Defiance

to let anyone know where I was until I wanted them to know. So I walked, and I tried to stay out of sight as much as possible. It was amazingly easy, with the aspect tingling every time someone glanced at me and instinct moving under my skin, telling me in clear radio bursts when to move and when to stop and wait.

I walked the whole way to my first stop. I barely noticed the scenery, because the rage inside me made the twilight crowds smell like . . . Well, let’s just say the problem of keeping my mouth shut had never been so simple or complex all at the same time.

Night had fallen fully by the time I turned a Brooklyn corner and saw the suddenly–familiar) street brick apartment houses marching all the way down and the black bags of trash piled all along the curb. It looked just the same as it had years ago, and a moment of homesickness crawled up my throat, displacing the rage for a second.

The little bodega on the corner looked the same, too. Red and yellow, packs of gum and cartons of cigarettes stacked neatly, crowding around a man with a shiny bald head and a red plaid shirt instead of the spare white- haired woman with a breath of weird on her who used to be in the window when I’d been here with Augie. The pizza place I’d been at with Nat and the wulfen just a short while ago wasn’t far from here, either. It was nice to find my navigation-fu was still strong.

I ducked into the alley, took a deep breath, and stared at the blank brick walls. Trash drifted in corners, the Dumpsters were overflowing, and the reek almost choked me before I shut it away. Which was easy to do, with the aspect so close to the surface.

The fire escape was no problem, and I even managed to do it quietly. The entire apartment building thrummed with sounds of habitation—everyone was home from work, and sleeping or doing whatever it is people do in apartments at night. I reached the roof and hopped down, taking my bearings even before my sneakers hit the weird, gritty surface.

A cool spring breeze skimmed across the rooftop, other buildings clustering around bouncing the wind in odd directions. It lifted one of my curls, brushed it against my cheek, and I caught a fading, flaring drift of familiar scent. The touch woke up inside my head again, a sudden vivid mental image of Augustine slipping across this same rooftop, his yellow hair combed back and his jacket open, sliding a gun back into its holster. Moving too swift and sure to be anything but djamphir.

I found myself silently stepping across the roof, too, until I reached the weird three-sided gap between buildings. Augie’s kitchen window only looked out on blank brick in this triangle of forgotten city space, and he’d made me look out the window so I could see the hand- and footholds. It was ridiculously easy to climb down and jimmy the window open—I knew just where to press.

Oh, e w w w. Augie, yuck. Something smelled. Like rotting food, and a particular sharpish undertone. I almost got hung up in the window, the twin hilts of the malaika awkward while I was crouching, but then I slid inside and hopped down from the counter.

His kitchen was an unholy mess. I’ve seen vampire destruction before, but each time it’s . . . well, incredible. The cabinet doors were busted, the fridge blown open like someone had stuffed dynamite in it, and the smell of rotting exhaled from both there and the kitchen garbage, which had been upended. The dishes were all broken.

Jesus. I wrinkled my nose, peeked out into the living room. His plasma TV was busted all to hell, the couch was shredded, but the wall with the front door was curiously unharmed. Had they come in through the window? Had he been attacked after I called him from the Dakotas? He hadn’t said anything about his apartment being busted.

The cache was in the bedroom, which wasn’t damaged much. The narrow single bed I’d slept on was ripped up, the antique dresser sledgehammered to bits and vomiting up clothes, and the closet door reduced to matchsticks. Fortunately I could get one of the wrecked closet doors aside, and I pulled out some of Augie’s familiar plaid shirts and found bare carpet. I pressed in the right place; there was a click! and a square of carpeted floor rose.

It hadn’t been rifled. Thank God.

Silver-grain ammo and a spare gun—a serviceable 9mm, basic Schola armory issue.

Thought-provoking, but it was gear and I took it.

I took that and a clip-on holster, emptied the blue bag full of cash, and stowed it in my emergency bag—a canvas messenger number I’d managed to sew a false bottom into in between training these past weeks. Most of the cash went under the flap, but I did up a few rolls for stashing in pockets and in the top of the bag, too, my fingers moving with habitual ease.

I took as much ammo as I could carry without clinking, stuffing clips into the pockets of Graves’s long dark coat, too. There was a spare Medikit in there too, a homemade one that held penicillin and other stuff as well as a stack of hypodermic needles in shockfoam.

“Oh, Augie,” I whispered.

It’s bad manners to clean out another hunter’s cache, but I didn’t have a choice.

A sudden ringing made me jump. My heart leapt like a fish pulled from water, and one of my fangs pricked my lower lip. I tasted the copper sweetness of my own blood before swallowing, hard, and taking a deep breath.

It was the phone.

I went back to the cache. I took another city map and a couple glass ampoules of what had to be holy water. Hey, better safe than sorry. The phone shrilled four times, then I heard a click and a whir.

It was just like Augustine not to have voice mail. He had a great plasma TV and only watched black-and- white movies on it, too.

“Leave a message.” A thin growl, Augie sounding scary as possible. A long static- laden pause, and a beep.

I jumped again when he spoke.

“Dru, kochana, if you are there, pick up the phone.”

Christophe. I clipped the holster on with shaking hands. How much time did I have? Goddamn him being so smart. How would he guess?

“Dru. Pick up. You’re in terrible danger.” He sounded frantic, and I could hear a murmur behind him. A faint thopping, like a helicopter.

Oh, this is so not even funny. I loaded the gun, chambered a round. The sound was very loud in the hush. How had Augie’s neighbors not heard vampires in here? But maybe that’s the big city for you. Nobody in anyone else’s business, everyone taking care of himself, and devil take the hindmost.

“Whatever you think, whatever you’ve been told . . . Dru, please. Please. Pick up. Let me explain.”

Explain? Oh, yeah. Sure. “Not fucking likely, Christophe,” I muttered. Here I was like an idiot, talking to an answering machine that couldn’t even hear me. I slid the gun into the holster, checked the cache one more time. The touch tingled faintly inside my head.

“Please, Dru. Please. Pick up. Pick up the phone, kochana, milna, skowroneczko moja, little bird, please—”

The machine beeped and cut him off. I let out a shaky exhale, checked my watch. I had a whole night to keep everyone off my trail, find the mansion in Queens, and lay low until dawn. But first I had to get out of here.

I didn’t want to use the front door, and I didn’t want to use the roof again. You should never ever use the same exit as entrance path, especially if you’re visiting what is almost certainly what Dad would call a “compromised location.” His other term for it started with “cluster” and ended up rhyming with “duck.”

So it was up on the bed, sliding the window open—it looked down onto the street, and I’d spent so many mornings that whole month Dad was gone laying on the bed and craning to get a glimpse of the sky—while the phone rang again.

I checked the street—clear. Knocked the screen out with one well-placed kick.

“Dru!” Christophe was yelling into the phone now. “Dru, please, please pick up!”

Time to go. I launched myself feetfirst through the window as the ghost of wax- orange danger candy filled my mouth.