Reckoning Page 0,83

gently as I could.

Graves’s head tipped back. But his arms and legs tensed, twining us together, tighter and tighter. I swallowed. It slid down my throat like silk and exploded in my stomach, and the touch came back to roaring life. My fangs drove in deeper, strength flooding my arms and legs again, and he made an odd sound, like all the air had been punched out of him.

It poured into my mouth again, heat and life and light. But with it came a flood of images, swirling through the touch and blasting straight into my brain.

. . . “Stupid little—” The words became a roar, the spilled paint bright blue against the garage floor as the fosterdaddy’s slap caught him right on the cheek. Red pain, falling, hitting the side of the car with a dead crack and the pain a red monster, swallowing him whole.

. . . crouching on the playground while the bigger kid swings his foot, kick catching right under the ribs, falling and hearing their laughter. The teachers were hurrying to bust it up, but he just hunched and sobbed, because it was too late.

. . . sobbing in the middle of the night, hearing the scream as Mom’s latest boyfriend took the belt to her, writhing in shame and pain because he was too little, too afraid. Never, he swears to himself, never be helpless again, never never never . . .

. . . the blue-eyed girl turned in a circle, and his heart was a stone in his chest. “It’s nice,” she said, looking at the posters and the books and the shabby little room he’d managed to cobble together. His hideaway, where he retreated to lick his wounds every day. “It’s cozy.” And just like that, she turned the whole place into a clubhouse, because he wasn’t in here alone.

. . . she was beautiful, even soaked and shivering, with the gun in her hand. Her eyes blazed, and the grinding in his shoulder from the thing that had bit him was a flaming brand. “Dru. Don’t leave me. Please.” Because she had that look, his mother’s look every time she vanished and the social workers came sniffing around. The look that said he was nothing but baggage, and she was better off without him, because he’d make her sink like a rock. So he pulled himself up, as tall as he could. Don’t care what I have to do. “Dru.” Trying not to sound like he was pleading. And when she nodded, the gun pointed at the floor and the tears sliding unnoticed down her cheeks, the relief in him was enough to make the hamburger mess of his shoulder suddenly inconsequential.

Because for the first time, someone didn’t shrug him off. She set her shoulders and nodded. “All right,” she said, and he suddenly understood everything had changed, that he wasn’t going to get left behind, that she was going to take him with her. He’d say anything, do whatever he had to—she asked questions, he answered. And finally she nodded again. “All right, Graves. You and me. Let’s go.”

And it was enough. More than he’d ever thought he’d get.

I swallowed again. The heat slammed through me, a good cracking-clean hit like a baseball against the sweet spot of a bat. They poured into me, the images, and seeing myself through his eyes was like vanishing. Because he hadn’t seen the frizzy-haired, scared-to-death, mousy Dru. No, to him I’d looked like a supernova, flaming and deadly beautiful, an escape from the dead-end world he’d been born into.

And Jesus, I’d known it had to have been bad for him—nobody with a well-adjusted family life lives in a forgotten office in a mall, for Chrissake—but I hadn’t known how bad. He’d never said anything about it. At least, nothing directly. And I hadn’t asked because, well, you don’t ask about shit like that. You just leave everything open in case they want to say something, and you try not to squeeze any raw parts.

When Ash’s teeth had ground in his flesh and the change agents worked in with Ash’s saliva, Graves had been born again. Dragged out of the dead end and plonked on the highway. He didn’t want to look back.

And now I could guess at all the broken places inside him, where Sergej had his claws. Except I had hold of everything else, and I pulled, the touch flexing as his blood filled my mouth again and he made another harsh