Dogs can smell fear, and sometimes people—or things from the Real World—are the same way. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a dog can also smell when you’re the alpha. It takes the same kind of flat look and decision to be fearless as facing down a bunch of jocks bent on harassing someone.
Shoulders square. Heart thumping, but not too hard. Eyes glazed with dust and buzzing with what I hoped was power. I gave him the look I’d practiced in the mirror so many times, and pretended I was Dad, grinning easily in a bar frequented by the Real World, hands loose and easy, one of them resting on a gun butt and the other just touching a shot glass, while I sipped at a Coke and pretended not to notice.
It should have been Dad there. He would have sorted Christophe right out.
“Where do you think you’re going to go that Sergej can’t find you?” He made another grab for the keys, but the world slowed down and I was quicker again—just by a fraction, but still. Graves sucked in a breath and I skipped backward again, hoping he had the sense to move.
“I’m not so sure he’s the problem, Chris.” I ducked through my bag’s strap and backed up again. Another few steps would get me to the door to the garage, and if I took my eyes off him I wasn’t so sure he would stay put, either.
There were a whole lot of things I wasn’t sure of anymore.
The djamphir’s hand made another swift move; my eyes darted instinctively, and things got very confused. I heard a snarl and a clatter, my feet shot out from under me, and the keys were ripped out of my hand. Something very warm and hard clamped around my throat, and Graves let out a high, yipping yell. Glass shattered.
Christophe’s hand tightened just a little, and I choked, staring up at his three-quarter profile as he looked toward the other window, the one that looked at the bit of greenbelt running at an angle beside the house.
The window he’d just thrown Graves against. Right over the spindly little kitchen table that had been here when we moved in.
He looked down at me, fangs sliding beneath his upper lip, his eyes burning. The highlights had bled out of his hair, slicking it back against his head, and his eyes were actually glowing in the bruised, ugly light slanting through the kitchen.
“I’m being patient,” he hissed, the t’s lisping slightly because of the fangs. “I’ll get you and your pet through this alive, but you have to do what I say. Got me?”
How did he do that? And the other thought, so loud I could have sworn I said it out loud. Could he teach me that?
“Sonofabitch,” Graves growled, and the obscenity shaded into a low sound that rattled broken glass as cold wind spilled into the room, laden with the flat iron tang of snow and violence. “Dru? Dru?”
He didn’t even sound human, though it was recognizably my name.
“As soon as the sun fails out here, all your neighbors will wake up.” Christophe’s fingers weren’t cutting off my air, but there wasn’t any space to wriggle, either. “I only wounded the dreamstealer; it probably crept through every window on the block and laid eggs in their sleeping bodies before dawn rose. When those young hatch, they’ll be hungry, and here you are. Such a nice little morsel.” He cocked his head slightly. “On the good side, Sergej probably doesn’t know you’re alive, but he’s suspecting, since his expensive little assassin didn’t come back, and as soon as the sun fails he’ll—Stay where you are, dog-boy!” He lifted his free hand and pointed, probably at Graves. The growling subsided a little, but it was the sound of a wolf getting ready to spring, not a teenage kid who had just been thrown into a window. “Are you going to behave, little bird?”
I might have even agreed with him, at least long enough to get his hands off my throat, but the wind rose to a shriek and I realized two things.
The light was really bleeding away fast, no longer bruised but dying, my ears popping under a sudden shift in air pressure.
And the growling wasn’t just coming from Graves.
The werwulf barreled through the door like a freight train and hit Christophe squarely in the chest.
There was a horrible crushing half-second as his fingers tightened on my windpipe before they were ripped away. I only found out I was screaming after I’d scrambled backward on palms and sneakered feet like an enthusiastic crab-walker at a drunken frat party, and spilled down the two steps onto chill garage concrete. I barked my elbow a good one on the doorframe, didn’t care, hit so hard my teeth clicked together and I almost lost a piece of my tongue.
Another furry leaping shape sailed over me, melting and reforming as it flew, and I flinched, running out of breath and hitching in more to scream again.
“DRU!” someone yelled, and Graves leaped out the door, narrowly missing landing on me by twisting in midair, with a kind of breathtaking, unthinking grace. He had something glittering in his right hand—my keychain, I realized, just as he skidded to a stop and the noise from inside the house began to crash instead of just roar. Wood splintered, something thrown against the wall hard enough to punch the drywall out toward me, splinters from the studs ramming through, and there was a massive wrecked yowl of pain.
I made it to my feet and hesitated for a split second, long enough to hear other crashes and howls. It sounded like more of them had arrived—shadows flitted across the open mouth of the garage, and the howling began.
If you’ve ever heard that sound, you don’t need it described, but here goes. It’s like a spiral of glass on the coldest night you’ve ever known, naked outside in the deep woods. Just hearing it is enough to give you nightmares about hunching near a fire and praying the wood holds out until dawn.
But what’s even worse—what makes it so much worse—is how the howling drills into your head and starts pulling on deep, secret things in the brain.
The blind, hungry thing on four legs that lives in all of us.
I clapped my hands over my ears. Graves grabbed my arm, his fingers sinking in so hard it almost went numb, and hauled me toward the truck—still parked crosswise, but it had started up just fine earlier. Thank God for the engine-block heater.
Maybe I shouldn’t have stopped to pack.
Another long lean bullet-streak of fur bolted into the garage, its padded feet slithering on smooth concrete starred with oil droplets from a car long since vanished. Graves let out a smothered yell. I clutched at him like a girl at a scary movie hanging onto her jock boyfriend, and the thing actually lifted its lip and snarled at us before plunging past.
“They’re going to kill him!” I yelled.
“Better him than us!” Graves screamed back, and yanked me toward the truck.
The sky had gone livid. Little pinpricks of ice were showering down, lifting and massing on random eddies and swirls as the wind, confused, keened and turned in circles. Graves yanked the driver’s-side door open and clambered in, and I followed.
It’s not right to leave him there. It wasn’t. But Jesus, what else were we supposed to do? Because the werwulfen were even climbing on the roof, lean humanoid shapes running with fur, orange-yellow eyes like lamps. There were at least six of them, and one landed with a thump right in front of the truck and spread its lean, muscle-ropy arms, its black-gummed upper lip lifting and the thrum of its growl making the dashboard groan sharply.
Graves and I both screamed, high, oddly harmonized cries that would have been funny if the situation hadn’t been so deadly serious.
I jammed the key in the ignition and twisted so hard I almost bent it. The Chevy roused, its engine sound pale compared to the thunder rumbling around my house.