Reckoning

A
STRANGE ANGELS
NOVEL

Praise for the Strange Angels series:

‘This cracking read is for youngsters and adults alike’
Sun

‘Dru Anderson is the toughest teen gal since Buffy hung up her stake!’
Mizz

‘An elegantly written thriller’
Bliss

‘It actually is a supernatural thriller. A very good one . . . If you prefer supernatural thrillers with a side of romance, as opposed to romance with a side of supernatural thrillers,
Strange Angels
is the perfect book for you’ Bookbag

‘I would give
Strange Angels
a 4/5 and I can’t wait to read
Betrayals
, the sequel, which is coming out in November!’ Chicklish

‘She has managed to craft an excellent story. Her teen characters are well written and believable and she weaves suspense and horror together well’ Teen Librarian

‘A heart-stopping first book in a thrilling series’ Betty Bookmark

‘A stellar new series that will spellbind readers and leave them begging for more’ Compulsive Reader blog

‘Strange Angels is Buffy and Supernatural thrown together . . . St.Crow’s writing is sharp and contemporary, with enough sarcasm to make even the snarkiest teen appreciate Dru’s voice’ Wondrous Reads blog

The Strange Angels series

STRANGE ANGELS
BETRAYALS
JEALOUSY
DEFIANCE
RECKONING

A
STRANGE ANGELS
NOVEL

L
ILI
S
T
. C
ROW

First published in 2011 by the Penguin Group
Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Quercus
55 Baker St
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © Lili St. Crow, 2011

The moral right of Lili St. Crow to be
identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Design and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available
from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 85738 189 7

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
businesses, organizations, places and events are
either the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or
locales is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

For Christa Hickey, true blue
.

Thanks again to Mel Sanders, Christa Hickey, Miriam Kriss, and Jessica Rothenberg. Special mention must go to Lea Day, Bookweasel and Research Helper extraordinaire as well as Hutch and Bogna. (Any errors are mine alone.) Last but not least: You, dear Reader. Let me, once again, thank you in the way we both like best
.

Let me tell you a story
. . .

People like us don’t give up
.

—
Sixten Zeiss

Stealing a car
was easy. The hard part was putting up with the whining.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Graves muttered for the fiftieth time. I kept the speed steady, an even fifty-five. It was an older red Subaru sedan, and I’d checked for insurance papers before we’d taken it. Someone would be inconvenienced, but not completely out of luck.

When you’re running from the king of the vampires, you can’t afford to be
too
choosy. But I was glad I’d been able to avoid being a complete douche.

“Well, if you’d like to hike out there on foot, be my guest.” I didn’t reach for the volume knob to drown him out, but it was close. Little Richard wailed softly from the speakers, robbed of all his sass. The all-wheel drive would be nice when we started to hit the hills. “Or if you want to be caught without wheels when the vampires find us.”

When. Not if. Because they’re going to
. After all, I’d stabbed the
closest thing they had to a king through the heart and escaped. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that will piss a monster off.

It was a partly sunny late-spring midafternoon and we were on the freeway. I actually missed the food back at the Schola Prima. At least it had been pretty fresh, and there’d been plenty of it, brought up on a tray each evening as the Schola woke and the
djamphir
started getting ready for another night of fun and games learning to hunt suckers.

I would groan at having to get up, blue-eyed Nathalie would laugh, and the night would start with breakfast and a hot shower while she set my mother’s room to rights. And I would secretly feel glad not to be alone.

Now I just felt empty and nauseated. Plus my head hurt, and even though I was exhausted, I hadn’t been able to sleep for more than a few broken hours. I’d been too busy jerking into wakefulness every time the cheap hotel room creaked, or a car backfired, or the boys’ breathing changed. It didn’t help that the motel’d had paperthin walls, either.

But options are sometimes limited when you’re running for your life.

Ash lay curled up in the backseat. He’d been asleep since we hit the city limits, snuggled up like he didn’t have a care in the world. I’d managed to get him mostly cleaned up, but he was still barefoot and greasy-haired. He’d put away even more food than Graves this morning, and that was saying something. We’d spent seventy bucks at a Denny’s off the freeway for breakfast, then stopped at a McDonald’s and loaded up. Cheap food, but both of them needed the calories. A werwulf and a
loup-garou
would heal up in a matter of hours, but only if they had enough food to fuel the metabolic burn. So both of them chowed down, and they were looking pretty pink by now.

The greasy paper and wrappings went in an already-f rest-stop trash bin four hours ago, and I hoped we couldn’t be tracked from them.

Neither Graves nor Ash knew how to drive, so it was all on me. Driving wears on a body, Dad always said. It was why he taught me to spell him as soon as my feet could reach the pedals.

Silence, broken only by Little Richard going to town like he wanted to reach through the speakers and shake me for keeping him turned down. My hands ached, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel.

