Reckoning (11 page)

“I don’t have to like your
loup-garou
for you to trust me, do I?” Whispered, his lips softly moving.

I wanted to nod, or shake my head, or something. Couldn’t move. Could barely even breathe. He was so close, and the pulse in his throat called out to me. If I got close enough, if I drove my fangs in and felt his blood scorching my tongue again, would I hear him in my head the same way I heard Anna? Why didn’t I
now
?

He leaned forward, and for one mad moment I thought he was going to kiss me. Instead, he pressed his lips to my forehead and inhaled. A shudder went through him.

“
Moj boze
,” he whispered, his lips moving against my skin. I was shaking too, now. “Thank God you are still breathing.”

Someone knocked at the door. I jumped, Ash twitched, and Christophe was across the room in a heartbeat. He was just so goddamn
fast
. “Relax.” And he was back to sounding amused. “It’s food.”

I opened my fingers while he unlocked the door.

There, in my palm, two diamond studs glittered. I’d left one in my room at the Schola. It must have been how he tracked me, somehow. The other one I’d left on the table in Gran’s house.

Gran’s burning house. Christophe had been inside when they attacked? With Graves, maybe?

I closed my fist up tight. Ash was on his feet now, nose lifted and his eyes settling down, and Graves was deathly quiet in the bathroom.
He could probably hear everything Christophe said to me.

Great. Just . . . great.

I laid the legal pad on the table, suppressed a burp that reeked of bacon. Club sandwiches are pretty standard everywhere you go, and I’d wolfed this one so fast I’d barely tasted it. The french fries were all right, though, when doused with enough ketchup. “This is what I’ve got. Routes, alternate routes, stops to get liquid resources, the works.”

Christophe glanced over it, riffling the pages. “Good work. You’re heading to California?” He hadn’t eaten, but he’d gotten enough food for six people. The bill was going to be sky high.

It was a relief to find something that really wasn’t my problem. It was damn near Christmas, as a matter of fact.

Ash was busy demolishing the last plate of steak and eggs, crouched on the bed. Graves ate a bacon cheeseburger more slowly, each bite carefully chewed, watching us with narrowed eyes. He’d refused to sit at the table, folding himself down with his back braced against the bed closest the door.

I shrugged. “For now, yeah. I know how to run. There’s . . .” I hesitated. “I’m not going back to the Order.”

Christophe shrugged. He said nothing. Just watched me.

Oh, what the hell. I might as well tell him
. “There’s a hunter in Carmel. One of Dad’s contacts. He hunts suckers with his gang. Figured he was the best choice out of all Dad’s friends. I can’t tell which of them were
djamphir
like August, or which would . . . well, I just figure Remy’s safest. Plus he’s all the way across the country, and we didn’t spend long in California any time we were there. We were mostly below the Mason-Dixon. Hell, we spent more time with
August than we did . . .” I swallowed hard.
Plus, if I have to, I can go over the border to Tijuana and points south. Chupacabras and cockroaches and nasty things, but at least it’ll be harder to track me there, and Juan-Raoul will help me
.

It was an effort to keep my mouth shut. I was doing the nervoustalky thing, and that never works out well.

Christophe nodded. “Good thinking. By tomorrow I’ll have more cash and a car that won’t attract suspicion; I’ve already disposed of the other.”

I immediately fastened on that. “We’re without transport tonight? What if—”

“I have a backup plan.” He actually rolled his eyes, a very teenage movement. “Have a little faith in me. Besides, none of the
nosferatu
escaped yesterday. I’m fairly certain we have another night before we’re tracked here.” He flipped back to the beginning of the legal pad, drew the atlas over, and opened it to the page number I had listed next to our first stop.

“You’re sure none of them escaped?” My palms were suspiciously damp, and not just because it was eighty-eight degrees and a hundred percent humidity out there. I’d thought my hair would frizz, but no. The ringlets lay sleek and veined with blonde, though if I braided them back they would slip free. I didn’t even have a piece of string to tie them up with; the one I’d been using before was probably still up in the meadow, lying in the mud.

At least my hair covered up the diamond studs. Yes. I’d put them back in.

Why not? At least Christophe never wavered. He was always the same. Maddening, opaque, kind of creepy because he was so much older and stuck in a teenage body . . . but he never did a 180 on me. I never had to guess whether he liked me or not.

What are you thinking, Dru?

“I’m certain.” He sounded so absolute. What would it be like to be that sure of everything? He never seemed nervous or like he was going to change his mind about me.

“Thanks.” It sounded pale and inadequate even as soon as it left my mouth. “For everything.”

“An honor, and a pleasure.” He didn’t even look up. “How did you escape Sergej?”

I shivered at the name. Ash looked up, watchful. Graves’s shoulders hunched. He stared at his plate instead of me now.

Well, I guess Christophe had to ask. And an explanation was the least I owed him.

My mouth was dry. “Anna . . . she was there. And her Guard. They were all locked up. We . . . Leon was there too. I hit him pretty hard, I stabbed S-Ser—” I couldn’t say the name. Not after the warehouse and that dark little room, where he’d just
appeared
. “I stabbed
him
.”

“With a lamp,” Graves supplied helpfully. “Then we got the hell out of there.”

He didn’t mention me sucking Anna’s blood. He also didn’t mention coming back and shooting the king of the vampires.

Saving my life.

I found out I was twisting my hands together. My teeth tingled faintly, remembering, and I smelled smoke. “Graves came back for me. The whole place was burning. Anna and her Guard, well, they vanished. We were outside, and Ash found us.”

