“The wampyr have gone to earth, if Reynard left any alive. We have to move now, and get to a safe place.”
“Like where? And Shanks is half-dead. We can’t leave him.”
“You’re not in charge. We’re already carrying her. You gonna carry him too?”
“Fuck you I’m not in charge. We’re not leaving anyone behind.” It was Graves, like I’d never heard him. Angry, determined, and with that growl under the edge of the words. He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and he wasn’t about to take any shit.
I realized my mouth was open, dry, and tasted like something had died in it. I closed it and tried an experimental movement. The haze of light coming in through my eyelids sharpened.
“Please. Who do you think you’re kidding? The djamphir might think you’re gonna control us, but you’re not.”
Movement. I was shifted to the side. A small sound escaped me, like I was caught in a nightmare.
Go figure.
“Let’s get this figured out right now,” Graves said, quietly. The growl turned into a sharp crackling, as if bones under plastic wrap were snapping into dust.
Oh boy. The thought was sharp and clear, and it was another relief. A little bit of warmth stole back into me, the locket oddly heavy under my shirt. The ripped-up places inside me quivered like scabs. With thought came being again. I was.
Dru. I’m Dru. And that’s Graves.
Life, color, and sound all rushed back into me. I opened my eyes and found out I was slumped against Dibs, who had gone pale, his eyes wide. He stared at the clearing, which was ringed by wulfen in various hunching poses. Some of them even lay stretched flat on the forest floor.
Oily-white, almost-glowing fog drifted cotton-packed between the trees, and birds were calling uncertainly. It even smelled like dawn, if you’ve ever been out when the sun comes up, you know what I mean. It’s the metallic scent of sunlight hitting the atmosphere and everyone needing a good shot of caffeine.
Graves and another black-haired boy were the only ones standing up in the middle of the clearing.
Beads of water touched Graves’ messy hair. The fog was so thick it was like being caught in a bubble, swallowing the rest of the world.
The shape at my feet was Shanks, stretched out at full-length, dried blood in a shocking spill down the side of his face. His clothes were ripped to shreds, and more blood, black and still-smoking as well as red and human, crusted him. He looked like he was in bad shape, cheese-pale and with his sides heaving as he breathed in shallow gasps.
Graves leaned forward. The other boy, slim, black hair cut short, big dark eyes almost glowing with anger, rocked back on his heels as if he’d been punched. The invisible tension between them boiled like heat-haze above pavement on a tar-melting-hot day.
“Don’t fucking mess with me right now, man.” Graves said every word very slowly and very clearly, his lips moving as he enunciated. He had to, because his jaw was shifting. Still, the command-voice came out clean and clear. The other boy rocked back even further on his heels, dropping his shoulders and dipping his chin.
“We’ll all die,” the other kid whined, but all the starch had gone out of him. “You’re not ready.”
“Not ready my ass,” Graves snapped. “I was born ready, dick-wipe. You want to test me now, you go ahead, but it’ll waste valuable time. We get caught, you’ll die just like the rest of us. So stop being an asshole and shut the fuck up.”
Silence, as ticking-tense as the moment between stepping off a diving board and the instant you hit the water. I leaned against Dibs and looked down at Shanks. His eyes were half-closed, little gleams peeking out from under the eyelids. There was no sign of iris or pupil, just blind white.
Something was wrong. The world looked flat, oddly two-dimensional. I tilted my head back, trying to hear something, anything, with the touch. Trying to unloose the fist and send little questing fingers out to take in the world.
My pulse leapt up, hard and high in my throat. There was nothing there.
Stop it. You’re just tired. God knew I was exhausted. But it was like being blind. I’d never realized before how the touch lay under every thought, bubbling and boiling and showing me the depths of things.
It was gone, and I was blind. I hated the feeling.
I found I could stand on my own two feet. Dibs still clutched at me, though. His skin was hot against mine, and he smelled just like a regular boy, without the undertone of cold fur and danger.
Is this what it’s like to be normal? Shaking spilled through me. The trees looked dead. The fog was flat. And Graves and the rest—
No, wait. Graves looked normal. He stared at the other boy, green eyes piercing and a high blush of color on his cheekbones, the slight suggestion of epicanthic folds vanishing as his face shifted to more hawklike than half-Asian. Other than that, he looked just the same as usual, except a little more unwashed. His coat was singed and plastered with mud up the side, his hair was wildly mussed, and a bolt of something hot and hard went through my chest as the other black-haired boy dropped his eyes. Graves kept staring until the kid actually crouched, as if the green gaze was a heavy weight.
It looked like a grainy color film I’d seen on late-night cable in a weird little motel outside a teensy town named Zavalla in Texas. It was a nature special on satellite cable about wolf packs, and all about how wolves will give in and give up so the more dominant wolf keeps his position and the less dominant one doesn’t get killed. There was a lot of snapping and snarling, but killing everyone who wanted to maybe get a little higher on the ladder was bad evolutionary logic.
I blinked. My eyes were full of crusty stuff. And Graves really did look like the only real 3-D human being standing there. Even with his hair in messy strings and his coat singed, he looked…
I don’t have a word for the way he looked. Solid. Comforting. Like he was the one piece of the world that was holding the whole damn thing up. I let out a small sipping breath, trying not to taste the smoke smell rising up all around me or the stink of danger in the air. And that was another thing too, everything smelled washed out. Insipid. Not as real and true as it should have.
There was that spot of warmth against my chest, though. That was comforting.
“Now,” Graves finally said, “anyone else want to piss me off? Anyone else think this is a goddamn democracy?”
I swallowed, hard. My throat clicked, but nobody paid any attention. He’d drawn himself up to his full height, and turned slowly in a circle, looking at everyone.
“We’re a pack.” He halted once he’d made a full circle, and looked down at the kid in front of him. It might’ve looked weird anywhere else, but here in the woods surrounded by fog it looked perfectly normal.
Well, not normal. But natural. It looked like he belonged here, splashed with mud and scorch, his eyes burning and his coat straining across shoulders that had grown broader. It was the loup-garou burning in him, turning him into something other than the weirdo bird-thin Goth Boy hiding in the corners of your average school.
His hands were whiteknuckle fists. “We don’t leave someone behind. We’ve all been left behind one way or another, we ain’t gonna do it to nobody else. Anyone got a problem with that?”