A glare filled my vision, but not before I saw the head of the figure on the table, face turned to the side and with plastic tubing in its nose. Dark curly hair lay tangled wildly against the operating table, and I saw my eyes were fluttering as if I dreamed. My skin was chalk-white, and Bruce was on the floor.
“Touch me again,” Christophe said quietly, “and it will be your last act in life.” He shoved aside two dark-haired, lanky djamphir in white coats who were fiddling with the machines, and I saw a huge flayed mess where my left shoulder should be. The blood was almost black. I wasn’t seeing color. Flecks of white bone gleamed as another duo of teenage-looking Kouroi probed in the mess with shiny surgical tools and dropped fragments of something in a metal pan. Another djamphir with curly hair stood by with paddles, and I saw the electricity trembling in them like drops of water spattering on a hot griddle.
I’m in bad shape, I thought. It didn’t seem particularly important. I just stood and watched as Bruce wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t do it, Reynard. We can’t afford to lose —”
“I will not lose her. Get OUT!” The yell shook the walls, but nobody moved.
Christophe lifted his wrist to his mouth. He bit down hard, the aspect flickering over him. A flash of red down near his feet, shocking in the black-and-white movie the world had become, was the fox I’d seen before. It was puffed up, baring its teeth and hunching down, ready to spring.
He lowered his wrist. “This is usually private. But if you insist.” Something dark dripped down his hand—he was bleeding now, too.
He pressed the ragged wound in his wrist to the mouth of the body on the table. “You can hear me,” he whispered, bending down. “You’re in there, skowroneczko moja. You’re fighting. Fight just a little harder. Take what you need.”
Oh, gross. A shiver went through me. My body twitched. I remembered what it was like, that night in the woods, fire and smoke and Christophe’s fangs in my wrist. The awful pulling, tearing, ripping sensation as bits of myself—something I would call my soul—were torn away. I couldn’t do that to someone else.
But the body on the table stirred weakly. Lighter highlights slid down the tangled curls, and I saw the fangs in my own mouth grow with an imperceptible crackling. The machines were going crazy.
“She’s going to strike,” one of the djamphir said breathlessly.
My body twitched.
Don’t do it. I struggled to open my mouth, to say something. Don’t. Don’t do that to someone else.
Because when it got right down to it, sucking someone else’s blood made me one of the things Dad would have hunted. Didn’t it? Especially when I knew what it felt like. When I knew how it hurt to have something invisible inside you scraped away an inch at a time.
The body on the bed jerked. Fangs drove into Christophe’s bleeding wrist as I struggled to scream, to move, to stop myself. But the body didn’t listen. It took a long, endless gulping swallow.
Christophe had gone an alarming shade of gray, pale skin ash-colored and sickly. The curly- headed djamphir swore softly. Bruce levered himself up from the floor, dabbing at his mouth with the back of his hand. A thin trickle of blood traced down his chin, black in the weird directionless light, and I saw a shimmer near his right shoulder. A bird-shape hovered just on the edge of visibility, but I was more worried about the body on the bed and what it was doing to Christophe.
Another long gulping swallow. Christophe sagged, catching himself on the operating table with his free hand. The fox twined around his ankles, its brush losing the touch of faint color.
Stop it! I wanted to yell, but I couldn’t. I was only observing. There wasn’t a damn thing I could do. I couldn’t even move.
BOOM . . . BOOM . . . BOOM. The thuds startled me. If I hadn’t been nailed in place I would have jumped like a cat finding a snake. The feathered wingbeats came back, brushing all up and down my body—or my unbody, because my real body was lying on the bed.
The mess of my left shoulder was knitting itself back together. Faint color tinged through the tissues, like the tinting on those antique photographs. A pink bloom spread out from the swiftly healing wound, the splinters of bone easing back together with little whispering sounds and the muscles sliding up, shards of metal oozing free on a slick of clear fluid before the skin wrapped itself up. The wound flushed an angry deep red for a moment. Then my shoulder made a convulsive movement, and there was a meaty thud. The ball of the humerus socketed itself back in, and the sound was a shockwave all through me.
Tingles started at the top of my unhead. Christophe’s knees buckled, but he kept himself upright. “Take what you need,” he whispered to the blind face on the table, its hair writhing and waving just like a vampire’s. “Take everything if you must. Just live, little bird. Live.”
The thudding grew closer together, beats blurring like hummingbird wings. The tingling intensified as color ran through the rest of my body. The rags of my T-shirt were dark blue and spattered with drying blood, and one of my breasts peeked out momentarily through a rent in the fabric. Faint faraway embarrassment scorched all through me. My skin began to take on a blush, hideous in the middle of that black- and-white world.
Every part of me that wasn’t lying on the table lunged for release, battering against the huge weight pressing down, keeping me immobile. The body on the table inhaled through her nose, a slight wheezing sound because of caked crusted blood.
And it began another long, sucking gulp.
Christophe half-fell against the beeping machines, driving them toward the wall. He braced himself, and his face turned up to the ceiling. His mouth fell open, and his eyes rolled back until all you could see were the whites. His hips jerked forward and he almost fell again, chipping and cracking the heavy plastic case of the machine showing the high hard spikes of my heartbeat. The screen fuzzed out with static as I glanced at it, and sparks flew.
“NO!” Bruce roared, and leapt forward. He grabbed Christophe, wrenching his arm away from the greedy, fanged mouth on the bed. A jolt rammed through me, crown to soles, and for a dizzying moment I was standing up and lying down at the same time, pulled in completely different directions like a piece of Saran Wrap someone’s trying to untangle. My teeth clicked together with a heavy billiard-ball noise, echoing inside my skull, and red agony tore through me.
Snarling. Sound of fist hitting flesh, a scream of pain that was mine, rising from my burning throat. The place at the back of my palate where the bloodhunger lived was on fire, a hot sweet kick like the Jim Beam I used to spike my Coke with sometimes when Dad wasn’t home. My body was a riptide catching an unwary swimmer, flesh constricting around the core of what I was, the me that had just gotten used to freedom. Muscles screamed and locked and I—
—fell, slithering off the operating table and fetching my head a stunning blow. Landed on something too soft to be the floor, writhing underneath me, and my fingers sank into a head of hair before whoever it was surged upward, rolling me away and shaking free. Plastic tubing yanked free of my nose, the loops of it over my ears tearing loose.
Confusion. Yelling. Noise. I screamed again, thrashing as the bloodhunger ignited. It hurt. I hurt all over as if I’d been doused with gasoline and set on fire, and I wanted more of the sweet red stuff. I could taste it on my lips, smoke and spice, a smooth hot redness full of the flavor of a boy’s lips and the tang of winter-cold eyes. He tasted like danger and wildness and a hot breeze through a car window at dusk out in the desert when you’re going eighty and not going to make the next town anytime soon. Cinnamon and male and goodness, and I wanted more.
Christophe grabbed me. He was ashen, his cheeks sunken. But his eyes blazed, and the aspect on him was like a drenching perfume. I could feel it,