“I didn’t mean that.” Graves hunched in the passenger seat, as far away from me as he could possibly get. He was pale under his half-Asian coloring. The dark brown roots of his hair showed as he ran a hand back through it, wincing as he hit tangles. “I just meant, shit. I can’t believe I’m out.”

I can’t believe you got kidnapped in the first place
. I sighed, easing off the gas to drift behind a red semi creeping in the right-hand lane. Big fluffy white clouds sailed across the sky, but the spring sunshine was enough to make it hot under the dome of the car. My window was half-open, and the roar of the slipstream sent me bullets of concentrated scent. Fresh-cut grass, car exhaust, blossoming things, tree pollen—you name it, I smelled it.

It was distracting. Especially with the car full of the reek of wulf and
loup-garou
, neither of them too fresh and one of them, at least, nervous as hell. Next hotel we used would
have
to have a decent shower. I reeked of
nosferat
, fear, and cinnamon buns, not to mention old dried rusty blood.

The fear and the blood, well, I could deal with that. But the spice scent was just a reminder of how much things had changed. I’d changed. I’d finally “bloomed” and become toxic to suckers.

Not that anyone was noticing.

I rolled my window down a little more. Suddenly remembered something. “You need smokes?”

“Nah. Not yet.” Graves stared out his window, running his coppery fingers over the armrest like he was searching for a way out. “Come on, Dru. We can talk about it, right?”

Talk about what? Where would I even begin?
Hey, dude, sorry I didn’t come rescue you sooner. Sorry you got bit by the boy in the backseat when he was still a slavering wulfen broken to Sergej’s will and trying to kill me, back in the Dakotas when you were living in a mall and I had to shoot my dad because he was a zombie. Sorry I dragged you into this. Sorry I didn’t tell you what had happened in the gym with the Queen Bitch of the Schola; maybe if I had you might not have run off and got kidnapped. Oh, and while you were being tortured, I was kissing the guy who hates you most
.

Yeah. Where to begin?

And I totally felt like an idiot for hoping he’d notice that I’d bloomed. I looked different now. Wider in the hips and a little bigger in the chest, and my face was heart–shaped like my mother’s instead of long like my father’s. My hair had streaked itself with blonde like I’d gotten a salon highlighting job, sleek curls instead of frizz—and the shape of my mouth had changed too.

Seeing a stranger’s face in a mirror is like vanishing. For a moment you’re not sure who or what or where you really are. Maybe Graves just didn’t notice.

How could you not notice, though? And if he did, he could’ve said something. Even
hey, gee, nice hair
.

But me expecting him to pay attention to a little thing like that right after he’d escaped a hole where he was being tortured by vampires wasn’t exactly fair, was it.

Yeah. Fair. Nothing about this is fair
.

No. There really wasn’t anything to talk about right now. Nothing I felt like saying, or things I felt like saying that wouldn’t be kosher.

So I settled for prevarication. “I dunno.” I checked my blind spot, hit the blinker, and gave it some gas. We slid by the limping candyred semi like we were on rails. The sun came out for a moment just as we crested a hill, and the scenery was breathtaking. Pleated green hills rolled away, Pennsylvania opening up with late-spring color. It was probably gorgeous around here in the fall, too. I eased the accelerator down another tick.

Unfortunately, there was also a highway patrolman in front of the semi. We breezed by him; I swung back into the right lane and kept an eye on the rearview.
Don’t act nervous. Not any more nervous than anyone else around a cop. You’ve got ID; you memorized the address on the paperwork
. The
touch
throbbed inside my head, bruised and overworked, echoing like it was in a cathedral instead of a bedroom. The little tickle that warned me of danger was working overtime, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I was exhausted and hungry no matter how much fast food I took down, because I’d bloomed, or because we’d fought off Sergej and were still alive.

The world just seemed so much bigger today. And to top it all off, my jeans weren’t fitting right. Because the shape of my hips had changed. If I crouched down, I’d have a plumber’s crack, dammit. I hoped my T-shirt was long enough to cover it until I could figure out what size I was now.

My right hand played with my mother’s silver locket, picking it up and dropping it against my breastbone. The metal was only skinwarm. Not throbbing with heat or icy cold, thank God. Not warning me.

Graves shifted restlessly. “Cop.” Oddly breathless. “If he—”

“He’s not gonna.” I tried to sound sure. “We’re a touch under the speed limit; he’s got no reason to run our plate; we probably haven’t even been reported yet. Chillax.”

“I can’t believe this.” He moved again, and I wanted to tell him to sit still. He was broadcasting “guilty” and “nervous.”

But we pulled away from the fuzz; they weren’t interested in us. The patrolman seemed to be pacing the semi for some reason, and I forgot him as soon as he dropped out of sight behind us on the highway’s curves.