Defiance

pressed the button and let some of the curls hanging from my updo fall over it.

Noise-canceling earphones are a blessing. I just wished he’d given me two of them. Or earplugs. Earplugs would’ve been just jim-dandy.

“We read you, Dru.” Christophe’s voice, as crisp as if he was standing right next to me, overriding the attack of the music. Now it was some retro whitewashing of an eighties song, about a girl named Eileen and how she needed to come on, over thunking, thudding bass. “We have a visual. Primary team, move in.”

This was, he’d told me, the most dangerous part. Before the other djamphir infiltrated the building, while I was still dancing. I was just about to break free of the crowd and head for the exit when another bright shard of hate lanced through my head.

I drew back instinctively, and the exit I’d been planning to take suddenly had a flicker of movement around it. “Shit.” I wasn’t even aware I’d said it.

“What?” Christophe didn’t sound worried, but I could almost see him sitting at a sleek black desk in Mission Central at the Schola Prima on the Upper West Side, tense, his head cocked and the aspect slicking his hair down and back, the fangs peeping out from under his upper lip. His fingers would be poised over a slim black keyboard, and his blue eyes would be cold and far away, completely closed off. He would be coldly handsome, and I would almost feel . . .

No, I was never afraid of him. Not really. But it was easy to see how I could be, when he looked like that.

I had other problems right now. “Primary exit’s blocked. I’m using secondary.”

“Dru—”

But I was already moving. It wasn’t a mistake, because the flickers at the door resolved into three teenage- looking males. One blond and two dark, all of them cute enough to get a second glance from any reasonable girl. If she was smart, the girl would see the hard edges of their smiles, or the nasty glitter in their dark eyes, or even just the way they moved. And she would run like hell.

But normal people don’t look too closely. They glance, slot you into whatever hole they think you fit in, and bebop along right into the jaws of whichever slice of nasty is looking to feed. Dad and August used to argue over whether or not people wanted to know about the Real World, about the things that went bump in the night. Neither of them ever won the argument.

Me? I’d had nothing to say. I’d just been a kid.

I was still following the plan. I headed for the secondary exit, Christophe muttering in my ear as he sent the secondary and tertiary teams to their backup positions and gave the primary new orders. There was an odd echo to his voice, as if the signal was getting bounced around or he was outside.

I wished he was a little closer than the Schola, to tell the truth. But he was my control for this run, and Mission Central was where he belonged, coordinating. I drew in a nice deep breath, trying to force my galloping pulse to slow down. We were about to serve the vampires hunting the rave scene a really bad plate of kickass, Christophe had finally judged me competent enough to work inside a very limited seek-destroy operation, and the thought was comforting. Like I was doing something real, for once, instead of just training. Even if this was the closest thing to safe you could get when dealing with vampires.

That was when everything went bad. Because another quick movement near the secondary exit caught my eye, and the bass hit a smashing, rollicking rhythm. Everyone raised their arms, the crowd’s mood turning on a dime into a breathless anxiety under all the roller-coaster fun, and I realized the secondary was a no-go too. My scarf fluttered a bit, seed pearls rasping against my suddenly damp neck.

Unfortunately, I’d just stepped out of the mass of normal kids and into a clear space, a sort of walkway for anyone who needed to escape the dance floor. I should have kept moving as if I was heading for the bathroom. When you freeze and stare at a rave, you stick out.

The lead vampire at the secondary exit lifted his head. His eyes shone flatly, the black of the hunting aura eating the irises and spreading into the whites, oddly like oily rainbows on wet pavement. The older ones have those black oily eyes pretty much all the time, but it takes a while for the younger ones to develop it.

He sniffed, aristocratic nostrils flaring, dark curls falling over his forehead.

Oh shit. “Secondary exit blocked,” I muttered. “Switching to Plan C.”

“Wait.” It wasn’t often I heard Christophe sound baffled. “What’s plan—”

The curly-headed vampire stopped sniffing. His head moved a little, and he looked right at me. His lips moved, and I knew what he was saying.

I swear to God I heard him, too, a whisper bypassing my ears and sliding right into the center of my brain.

“Svetocha.”

The name for what I was—part vampire, part human girl, poisonous to suckers and all kick ass once I bloom and finish getting trained.

If I survived tonight, that is.

I swallowed hard, wished I hadn’t. “Plan C is where I improvise,” I said through the sudden thickness of danger candy, and bolted.

CHAPTER TWO

You’d think I’d feel good about being able to turn a Chelsea warehouse rave into complete and utter chaos in under fifteen seconds.

I didn’t.

I went over the bar in a flying leap, my boots barely kissing its glass surface. There was no liquor here, just overpriced bottles of tap water and energy drinks in shiny cans. The bartender, a beefy guy who was probably pretty upset at being stuck here instead of at a real bar, held a baseball bat the size of a small tree. He was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear him over the fire alarm and I was already past him anyway. The crush toward the doors set off by my yanking the jury-rigged alarm—I hadn’t actually been sure it would work—might keep the suckers off me for a few more moments.

Instead of hunting helpless humans tonight, they were going to be hunting me. I was hoping I wasn’t as helpless as I felt right at the moment.

Dad’s voice, showing up like it always did when I needed to figure out what to do next, and fast. Don’t think about that, Dru-girl. Thinkin’ slows you down. Move.

They had to have somewhere to bring things in behind the bar. I saw the door and dove for it, a splintering crash behind me audible through the wall of noise masquerading as music plus the whoop of the alarm.

The suckers had hit the bar. For a moment I wondered and worried about the bartender, but I couldn’t for long. I was too busy.

“What are you doing?” Christophe sounded calm. But I needed all my breath for running. “Never mind, kochana. I can hear you breathing. All right.”

Hearing him, cool and collected in my ear, was comforting. I always work better with someone telling me what to do, I guess. At least when there were vampires behind me. It was like that when I was with Dad, too— with him doing the directing, I could just calm down and focus.

The door behind the bar flew open and I piled down groaning wooden stairs. The noise decreased, partly because the migraine attack they called “music” was cut short on a squeal of feedback. I found myself in a kind-of basement. Concrete walls, crates of bottled water, other shapes I couldn’t identify.

They have to bring the supplies in somewhere, or else I just trapped myself. But I saw another set of rickety wide stairs and a ramp going up to a wide metal double-door thing, the kind you walk over on the sidewalk, on your way to somewhere else.

At least, people walk over them without thinking twice. I try not to. You never can tell.

It took me half a second to see it was padlocked.

Shit. But I was going too fast to care. And behind me, I heard a high glassy scream of rage that went straight through my head.

A nosferat’s hunting cry. It speared through my temples and twisted, hard.