“Shut up.” He didn’t say it harshly or unkindly, but Graves did shut up. “Dru? You’re listening.”
Oh, God, leave me alone. But I raised my head, looked at the dash. There really was no option. Hair fell in my face, the curls slicked down with damp, behaving for once. “Yeah.” It sounded like I had something caught in my throat. The word was just a husk of itself. “I heard.”
“You were lucky. You ever put yourself in danger like that again and I’ll make you regret it. Clear?”
He sounded just like Dad. The familiarity was a ragged spike in my chest. “Clear,” I managed around it. My entire body ached, even my hair. I was wet and cold and the memory of the sucker’s dead eyes and oddly wrong, melodious voice burrowed into my brain. It wouldn’t let go.
That thing killed my father. Turned him into a zombie. And Mom . . . “My mother.” The same flat, husky tone. Shock. Maybe I was in shock. I’d heard a lot about shock from Dad.
Silence crackled, but then Christophe took pity on me. Maybe. Or maybe he figured I had a right to know, and that I’d listen to him now.
When he spoke, his voice was husky too, whether with pain or with the cold I couldn’t guess. “She was svetocha. Decided to give it all up, stop hunting, married a nice jarhead from the sticks and had a kid. But the nosferatu don’t forget, and they don’t stop playing the game because we pick up our marbles and go home. She got rusty and she got caught away from sanctuary, drawing a nosferat away from her home and her baby.” He put the truck in gear. The windshield was clearing rapidly. “I’m . . . sorry.”
“What else do you know?” I pulled away from Graves, his arm falling back down to his side. He slumped, looking acutely uncomfortable, a raccoon-mask of bruising beginning to puff up around his eyes. His nose was definitely broken.
“Go to the Schola and find out. They’ll train you, show you how to do things you’ve only dreamed of. God knows you’re so close to fully blooming, and once you do . . .” Christophe stared out the windshield, his profile as clean and severe as ever. His eyes were bright enough to glow even through the gray daylight. Drying blood coated his face, a trickle of fresh red sliding from a cut along his hairline. He was absolutely soaked in the stuff, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. “And when you hear from me, I’ll set you a challenge worthy of your talents. Like finding out who almost got you killed here.”
The truck was still running like a dream. Good old American steel. Dad’s billfold sat in my jacket pocket, a heavy, accusing lump.
Christophe measured off a space on the wheel between two fingertips, looked intently at it. “So what about it, Dru? Be a good girl and go back to school?”
Why was he even asking? Like I had anywhere else to go. But there was another question. “What about Graves?”
The kid in question glanced at me. I couldn’t tell if he was grateful or not. But I meant it. I wasn’t going anywhere without him.
He really was all I had. That and a locket, and Dad’s billfold, and a truck full of stuff.
A shadow crossed Christophe’s face. The pause was just long enough for me to figure out what he thought of me even asking that question, and how hard he was weighing the likelihood that I might be difficult. Or just letting me know I didn’t have anywhere else to go. “He can go with you. There are wulfen there, one or two other loup-garou. He’ll be an aristocrat. They’ll teach him too.”
That’s all right then. I nodded. My neck ached with the movement. “Then I’ll go.”
“Good.” Christophe took his foot off the brake. “And for the record, next time I ask for the keys, hand them over.”
I didn’t think that merited a response. Graves scooched a little closer to me, and I didn’t even think about it. I put my arms around him and hugged. I didn’t care if it hurt my arm and my ribs and my neck and pretty much every other part of me, my heart most of all.
When you’re wrecked, that’s the only thing to do, right? Hold on to whatever you can.
Hold on hard.
We bounced out through the gingerbread gates, which were knocked inward, the wrought iron curling like it had been in a fire. Christophe turned left, tapped the gas, and we bumped out onto the road. The stone wall continued to our left, snow falling thick and fast. The sky, however, was brighter. You could finally tell there was sunlight up there, instead of just a flat pan of aluminum.
“It looks different now,” I said, stupidly.
“Sergej.” It was all Christophe needed to say, and I shut my mouth.
What else could a sucker do?
Had Dad been chasing him all along? Because he’d killed Mom?
What else was I going to find out at this Schola? How to walk on snow without leaving a track, how to float while I fought?
Too bad I wouldn’t learn what I really wanted to know. I had a sneaking feeling I wouldn’t ever learn what I really wanted to know.
As soon as the stone wall ended to our left, he cut the wheel. I braced myself—there were ditches out here, and deep ones, running alongside the roads—but the truck merely bumped a little, up and over, and we were swimming through a wheel-deep sea of snow. The truck jounced and whined, and the cracked windshield was still a little foggy with all of us breathing hard.
We jolted and swam for a long time; then Christophe made a quick inquiring movement with his head. The blond highlights had slid back through his hair, little bits of them visible through clotted, drying blood. He didn’t seem too bruised, though. “Ah.” He let off the gas, and the truck rolled to a stop. “That should be transport now. Get out and wait for them.”
“Here?” Graves didn’t think much of the idea. “You’re going to leave us in the middle of a snowstorm?”
Oh God, don’t argue. I pulled at his coat. “Yeah. Sure.” I reached for the door handle, pulled it. The door swung open with a protesting creak, and snow puffed in on an arctic breath. The temperature was dropping. My nose was full, but I didn’t want to think of what. “Whatever you say, Christophe.”
I didn’t mean it to sound snarky. Really, I didn’t.
And besides, I could hear what Christophe could. A thwopping, thudding sound I’ve heard on a lot of TV shows late at night.
“Dru.” Christophe leaned over the seat, his mouth twisting down. I couldn’t smell apple pie now, and part of me was vaguely glad about that. “I’m sorry. I—”
I didn’t want to hear it. He hadn’t told me everything, but I’d left him for dead. I guess we were about even, especially after he took on something so old and so powerful. Something that wanted to kill me.
Something that would have killed me.
What do you say when someone takes on a really badass, murdering sucker for you? There just aren’t words for that.
“See you around, Chris.” I pulled at Graves; he slid out behind me without protesting. It was like agony to stand upright again, my hamstrings and glutes singing in pain, my neck like a solid bar of crying steel. I grabbed my bag, too. Half my body groaned in protest when our feet sank into knee-high snow, and I slammed the truck door on whatever Christophe wanted to say next.
The truck idled, and the thopping sound got closer. It hovered into view—a red-and-white helicopter, the only blot of color in the wasteland around us. The stone wall was in the distance, swallowed up in white, and the snow was coming down so heavily even the city in the distance, or the houses a few blocks away, wasn’t visible. Fierce cold swallowed my sneakers and stung my calves.
White spray fumed up as the helicopter hovered for about twenty seconds, its downdraft scraping snow away before it touched down. I gingerly ducked through my bag’s strap, held up an arm to shield my eyes, and almost missed it when a hatch opened on the side and a figure leaped down, bent over, and scuttled for us.