chapter FOUR
I sat straight up on the loveseat, my fingers clawing at empty air like I was going to grab Christophe’s sweater and pull him back. One of Gran’s quilts slid to the floor in a heap. I did actually throw myself backward, hitting the high hard back of the loveseat and giving myself a good jolt.
Graves tore out of the sleeping bag and leapt to his feet. Sometime during the night he must’ve crept downstairs, because he was on the floor next to the loveseat. My heart hammered, pounding in my throat, and my fangs tingled. For one nightmarish moment I didn’t know where I was, and the scream caught in my throat.
The deep thrumming rattling everything not nailed down was a growl. It came from Graves’s chest, and his eyes were wide, green, and blank. The Other—the thing wulfen use to change and loup-garou use for mental dominance—rippled under his skin, his shoulders bulking up as he hunched them, ready for attack.
I clapped my hand over my mouth. The touch throbbed inside my head, little invisible fingers soaking in the anger radiating from him in red-violet waves. Beyond that, the glow of the wards sparked, bright blue. Out in the meadow, nothing. Just static, the formless buzz of the country before your ears adjust and start hearing the wind and the crick and the animals again. It’s like they have to shift between city and country tuning.
Morning sunlight filtered through the shutters, bars of gold with dust dancing in them. Graves’s growl petered out. He half-turned, glanced at me with that empty green-glowing gaze, and for the first time since I’d met him, Goth Boy looked completely dangerous.
I swallowed, hard. “I’m okay,” I managed through my clenching fingers. “I just . . . I had a dream.” About Christophe. The words stuck in my throat. “Jesus. What are you doing?”
He just stood there. The anger leaked away, bit by bit. Sense stole back into his mad green eyes, and for a moment I wondered why I wasn’t scared of him, especially since he looked ready to rumble.
I mean, I was apprehensive, yeah. But he hadn’t been fixing to hurt me. No, he’d been focused on the door.
In case something was coming through it.
Something like that makes you think. It really does. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to think about it.
Graves eyed me sidelong for a long while. Finally, the last of the anger died down. I saw it creep back into him, sinking under his caramel skin. You couldn’t see the marks of torture on him anymore, and the anger was something new.
Not anger. Rage. He didn’t have that before. I was the one who had that before.
I guess being tortured by vampires will do that to you. Guilt bit me hard, deep inside my chest, again. “Graves?” It was hard to talk, because my fangs were out and my hand was clapped so tight over my mouth I could barely move my lips.
I didn’t want him to see. To remember that he’d seen me with my face in Anna’s throat, drinking her blood.
He crouched, suddenly, and his hands moved. I almost flinched before I realized he was smoothing out the sleeping bag. “Nothing. Not doing nothing.”
A high dull flag of red stood up on each sculpted cheek under a screen of dark stubble. The stubble was pretty new; he’d been a smooth-cheeked boy when I’d met him. He still needed a few meals to replace muscle mass; wulfen metabolism burns pretty hot to fuel the change. It would burn in him to give him their strength and speed, even though he wouldn’t get hairy.
Not much, anyway. No more than any regular boy.
The tingling through my fangs receded. I finally peeled my hand away as he started rolling the bag up. My hair was probably sticking up all over, but I felt loads better. Not even stiff, but as if I’d taken a deep, refreshing nap. And there was the quilt—he must’ve brought it downstairs and covered me up. I searched for something to say. “You didn’t, um, want to sleep upstairs?”
Way to go, Dru. State the obvious.
“No.” The rage flushed through him again, retreated. “I didn’t.”
The touch was stronger now, and if it wasn’t for Gran’s training I probably would’ve been seriously disturbed by how strongly his anger rang in my skull. “Graves—”
Now why did I sound breathless?
“Look.” He finished rolling up the sleeping bag, snapped the elastic loops over it, and glared up at me. “I know I’m just a loup-garou, all right? I know. I’m just the deadweight holding you down. You dragged me along and I’m glad about that. I’m even glad I got bit by that thing up there. I handled everything they threw at me, and told him to go f*ck himself more than once. Sergej.” He all but spat the name, and his face twisted up, bitterly. “So quit treating me like a little kid, Dru. I ain’t been a little kid for years. I’m not as Billy Badass as some of those stuck-up djamphir, but I’m learning and I’ll be hell on wheels when I’m done. You won’t ever have to worry again.”
Where did that come from? My jaw had dropped. I stared at him. What the hell?
“You don’t think I can hack it.” He leapt to his feet, carrying the sleeping bag with him. He’d slept in his coat, too, and it flapped as he moved. I’d stitched it up, clumsily, and now I was wishing I’d done a better job. “Well, I’ve got news for you. I already have. Whatever it takes to make you see, I’m gonna do it. You get me?”
Silence stretched between us. “Um.” I searched for something to say. I settled for the absolute truth. “What? No. I don’t get you. What the hell are you on about?”
I got one long, very green look, his eyebrows—eyebrow, actually, since nobody had held him down and plucked him up yet—drawn together and his mouth a bitter scowl. I was struck once again by how cute he’d gotten. Those cheekbones, and those eyes.
How had I ever thought, even back in the Dakotas, that he was dull? Or gawky?
I had the weird sinking feeling I was missing something important. What a thing to wake up to. And the dream was still filling my skull like cobwebs, something important glimmering in its depths.
He filled his lungs, his chest swelling as if he was growling again. When he opened his mouth, though, the only thing that came out was a yell. “I love you!” he shouted, his eyes glowing laser green. “I love you, okay? I’m not some hopeless retard you pull along behind you because you feel sorry for him! I love you and I’m going to prove it!”
I had the exquisitely weird sensation of being transported to a parallel universe. Or of waking up in a movie where everyone knew the script but me.
