the hurtful glee came back. He clicked his bootheels as he stalked across the floor and Christophe surged against the chains, fighting.
It hurt me to see. Blood dripped, each plink hitting the floor loud in the magnified silence. If he kept this up, he was going to hurt himself even worse, and anger crested inside me for one red-hot moment.
“Christophe!” I yelled. The light flashed, brighter, crimson instead of low red, and a draft of cinnamon and perfume roiled up from my skin. “Stop it!”
Dibs let out a soft little hurt sound. The vampires were still, staring. Sergej halted as if slapped.
Christophe sagged against the chains. Sergej made a noise like trains colliding.
Sergej was suddenly there, leaning into the sphere of toxicity the aspect gave me. His face mottled purple, and he hissed, everything in him twisting. Maybe it was because Christophe had listened to me—or maybe it was just because he wanted to be the only one doing the talking.
He’s a garden-variety bully. For a moment I felt a surge of hope, of strength, of something warm and comforting. You don’t stumble through the jungle of the public education system in sixteen different states without learning about bullies.
But then the hope crashed. He wasn’t just a bully. He was the king of the vampires, and I was in deep shit. We all were.
And I couldn’t see any damn way out.
Sergej backed off a couple steps. His entire body twisted, shoulders shaking, and he drummed his heels into the stone floor with little cracking sounds. The mottling retreated as he hissed, the sound shaking everything around us. Everything rippled, even the floor. The wheelchair groaned, and I squeezed my left hand. Hard. The sunburst of pain jolted up my arm, cleared my head, and I twisted, working against the straps.
No use.
Sergej’s head tipped back down. He made another one of those little clicking noises, and the wheelchair shook as Graves’s fists tightened again.
He pushed me slowly across the acres of checkerboard squares, closer to the table. I looked at the stuff on it, and swallowed dryly.
So that’s what he’s going to do.
It made a kind of sense. The happy stuff in my blood that drives boy djamphir a little crazy pretty much only functions when it hits the air. But it also breathes out through my skin, and that’s what makes me toxic to suckers now that I’d bloomed and could reliably use the aspect. If Sergej, for some reason or another, couldn’t get through that shell, if my blood was even more toxic when it hit oxygen and he couldn’t get his fangs in me the way he had with Anna, well . . . the best solution was to make sure the blood didn’t hit the air, right? And there was a good way of doing that.
It involved needles and tubing, and something simple to push the blood.
A transfusion.
Sergej must’ve seen it on my face. “It has a certain symmetry, does it not? I was not able to drink from your mother; I had to settle for merely destroying. But you are heir to all her strength, and whatever remnants of dear sweet Anotchka you stole before she died, and a bastard strain of the djinni themselves. I will have it all. This is only the beginning. It will take me weeks to wring the last drop of strength from you.” He indicated Christophe with one short stabbing gesture. “And my son will watch every session.” Another hideously jolly chuckle, and Sergej dropped into his iron throne. He laid his hands along the chair’s arms, and clicked his tongue again.
Graves wheeled me toward the table.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I thought he’d make Graves stick the needle in my arm. But instead, Sergej tapped his fingers and stared at Dibs. I yanked against the restraints. Nothing. The wheelchair threatened to tip, but Graves steadied it. He was breathing hard, his pulse ratcheting up into redline, fighting.
It didn’t matter.
“You.” The king of the vampires sounded bored. “Ready the transfusion.”
Dibs rose, slowly. He was still staring at me, his pupils pinpricks and his hair wildly curling over his forehead. High bright flags of color stood out on his cheeks, and I saw the messy fang marks on his neck. Little bruised holes, crusted with dried blood.
Oh, God.
His ribs flared with sharp shallow breaths. He looked scared to death.
“No.”
Even I couldn’t quite believe he’d said it. Everyone was staring at him instead of me now, and despite the relief, I suddenly cast around for something