Strange Angels

to step forward, looking at the other little thing, glittering patiently on the waxed floor.

It was silver, and as I bent my aching knees to take a look at it my body knew, chilling all over, gooseflesh prickling across my back and down my arms.

It was a heavy locket, almost as long as my thumb. Scrollwork on its front I knew better than my own name, even, and a silver chain, now broken, that I’d seen all my life. The scrollwork made a heart with a cross inside it, and on the back there would be little foreign symbols sketched, where they could rest against the skin.

I touched it with my index finger, letting out a clouded breath that ended on a short sound as if I’d been punched and lost all my air. My fist closed over it and I pushed myself up, dry-eyed.

And all of a sudden I knew something else. I wasn’t alone in here.

Someone spoke from the hall beyond the foyer. It was a boy’s voice, more tenor-sweet than Graves’s and harsher than Christophe’s, with the same queer space between words and sounds as the djamphir’s.

“Come into my parlor, said the spider.” A light, happy giggle, as if someone was having a hell of a good time. “And obediently, she walks in and picks up the bait.”

I raised my head. Strings of damp curling hair fell in my face.

There was a shape in the door to the hallway, a cloak of more-than-physical darkness clinging to it. I suddenly knew who had been on my front porch that night. He hadn’t had an invitation, so my threshold was a barrier to him. But here I was, and here he was, and why had Christophe sent me here?

A cool bath of dread slid down my back.

“Sergej.” I sounded normal, not terrified. As a matter of fact, I sounded pretty good.

He stepped into the wash of gold from the chandelier, and I understood why it was so cold. The cold was coming from him, breathing out from his poreless skin with its faint tint of swarthiness. And here was another shock.

He looked about eighteen—a little older than Graves, a little older than me. Broad-shouldered as if he worked out, and with a face chipped from an old coin—a long narrow nose, a chiseled mouth, a mess of artfully disheveled honey-brown curls. But his dark eyes were wrong. They were dusty, and far more adult than they should be. The closest I’d ever seen to eyes like that was on some city streets, where kids melted out of the shadows as cars cruised slowly past, their bodies young but something ancient shining from their faces. Kids who had seen a lot of things no kid should have to see, kids I shivered when I thought about always making me scoot closer to Dad on the truck’s seat.

Only they were still human, those kids. And this thing wasn’t. It looked young, and I suppose if you weren’t in the habit of looking closely at things you’d just think he was lucky to have such great skin and killer lips.

If you looked any closer, the thing looking out of those dark sparkling eyes would leer at you. Right before it ate you alive.

He wore a thin black sweater and jeans, like Christophe. A pair of high-end black Nikes and a gold wristwatch too huge and ostentatious to be anything but real. Probably a Rolex. He looked like the Rolex type.

I stood there staring at him, my mouth fallen open a little. I heard something through the ringing in my head. A steady thumping, like a clock ticking against the head of a giant drum, echoing. Faster and faster, a sound that made me think of a small dark space, stuffed animals, and my own stale breathing as I listened before falling asleep. I’d been so tired.

I love you, baby. I love you so much. . . . We’re going to play a game.

The knowledge rammed through me like a baseball bat swung by a player coming all the way up from his heels. That ticking beat was the sound of his heart. I was here in a huge pile of fake adobe with a snowstorm and Graves outside, and I was facing down a sucker all by my lonesome. A sucker who had turned my father into a zombie—and murdered my mother, back Before.

My left hand was still a fist around the locket. The pumping, thumping sound was very close, and the boy smiled at me. A very sweet smile, if you didn’t mind looking at the needle-sharp fangs, much sharper and more grotesque than Christophe’s. But white, so blinding white. And those eyes, like pools of mud just waiting to drag you down and fill your mouth and nose with cold, cold dirt Jell-O.

I heard something else, too. The muffled beating of wings.

He took a step forward. “Ripe,” he said, the word contorted because of the way his teeth were now shaped. A trickle of something black slid down his chin, right below where the tip of one of his fangs scraped the perfect matte skin. “And coming so willingly to the slaughter. I’ve drunk from the veins of a thousand djamphir, but the sweetest are always the little birds, just before they flower.” A low chuckle, like gas burping and bubbling up from oozing slime.

I raised the gun and his dark winged eyebrows flew up in mock astonishment. He looked just like a psychotic clown, and a red spark lit in the back of his weirdly shaped pupils. They were hourglass-shaped, darker slits against the black velvet of his irises, thin threads of black in the whites turning them gray. He looked almost blind.

The owl hooted nearby, the sound slicing sharp through a sudden howling outside, the door rattling behind me, and the sucker’s eyes widened just a fraction before I squeezed the trigger and a neat half-dollar sized hole opened up in his forehead.

It was a perfect shot.

Good girl, Dru! I heard Dad cry, and a gout of thin blackness gushed down the sucker’s face, his head snapping back like he’d just been kicked in the teeth. I heard someone screaming, thinly, and knew it was me.

Because his head jerked back down again, sharply, and he grinned at me through the mask of rotting black ichor, his teeth saw-edged except for the fangs. His entire body coiled, compressing itself. I knew he was going to jump me and knew I had no hope of getting out of the way. The blackness ate his eyes, turning them into singularity holes under the scrim of foulness, and he leaped, hanging in the air for a long moment as everything slowed down around me and the ringing in my ears turned to an agonized shriek.

The world stopped again, but only for a bare second. I dropped, one knee giving way and the gun fighting its way up through air gone clear and hard as a diamond. Pale feathers puffed as the owl swooped, razor claws raking the sucker’s back, and it banked away, black goo dripping from its feet—and I knew it had missed, it hadn’t hit where it wanted to, and as soon as the world snapped back up to speed the sucker was going to fall on me and bury its fangs in my neck, and I wouldn’t feel a thing until it was too late.

Time popped hard, like a rubber band pulled back and let loose, careening across a classroom. A burst of warm air traveled across my skin, and there was a hideous wrenching sound.

The front door exploded inward. A streak of black and denim-blue leaped off the truck’s hood, flung with sharp lances of broken, splintered wood. He flew like Superman and they collided like planets flung into each other.

Get out of the way! Dad’s voice yelled in my ear, and I rolled, one fist full of the locket, the other weighted down with a loaded gun. Snow flew into the hole in the side of the house, the shattered door falling in bits and pieces. The headlights were on, and through the cracked windshield I could see Graves, his nose bleeding and his eyes running with green flame, clutching at the wheel like a life preserver. He must have bonked himself a good one when they hit.

Around the truck, flowing like a creek in spring, the lean long forms of werwulfen leaped. My gaze snapped back toward the roaring bloodlust, and I saw Christophe go down, red blood flying in a perfect arc before splashing onto a blank white wall.

That’s what’s wrong in here, I thought hazily. No pictures. No furniture. Nothing living. It’s an empty house.

The sound was hideous. The wulfen were making that chilling glass-at-midnight noise again, and they flung themselves at the sucker like water running over rocks. The sucker was making a low inhuman growling, and Christophe . . .

He twisted to the side, avoiding Sergej’s hand, suddenly freighted with claws that looked sharp enough to rip air. Two quick steps, Christophe’s feet blurring, and he leaped, one boot cracking across the sucker’s terrible- beautiful face. The kick was used to propel him up and over; it looked like he was on wires, landing lightly as a butterfly. His entire face was covered with blood, his sweater was sopping, but his eyes blazed winter-freeze blue and his lip lifted, snarling back at Sergej even as the wulfen