A different kind of silence, now. It was the kind where something you can’t take back is still vibrating in the air, all around you. We looked at each other for what felt like the first time, Graves and me, and in that moment the last bits of the kid he’d been completely fled inside my head.
This was a new animal. And he was looking at me like he expected me to say something.
“I never thought you were a hopeless retard.” I sounded very small, and very young. I found out I was hugging myself, too, scooted back on the loveseat like it was a raft and the water around it was full of sharks. “You just . . . I . . .” Every word I’d never been able to say to him backed up, crowding around me and squeezing all the air out of my chest. “I thought I disgusted you,” I said finally. It was hopelessly inadequate. As usual. But Jesus. Waking up from a dream about one guy and having another one yell something like that, it’s confusing.
To say the least.
He actually cocked his head and stared at me like I was speaking in Swahili. “What?” As if all the air had been punched out of him.
“The, um. Sucking blood thing. And . . . I can’t . . . sometimes I just can’t explain things to you. I can’t tell you. It all gets balled up and you get mad and stomp away and—” I was actually working up a good head of steam here.
“I’m sorry.” The words jumped out. He hugged the sleeping bag, hard, tendons standing out on the backs of his hands. The flush on his cheeks had died away, so that under his caramel coloring he was ashen. “I was angry. Didn’t want to hurt you.”
Well, thank you sonny Jesus, we’re getting somewhere. Finally. “If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be in this.”
Bitterness, then. His shoulders hunched and his face turned old. A shadow passed through his eyes, turning them mossy instead of emerald. “Yeah. I’d still be cowering. Hiding in the f*cking mall. I’m glad I got bit, Dru. If I coulda done it earlier, I would’ve.”
Jesus Christ. He’d seen the Real World by now. It wasn’t anything anyone sane wanted to be involved in. There’s a reason people run away from it. There’s a reason cops and governments sweep weird shit under the table. It’s because nobody wants to know. They don’t even have to work that hard; nobody goes looking for this sort of thing—the kind of weird where you can seriously die. They all go looking for the Saturday-trip, New Age, crystalgazing weird you can come back from.
Except Graves and me, we’d been stranded out in the black. Out in the place you can’t get back from and you just have to deal with. “You can’t mean that,” I whispered. My arms were around my knees. I was curling up into myself like a fern, or like he was shouting at me. My heart was triphammering. Wait. Let’s go back a couple seconds here. Did he really say what I thought he just said? “Graves—”
He flung out one hand, like he was blocking a dodgeball. “Bullshit. I do mean it. Best thing that ever happened to me, Dru. What was I gonna do—try to go to college with no money? Work my way through and hope someone would throw me a bone or two?” A swift snarl passed over his features, and his hair stood up in vital springing curls. “No way. This is my chance to be good enough. I’m taking it. You’ll see. You’ll just see.”
He dropped the sleeping bag. It hit the floor and keeled over, and he turned on his heel. Bare feet smacked the worn floorboards, and it took him less than a half second to undo the lock on the door. He plunged out into the morning, and the door slammed shut behind him. Shivers rolled through me, first hot, then cold.
What. The hell. Just happened?
A soft sound alerted me. I looked up, and there was Ash, crouched easily on the pulldown steps that led to the loft. He cocked his head, and greasy hair fell in his face. He was barefoot too, and he’d somehow lost his shirt. His narrow chest was dead pale, and muscle flickered under his skin.
Wait a second. Just hold on one goddamn second. Graves said he . . . did he actually say that? Did he say what I think he just said?
We looked at each other for a long time, the Broken and me. It occurred to me that he was waiting for something. For me to make the world settle down.
Except everything was still spinning around me, and if I didn’t hold on, I’d be flung off. I hate that feeling.
I’d been spinning since Dad died, in one way or another.
But Ash was counting on me. Examining me solemnly, his face like a child’s. Wide open, and scared, and utterly trusting all at the same time. You’re going to make the bad stop, right? That’s what was painted all over him, from the way he crouched to the wide eyes and his mouth just a little bit agape.
“It’s okay.” I tried to sound steady. “Everything’s all right.”
“Awwight.” His mouth worked loosely over the word. I’d shot him in the jaw with Dad’s silvergrain bullets, and some of the silver was probably still in there, buried in the bone and preventing everything from changing back and forth right. Or, even scarier, the silver had worked its way out and now I had the thought that he was free of Sergej’s hold but somehow still Broken, and I didn’t know enough about how to fix him.
Every single problem I’d forgotten about while sleeping came crowding back. First on the list was breakfast.
I felt like falling asleep on the loveseat had twisted the world off course again, just a fraction. I wasn’t complaining, but I wished Graves would’ve waited until I’d had some coffee and I could think before he laid that on me.
Did he just say what I think he just said?
Ash slid down a few more stairs, slinking bonelessly on his hands and feet like a cat. “Hongwee.” He nodded vigorously. “Hongwy.”
Great. He’ll have a three-year-old’s vocabulary by the end of the week. Stellar. “Yeah. I was just thinking about breakfast.”
It hit me sideways.
Graves. He’d really said that.
I love you. That was good, right? Good, hell. It was outright great.
Except every time things got better with him, I ended up even more hopelessly confused. I groaned, gingerly got up from the love seat in case I’d stiffened up overnight, and found out I hadn’t. “Outhouse first,” I amended. “Then breakfast.”
Ash actually let out a crow of delight. Then he was out the door too, quick as a flash. Which would leave me to make breakfast alone.
Did he really say he . . . loved me? Maybe it wasn’t hopeless. Maybe I could learn to say the right thing the next time he laid something like that on me. Maybe I had a chance.
Wouldn’t you know, I found out I was grinning. Ear to ear, despite every single problem crowding in around me.
Grinning. Like a total fool.