Defiance (5 page)

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Authors: Lili St Crow

BOOK: Defiance
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He didn’t even break stride. “Bruce, Hiro. We have confirmed kills.”
“Including mine?” I tried to find a more comfortable way to slouch in the chair, but nothing worked.
He brushed past Hiro, the aspect boiling between the two of them and Hiro’s head jerking aside like he smelled something bad. Christophe descended on me, grabbed my shoulders, and hauled me out of the chair. It went over backward and landed with a gun-crack sound, and Bruce let out a yell and shot to his feet.
“Are you damaged? Are you
hurt
?” Christophe held me at arm’s length, his fingers gentle but iron-hard. He checked me from top to toe, and his eyes narrowed when he saw the dried blood crusting on my arm and the scrape on my leg.
“I’m
fine
.” I said it a little louder than I necessarily
had
to, but I didn’t try to shake him off. It went better when I let him reassure himself that I was okay. “Really. I did the scissors thing right, too. Shanks had
malaika
. Ash was there too.”
“You are
never
playing bait again.” A muscle flicked once in his cheek. “Never. Do you hear me,
moj maly ptasku
? They swarmed the club. They knew you were there!”
“Of course they knew. I’ve been going raving for two
weeks
to draw out this group of happy little bloodsucking assholes. We made
sure
they knew. Plus, they’ve done lure-and-kill at every rave from Chelsea to Newark we’ve been able to check.” I leaned forward, but his arms didn’t bend. “I’m fine, Christophe. Only one of them chased me. I got away and—”
He looked about ready to explode. “I should never have allowed—”
Oh, for Chrissake.
“Allow? What’s this
allow
? I was ready, wasn’t I? Next time it’ll be better. I got my first kill, Christophe! I used the
malaika
! Ash was there, too!”
Well, that was the wrong thing to say. His mouth turned down like I’d just offered him a plate of caterpillars. “I will not trust your safety to the Silverhead.”
“Yeah, well, he’s more faithful than
some
I could name.” I shut my mouth, but it was too late. The damage was done. And I’d been sucking at keeping my mouth to myself lately.
Christophe’s face slammed shut, almost audibly. The aspect fled, blond streaks moving back through his hair as if painted by invisible brushes. He examined me one more time, let go of me finger by finger. “I trust you’re not flinging accusations,
Milady
.”
That actually managed to hurt me. “Of course not. I just . . . goddammit, Christophe, can’t you be happy? I got away! I fought! I did what you’ve been training me for!”
“Nobody’s disputing that.” As usual, Bruce stepped in to smooth things over. He was good at that. I should be taking lessons. “You did very well. We’re just worried for your safety, Milady.”
I wished I could tell him to quit
calling
me that.
It was what they called Anna. Each time one of them used the word it was like a pinch in an already-sore spot. The word bruised me on a daily basis.
Christophe leaned forward. “You shouldn’t have—”
Oh, he was
so
not going to Monday-morning quarterback me. “What, I should have just stayed in there and waited for them to move in and kill me before the combat units could get to me? Then I would have had to fight off six of them instead of just one.”
“I was on the roof,” he said quietly. “You don’t think I’d send you in alone?”
Well, it was kind of comforting knowing he’d been there, and the sound of outside I’d gotten through the earpiece made sense now. But still. “You were supposed to! You were home control! You said I was ready!”
Ready for an easy operation, ready for the closest thing to safe you can get while hunting suckers!
“You are ready, but not without me.” His hands flickered forward, and before I knew it, they were cupping my face. He was so damnably fast. “I would not put my little bird in the jaws of a trap without being near enough to make sure it wouldn’t close on her.” Warm skin against mine, and he leaned in. He
did
smell like a Christmas candle, warm apple spice. It was familiar, and comforting.
He reeled me in. Our foreheads touched.
For the first time since the sun went down that evening, I felt safe. He breathed out and I breathed in, and the shaking in me went away little by little. I was vaguely aware of the others watching, but it didn’t seem important. Nothing seemed important when he did this.
Except sometimes I wished he was someone else. Someone in a long dark coat, with the smell of wulf and wild and strawberry incense on him.
Which was, again, the wrong thought. My chest tightened, and a shiver went through me.
Christophe murmured something I didn’t quite catch. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to pretend it didn’t matter. And also tried to pretend most of me wasn’t running with soft lightning because he was so close. It was like my hormones had decided to stage a revolt whenever he got within a ten-foot radius.
And wasn’t
that
confusing and unwelcome? Yessir, it was. Right next to being the best thing I’d felt since the night before Dad’s dead meatless fingers tapped at the glass on our frozen back door, way up in the Dakotas.
The night everything went sideways and my life imploded.
He finally pulled away a little and pressed his lips to my forehead, a soft touch. “Nathalie and Benjamin are outside. I’ll be along.”
In other words, I was dismissed. Bruce was looking up over my head, his face set and a little embarrassed. Hiro had folded his arms and turned, staring at the samovar’s gleam.
“What about the rest of the Council?” I tried not to sound petulant. Probably failed miserably.
Christophe’s half-smile would have been chilling if his eyes hadn’t been so soft. He never looked at anyone else like this, and it was a mystery to me how the same blue eyes could be so cold one moment and warm and giving the next. “Would you care to wait for them? I am certain there will be an argument about the night’s events, at which I will be taken to account for risking your safety. It should be most entertaining.”
He had a point. “Okay. I’ll leave you to take care of that, then.”
Christophe actually
grinned
. Without the aspect, his teeth were perfect, white, and wholly human. “I thought so. Happy to be of service,
skowroneczko moja
. Tomorrow, bright and early. More
malaika
practice.”
“Great.” I scrubbed at my forehead with the back of my right hand and scooped the tiny purse off the table. “Bruce, Hiro. Sorry to worry you.” That was as far as I’d go.
Bruce nodded. His aspect had retreated, and he was just a cute Middle Eastern guy in a green cable-knit sweater and fashionably frayed designer jeans. “We’ll celebrate your first kill, Milady. It’s tradition, after all.”
The sick feeling returned. “No. I mean, no thanks. It’s okay. Really.”
And then I got out of there, feeling Christophe’s eyes on me all the way.
CHAPTER FOUR
 
