“It’s insulting.” Benjamin’s jaw set like concrete, and the emo-boy swoop over his eyes ran with auburn highlights.
“It’s not personal.” Leon actually snorted a little, laughing. “They don’t trust anyone. I don’t blame them.”
I saw Zeke in a sapphire silk button-down, his blue eyes dark with worry. I actually lifted a hand and waved at him a little and instantly regretted it. He actually blushed, dropping his eyes, and a couple of his friends elbowed him. Someone laughed, and my cheeks were hot.
There went my Sunday coffee date. It wasn’t like I was really counting on it, but damn.
Leon laughed again, a weird choked chuckle, and I considered turning around and punching him in the face.
“Who’s that?” Christophe wanted to know, but I just slumped down in the pew and rolled my eyes.
“Nobody. He’s from my history class.” I wish Graves was here, dammit. No matter how this ended up, the first thing I was going to do when I got out of here was go looking for him. I was going to slip out of here somehow, anyhow, and follow the touch until it led me to him. I was going to find him and make everyone leave us alone long enough for me to tell him . . .
. . . what? What could possibly make this sort of thing better?
I didn’t know, but I’d find it. I’d say anything I had to, to make him understand.
The crowd went still again, but differently than before. When I looked up I saw why. The Council had arrived.
From left to right they stood in front of their chairs: Kir with his red hair echoing the flaming sky filling the glass, Marcus in another gray suit, and Bruce placed precisely one step out in front, halfway between his chair and the big red throne. On the other side, Alton looked somber as he folded his arms and looked out across the crowd, Hiro stared steadily down at me with something I think was supposed to be an encouraging expression, and Ezra pulled his sweater sleeves down and settled into watchful immobility.
I’d forgotten to breathe. I inhaled.
Bruce tilted his head a little. He didn’t have to yell; the words cut the silence like hot knife through butter. “The Kouroi are assembled. The Trial will begin.” His mouth turned down for a moment, like he was tasting something bitter. “Christophe Reynard, you stand accused of treason. Present yourself.”
Half of Christophe’s mouth quirked up. He stayed where he was for a few moments, looking intently at me, then straightened. Turned on his heel and paced toward the dais, where the crowd had magically melted away.
He moved out into that space like he owned every inch of it. “Isn’t the head of the Order supposed to be here?” It could have been possible to put a little more fuck you into his tone, but some of it might’ve slopped out the sides.
Kir stiffened. Hiro looked bored, but his eyes glittered. I knew that look, having seen it in a few bars where Dad took me, looking for information on the Real World while I sipped a Coke and ignored pretty much everything except whomever he was talking to.
“You’d think he’d learn to be tactful.” Leon’s whisper drifted to my right ear. “Breathe, Milady.”
“You will be judged by your peers, Reynard.” Hiro’s weight was all on the balls of his feet, and the aspect actually crackled around him. His hair stood up, short black spikes rubbing against each other.
I began to feel sick. Way deep-down sick.
“And who among you is my peer? My ancestry is ancient, and my deeds are taught in your classrooms. I’ve saved a svetocha, which is more than any of you have done in the last sixty years. I’ve kept one step ahead of the nosferatu and those sent to kill me—the Kouroi sent to kill me. I’m here because I choose to be, because Milady requests it.” He tipped his head slightly toward me, and I wondered how he made it so effing clear just who he was talking about. Of course, I was the only girl in the room. But I was looking around for Anna. She had to be here somewhere.
“No Kouroi have been sent to—” Alton began.
“They have.” Kir had turned green under his paleness. “I signed the orders. At the Head’s request.”
Nobody moved; nobody even blinked. Bruce’s fangs slid out from under his top lip. He stood, rigid, and I got a very bad feeling about all this. Nausea and terror all rolled together, roiled in the pit of my stomach.
Christophe stood, very straight and slim, his boots placed military-precise against the stone floor. “Set against each other. Divide and conquer. At least she learned well.”
“An extermination order on another Kouroi?” Hiro shook his head. “That is against the Codes.”
