicked his cheeks. I blinked at him. There was a buzzing in my ears, and everything looked two-dimensional.

The touch was weak, too. Contracting, like a slug with salt sprinkled on it. Thin and washed out, the world with most of its color removed, all its solidity evaporated. Just a television show, light played on a flat screen.

“Dru!” Dibs, sobbing now. “Dru, please, wake up. Wake up.”

I don’t think I want to. But I was doing this for him, wasn’t I? So I tried to focus through the haze. My mouth wouldn’t quite work right.

“Dibsh?” I slurred. Tried again. “Shamuel?”

Because I’d always thought it was kind of funny when Christophe called him Samuel. A weird, floaty laugh came out of me, my lips loose and numb. I sounded drunk.

He made a low hurt noise. That snapped me back into some kind of sense.

Buck up, Dru. You’re still breathing. Things could be worse.

As “comforting things to think” went, it kind of sucked.

I forced my eyes to open all the way. It wasn’t the cell. It was a bedroom. No windows, the blank stone walls faintly sheened with something like greasy sweat. But the bed was a four-poster, done in faded pink, hanging curtains fuzzed with what looked like a century’s worth of dust. A small brass lamp on a flimsy black-painted nightstand, its shade a bell of dark pink Tiffany glass, Art Deco and probably worth something. There was also a cut-crystal water pitcher. My left-hand fingers itched a little, and a terrible lassitude filled every inch of me.

A girl I’d hung out with in seventh grade had told me about having mono once. About being so tired she didn’t even want to get up to pee. About how her whole body didn’t even seem to belong to her. Just a lump I was hanging around in until a bus came, was the way she put it.

Sarah. Her name was Sarah Holmes. She had black hair.

I hadn’t thought about her in ages. We’d moved on after Dad and I cleared out a roach-spirit infestation and did a little hexbreaking on the side. But now I wanted to see her again and tell her that I understood. And to apologize for promising to be her friend, when I knew I was going to be leaving.

Dibs’s face loomed over mine. His eyes were red and inflamed, and his cheeks were chapped under the tearstains. He looked like he’d been crying for a long time.

Christ. Locked up in this room with me almost dead on the bed? No wonder.

“Hi,” I croaked. “Don’t cry. It’s okay.” For some reason that set him off again, but I didn’t worry about it. I was thinking through mud, each separate thought very slow and stretched out. “Dibs. Kiddo. Calm down.”

“I c-c-can’t s-s-smell you!” The water glass shook in his hands. “You were s-s-so still, and I—”

“Whooooaaaa.” I drew the word out. “Chill, Dibsie. Calm down. Nice and easy.” I am comforting a submissive werwulf. Wow. For some reason it seemed funny. Horribly, bleakly funny. It would take too much energy to laugh, though. “How . . .” I struggled to find the right question to ask. “How long?