Jealousy

Kir let out a high-pitched moan. Nobody paid any attention.

“How can we be sure?” the sucker continued. “He will need some guarantee.”

Anna made a short, dismissive sound. You could just see her waving her hand, waving it away like it was no big deal. “Oh, that’s easy. I’ll take care of that. A prearranged signal, from the very location. You take care of her and I . . . ”

Static filled the tape then. My mouth was desert-dry.

“Ephialtes,” the sucker hissed. I was cold all over, wet with sweat under my T- shirt. Aching as I held onto Augie. He had his arm around me. But Christophe had turned, and he was staring directly at me.

Do you see? his cold eyes asked me. Do you see now, Dru?

And I did. But I didn’t understand. How could you sell someone to the vampires? And if Anna was with the Order, she would know what the suckers could do. How they savaged djamphir, not stopping until the body was reduced to rags of flesh and splinters of bone.

And I heard her again, from the vault in my memory where the really bad stuff hid. The stuff I didn’t ever want to think of again, the things the touch showed me that I didn’t want to see.

Don’t let the nosferatu bite. A prearranged signal from the very location. It meant our house. My mother’s house. The house where I lay asleep upstairs until she woke me up. The yellow house with the oak tree in front, its branches twisted and blackened by whatever Sergej had done to my mother’s body.

How could Anna betray another svetocha, even one she hated? How could anyone do that?

“Keep your commentary to yourself and pass along the message,” Anna said calmly. And the sound of a phone being laid down in a cradle clicked through, right before Christophe hit the stop button. He still stared right at me, his mouth a thin line, and I got the feeling he was trying to tell me something.

I didn’t know what. I couldn’t even begin to guess. But it was like he’d thrown me a line, and the thin cord that stretched between us poured a flood of heat into me. It ran up into my cheeks, and I closed my eyes and leaned against Augie. He swayed a little.

“You should look elsewhere for your traitor, Kouroi. Not at me.” Christophe’s heel scraped the floor as he turned away.

Murmurs raced through the crowd. I wished I could open up the ground and crawl into it. I felt sick all over. It was Anna. Anna had done it, betrayed my mother to the vampires.

Don’t let the nosferatu bite.

Why?

But I knew why. The horrible shape under the blanket in my head twitched.

Where is he . . . if you’re hiding him . . .

“Dru.” Christophe was very close now. “You have something to tell us. Something you remember.”

I shook my head. No. God, no. I didn’t want to remember anything about that night. I didn’t want to remember what happened after I went to bed. I didn’t want to remember Anna’s visit or my mother hiding me before she went out to fight.

The only thing I wanted to remember was Dad’s face when he opened up the hidey-hole in the closet and collected me. He’d told me I was safe and taken me out to the car, and we’d driven for days to Gran’s house.

There was nothing else I wanted to remember. Nothing. Not even my mother’s face, or her perfume, or—

But Christophe was pitiless. “That was why Anna came to see you at the reform Schola.” Patient and calm, like a teacher with a slow student. “You were so close, Dru. So close to remembering. But you didn’t, not yet. It was so long ago, and you were so young.”

I did remember, but I wasn’t going to tell him. “Shut up,” I whispered.

“This isn’t necessary,” Bruce said. “The evidence—”

“It is necessary.” Christophe’s words cut across his as if he was the one in charge here. For all I knew, he probably was. It certainly looked like he was from here. “You won’t believe me. You may even hide the evidence or lie about it. But the word of a svetocha . . . who can stand against that?” The words were nasty, each one a ragged bullet of rage. They scraped against the inside of my skull like a nosferatu’s glassine hatred.

Did Christophe have any idea how he sounded? He sounded like his father.

I wanted no part of any of this. I just wanted to be left alone, so I could figure out how to escape this place. “Shut up,” I whispered again. “Shut up.”

“You’ve made your point, Chris.” Augie’s arm tightened around me.

Christophe whirled away, the fury around him smelling of burnt insulation, broken glass, pain, and the colorless fume of fury. His boot heel made a black mark against the marble floor. “I don’t think I have. How many years has it been since the Order has been able to save a svetocha? We find them, certainly. We even find them before they bloom. But the nosferatu snatch them, sometimes mere hours, a half-hour, before we do. Why? Why is that?”

Kir moaned again. “God in Heaven. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

I wondered if he was trying to convince them or himself.

“Shut up, Kir,” Hiro said quietly. “Or I will kill you myself.”

He sounded like he meant it, too.

Sounds of papers being shuffled. “These are legitimate.” Alton sounded as sick as I felt. August swayed again.

I opened my eyes and tried to brace him. Under the bruising, blood, and dirt, he looked gray. It wasn’t good. “Augie?” I sounded as small as I felt. “You okay?”

“Marvelous.” His split lip leered as he tried to give me a smile. “It’s been a rough week, Dru. Been chased by every nosferatu on the planet, feels like, since my pad was blown. Was a real trick to get to the dropoff and get the information Dylan—”

“Dylan?” The breath left me. “He’s alive?”

“I hope so.” August’s pained expression told me everything I needed to know. “He sent it ’fore the other Schola was broken, Dru. Figured he could trust me, I guess.”

“Of course they are legitimate,” Christophe snarled. “I ask again, why have you been unable to save other svetocha?”

“Wh-wh-why? Marcus actually reeled and dropped down into his seat. It creaked a little under him. “Dear God. Why?”

The assembled djamphir whispered to each other.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

“Because,” Christophe said finally, as if he was answering a question in class, “the Red Queen thinks we only need one svetocha.”

Someone laughed. It was a high, feminine titter, bouncing and echoing off all the stone and glass. Every head tipped back, and there, high above everyone, on one of the carved stone railings girdling the bottom of the dome, stood Anna.

“Why?” she yelled. “You want to know why? Ask Reynard! Ask him what he knows! He made me do it!”

The careening echoes made me feel even sicker. Between August and me, we were having a hard time standing up. Either he was swaying drunkenly, or I was, or the world was tilting underfoot like a carnival ride.

“None of this would have happened without him!” Anna screamed. Even as far up as she was, the hate contorting her face was visible. Her hair was a wildly curling mass of reddish-dark, and she wore red silk, too. Another one of those old-fashioned dresses, fluttering as she hung over the railing. “She stole him from me! He was mine and she