“Milady . . . ” Kir shrank into himself. “The Head said it was a matter of necessity. She . . . she showed me a transcript. Of a call made to betray the position of Elizabeth Lefevre. She died eleven years ago, and the transcript was proof that Reynard had betrayed her to the nosferat.”
Leon’s hand came down on my shoulder. He pushed me back down in the pew. “But—” I began. Lefevre? That had to be her maiden name. Funny, I’d never thought about it before. It was like Mom’s life had only begun with Dad, and with me.
“Be quiet,” he hissed in my ear. “Please, Dru!”
I subsided.
“Lies!” someone yelled from far back in the crowd. “Lies, and I can prove it!”
Wait a second. I knew that voice, and if Leon hadn’t been holding onto me I would have been up out of that pew like a rocket.
Bruce didn’t look surprised, but he did lift his head and stare in the general direction the voice had come from. “Approach,” was all he said.
“Oh, Christ,” Kir moaned. “What have I done?”
“She promised you the Princeps, didn’t she?” Christophe’s hands curled into fists. “I wondered who’d signed the orders. Did you also sign the directive to send wulfen teams after me in the Dakotas?”
Kir actually stumbled back and collapsed in his chair. “I did. I swear to God, Reynard, she told me we had to protect the—”
“What about Dru?” Christophe was pitiless. “Did you sign the directives to keep her in a reform Schola, unprotected and vulnerable? Did you?”
“No.” Marcus stood straight and defiant. “I signed those. The Head told me they were for a troublesome new Kouroi, not a svetocha . And when I went back later to check them, after Milady Dru told us her tale, I found they had vanished.”
Oh. Well, that answered that question. It wasn’t like I was surprised, but I was happy to know. Kind of.
Now if I could just keep my stomach from unloading itself all over the floor, I’d be peachy.
An avenue had opened in the crowd. I let out a breathless little cry. It was a djamphir I knew, his blond hair mussed and his eyes blazing. He was crusted with dried blood. His standard uniform of white tank top, red flannel shirt, and jeans was tattered and torn. Bruising marched up his familiar face on one side, and he held—of all things—a red collapsible file folder. “I can prove it!” he yelled again. And he held himself ramrod-straight, the same shoulder holster under his arm and the familiar gun butt peeking out as he moved.
“Augie—” It was barely a whisper. My mouth wouldn’t work right. Oh my God, it’s him. It’s really him.
“I barely escaped Sergej himself.” The name made everyone wince and sent a glass spike of pain through my head. I finally shook away from Leon’s hand and made it to my feet. “It’s all here. The original transcript and a recording. Treachery so unspeakably vile it would steal the heart of any who heard it. Copies of the directives, signed by each member of the Council, altered after the signing.” August gasped in a breath, and Christophe stepped aside, deftly focusing every eye on him. I saw it, even though I didn’t believe it. The relief was . . . Jesus.
Indescribable. That was the only word that applied.
August never once used the aspect that month I stayed in his Brooklyn apartment. He went out almost every night, hunting, and came back battered sometimes. I’d cooked him dinners. I’d helped him bandage himself, and I hadn’t thought much about how fast he healed. In th
e Real World, anything goes. I didn’t have any gift for healing; that was Gran’s thing.
Still, seeing him, even as beat up and bloody as he was, was like Christmas.
“August!” I yelled and slipped my arms out of my hoodie as Leon grabbed at its back. I was over the wooden railing in a second, and I hurled myself at him. “August!”
“Eh, Dru.” Half-Bronx, half-Brooklyn, all Augie. “Never thought I’d see you again.”
I shoved past Christophe and threw my arms around August. Hugged, hard. He smelled horrible, but I caught the familiar tang of cigarette smoke. August could make a thin yellow flame spring up on his index finger.
He was real, and he was here, and he was a piece of the life I thought was gone for good. I forgot everything else, even the tangle that was Graves missing and Anna lurking somewhere, in the flood of scalding relief.
Hot tears slicked my cheeks. I just kept saying his name over and over. He winced, and I eased up on the hug a little.
“Dru—” Christophe said, trying to pull me away.
