Reckoning

rasped, and the aspect boiled free of him, waves of power visible now in the dull punky glow. “I told you if you touched her, you would die.”

He sounded so calm.

Sergej said something, the spiked consonants of a foreign language. Ragged, and full of so much fury, so much twisted hate, it turned my stomach all over again.

“Yes,” Christophe said. “You are my father. And I hate you for it.”

It happened so fast. One moment he was there, holding the iron spike. The next, he jammed the spike all the way through. It hit the stone with a screech, and sparks flew.

But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was Sergej twisting, his feet flailing, an animal in a trap. And Christophe on him, the horrid sound of bones grinding as he grabbed his father, wrenched Sergej’s head aside, and buried his fangs right where the shoulder met the neck.

The red light flared. Then I was moving, every step taking a hundred years. “Christophe!” I was moving through syrup, through mud, through concrete. “Christophe! No!”

Sergej howled. The sound was immense, every key on an ancient bony organ hit at once, wheezing and screaming. It blew my hair back, and the touch turned to acid inside my head. The cry cut short on a gurgle that stood a good chance of starring in every nightmare I’d have for the rest of my life, as if I didn’t already have so much nightmare material already.

I was on my knees, sliding, and it was a good thing I’d dropped my left-hand blade. Because my fingers curled in Christophe’s slicked-back hair, and I yanked his head back.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Or at least, I tried to. I got exactly nowhere.

His shoulders hunched. Something ripped as he used his teeth, settling more firmly into his father’s neck. Blood sprayed, black and viscous, not thin like the other suckers’. It smoked, and the thought of that oozing down my throat was enough to make me feel even sicker.

I set my feet and yanked again, but it was as if he’d been turned to stone. He gulped, greedily, and the sound forced bile up into my throat. The thought that if I threw up, I’d be throwing up blood— Graves’s blood, at that—did not help.

“Christophe.” I swallowed hard. “Christophe, please. Listen to me. You’re not him. Don’t be him. Please. Please, Christophe, stop. Stop it. Please. I’m begging you, stop.”

Everything paused. I had my fingers in his blood-clotted hair, and a current roared through him and into me. The touch flamed into life, and I almost reeled. But I didn’t let go of Christophe’s head. I couldn’t.

“Please,” I whispered. “Please, Christophe. Don’t do this.”

He shuddered, his ribs popping out and mending with horrifying, meaty sounds.

Then Christophe threw his head back and screamed. It was a long, despairing cry, but at least it got him away from his father. Who twitched again, horribly vital, and I could feel him gathering himself. Like a tornado or a thunderstorm approaching.

I brought my right hand up, my knees dripping as I rose too, the perfect angle unreeling inside me. The malaika made its low sweet sound, but it was lost in the noise Christophe was making. I might have screamed too, but it was lost in Christophe’s cry as well. All the loneliness, all the pain, all the betrayal in the world was in that sound, and the wooden sword whooshed down.

I put everything into it. It wasn’t just me. The dead filled me, all of them, whispering and chattering in a vast silence wrapped around me.

This was the way to kill him. Not with hate, not with taking in his blood and everything about him. Instead, it was my mother’s hand on the malaika’s hilt, and my father’s. Even Gran’s ancient, liver-spotted hand, her fingers calloused from a lifetime of work and her eyes sharp with take-no-prisoners compassion. It was Graves’s hand, too—even though he wasn’t dead, it was the hand of the boy he could’ve been, tight against mine. And Anna’s, red nails gleaming, as I felt the tears slicking my cheeks and understood it was for her too. Even though she’d tried to kill me, I wept for the girl she could have been.

The person I would have to try to be, so I didn’t turn out like this horrible, twitching thing on the floor.

The blade carved cleanly, and Christophe’s cry cut off as if I’d sliced him. For a nightmarish moment I thought I had, and it was probably a mercy the dull reddish light failed completely then, snuffed out like a candle flame. The darkness that descended was absolute, the silence a ringing tone.

My knees hit the stone floor with a splashing thump. Another thump brought a hot wad of something up in my throat, because I could imagine Sergej’s head hitting the floor. It rolled away like a big granite ball, making more noise than it should, and I dropped my malaika.

I was sobbing. Little hitching gasps turned into spasms, racking convulsions, I wrapped my arms around myself and rocked back and forth. The silence was so immense, and the dark was so deep. It was like the needle in my arm and the cold again, and I curled in on myself.

“Dru.” A whisper. “Dru.”

He reached me in the darkness, and part of me wanted to scrabble back and away. My skin crawled when he touched me, but the rest of me fell into him. Something against my forehead, a soft pressure. His lips. He kissed my forehead, my cheeks, my bloody, tear-streaked, dirty face, everywhere he could reach. I didn’t care. The shakes had me now, like a vicious dog shaking a toy, stuffing flying everywhere. Everything inside me was shaking loose, shaking free; there was nothing to hold onto.

Nothing except Christophe, there in the dark.

He held me, murmuring my name, holding me bruising-tight. Kissed my hair, my forehead, again. He couldn’t reach the rest of me because I’d buried my face in his neck. We clung together like survivors of some huge natural disaster, and the sobs retreated like an ocean wave.

He was saying something else, over and over again, in between repeating my name.

“Thank you,” he would mutter, hoarsely, ragged, into my hair. “Dziekuje, Dru, milna. Thank you.”

Jesus Christ, for what? But then he stiffened, and his head came up. I felt the movement in the dark, and I swallowed the last of the sobs, folding my lips over my teeth and pushing them down.

We’d just killed the king of the vampires.

And in the distance, muffled but still distinct, I heard gunfire.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

He somehow found both my malaika. Pressed them into my hands. The wooden hilts were warm and satiny. “Are you hurt? Anywhere?”

I shook my head, realized he probably couldn’t see. It was so dark it had actual physical weight. I had to cough twice before I could even think about talking. The bile in my throat burned, and the heat in my middle was fading. “N-no. I don’t th-think so.” Now I was stuttering, just like Dibs. If he felt anything like this, I didn’t blame him. “Tired, though.”

“Thank God.” He grabbed my shoulders, his fingers sinking in, and pulled me forward. This time he was smack-dab on the button, and I don’t know why I was surprised. If he could find my malaika, he could certainly find my mouth.

There was blood on his lips, but it tasted like spice. An apple pie just pulled from a hot oven, and a desert wind—sand and the windows down, right at dusk, when you’re out on those roads that arrow for the horizon and the city is behind you; you’re doing eighty and you’re not going to stop anytime soon. The