Defiance

I tried to breathe more slowly. My heart pounded, and dark little spackles raced across my vision. Look, Dru. Look where you shouldn’t.

It’s a kind of sideways-seeing, not quite focusing on the thing you’re seeking. You have to soften up your eyes and look without looking, without expecting. It’s damn hard to do. I had two things on my side, though. Gran had been a strict teacher who believed practice made perfect. And with Dad, I was used to performing under fire—meaning, when something from the Real World was trying to get at us—all the time.

My teeth tingled. Under the running water and the weird scraping soft sounds the fog made, I heard an owl’s quiet passionless cry. Little feathers brushed my wet naked skin, and my breath turned into flashing ice crystals as soon as it left my mouth. The shower water cooled perceptibly. It was stealing heat from the shower itself now, which meant it was getting stronger. And it was resolving into a writhing mass of finger-thick tentacles, some of them wickedly clawed at the tip.

My left hand jabbed forward, the hex flying like a flat blue star, not-quite-visible sparks pouring from its points. It was just like flicking a playing card, the way I learned to do down in Carmel with that hunter who went surfing every day. Dad had really liked him; he wasn’t half bad. Remy Gagnon had a lot of weird tics, but he could stand at the front door, fling a playing card all the way down the hallway in his shotgun shack and hit the back door hard enough to make a cracking sound. Sometimes he even swore in bayou Cajun while he did it, especially if he’d had a bad day.

His idea of bad day? It involves sucker nests, flamethrowers, support just short of heavy artillery, and usually a lot of screaming. Or, you know, Sunday at about eleven at the health-food store, when the church crowd gets out and he’s there looking for colloidal silver.

I wasn’t swearing. I was screaming as the hex hit the thing, the feathers turned to scraping little wires all over my body, and the shower coughed. Water sprayed in every direction, and I heard shouting. Boy voices, oddly muffled and far away.

So someone had noticed I was getting eaten by tentacles and red fog in here. That was good. But I was naked.

The fog swirled. The hex struck true, tearing away a bit of it I hadn’t exactly seen. It looked like a fist-sized blood clot, turning and splattering in midair. More warm water gushed everywhere, including in my face. My fingers snapped back, yanking the hex at the last moment like flicking a wet towel to snap someone’s unsuspecting backside, and the clot was whipped smartly aside. It screamed as it tore away, like a rabbit under the claws of a hawk, and the sound drilled through my head until I thought my teeth would shatter.

My knees slipped on tile. The water was a couple inches deep and rising, and little bits of the fog-thing rained down with sickening wet thumps. Tentacles plopped free, bleeding fog and thin red fluid. It sounded like wet hamburger being dropped onto sheet metal and smelled like the worst garbage dump in the world. I actually considered throwing up as I slumped, trembling, in the corner. The showerhead was sputtering, twisted and eaten as if it’d been sprayed with acid and blowtorched.

The little bits of fog-thing were a lot more substantial than they should have been. Ivory teeth clinked down, and tentacles I hadn’t seen. I’d hit it just right, thank God.

I huddled there with the knife, shaking, and waited for whatever came next.

CHAPTER NINE

“Drbarnak,” Hiro’s voice bounced oddly off the tiles. “The larval form could have been in here for up to a month, gathering strength. A parting gift from our Red Queen, perhaps?”

Red Queen. He meant Anna. It didn’t seem her style, though.

“Perhaps.” Christophe shifted his weight. I could see his boots as he leaned back against the door of a changing stall in the girls’ locker room. They’d handed dry clothing over the top of the door while they cleaned everything up out there. I heard murmurs, someone muttering a sharp command. “Or an opportunist. Impossible to tell.”

Hiro had about as many questions as I did. “How did she fight it off?”

“I don’t know yet.” Finely leashed impatience. I knew Christophe well enough to hear it, if not in his tone, then in the way he moved against the stall door. “She was . . . upset.”

Upset? I’d been about ready to stab whoever came for me. It took Christophe two towels and a few minutes of gentle talking to get me out of my crouch in the stall, and I refused to give up the knife.

He looked like he understood. Wrapped me in the towels, sent someone for dry clothes, and whisked me off to a changing stall to dry off and calm down.

All this, after I’d been a total ass to him. It kind of made me like him more. But it was confusing.

Hiro wasn’t taking the understatement as a hint. “As well she should be. This makes ten attempts on her li —”

“Shut up.” Christophe actually jerked away from the door, all his weight on the balls of his feet like he was going to throw a punch.

I pulled my damp hair out from the T-shirt’s collar. It was hard to get dressed with my hands shaking like I had the palsy, like old Mrs. Hatfield—Gran’s closest neighbor, back in the long ago. “Ten what?” The words echoed, a little more shrill than I intended. “Hiro? Ten what?”

“Attempts on your life, Milady. Since the unpleasantness with . . . Milady.” True to form, he loaded up the last word with such sarcastic spite that there was no question who he was talking about. He used the same word for me and for Anna, but he actually sounded respectful when he referred to me.

I was taking notes on how he did that.

“Hiro.” Christophe, all the warning in the world in that one simple word. “There’s no need to—”

Oh, hell no. “I’ll say there’s a need.” It was kind of a relief to feel something other than queasy, shaky terror. Irritation felt like I had some sort of control over the situation. “What kind of attempts are we talking about here?”

“The standard. Anything you might expect, given a svetocha to protect. Assassins, traps, one particularly inelegant attempt by a team of strictly human mercenaries—” There was a scraping sound, and Hiro stopped talking. Christophe’s feet hadn’t moved, but I could just see him staring down the other djamphir, one elegant hand closing into a fist.

I hastily buttoned up my jeans and unlocked the door. My hands had stopped shaking, but I still felt a little weird. It had taken four towels to scrub myself dry, mostly because I kept seeing traces of red on me and rubbing hard until my skin hurt. “Wait a second—wait. Jesus, Christophe. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“There was no need to worry you.” He gave me a once-over, blue eyes dark and thoughtful. “Most of them were of little account. And you are well-watched now.”

Yeah, if you’re following me even when I run with the wulfen, maybe. I guess. Something inside me was trying to tell me to calm down. It didn’t sound like Dad’s voice, which was probably good.

I didn’t think I could stand that, even inside my own head.

Behind him, a group of older djamphir students were mopping up the flooded locker room. It looked like someone had set off an M80 full of red food coloring. Some of the tiles were cracked as well as discolored, and one of the tubs—the one closest the door, the one I never used—was draining. It looked like an almighty-big thing had busted out of it, breaking tile and shattering its edges, bleeding red everywhere. Another group, this one of wulfen students, had shovels and wheelbarrows and were carting Jell-O-like red tentacles out. Their faces were all set in that particular way that tells you someone’s smelling something nasty. I didn’t blame them. The thing reeked like old copper and something I’d only smelled in one or two places along the Gulf—when the sea itself starts to rot offshore and mist rolls in. A salty, decomposing reek that crawls into your clothes after a few hours and is damn hard to wash out even with hot water and borax.