“His what? Slow down and speak English.” I pushed myself upright in the chair. I was tired and hungry, and I wanted to see Graves. And oh yeah, I wanted to curl up in bed and shake. I wanted to lock my door and the shutters over my window and spend a little time just trembling. It sure as hell sounded good.
There was a slow, uncomfortable silence. “You might as well tell her,” Dylan said. “If you’re going to.”
“I suppose so.” She fixed me with her limpid look, and I felt every pimple I’d ever had fighting toward the surface again. “Did Christophe tell you anything about his family?”
“Just that his mom was dead too, I think.” It was hard to remember when I was thinking through soup. Come to think of it, he hadn’t told me much at all. “Other than that, nothing. What’s this all about? He didn’t tell me a goddamn thing, and nobody’s told me really anything since I got here.”
“It would surprise you, then, to know that Christophe’s given name was Krystof Gogol?” A significant pause while I shook my head, mute, wondering where the hell she was going. “And the nosferat you escaped from two months ago, the acknowledged king of those who hunt the night, was born Sergej Gogol?”
“Huh?” I was exhausted. That’s the only reason why it took ten full seconds for what she was really saying to trickle through the fog in my head. “You what?”
Anna’s shoulders slumped. For the first time, she looked a little tired too. But it was just a gloss over her prettiness. “You didn’t know. Christophe is Sergej’s son. The eldest and, for a time, the most proud and wicked of his progeny. He saved you from his father and disappeared. But even before that, Reynard was interfering in your family.”
My heart was beating very loudly. All the breath had whooshed out of me. “Say what?” It was a tiny little squeak from a dry throat.
Anna hopped off the desk and faced me squarely, her hands clasped in front of her. She said what I was afraid she’d say. “We have reason to believe, Miss Anderson, that it was Reynard who gave away your mother’s location to Sergej. And we need your help to find out if he did.”
She laid the manila folder on the desk’s cluttered surface. Her pink-lacquered fingernails scraped slightly. “This is what we think happened. Your mother was in a safe location.” The folder flipped open, and the world skidded to a halt underneath me.
My teeth ground together behind the frozen lake of my face. They were tingling again, and the red sparkles at the corners of my vision were back. I swallowed harshly, tasting danger and rage.
It was an eight-by-ten glossy in full color, and it showed a yellow house with an oak tree growing by the front steps. I stared at the picture and my skin went cold, then hot, then cold again. Every muscle ache twinged once, then hardened into nausea.
Have you ever felt so sick your entire body feels like throwing up? Like that.
The last time I’d seen that house was in a dream.
Or was it a dream? Something I’d woken up from with Christophe and Graves both in the room, fighting off a dreamstealer, a winged serpent sucking at my breath, a thing that slunk away to lay eggs in my neighbors. Those eggs had hatched the next morning, and driving through a bunch of young wiggling dreamstealers to escape the wulfen attack on my house had been a nightmare.
I’d thought maybe it was a hallucination, the impossibly clear and detailed vision of my mother hiding me in the middle of the night.
It wasn’t a dream. A chill hard voice spoke up in the very middle of my head. It was memory.
That was what happened when Mom died. This is the house she died in. She hid me in the closet and went out to fight. And she got killed.
The svetocha next to me flipped the photo aside. Next was another glossy eight-by-ten. This time, the oak was in full summer leaf, except for the huge scorched half of it, twisted and blackened by some horrible thing still vibrating in the branches. The screen door was busted off its hinges, and the steps were shattered.
There was something terrible caught in the tree’s clutching fingers. Something human-shaped, but agonizingly distorted. The image seared itself on my eyes, burrowed into my brain.
“We think she died on the steps,” Anna said softly, “but Sergej hung her in the tree and… well. We didn’t get there in time. Your father was long gone, too, with you. We didn’t even know about you until years later.”
He hung her in the tree. Oh God. “You didn’t know about me?” I sounded breathless even to myself.
When she answered, there was a faint tinge of something, bitterness? Anger? I couldn’t decide and didn’t care. “No. Your mother… left the Order for her own reasons. Nobody knows what those reasons were.”
I don’t either. I blinked hard. Cleared my throat. “I thought svetocha were toxic to suckers. That’s what—” That’s what Christophe said.
“We are. We poison them just by breathing, just by existing in their vicinity. But some, a very few, nosferatu are powerful enough to endure that toxicity for a short amount of time. And a short amount of time was all Sergej needed.” Her perfect eyebrows drew together. “There is a reason he is their leader.”
It was weird. Nobody else would say his name. They said he or you-know-who. But Christophe, and this chick, said it quietly. Like they were talking about someone they knew.
I didn’t want to think about it. My entire body, and everything inside my head, felt like throwing up, passing out, or just sinking down on the floor and trembling for a bit. “What does this have to do with Christophe?”