“Aye-aye, Captain,” someone said, and I surprised myself by giggling. The sound was very small and lonely, but Graves looked at me, and the corner of his mouth tilted up a little. Just a little.
The empty places inside me didn’t feel quite so big after that.
I need to borrow something…. It will come back, I promise.
I didn’t ask where Christophe was. I was too busy trying to keep upright. And besides, if I had to really admit the truth, I didn’t want to know. Not while my wrist pulsed, hot and sore. Not while the world looked like a paper cutout and the space inside my head where the touch should be was glaringly empty. Not while I was still scared, and hungry, and smelling of smoke.
It was better to lean in close to Graves and smell whatever shampoo he’d used before everything went bad. A breath of it clung to him under the smell of outdoors, smoke, and healthy young male who needs his daily shower.
We moved into the weird fog, steadying each other. And vanished like ghosts.
CHAPTER 23
The woods were a dripping, treacherous wonderland. It got a little warmer, and the trees ran with fat drops of sweat from all the moisture in the air. I wondered about that, but it meant that the helicopters passing over were nothing more than sounds. They got awful close and circled for a while, but faded away as we moved down wooded slopes, over small streams trickling with black water under ice, and slogged through slippery mud.
“At least it’s not raining,” someone said once.
Someone else snorted. “Djamphir,” he said, as if it explained everything.
Maybe it did. How was Christophe doing this?
I hung onto Graves, and slowly I realized the fog, or whoever was behind the fog, keeping us under a curtain of vapor, was watching us.
If I hadn’t been so tired and drained I might’ve seen it sooner. The empty place inside me started feeling a little bit more normal, three-dimensionality returning to the world, and I began to see faces peeking out of the thick white vapor. They were thin, sexless faces with burning deep-socketed eyes and mouths that hung ajar just enough that you could see the fangs.
Just after mid-morning it got pretty bad. No matter how many times I blinked, the faces wouldn’t go away. I could walk on my own now, a kind of lurching. There was a whispered conference about what to do with the oxygen tank. I just slung it on my own shoulder and kept carrying it. Leave no traces, that was the first rule of being on the run in hostile territory.
One of the boys, Beau, the slim quick redhead, had a package of beef jerky, and we shared that out equally at one stop. Everyone took a small piece and we walked while chewing. The salt in it stung my smoke-rough throat, but a couple of the boys had water bottles and we each got a swallow or two as we walked. It made the jerky into a flavorless cud of salt and ick, but I kept chewing. I was too hungry not to.
Graves had held me up until I could walk on my own. But I veered around so drunkenly he reached down and took my hand, warm fingers slipping through my cold, wet ones. I was worried about my sweating, filthy fingers for about half a second, until my legs made me veer again. I couldn’t find my bearings with the world looking as paper-flat as it did. And I was so tired. My head felt like a pumpkin balanced on a stem.
But it was better with him holding my hand.
The faces crowded around. The better I felt, the more the world started looking normal again, the more they clustered around us, their mouths open as they stared at me. Some moved their lips; others vanished into thinning smoke as the sun climbed toward noon.
Yeah. Some normal. Why was it that I only felt like myself when the weirdest shit was happening?
“Fog’s thinning,” Peter remarked.
This got Shanks’ attention. He sucked in a deep, sharp breath, raising his shaggy head a bit. He looked like death warmed over, but at least the blood sticking to him was dried instead of fresh.
Terrific bruises swarmed across his face, one eye puffed almost shut. And his eyes were there, not just the whites glaring between his bruised eyelids. “Noon. Sun at its highest.”
“Which means Christophe might not be able to cover us from wherever he’s hiding during daylight.” Graves said it quietly, as if he was just talking to me.
Oh. That makes sense. Kind of. My wrist throbbed. I didn’t want to peel the bandage back. I didn’t want to even look at it, because the thought of that pulling against everything inside me was too horrible. It made me sweat under my four layers and coating of dirt and soot. I itched all over, miserably, but it was a better feeling than the dragging drunken pain or the sense of the world having been drained of its entire third dimension.
“I didn’t know a djamphir could do this.” Dibs scrubbed at his cheeks with both hands. He had a little bit of peach-fuzz stubble. A smudge of dirt wandered across his forehead.
“They usually can’t, and now he’s pretty much crippled until sunset.” Peter hopped up on a fallen tree, its moss gleaming with fat pearls of moisture, and glanced back over his shoulder at me. “How much did he take?”
He means me. How much of me did Christophe take? A wave of dizziness passed through me, hit my heels, and rebounded hard enough to bring bile up into my throat. The remnants of beef jerky clung to my tongue.
Underneath that was the real thought.
He means how much of my blood. “I don’t know.” I had to pack my cheek with chewed beef jerky like a Bible Belt farmer sucking on a wad of tobacco. “It was… it was horrible.”
“Well, no shit. It’s not a pleasant thing to get bit by a sucker of any stripe.” Peter hopped down.
The rest of them drew closer as the fog thinned. For a group of teenage boys wandering through the woods, they were remarkably quiet. Not a leaf stirred or a stick crackled underneath, unless I stumbled and Graves didn’t give me a quick jerk on the hand to bring me back on my keel. “But seriously. How many gulps did he get down?”
Jesus Christ. “Th-three. I think.” The strange unsteady feeling under my heart was better than the emptiness, too. It was a relief to feel anything other than that soul-destroying numbness.
“That’s good, right?” Dibs looked up anxiously. “More than that and you’d be at risk of bonding and the blood-da—”
“Shh!” Peter stopped. Everyone froze. Graves actually stepped close to me before going absolutely still, most of the boys with one ear cocked. Wulfen never look particularly canine unless they’ve changed, but seeing them all holding their heads that way made me think of the RCA dog on some of Gran’s old records. A rancid laugh bubbled up inside me. I listened just like they did, blood pounding in my ears, and the sound of another helicopter split the eerie silence.
A nasty little thought came padding into my head on little cat feet.
A sucker of any stripe, huh? I didn’t know djamphir drank blood. I suppose that’s what the hunger was about. If I drank someone’s blood, would I be able to do…something? Whatever it is Christophe did? Or what we’re guessing he did, since this fog is nowhere near normal?
Sergej had made the weather change too. He’d made it as dark as night during the day, called up a huge snowstorm. And Christophe was his son.
The whole line of thought made me feel queasy. It was one thing to have something inside yourself ripped out by the roots. It was another thing entirely to think of doing that to someone else. I mean, that made me one of the things from the Real World, all right.
It made me one of those things that my dad would have loaded up his guns and gone hunting after.