Reckoning

louder than a whisper, because my throat had closed up. “I want you to go. I can’t stand to lose you too.”

He opened his mouth, probably to argue, but a strange whooshing sound filled the auditorium like water poured into a cup. A spike of diamond pain speared my temples, and Sergej laughed.

“Oh, children.” His voice filled the entire vast space as well, and I slumped against the wall. “You make it so easy.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Christophe spun, but Sergej was already moving. I leapt, the world dragging at me with weird clear-plastic fingers, as if superspeed wouldn’t even be enough. My right-hand malaika flicked, and black blood flew.

I was too slow. He was already past me, my soles slipping in the foul-smelling guck, and Christophe screamed. It was a high despairing cry, with a djamphir’s hiss-growl behind it. The crash of the two of them colliding shivered the air into fragments. The entire auditorium rocked, and a sheet of black blood splashed up. They hit the stone wall, and cracks radiated through the sheer, bloodred rock.

Christophe!

Slipping, scrabbling, wishing I had boots or real sneakers instead of these crap flimsy things, needed traction, I wrenched myself the opposite direction and Gran’s owl rocketed past me in living color, claws outstretched and wings glinting with sharp-edged metal. In the bloody glow it was a spot of clean white, banking sharply. I threw myself after it just as Sergej turned, blinking through space with the eerie stuttering speed of a badass sucker.

Fast, he’s fast, got to slow him down—Something in me stretched, instinctively, and I twisted again, my foot touching down lightly and sending up another spray of that black, thin, sickening fluid. They were just never going to get it clean in here. But I guess cleaning isn’t high on a vampire to-do list, really.

Gran’s owl arrowed down, and it hit Sergej’s head with a crunch much larger than a bird could produce. He went forward, tucking and rolling with jerky, weird precision, as if he was a clockwork instead of flesh and blood.

“Coward!” I yelled, pelting for him. “You fucking coward! ”

The words stung the air. He rose from the wash of rotting blood on the floor, chunks of decayed flesh clinging to him, his curls tumbled and that black, oily gaze striking like a snake.

I screamed, a hawk-cry of rising effort. There was finally enough air in my lungs—and Gran’s owl shot past me, claws out and its golden eyes a streak of brilliance. Hit him square, and it wasn’t just me hitting him.

It was the photograph I’d seen just once, the yellow house I found sometimes in my nightmares—the oak tree shading the front porch blasted by some terrible evil, a rag of flesh and bone hanging in its branches; my mother’s body hung there like a Christmas ornament. It was the long corridor my father had walked down, toward a slowly opening door that exhaled cold evil—and my father’s body standing at the back door of the house in the Dakotas, its blue eyes clouded with the film of death and its fleshless fingers tapping at the glass. It was Gran’s house burning and the dark pain in Graves’s eyes, the scars I’d seen on Christophe’s back and the cold nightmare of the blood drawn out of my veins while Sergej laughed.

There were other things, too. Dibs, flinching and terrified, sobbing. Dylan from the first Schola I’d ever attended, probably dead because he’d been blown from the inside; August, showing up bloody and battered in the nick of time. Anna, who had tried to kill me in her own way, sure, but . . . she didn’t deserve what happened to her.

Nobody deserved what this thing had done to them.

Sergej skidded back, one slim iron-hard hand flashing up. He hit Gran’s owl, hard, and the impact smashed through me, throwing me sideways. I went tumbling, splashing through the foulness, and before I slid to a stop Sergej was on me, his hands around my throat, and he squeezed.

My hands lay encased in cement. The malaika suddenly weighed a ton, and something crackled in my throat. Little black spots danced at the edges of my vision, and a shrill inner voice screamed at me to do something, to move—but the lump of heat in my stomach was fading, and the rage had deserted me.

Because the twisting hate in his face was what I felt. It was the rage, and it was mine, too.

It was how I was like him.

The aspect flamed, and he coughed. The purple mottling rose in his perfect, planed cheeks. But he laughed, a gleeful, hateful sound that exhaled rot in my face. “Stronger!” he chuckled. “Inoculated against your poison, little child-bird!” He braced himself, leaning close, and laughed in my face, rank breath filling the world. “There will be other svetocha. I will walk in the daylight. I will leave your body for the crows to—”

A meaty thunk interrupted. Sergej stiffened, and my aspect flared again. I got my right hand up, braced with malaika hilt, and clocked him a good one across the head.

He pitched to the side, and Christophe’s face rose over his shoulder. Christophe was smeared with even more vampire blood, and the left side of his face looked smashed-wrong. He was oddly twisted, and I realized why—something in him had been crushed. By something I mean bones—the entire left side of his ribs was caved in. But he held onto the iron spike grimly and shoved it further into Sergej’s back, his lips skinning back from his teeth. In that one moment, he looked more like his father than I’d ever believed possible.

The sharp thin tip of the spike punched out through Sergej’s chest. The vampire king writhed, inhaling, the purple mottles sliding up his face with grasping, ugly fingers. He looked ancient now, not always-seventeen and too beautiful to be real.

No, this was the face of something old and terrible, something so far removed from human it wasn’t even related anymore. The bloody directionless light pulsed, stuttering, and I realized it was coming from him.

Oh, Jesus. Nausea grabbed my entire body, a wracking spasm of revulsion. I was on my knees as Sergej scrabbled back. I’d stabbed him with an iron lamp-stand last time, and it had only put him down temporarily.

“No!” Christophe grabbed my arm. “Dru! NO!”

He shoved me, with more strength than I would’ve thought possible. I flew back, my left-hand malaika clattering free. Shit, dropped my sword, junior move, can’t do that—Then I hit the wall, hard enough to stun. Little stars danced in front of my eyes, and I whooped in a breath.

Christophe limped, dragging his left foot. It was a weird, snake-like motion, and Sergej was curling up like a bait worm on a hook. The king of the vampires was making a noise, a queer rattling that scraped against my skin, and the red light deepened. Instead of fresh blood, the light was clotting on every surface, fouling and streaking.

I whooped in another breath, coughed and retched. Still had my right-hand malaika. Dragged myself up the wall, the aspect’s strength a warm glow, but fading now. The voices eased, whispering instead of screaming inside my head, and the touch brushed over my skin with feather-soft caresses. It felt . . . clean.

Thank God. But I already felt filthy way down inside, where scrubbing wouldn’t reach.

Where the rage came from.

Christophe grabbed the cruel clawed end of the spike jutting up from his father’s back. “I warned you,” he