But I clung to Augie. I wouldn’t let go. He wrapped one arm around me. “Easy there, księżniczko. Break my ribs, eh?”
“Augie!” The sickness went away. I hugged him even harder, forgetting again that he was hurt. And the smell of dried blood on him didn’t make the aspect rise. I was too goddamn happy. “Jesus! Augie!”
“Pick one,” he said. “Now be quiet, Dru. Got work to do.”
I shut up. But I still kept hugging him.
“I got here in time.” He lifted the large red file with his free hand. It was spattered with blood, both black and crusty drying red. “It’s in here. Christophe?”
“I did not doubt you, Augustine.” Christophe subtracted it from his fingers. Opened the accordion file and pulled out, of all things, a mini tape recorder. The papers inside made a whispering sound as he closed the file with its rubber band, then tossed it. A passionless, accurate throw, flying in a perfect arc to land at Bruce’s feet.
“I require the Council to view—and hear—the evidence,” Christophe said and held the recorder up.
He pushed the “play” button. It was an old-fashioned model, and the hiss of magnetic tape filled the expectant, watery silence. I might’ve worried about nobody being able to hear it in this cavernous space, but the djamphir were all utterly quiet.
I’d read the transcript when Dylan dug it up. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the shock. The first voice was cold and male, with a funny lisping tone because the fangs made it hard to enunciate. It was a sucker’s voice, chill and final as the grave, rasping with hate.
“Do you have it?”
The other voice . . . God. “The information’s well-guarded.”
The sucker sounded like he was losing patience. “That’s none of our concern. Where is she? We are prepared to pay for the information.”
“Keep your money,” Anna said. “I just want the bitch dead.”
The sucker laughed, a horrible silk-soft, rotting sound. “I can arrange that.”
Kir let out a high-pitched moan. Nobody paid any attention.
“How can we be sure?” the sucker continued. “He will need some guarantee.”
Anna made a short, dismissive sound. You could just see her waving her hand, waving it away like it was no big deal. “Oh, that’s easy. I’ll take care of that. A prearranged signal, from the very location. You take care of her and I . . . ”
Static filled the tape then. My mouth was desert-dry.
“Ephialtes,” the sucker hissed. I was cold all over, wet with sweat under my T-shirt. Aching as I held onto Augie. He had his arm around me. But Christophe had turned, and he was staring directly at me.
Do you see? his cold eyes asked me. Do you see now, Dru?
And I did. But I didn’t understand. How could you sell someone to the vampires? And if Anna was with the Order, she would know what the suckers could do. How they savaged djamphir, not stopping until the body was reduced to rags of flesh and splinters of bone.
And I heard her again, from the vault in my memory where the really bad stuff hid. The stuff I didn’t ever want to think of again, the things the touch showed me that I didn’t want to see.
Don’t let the nosferatu bite. A prearranged signal from the very location. It meant our house. My mother’s house. The house where I lay asleep upstairs until she woke me up. The yellow house with the oak tree in front, its branches twisted and blackened by whatever Sergej had done to my mother’s body.
How could Anna betray another svetocha, even one she hated? How could anyone do that?
“Keep your commentary to yourself and pass along the message,” Anna said calmly. And the sound of a phone being laid down in a cradle clicked through, right before Christophe hit the stop button. He still stared right at me, his mouth a thin line, and I got the feeling he was trying to tell me something.
I didn’t know what. I couldn’t even begin to guess. But it was like he’d thrown me a line, and the thin cord that stretched between us poured a flood of heat into me. It ran up into my cheeks, and I closed my eyes and leaned against Augie. He swayed a little.
“You should look elsewhere for your traitor, Kouroi. Not at me.” Christophe’s heel scraped the floor as he turned away.
Murmurs raced through the crowd. I wished I could open up the ground and crawl into it. I felt sick all over. It was Anna. Anna had done it, betrayed my mother to the vampires.
Don’t let the nosferatu bite.
Why?
But I knew why. The horrible shape under the blanket in my head twitched.
Where is he . . . if you’re hiding him . . .
