a stop Sergej was on me, his hands around my throat, and he squeezed.
My hands lay encased in cement. The malaika suddenly weighed a ton, and something crackled in my throat. Little black spots danced at the edges of my vision, and a shrill inner voice screamed at me to do something, to move—but the lump of heat in my stomach was fading, and the rage had deserted me.
Because the twisting hate in his face was what I felt. It was the rage, and it was mine, too.
It was how I was like him.
The aspect flamed, and he coughed. The purple mottling rose in his perfect, planed cheeks. But he laughed, a gleeful, hateful sound that exhaled rot in my face. “Stronger!” he chuckled. “Inoculated against your poison, little child-bird!” He braced himself, leaning close, and laughed in my face, rank breath filling the world. “There will be other svetocha. I will walk in the daylight. I will leave your body for the crows to—”
A meaty thunk interrupted. Sergej stiffened, and my aspect flared again. I got my right hand up, braced with malaika hilt, and clocked him a good one across the head.
He pitched to the side, and Christophe’s face rose over his shoulder. Christophe was smeared with even more vampire blood, and the left side of his face looked smashed-wrong. He was oddly twisted, and I realized why—something in him had been crushed. By something I mean bones—the entire left side of his ribs was caved in. But he held onto the iron spike grimly and shoved it further into Sergej’s back, his lips skinning back from his teeth. In that one moment, he looked more like his father than I’d ever believed possible.
The sharp thin tip of the spike punched out through Sergej’s chest. The vampire king writhed, inhaling, the purple mottles sliding up his face with grasping, ugly fingers. He looked ancient now, not always-seventeen and too beautiful to be real.
No, this was the face of something old and terrible, something so far removed from human it wasn’t even related anymore. The bloody directionless light pulsed, stuttering, and I realized it was coming from him.
Oh, Jesus. Nausea grabbed my entire body, a wracking spasm of revulsion. I was on my knees as Sergej scrabbled back. I’d stabbed him with an iron lamp-stand last time, and it had only put him down temporarily.
“No!” Christophe grabbed my arm. “Dru! NO!”
He shoved me, with more strength than I would’ve thought possible. I flew back, my left-hand malaika clattering free. Shit, dropped my sword, junior move, can’t do that—Then I hit the wall, hard enough to stun. Little stars danced in front of my eyes, and I whooped in a breath.
Christophe limped, dragging his left foot. It was a weird, snake-like motion, and Sergej was curling up like a bait worm on a hook. The king of the vampires was making a noise, a queer rattling that scraped against my skin, and the red light deepened. Instead of fresh blood, the light was clotting on every surface, fouling and streaking.
I whooped in another breath, coughed and retched. Still had my right-hand malaika. Dragged myself up the wall, the aspect’s strength a warm glow, but fading now. The voices eased, whispering instead of screaming inside my head, and the touch brushed over my skin with feather-soft caresses. It felt . . . clean.
Thank God. But I already felt filthy way down inside, where scrubbing wouldn’t reach.
Where the rage came from.
Christophe grabbed the cruel clawed end of the spike jutting up from his father’s back. “I warned you,” he rasped, and the aspect boiled free of him, waves of power visible now in the dull punky glow. “I told you if you touched her, you would die.”
He sounded so calm.
Sergej said something, the spiked consonants of a foreign language. Ragged, and full of so much fury, so much twisted hate, it turned my stomach all over again.
“Yes,” Christophe said. “You are my father. And I hate you for it.”
It happened so fast. One moment he was there, holding the iron spike. The next, he jammed the spike all the way through. It hit the stone with a screech, and sparks flew.
But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was Sergej twisting, his feet flailing, an animal in a trap. And Christophe on him, the horrid sound of bones grinding as he grabbed his father, wrenched Sergej’s head aside, and buried his fangs right where the shoulder met the neck.
The red light flared. Then