Betrayals

class. No matter how far back in the family tree the sucker is, it still makes the kids djamphir

They get the aspect, the speed, the strength, and the hunger. And they’re all boys, except for the one-in-a- thousand girl. Who rarely ever reaches adulthood, because the suckers find them before they bloom and drink them dry, getting a big old jolt of power from it.

Nice, huh? I was just special all over the place. Me and Anna. Were there more? There could be.

I might not be so special.

It also occurred to me that the wulfen were probably my best bet of surviving. They couldn’t want me dead, really. Right? Because I didn’t matter either way to them unless they were working for Sergej too.

There was no way of knowing for sure. Which meant the wulfen weren’t that great of a bet after all.

I had no way of getting out of here. Not for a while.

Graves didn’t want to hang out that much, and what could I do? Just follow the werewolves around until they took pity on me? What if some of them had a reason, God only knew what, for hating me?

And did I even dare to figure out how to sneak down to the boathouse?

I was in history class, again, sitting on one end of the couch. The doors had been replaced and the halls repaired, but you could still see the white gouges in the paneling and the carpet was a glaring mismatch, the only patches of new flooring in the whole school. The renovated bits smelled like formaldehyde, and I pulled my knees up, resting the pad of paper on them. The doodle unreeled under my pencil, long narrow arches and stone walls. I shaded in each block of rock, the grass forcing up through flagstones, and worked all around a huge blank spot in the middle of the page.

Graves perched next to me, and the kid he called Shanks, dark emo-boy hair brushed sideways across his forehead and hanging in his chocolate eyes, bony wrists sticking out from under his sleeves, engineer boots, and a sideways smile, leaned forward on his other side, elbows braced on his knees. Irving had settled himself on the floor, knees up and arms circling them. Other than that, everyone gave me a wide berth. Even Dibs acted like he didn’t know me in class.

I caught Graves and the Shanks kid exchanging pointed looks, usually every time Irving opened his mouth.

Right now Blondie the teacher was droning on about basic rules for interaction between djamphir and wulfen. I filled in another block of shading.

“Djamphir are trained for tactics and wulfen are trained for logistics. This plays to the particular strength of both. Wulfen lack a djamphir’s sensitivity to nosferat infestation, and djamphir lack the peculiar qualities of consensus and cooperation that come naturally to wulfen. Each is half of a balanced equation, and it was only when we started cooperating that we began to be able to clear entire territories and hold them.”

“What happened before?” Graves wanted to know.

Blondie’s teeth peeped out from behind his lips. Very white, but his aspect was nowhere to be found. “Before? We died. We were very close to being eradicated completely, and it was war on wulfen whenever the nosferatu felt like it. Those who weren’t taken were killed, or they lived by the leave of the Blood Princes only. As the Broken.”

That perked my ears up. Broken to his will, Christophe whispered inside my head.

I looked up from the paper. “Broken? What does that mean?”

I immediately felt stupid. It was probably not the best thing to ask in a room full of wulfen. They might be, you know, offended.

Oh jeez. A slight rustle went through the room. Shanks hunched his shoulders and settled back on the couch.

“Anyone want to answer that?” Blondie turned in a full circle, taking in the faces all around him. No? Well, I’ll go ahead then. ‘Breaking’ a human being, even a djamphir, is easy. Sleep deprivation, temporary lack of protein, a constant stream of propaganda, it’s called brainwashing, and it’s very simple to do. Doing it to a werwulf, or a skinchanger like Mr. Graves here, is harder, because of their resistance to both physical damage and persuasion.”

“They’re stubborn,” Irving said, sotto voce, and another ripple ran through the room. It might’ve sounded like laughter if you weren’t listening too closely.

“They are resistant,” Blondie corrected, in the snootiest possible voice. “Nevertheless, it can be done. The most popular method was chaining in a tatra. This is a stone cube just big enough to allow the victim to stand upright, but not enough to turn around, bend over, or sit. The chain is fastened to a spiked collar, the spikes are turned inward, like so.” His manicured hands sketched the air. “So the victim must move carefully even in that confined space. Then, raw meat is thrown onto the floor or placed just outside. The food scent torments until the meat begins to rot, and every day water is flung in through an aperture above the head. It cascades down, and the danger of inhaling it and developing pneumonia is very real. Then there are the Revelle, the dreamstealers, creatures bred by the Maharaja.”

That got my attention all over again. Graves tensed next to me.

“The dreamstealer is brought in close proximity to the wulfen, fed carrion, and allowed to sing. Does anyone here know what a dreamstealer’s song can do?”

“I know what happens when they stick their tongues in someone’s mouth and start drinking,”

Graves muttered. “It was singing. I remember that much.”

I didn’t remember that. I still hadn’t decided if I’d been out of my body or just having a really vivid dream that was my unconscious putting things together and presenting me with memory. But I did remember what happened after Graves tore the dreamstealer off me and Christophe stopped me retching and seizing.

Christophe. He lied. He didn’t tell me. Bastard. And someone else. Maybe that Anna chick. But she’s svetocha too. It doesn’t make sense. The vampires are the enemy, right? Why would anyone work with them?

His son. Sergej’s son.

Blondie paused, visibly deciding not to respond. “A dreamstealer’s song takes hope away and drives its victim to the brink of insanity. Exposure for more than a few hours breaks down the barriers between a werwulf’s conscious mind and the Other, the thing inside them that encloses and permits the change. Leaving the werwulf both psychotic and unable to reclaim his or her human form.”

“They did this to girls, too?” Someone behind me sounded horrified. I guess chivalry isn’t completely dead.

But I was thinking of the maddened, insane thing in Ash’s eyes. He’d once been a werwulf like the kids in the classroom with me, all of them shifting uneasily in their seats. And Sergej had done that, chained him in a stone box and turned him into something that couldn’t change back into a boy.

Blondie now looked pained. I was liking him more and more over the past couple of days, until I remembered he’d disappeared out the door and left me alone to be attacked. But right now, he was the teacher I was getting the most out of. “Sometimes,” he said, quietly, “a psychotic female werwulf is nearly unstoppable. However, it is more difficult to break down a female’s resistance and turn her into a Broken. Other methods were employed to force female wulfen’s compliance. Anyway, once the wulf can no longer shift back into even a simulacrum of humanity, it is collared by its master and becomes an automaton with no free will of its own. It becomes merely appetite and obedience.”

Wait a second. I sat up straight, the pad of paper sliding on my jeans. “Can you stop it? I mean, can you make someone like that human again?”

“Reclaim a Broken? it’s possible, if you have a strong enough chain, enough time, and a compelling reason to do so. But the master of such a creature will rarely let it go, and will call it back with such intensity the wulf will often kill itself trying to escape. Wulfen have been known to break their own necks, chew through their own arms or legs—”

“There were reclamation projects, though.” Shanks folded his arms. “My dad talks about them.

There were whole teams of them in the 1920s.” His entire body shouted I don’t like this, from hunched-up shoulders to the uneasy way his fingers flicked and his