“The blood won’t
come out of this.” Nathalie sighed, tilting her sleek dark head to the side. She held the silver dress up with delicate fingers, as if it was made of tissue paper. “We’ll have to go back to Nordy’s.”
“Not again.” I groaned, dropping down in front of the vanity. A shower and half an hour of
t’ai chi
in the middle of the room had settled me down, kind of. I didn’t even mind Nat watching, since she very obviously didn’t look at me while I did the familiar movements. “I won’t do it, you can’t make me.”
“You’d think I was taking you to an execution, not shopping. Jeez.” She grinned over my shoulder, the water-clear mirror holding our reflections. I was flushed and tangled, rangy like my dad, my blue Rolling Stones T-shirt torn but the hole-worn jeans I’d shimmied gratefully into mercifully hidden. Nathalie, on the other hand, looked like she belonged in a catalog. Curvy in all the right places, she wore a set of rosy-pink silk pajamas. You could tell she was werwulfen just by the way she moved and the supple grace of her shoulders as she flicked the dress again, laying it over a straight-backed wooden chair in front of the stripped-pine desk. “
Really
, Dru.”
“It’s the same thing,” I muttered.
She could even make a shoulder holster look like a planned part of her pajama outfit. The coffee-colored leather number carrying a 9mm that she had on today moved as she rolled her shoulders back once, settling them. She ghosted over the pale wooden flooring and picked up a silver-backed hairbrush. This was the part of the night I alternately dreaded and looked forward to most.
“I can take care of—” I began. But she took a handful of my hair and started brushing, just the last few inches and working up.
“It’s traditional. Before Anna, each
svetocha
had an honor guard of wulfen girls, too. Good way for us to get out of the compound, get to see a lot of boys, and you know . . . it’s bound to be lonely, being
svetocha
. I’m glad we like each other.”
Yeah, well, the last girl that was around emptied an assault rifle at me. You could just open me up like a soda can.
“So Anna changed all that?”
A shrug. “Slowly but surely, yeah. I think my aunt was around when it happened. She never talks about it.”
I sighed. Thin blue lines of warding slid over the walls, complex patterned knots over the windows and the door. Refreshed every night, trembling under the screen of the visible, the wards were at least
one
familiar thing. I never went to bed without redoing the warding, no sir. Gran would be proud.
The fingers in my hair were soothing, and Nathalie could be trusted.
Christophe told me so. So did Shanks and Augustine. I suppose I could trust them, right? At least, Christophe hadn’t been wrong yet.
I just . . . I wasn’t as trusting as I used to be. I guess. Getting betrayed over and over will do that to you. Still, I liked Nat. She had her head screwed on straight, and—this was the important thing—she understood that I was gonna go mad if I stayed cooped up all the time. So she was teaching me how to play another “traditional” game, slipping out during the day and exploring. We’d started with little runs through the Schola grounds and graduated to shopping and sightseeing. With a wulfen around in broad daylight, I was as safe as possible, right?
And every single time she threw a handful of gravel at my window, inviting me to come out and play, it was easier to trust her a little more.
The brush slipped through my hair. Nat could take the curling mass and make it look elegant, put together an outfit that looked actually
fashionable
in seconds, and she was so damn organized she could have given any Marine sergeant a run for their money. And I had to admit, it was nice to have a girl around.
One who wasn’t trying to kill me, that is. I’ve never had close girlfriends. Why bother, with Dad and me moving so much?
Christophe had actually argued me into having someone else around.
I would not choose one who couldn’t be trusted. You’ll enjoy it. It will help me worry less.
That was the big argument, trotted out whenever he wanted to mushroom-cloud me into something. I let out another long heave of a sigh and felt the night’s tension slip away from me. It was in the long dead stretch between three and four a.m., quiet time. Just like the shoal between three and six in the afternoon, when everyone in the hot part of the world is taking a siesta.
The Schola is oddly reversed. Nights were our days, because sunlight is safer to sleep in. My body clock was adjusting slowly. Sixteen and a half years of being diurnal is a hard habit to shake.
“You have such beautiful hair.” Nathalie lifted a handful of it. “These highlights. My God. You’d look great with a shorter, layered cut . . .”
I glanced up at the pair of
maliaka
hanging in a leather harness next to the vanity. They’d been my mother’s, and they were beautiful. I didn’t know where the ones Shanks had handed me had come from. “No way.”
Gran would kill me.
It was a habitual, instinctive thought. I hadn’t had more than a trim in
years
. “If it’s short, it ends up in my face all the time. Eating hair is so not cool.”
She rolled her cat-tilted, beautifully expressive eyes. “That’s what
product
is for. You kill me, you really kill me. Hey, I think we should paint your nails. Not pink, though. I’m thinking a dark red, because your skin tone—”
I shivered. “Not red. Besides, I don’t have time.” I glanced at the mirror. Her skin was perfect, poreless, and her sleek dark hair, parted on the side, looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon.
I, on the other hand, was a mess of reddish-purple bruising, scrapes, tumbled tangled hair, and red spots high on my cheeks as if I had a fever. My eyes were shadowed, darker than their usual blue, as if I was thinking of something serious. And that line between my eyebrows was back. Gran would’ve called it an I-want line.

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