Defiance

instead looked like beasts with their hindquarters raised, ready to spring. My breath plumed in suddenly-frozen air, and steam lifted from Graves’s shoulders in tiny finger curls.

Sergej examined all of us. When he opened his mouth, his pleasant tenor was even creepier than a horror- movie baritone would’ve been.

“The sweetest of all are the little birds. Hello again, Lefevre’s child.” He grinned, the spaces between his words just the same as Christophe’s. And faintly, a little bit like Augustine’s when he forgot his half-Brooklyn, half- Bronx Bugs Bunny and got a little tipsy, swearing in gutter Polish while he laughed with my father, bottles clinking against glasses and—

NO! The touch swelled inside my head, battering aside the pressure of his eyes. The place inside myself where the touch had been ripped loose echoed in a far bigger space than it usually did, a huge stone cathedral instead of the quiet little room where Gran’s spinning wheel sat by the stove.

I dragged the lamp base toward me, my stiff fingers creaking as the bar actually bent in my grasp. Shadows shifted crazily as the light and the shade both moved, and I swear to God Sergej actually leaned back a little on his heels, his hourglass pupils flaring and shrinking.

For half a second, he looked surprised. Anna shot me an indecipherable glance, and I knew what she was going to do before she did it. I opened my mouth to yell no, no don’t, but she didn’t listen. She launched herself at Sergej, screaming like a banshee, and Graves shoved me back against the wall.

Sergej just disappeared. Or, no. He moved so fast he literally blinked through space, one moment standing there, the next turned aside. One slim strong hand flashed out. A sharp high thwap smacked the walls, and Anna flew. She hit the paneling above the bed with a sickening crack and slid down, landed in a tangle of red silk and splayed pale limbs.

How did I hold him off before? I searched for the heat and balm of the aspect, but it was hard. What a time for it to get even more unreliable.

She lay slumped there, and I grabbed at Graves’s shoulder, my fingers sinking into bruised flesh. “Don’t. Don’t.”

Because the growl was rippling out from him in concentric rings of bloodlust, and a crackle ran through him. Loup-garou don’t get hairy, but they do bulk up when they get angry. The bruises glared, and some of the marks on his back broke open. Blood slid down his skin, slipping between the flickers and valleys of muscle definition, and the hunger hit the map of veins inside my body hard, pulling like it intended to rip them free. My fangs slid out, my jaw aching, and that syrup-smell of baking cinnamon rolls drifted up, like those places in the mall that sell big sticky piles of sugar rush. They smell so good, but I can’t even go near them without my teeth aching and my blood sugar crashing in sympathy.

The aspect blazed free, like all it needed was the bloodhunger to wake it up. I felt it move through me like a storm front on the plains, one you can maybe outrun if you keep the accelerator mashed down and the radio turned up.

And Sergej backed up. Just a half step, but still. He cocked his head, those curls falling over his forehead and that proud nose wrinkling, and I wondered for a brief second how the hell Christophe’s mother—she had to have been human—had ever not noticed how utterly alien he looked. Especially when he snarled, his lip lifting and the fangs lengthening, upper ones touching his chin and the hiss filling his chest.

The door creaked. I pulled Graves back, my fingers slipping in blood and sweat and whatever else was coating him. He leaned forward, tense, but didn’t shake me off. The thin tendrils of blood running down his back looked black in the uncertain light, and the lampshade swung as I dragged it. I couldn’t see where the cord ended, and if I yanked it out of the wall, we’d be in here.

With Sergej.

In the dark.

The door swung inward, its hinges giving a squeal that belonged in a bad B movie. Still, it was a relief, because outside in the hall was bright electric light. It speared my eyes like a fork digging through jelly, but I saw a shadow. The touch rang like a gong inside my head, and I knew who it was.

“You agreed,” Leon said quietly. Funny, he sounded just the same. Sarcastic, politely rude, and utterly normal.

“Leon?” His name slipped out. I couldn’t help myself. “Leon, please—”

Sergej’s head half-turned, and he stared at the door. Graves was still growling, and the unhealthy fever in him scorched my fingers. I blinked furiously, swallowing hard against the bloodhunger, its rasp like a cat’s tongue at the back of my throat. The hunger squirmed inside my veins, just looking for a way out, I shoved it down and clapped a lid on it.

Or at least, tried to clap enough of a lid on it that the thin trickles down Graves’s back didn’t smell so goddamn good.

Leon stared from the door. Now that my eyes were adjusted, I could see that even if he sounded okay, he looked like hell. Dark circles ringed his eyes, his fine lank hair was mussed, and he was in the same clothes he’d been wearing however long ago, when he’d waltzed into my room and started convincing me to leap into this trap. One sleeve of his T-shirt was torn, and dark stuff was splashed on his jeans.

It looked like dried blood.

“Our agreement,” Sergej said, enunciating with precision but lisping a little around his fangs, “was provisional.”

Leon smiled. It was a rather gentle smile, and it bared his own fangs. He wasn’t looking at Sergej. He was staring directly at me, his eyes grieving holes. They darkened even through the aspect on him, and Graves’s growl dropped another octave as his shoulders hunched in front of me. More blood slid down his back, and I could tell from the shaking in him that he was working up to something big.

“I delivered, didn’t I?” Leon’s hands curled into fists.

“Any ephialtes could have done the same,” Sergej hissed.

“There’s just one problem.” Leon stared at me, like he was willing me to figure something out. My fingers sank into Graves’s skin, the prickle along my fingertips and the fierce pain in my wrists telling me the claws were sliding free. I didn’t want to make him bleed more, but I was powerless to stop it.

“Problem?” Sergej laughed. It was a horrible sound, wrongly musical, lisping distilled hatred. His tar-black eyes shone. “I see no problem, Leontus Iulius. I see everything as it should be, the disobedient children brought to heel.”

Keep him talking, for Christ’s sake keep him talking! I ran through everything I could possibly do in this situation, came up with nothing that didn’t involve my own gruesome demise. Tried again.

“Except Reynard.” Leon’s smile widened a trifle.

Sergej’s face congested. That’s the only word for it, the twisting up and the color rising from his neck, an ugly flush. I guess vampires can blush; you’d think the way the hemoglobin strips out of their blood would kind of preclude that. Maybe that’s why he looked purplish instead of red.

It was damn ugly.

The touch tingled inside my skull. A fresh wave of bloodhunger pulled on all my veins, and my heart gave a funny leap before starting to pound. Sergej’s purple deepened, if that was possible, and he began to choke.

“Oh, Eleanor,” Leon whispered. “Forgive me.”

And he leapt straight for me.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Things got confused.

I remember jerking on the lamp, metal shrieking as my fingers bit down hard enough to bend it. The plug left the wall with a pop, sparks showered, and the lightbulb shattered as the sudden motion ripped the shade free. A photographer’s flash, then leaping shadows. The lamp actually whistled as I spun it, a sound like a train in the