At least my hair covered up the diamond studs. Yes. I’d put them back in.
Why not? At least Christophe never wavered. He was always the same. Maddening, opaque, kind of creepy because he was so much older and stuck in a teenage body . . . but he never did a 180 on me. I never had to guess whether he liked me or not.
What are you thinking, Dru?
“I’m certain.” He sounded so absolute. What would it be like to be that sure of everything? He never seemed nervous or like he was going to change his mind about me.
“Thanks.” It sounded pale and inadequate even as soon as it left my mouth. “For everything.”
“An honor, and a pleasure.” He didn’t even look up. “How did you escape Sergej?”
I shivered at the name. Ash looked up, watchful. Graves’s shoulders hunched. He stared at his plate instead of me now.
Well, I guess Christophe had to ask. And an explanation was the least I owed him.
My mouth was dry. “Anna . . . she was there. And her Guard. They were all locked up. We . . . Leon was there too. I hit him pretty hard, I stabbed S-Ser—” I couldn’t say the name. Not after the warehouse and that dark little room, where he’d just appeared. “I stabbed him.”
“With a lamp,” Graves supplied helpfully. “Then we got the hell out of there.”
He didn’t mention me sucking Anna’s blood. He also didn’t mention coming back and shooting the king of the vampires.
Saving my life.
I found out I was twisting my hands together. My teeth tingled faintly, remembering, and I smelled smoke. “Graves came back for me. The whole place was burning. Anna and her Guard, well, they vanished. We were outside, and Ash found us.”
“I should have followed the Silverhead.” Christophe set the atlas down, flipped through the legal pad again. “God knows he can find you. Which is a mystery. And he is Broken no longer.”
“That happened before. At the Prima. Right before Leon . . . He showed me . . .” I ran out of words. Pulled my legs up, bracing my heels on the chair, and hugged my knees. He made me think you’d handed Graves over to Sergej. Because of me. And I believed it. “Anyway, I got off the Schola grounds and you know the rest.”
“Some of it.” He kept looking at my handwriting. The pages riffled a little, because a tremor had gone through him. “We’d gone to rescue the loup-garou, but it was one of the decoys. You were headed straight for another decoy. It was a neatly laid trap.”
Which brought up another question. “Did you find . . . Is Leon . . .” Yeah, Leon had handed me over to the king of the vampires, and I’d been pretty sure he was dead in that dark little room. So had Graves.
But still. He was djamphir, not sucker. I kind of hoped he’d made it out somehow.
“Dead. Or I would have finished him myself. My father fled, gravely wounded. I was convinced you were still alive. Perhaps the Order has finished searching the wreckage for your remains.”
He said it so calmly. The club sandwich was revolving in my stomach. I swallowed hard, trying to convince it to stay down. “Does Bruce think I’m dead too?”
Christophe shrugged. He set the pad down. “It’s almost sundown. I’m going to go make a few preparations. I trust I can ask you to remain here, and you’ll listen?”
I nodded. “Unless more vampires show up.” It tried to be a joke, fell flat. I hugged my knees even tighter. The T-shirt rode up. All my weight was distributed differently. I didn’t even know who I was anymore.
But Christophe looked at me, blue eyes soft and direct. I’d never seen him look at another person that way. Even in the true-seeins where he looked at my mother like he wanted to . . .
Kind of like he wanted to eat her. No, that’s the wrong word. Like he wanted to consume her, pull her in and just assimilate her somehow. But he looked at me like he was seeing me. Really, truly seeing Dru Anderson, not just the shell I put up for the world.
He pushed his chair back and rose in one fluid motion. “I’ll be back before dark.” He scooped his new bag up and brushed past me. But his hand came down, and he touched my shoulder as he passed.
It was like he’d poured something hot and strong into me. A flush that worked down to my bones instead of staying on my skin like the aspect.
He paused at the door. Looked back over his shoulder, and it was as if we were the only two people in the room. “Keep this locked.”
A blast of humid air, the sunlight flooding in as he stepped out onto the walkway, and he was gone. The air conditioning kicked up a notch. Down here in the valley with the concrete, it was approaching the hottest part of the afternoon-into-evening. Up on the ridges there would be some wind, at least, and the creek and the trees.
And a burned-out shell of a house. I now owned nothing but the land, and not even that until I was eighteen. I’d always had this thought of moving up there after I was finished with school or something, just retreating from everything. Maybe trading hexbreaking and stuff for food, like Gran had. You could just scrape by in that part of the country. Everyone up in the hills pretty much “just scraped by.”
As life dreams go, I know it sucks. But it was my little dream, and now it was a charred mess. Just like everything else.
A wave of shaking slid through my bones, jostling around like my body hadn’t decided whether or not it was going to pitch a fit.
Ash kept chewing, staring bright-eyed at me. He was still filthy, and I had to coax him into a shower somehow. Christophe had even brought clothes for him. He’d thought of everything.