out of this. I was pretty damn sure of that. You’d think it would be the sort of thing that would reduce a girl to the screaming meemies.
But for Dibs’s sake, I was going to be brave. I was going to lose a little blood here.
I just hoped I had enough in me to buy the rest of them some more time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Sometimes I have nightmares about what happened next. They always start out with the smile on my face, cracked and faded but plastered there, and my encouraging nods every time Dibs glanced worriedly at me. Then there’s the sting of the needle and the aspect flaming into life, every muscle in me tensing against the intrusion and my fangs tingling, crackling, aching. Then there’s a skip, like a jolted CD player, and a sound like rushing water all through me.
A horrible draining sensation. A deep bruising ache in my arm. The bloodhunger rasping against my veins, like sandpaper flooding my circulatory system. Merciful darkness covering my vision, everything in flashes—Sergej’s hiss as the needle slid in, Dibs’s quiet sobbing, Graves’s quick light breathing, the wheelchair rattling as he twitched, the rising hateful murmur through the assembled nosferat, a thin silvery rattle as Christophe’s chains moved again.
My head fell to the side, my neck turning to rubber. A thin stem to hold my pumpkin head up. I thought I heard my mother’s voice again—Be brave, sweetheart. Be very brave now.
The blood she’d given me was now sliding into her killer’s veins. No oxygen to make it liquid poison for him.
Everything spilled away on that dark rushing water. This wasn’t like Christophe’s fangs in my wrist and the terrible inward-ripping sensation as something was pulled out of me by the roots.
No. This was worse.
Because it was black, and cold, and I was trying to scream, and I was alone, and nobody would hear me. It was like sitting in an empty house and waiting for Dad to come back, or sitting by Gran’s hospital bed while her breathing got shallower and shallower. It was like my mother snuggling me into a hidey-hole in the bottom of a closet, closing me away in the safest place she could, and leaving me in the dark.
I was always being left behind. Like a piece of luggage. Like a toy, set down while a kid runs away to play with something else. Like trash.
Now I was left behind, again, and this time there would be nobody and nothing coming to pick me up.
This was the end of the line.
I heard a sound. I was making it. A chilling, breathless moan. Air escaping past slack lips, a drowning swimmer’s final bubbles rising for the surface like silvery fish while the rest . . . sinks.
Fingers against my face. Cold, with the prickle of claws behind them. He scraped at my skin gently, like he enjoyed the feel of it. Something in me roused, knowing I was in terrible danger. It struggled for the surface . . . and couldn’t make it.
“Take her away,” Sergej said, and giggled.
No chain cuffed to my wrist. No need for it now. I was as weak as a sick kitten. Dibs held the cup of water to my lips; half of it spilled down my T-shirt. Tears slicked his cheeks. I blinked at him. There was a buzzing in my ears, and everything looked two-dimensional.
The touch was weak, too. Contracting, like a slug with salt sprinkled on it. Thin and washed out, the world with most of its color removed, all its solidity evaporated. Just a television show, light played on a flat screen.
“Dru!” Dibs, sobbing now. “Dru, please, wake up. Wake up.”
I don’t think I want to. But I was doing this for him, wasn’t I? So I tried to focus through the haze. My mouth wouldn’t quite work right.
“Dibsh?” I slurred. Tried again. “Shamuel?”
Because I’d always thought it was kind of funny when Christophe called him Samuel. A weird, floaty laugh came out of me, my lips loose and numb. I sounded drunk.
He made a low hurt noise. That snapped me back into some kind of sense.
Buck up, Dru. You’re still breathing. Things could be worse.
As “comforting things to think” went, it kind of sucked.
I forced my eyes to open all the way. It wasn’t the cell. It was a bedroom. No windows, the blank stone walls faintly sheened with something like greasy sweat. But the bed was a four-poster, done in faded pink, hanging curtains fuzzed with