Defiance

thing inside me quivered, too. What had I just done?

Shanks moaned, stirring. “You broke my nuts.”

So that was what my elbow had hit. “Sorry.” My voice cracked. My throat was sore, too, and the bloodhunger rasped unhappily at the back of my throat. I knew I was lying on him, but I couldn’t get up the gumption to move.

“Mother Moon,” Nat whispered. I’d never heard her sound actually shocked before. It was a revelation. “Oh, Mother Moon.”

“And Father Fucking Sky, she broke my nuts.” Shanks curled up; I slid bonelessly down to the stone floor. The claw marks were sharp and fresh, one of them scratching against my wrist as I lay there. It took all the energy I had left to turn my head. My vision cleared. The blackness retreated, bit by bit, like a movie’s first scene opening up.

The long pale shape curled in on itself like Shanks. A muscled back, three jagged scars swiping down across the skin. He was fish-belly white, with a shock of dark hair. It looked like it hadn’t been cut for a while. He shuddered, naked on cold stone, and when his head moved, I saw the streak of white at his temple. It reached all the way back like a skunk stripe now, and the white hairs had a silvery cast.

Like moonlight.

“Holy shit,” I breathed.

Muscle moved under that too-white skin as he shook. He coughed, a terrible wet retching sound, and I realized he was crying.

That somehow gave me the strength to move. I rolled, awkwardly, one of my sneaker soles skritching against the floor. Managed to make it to hands and knees. That was as far as I could get. I was shaking like I’d just run five miles without letup. My bladder was near to bursting, and I wished I’d taken the time to brush my teeth. Blood slicked the left side of my face, hot and maddening, I licked my lips and wished I hadn’t because I could taste it, a flood of red and jumbled images of my own face swirling through me.

Dammit. The torn-open spot inside of me quivered again, like it wasn’t quite sure what to do with itself. I had a hazy idea it was going to start hurting pretty soon, but I was too tired to care.

“Ash,” I croaked. “Ash.”

He twitched. The sobbing was like a toddler’s, messy and huge.

I couldn’t get up. So I crawled.

“Dru! You’re bleeding—” Nat scrambled away from the door. Shanks let out another yelp; I heard her fall. She landed on him as well. He was really winning the lottery today.

“Ow w w W W W W!” Shanks yelled again, and I reached Ash.

His skin was so soft. I grabbed his shoulder, and he curled even tighter around himself, hugging his knees. I couldn’t get my arm under him, but I threw my left one over and hugged as hard as I could. He lay shivering, and the sobs were pouring out of him hard enough to hurt my ribs, but I held on. Graves’s earring, in my left ear, lay against my cheek. It was ice-cold, and so was my mother’s locket, but both rapidly warmed as I hugged him, breathing into his hair. He smelled like outside at midnight, one of those clear-cold nights with a full moon where ice makes every edge stand out razor sharp. Under that was the tang of boy, and dirt. He smelled a little . . . unwashed.

But he was human. He was boy-shaped again. I didn’t know what it meant, unless it meant something fantastic. All this time he’d been trying to change back, and he finally did it.

“Dru?” Nathalie sounded scared half to death. “Milady?”

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I croaked through my rasping, bloodhunger-dry throat. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

I even believed it for a little while.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“There were reclamation teams in the twenties.” Shanks eased gingerly down on the satin window seat. “Casualties were high, prolly ’cause the djamphir wouldn’t lend support. It was just us. We thought that with enough food and quiet, we could maybe bring’em back.”

“Did it work?” I held the ice pack to the left side of my forehead. I didn’t even know what had opened up the gash on my head, just above my eyebrow. Midafternoon sun fell through the skylights, and I heard Nat’s murmur from the bathroom. She and Dibs were trying to coax a wild-eyed Ash into getting his blood pressure taken. Dibs insisted, right after he insisted on disinfecting the slice on my head and butterfly-bandaging it, then clapping the ice pack on.

Dibs does not mess around when it comes to patching people up. It’s weird, because the rest of the time he can barely stammer out a hello without blushing.

I wished I knew what had opened up the cut on my head, though. And I really wished I could heal faster than human right now, instead of when I bloomed.

Benjamin leaned against the door, his arms folded. “You should not have gone down there without me,” he muttered again, glaring out from under his dark emo fringe. As usual, he looked too handsome to be real. Pretty much all djamphir boys do, except Leon. “Reynard is going to kill me.”

The torn-open spot inside me still felt empty. But I could deal. I shook my head, managed to focus again. “So we don’t tell him.” I turned my attention back to Shanks. “Did it work?”

The long dark wulfen shrugged. He was pale under his tan, and he looked like moving hurt. Apparently both Nat and I had nailed him pretty good. “Not anytime I ever heard of. Dad doesn’t talk about it much, except when he gets mad and he thinks the cubs are in bed.”

“I can’t hide this from Reynard.” Benjamin was talking like Shanks wasn’t even here. I guess coming out of his door to find Nat dragging me and Shanks, and Dibs dragging a newly-boy Broken into my room, blood all over me and my hands shaking, had not put him in a good mood. “He’ll kill me.”

I pushed the ice pack more firmly against my forehead. “He didn’t tell me the whole Council was going out this morning. Fair’s fair.” Looked back over at Shanks in the window, who had hunched his shoulders and was staring at me. “But there had to have been something, right? Some method? Or maybe we just lucked out. I don’t even know what we did.”

“What you did.” Shanks was having none of this “we” business. “You did that.”

“I don’t even know how.” I could guess, though. At least some. That pressure on the other end of the chain —that had probably been Sergej. His will.

His master’s call. I shivered. Had Ash been feeling that pull the whole damn time? Fighting it off?

No wonder he’d gone nuts every night. I would’ve, too.

Right now I had an uneasy idea that that cut on my head was Sergej’s doing, at whatever distance. That was nastily thought-provoking, not to mention nightmarish. I could’ve lost an eye or something. Plus, I’d hurt something inside me by pulling so hard. I wished everyone would shut up for a bit so I could probe at the big raw empty thing inside my head, figure out what was going on. It wasn’t like the time Christophe drank my blood, where the touch had fled me and the entire world had looked two-dimensional. This was more like . . . some covering I hadn’t even known was hanging over me had been ripped away just like a scab, and I was raw underneath it. The touch still echoed inside my head, but faint and far away, like it was in a much bigger room than it was used to.

Like before it had been showing me the inside of a bedroom, but now it was echoing inside a cathedral.

“Hey! Hey!” Nathalie almost yelled. “Calm down!”

I was off the bed in a heartbeat. Benjamin let out a blurting sound, but I got to the bathroom door before him, despite my legs shaking like they wanted to walk off in the opposite direction.

Ash was, of all things, crouching on the toilet, clutching the heavy blanket from his room around his shoulders. The red and yellow plaid cloth looked too bright to be real. Dibs was holding the blood-pressure cuff, and