“I should have followed the Silverhead.” Christophe set the atlas down, flipped through the legal pad again. “God knows
he
can find you. Which is a mystery. And he is Broken no longer.”

“That happened before. At the Prima. Right before Leon . . . He showed me . . .” I ran out of words. Pulled my legs up, bracing my
heels on the chair, and hugged my knees.
He made me think you’d handed Graves over to Sergej. Because of me. And I believed it
. “Anyway, I got off the Schola grounds and you know the rest.”

“Some of it.” He kept looking at my handwriting. The pages riffled a little, because a tremor had gone through him. “We’d gone to rescue the
loup-garou
, but it was one of the decoys. You were headed straight for another decoy. It was a neatly laid trap.”

Which brought up another question. “Did you find . . . Is Leon . . .” Yeah, Leon had handed me over to the king of the vampires, and I’d been pretty sure he was dead in that dark little room. So had Graves.

But still. He was
djamphir
, not sucker. I kind of hoped he’d made it out somehow.

“Dead. Or I would have finished him myself. My father fled, gravely wounded. I was convinced you were still alive. Perhaps the Order has finished searching the wreckage for your remains.”

He said it so calmly. The club sandwich was revolving in my stomach. I swallowed hard, trying to convince it to stay down. “Does Bruce think I’m dead too?”

Christophe shrugged. He set the pad down. “It’s almost sundown. I’m going to go make a few preparations. I trust I can ask you to remain here, and you’ll listen?”

I nodded. “Unless more vampires show up.” It tried to be a joke, fell flat. I hugged my knees even tighter. The T-shirt rode up. All my weight was distributed differently. I didn’t even know who I was anymore.

But Christophe looked at me, blue eyes soft and direct. I’d never seen him look at another person that way. Even in the
true-seeins
where he looked at my mother like he wanted to . . .

Kind of like he wanted to eat her. No, that’s the wrong word.
Like he wanted to
consume
her, pull her in and just assimilate her somehow. But he looked at me like he was
seeing
me. Really, truly seeing Dru Anderson, not just the shell I put up for the world.

He pushed his chair back and rose in one fluid motion. “I’ll be back before dark.” He scooped his new bag up and brushed past me. But his hand came down, and he touched my shoulder as he passed.

It was like he’d poured something hot and strong into me. A flush that worked down to my bones instead of staying on my skin like the
aspect
.

He paused at the door. Looked back over his shoulder, and it was as if we were the only two people in the room. “Keep this locked.”

A blast of humid air, the sunlight flooding in as he stepped out onto the walkway, and he was gone. The air conditioning kicked up a notch. Down here in the valley with the concrete, it was approaching the hottest part of the afternoon-into-evening. Up on the ridges there would be some wind, at least, and the creek and the trees.

And a burned-out shell of a house. I now owned nothing but the land, and not even that until I was eighteen. I’d always had this thought of moving up there after I was finished with school or something, just retreating from everything. Maybe trading hexbreaking and stuff for food, like Gran had. You could just scrape by in that part of the country. Everyone up in the hills pretty much “just scraped by.”

As life dreams go, I know it sucks. But it was my little dream, and now it was a charred mess. Just like everything else.

A wave of shaking slid through my bones, jostling around like my body hadn’t decided whether or not it was going to pitch a fit.

Ash kept chewing, staring bright-eyed at me. He was still filthy, and I had to coax him into a shower somehow. Christophe had even brought clothes for
him
. He’d thought of everything.

“Dru?” Graves moved, like he was going to unfold himself from the side of the bed. “You okay?”

Don’t ask
. “I . . .” My eyes prickled. “I don’t know.”

He stripped his hair back from his face with stiff fingers. But he wasn’t looking at me. “He was there. Right before the . . . the vampires hit.”

“You lost your coat.” I let my hair fall down, because the prickling turned to hot water and welled up. I couldn’t blink it back.

Jesus. The crying needed to stop, and
now
.

Graves coughed slightly. “It’s okay. It’s a thousand degrees out there; I don’t need it. Dru, we have to talk.”

Oh, Jesus. Every time we have to talk, I end up more confused than before. I can’t take this
. “Not now.” I bounced up, swiping at my eyes. “Come on, Ash. Let’s get you cleaned up.”

It was another
Subaru, but blue, and newer than the one we’d stolen. Power windows, power locks, plenty of cargo space, and it smelled faintly of vanilla from the air freshener hanging from the rearview. Dawn was gray in the east, the whole world was greenjuice fresh, and it was going to be another scorcher. You could just tell by the way your clothes stuck to you as soon as you stepped outside.

I didn’t know if Christophe had slept. I’d curled up in the bed furthest from the door and fell into a darkness so deep I couldn’t even remember any dreams. When I’d closed my eyes Christophe had been standing looking out the window; when I opened them he was in a chair at the table, writing on the legal pad. A chunky silver watch gleamed on his wrist, and the window was just graying up with the sunrise. He glanced up, and saw that I was awake.

We were out the door fifteen minutes later.

I folded my hands around the paper latte cup. Christophe turned the air conditioning up a bit. The tires made a low sweet sound on
the road, and if I shut my eyes, I could almost pretend I was driving with Dad.

But the silence with Dad had never been this angry, or this dangerous.

Ash curled up on his half of the backseat, impossibly small. Graves hunched in his seat, holding an americano and staring out the window like the answer to world peace was in the passing scenery. I lasted about twenty minutes before flipping the radio on to fill up the silence, twisting the dial until I found an oldies station. Graves lasted about a half hour after that before he cracked the window and lit a cigarette. Christophe restrained himself, but I saw his jaw set.

It was a ways to California. Something told me this was gonna be a long trip.