“Dru.” Christophe was very close now. “You have something to tell us. Something you remember.”
I shook my head. No. God, no. I didn’t want to remember anything about that night. I didn’t want to remember what happened after I went to bed. I didn’t want to remember Anna’s visit or my mother hiding me before she went out to fight.
The only thing I wanted to remember was Dad’s face when he opened up the hidey-hole in the closet and collected me. He’d told me I was safe and taken me out to the car, and we’d driven for days to Gran’s house.
There was nothing else I wanted to remember. Nothing. Not even my mother’s face, or her perfume, or—
But Christophe was pitiless. “That was why Anna came to see you at the reform Schola.” Patient and calm, like a teacher with a slow student. “You were so close, Dru. So close to remembering. But you didn’t, not yet. It was so long ago, and you were so young.”
I did remember, but I wasn’t going to tell him. “Shut up,” I whispered.
“This isn’t necessary,” Bruce said. “The evidence—”
“It is necessary.” Christophe’s words cut across his as if he was the one in charge here. For all I knew, he probably was. It certainly looked like he was from here. “You won’t believe me. You may even hide the evidence or lie about it. But the word of a svetocha . . . who can stand against that?” The words were nasty, each one a ragged bullet of rage. They scraped against the inside of my skull like a nosferatu’s glassine hatred.
Did Christophe have any idea how he sounded? He sounded like his father.
I wanted no part of any of this. I just wanted to be left alone, so I could figure out how to escape this place. “Shut up,” I whispered again. “Shut up.”
“You’ve made your point, Chris.” Augie’s arm tightened around me.
Christophe whirled away, the fury around him smelling of burnt insulation, broken glass, pain, and the colorless fume of fury. His boot heel made a black mark against the marble floor. “I don’t think I have. How many years has it been since the Order has been able to save a svetocha? We find them, certainly. We even find them before they bloom. But the nosferatu snatch them, sometimes mere hours, a half-hour, before we do. Why? Why is that?”
Kir moaned again. “God in Heaven. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
I wondered if he wa
s trying to convince them or himself.
“Shut up, Kir,” Hiro said quietly. “Or I will kill you myself.”
He sounded like he meant it, too.
Sounds of papers being shuffled. “These are legitimate.” Alton sounded as sick as I felt. August swayed again.
I opened my eyes and tried to brace him. Under the bruising, blood, and dirt, he looked gray. It wasn’t good. “Augie?” I sounded as small as I felt. “You okay?”
“Marvelous.” His split lip leered as he tried to give me a smile. “It’s been a rough week, Dru. Been chased by every nosferatu on the planet, feels like, since my pad was blown. Was a real trick to get to the dropoff and get the information Dylan—”
“Dylan?” The breath left me. “He’s alive?”
“I hope so.” August’s pained expression told me everything I needed to know. “He sent it ’fore the other Schola was broken, Dru. Figured he could trust me, I guess.”
“Of course they are legitimate,” Christophe snarled. “I ask again, why have you been unable to save other svetocha?”
“Wh-wh-why? Marcus actually reeled and dropped down into his seat. It creaked a little under him. “Dear God. Why?”
The assembled djamphir whispered to each other.
I had a very bad feeling about this.
“Because,” Christophe said finally, as if he was answering a question in class, “the Red Queen thinks we only need one svetocha.”
Someone laughed. It was a high, feminine titter, bouncing and echoing off all the stone and glass. Every head tipped back, and there, high above everyone, on one of the carved stone railings girdling the bottom of the dome, stood Anna.
“Why?” she yelled. “You want to know why? Ask Reynard! Ask him what he knows! He made me do it!”
The careening echoes made me feel even sicker. Between August and me, we were having a hard time standing up. Either he was swaying drunkenly, or I was, or the world was tilting underfoot like a carnival ride.
“None of this would have happened without him!” Anna screamed. Even as far up as she was, the hate contorting her face was visible. Her hair was a wildly curling mass of reddish-dark, and she wore red silk, too. Another one of those old-fashioned dresses, fluttering as she hung over the railing. “She stole him from me! He was mine and she stole him!”