the dashboard, riding the car’s shuddering like a surfer. He still whined, but instead of patting me he kept his hand on my shoulder, fingers tensing. Not driving in, thank God. He had wulfen claws, and I didn’t like the idea of having my shoulder ground up like meatloaf.
“We’ll be okay,” I said, shakily. Another sob came along; I bit it in half and swallowed it. Rain poured in through the other three windows. This was not going to do the upholstery any good at all. “We’ll take this route. It’ll—”
The car slid sideways. I turned into it, cursing a blue streak—Dad would’ve yelled at me for using That Language, and I never would’ve dared around Gran. But neither of them was here so it was just me, the touch filling my head and pouring out through my arms as I wrenched the steering wheel and goosed the accelerator instead of the brake. You never want to hit the brakes in a situation like that.
The tires bit; we made it through and bumped up into a pair of overgrown ruts that was the alternate path. It would take us longer, but on this part of the ridge there was less chance of washouts. The trees glowered, leaves falling like the monsoon rain, and I judged we were about a mile from the house. We’d have to cover three miles of rutted track to get there, though.
Good thing there’s moonshine runners in my family tree, right? Along with vampires.
Oh, God. I grabbed the steering wheel with both hands, exhaled hard, and saw Gran’s owl again, flickering through falling water in a soft blur. It was dark, especially under the trees, and my head hurt. Whether it was from the crying or something else, I couldn’t tell. Glass spikes pressed in through my temples, and my nose was running so hard I had to root around for some damp fast-food napkins to wipe my top lip. I shivered, the trembling communicating itself to Ash.
“Bad,” he whispered, under the straining engine and the drumming of rain. Thunder drowned out most of what he said next. “—sowwy. Osh sowwy.”
My heart squeezed down on itself, hard. “It isn’t your fault.” I heaved a sigh, kept a sharp eye on the ruts ahead. The ghost of oranges on my tongue taunted me. “I could’ve just paid for it without getting mouthy. I screwed up, not you. It’s not your fault.”
I mean, what else could I say? It’s not like he did it on purpose. I was the responsible one. I’d just failed. Again.
He shut up, but he kept hold of me. Crouching on the seat like that probably wasn’t comfortable, but I had enough to worry about. The sobs juddered to a stop, and it took forever, but when we bumped out into the meadow I heaved a sigh of relief. Gran’s house stood on the far end, lit by garish flashes of lightning, and it took me halfway across the meadow to realize something was wrong.
The flickering orange light from inside wasn’t right. It was open flame, shining out through the windows and sending gushes of billowing black smoke up into the drenching blanket of water falling from the sky.
Gran’s house was burning. And my mother’s locket was a chip of ice against my chest. The owl turned in a tight, distressed circle in front of the car, veering sharply away just before it hit the windshield, and I began to get a very bad feeling.
Just then, slim black shapes boiled out of the undergrowth, and I reached for the shift lever as if in a slow terrible nightmare. The lightning showed their slicked-down hair and ivory-gleam teeth, the eerie quickness of their movements, and the hatred blurring around them made the touch ache like a sore tooth inside my head.
Vampires. They’d found us. But I didn’t taste the wax-orange foulness that usually warned me of them. Just that ghost of citrus, like orange juice you’ve forgotten you drank an hour ago.
There was no time. I couldn’t hope to get us down the ridge before they hit the car. I couldn’t even make the tree line.
Ash howled and pitched himself aside, fur rippling up over his dirty skin. The passenger window, only partly rolled up, shattered. Thank God he hit the ground outside before changing, because otherwise he’d’ve gotten stuck halfway through. Fur boiled up over him, his bones crackling as he swelled, his boy voice deepening and swelling into a wulfen’s roar.
I sat there,