Reckoning Page 0,32

did . . .” I swallowed hard. Plus, if I have to, I can go over the border to Tijuana and points south. Chupacabras and cockroaches and nasty things, but at least it’ll be harder to track me there, and Juan-Raoul will help me.

It was an effort to keep my mouth shut. I was doing the nervoustalky thing, and that never works out well.

Christophe nodded. “Good thinking. By tomorrow I’ll have more cash and a car that won’t attract suspicion; I’ve already disposed of the other.”

I immediately fastened on that. “We’re without transport tonight? What if—”

“I have a backup plan.” He actually rolled his eyes, a very teenage movement. “Have a little faith in me. Besides, none of the nosferatu escaped yesterday. I’m fairly certain we have another night before we’re tracked here.” He flipped back to the beginning of the legal pad, drew the atlas over, and opened it to the page number I had listed next to our first stop.

“You’re sure none of them escaped?” My palms were suspiciously damp, and not just because it was eighty-eight degrees and a hundred percent humidity out there. I’d thought my hair would frizz, but no. The ringlets lay sleek and veined with blonde, though if I braided them back they would slip free. I didn’t even have a piece of string to tie them up with; the one I’d been using before was probably still up in the meadow, lying in the mud.

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