I had to know. “Christophe?”
He went utterly still. “What, skowroneczo moja?”
“Where were you?” Was I bait? What were you doing? You said you’d be gone, but here you are.
“I was making arrangements to come collect my little bird.” His fingers bit in, and he raised my hand, palm up. “You don’t think I’d leave you, do you?” There was a gleam of teeth under the lamps of his eyes, and all of a sudden I knew what he was going to do. The knowledge sprang full-blown into my head, and if I hadn’t been so scared, exhausted, lonely, pained, you name it, I might have tried to backpedal. Graves let out another strangled sound, his arm tightening as I lost all the strength left in my legs.
And Christophe drove his fangs into my wrist, just where the radial pulse beats. It was like rusty spikes spearing through my arm, the pain branching up nerves to detonate in my head, and a horrible draining sensation spilled through me.
It hurt. Have you ever been so sick dying seems like an okay thing because it will make the feeling stop? Have you ever felt something inside you, something you never noticed before, something rooted deep in your chest, getting ripped up inch by inch? Stubbornly resisting, something twined around your ribs and internal organs being torn free.
I collapsed. A wave of coldness dilated around my mother’s locket, held trapped against my skin.
Graves made a soft, hurt little sound, holding me up. “Dru—” he whispered.
The drawing pull came again. This time it stretched up into my brain, a bony hand digging clawed fingers up my throat and into my skull the hard way, squeezing the tender meat I thought with.
Memories splashed and whirled, draining away.
Graves was holding me up now. I was trying to scream, but I couldn’t. My voice box had frozen up. Everything about me had frozen. One thought managed to escape the relentless, digging agony.
“please don’t please don’t not again please don’tdon’tdon’t”
But it came one more time, and this time was the worst because the digging, awful fingers weren’t pulling at anything physical. Instead they were scraping and burrowing and twisting into me. The part of me that wasn’t anything but me, the invisible core of what I was.
I’d call it the soul, but I don’t think the word fits. It’s as close as I can get.
Digging scraping pulling tearing ripping, invisible things inside me being pulled away, and something left me in a huge gush. My head tipped back, breath locked in my throat. Graves made another small horrified sound and tried to pull me away.
Christophe jerked his head back, fangs sliding free of my flesh, and something wrapped itself tightly around my wrist, below his bruising-hard grip on my forearm. He exhaled, shuddering, and Graves tried to pull me away again. My arm stretched like Silly Putty between them, my shoulder screaming, and I couldn’t make a sound.
The winter-blue of Christophe’s irises clouded, dark striations like food coloring dropped in water threading through the light. They still glowed even more intensely, in a way that shouldn’t have made sense. “Sweet,” he hissed, and made an odd hitching movement. His chin dipped, and his fingers tightened bruising-hard on my wrist, like he was going to do that again.
I wanted to scream, couldn’t. Nothing worked. My body just hung there, frozen and unresponsive.
“Christophe.” Shanks sounded nervous. “Um, Christophe?”
The world trembled on a knife edge. Blackness crowded in around the corners. My head tipped further back. Graves held me up, both arms around me now. I was so tired it was work to breathe.
In, out, in, out, my ribs almost refused to rise. There was air outside my face, but it was just so hard to bring it in. Instead, the sea of atmosphere pushed down on me, crushing.
“Jesus,” Graves whispered. “What did you do to her?”
Another gleam of teeth below Christophe’s darkened eyes. “I just borrowed her for a while, dogboy.” The casual, hurtful edge to the words abraded the inside of my head like an ice scraper against a windshield. I flinched. “Don’t worry. I’m not about to let one of them get their ugly fangs in moja ksi aniczko.”
Pain and dragging weariness pulled on every nerve and muscle in my body. Behind us, another chilling howl lifted into the night.
“We need cover,” Shanks said urgently. “And—”
“I know what you need. Shut up.” Christophe touched my face, stepping close and sliding his fingertips against my dirty cheek. I flinched. Graves dragged me back, and how weird was it that he stepped silently? All around us, the woods creaked and sighed in the darkness. The snarl running under the surface of Graves’ skin bounced around, echoing, inside my skull.
They faced each other, the two boys, and I was suddenly very sure something bad was about to happen. The moment hung, suspended in the cold night air.
“They’re getting closer,” someone whispered.
Christophe laughed. It was a bitter little sound, not unlike Graves’ sarcastic, pained bark. “I’m not saving you,” he said, very quietly. “I’m saving her. Remember that.”
He turned and literally vanished. The air made a weird popping sound, collapsing where he’d stood, and one of the wulfen sniffed deeply. Shanks cursed, but softly. Thick white wetness boiled in the air, rising from the ground where Christophe had stood. It rose in veiny, ropy fingers, curls of it touching my legs.
The touch made my skin crawl. It was exactly the kind of greasy fog the suckers had shown up in.
Wait a minute. What did he just do?
“Bloodfog,” one of them said. “It’ll cover us, and he’ll hunt them. Let’s go.”
At that point everything just turned weird and soupy gray. Dibs helped Graves heft me up on his back like I was a little kid getting piggybacks. I tried to say I was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come.
They started moving through the forest, everything blurring together. My head bobbled and joggled against Graves’ shoulder, and I heard him cursing steadily under his breath. The places inside me where everything had been ripped up twinged and settled, throbbing like a sore tooth. It was like a headache, only not in my head. In the invisible places where I lived that weren’t connected with any muscle or bone.
“Graves…” I whispered against his shoulder. Then the darkness swallowed me, and everything inside me still hurt. I fell down into the hole where things had been ripped free, and small chill voices laughed while I did.
CHAPTER 22
I came back to myself slowly, in fits and starts. First there was gray light, coming through two horizontal cracks. A single spot of warmth against my chest, like someone had breathed on me.
Voices. Shanks and Graves, mostly.
“She still out?” Grudging concern. The tall werwulf didn’t sound happy.
“Like a light. I can’t believe you suggested that.” Graves, tired and unhappy too. The movement under me hadn’t stopped. Wind touched my hair. For the first time I smelled something other than smoke. Leaf sludge, fresh air, the iron smell of very early or very, very late.
“We had to. Jesus Christ.” Feet hitting the ground. “All right, everyone. Let’s get moving.”
The horizontal slices of light thinned and vanished. I drowned in blackness again. Something inside me felt different, but I couldn’t figure out what.
A sound like feathers surrounded me. I waited for the owl, but it didn’t show up. Its wings beat frantically, a muffled heartbeat. The horizontal bars of light dawned again, and I realized they were my eyelids opening a little to let in morning.
Voices, arguing. I felt like I’d been ripped apart and put back together wrong. My arms were around something, and a tree trunk was braced against my back. My feet dangled. I hitched in a breath. It was a relief to find that breathing wasn’t a huge struggle anymore. My lungs and ribs had decided to work together, and the air was no longer heavy as lead.