Free Reckoning by Lili St. Crow

was from the crying or something else, I couldn’t tell. Glass spikes pressed in through my temples, and my nose was running so hard I had to root around for some damp fast-food napkins to wipe my top lip. I shivered, the trembling communicating itself to Ash.
    “Bad,” he whispered, under the straining engine and the drumming of rain. Thunder drowned out most of what he said next. “—sowwy. Osh
sowwy
.”
    My heart squeezed down on itself, hard. “It isn’t your fault.” I heaved a sigh, kept a sharp eye on the ruts ahead. The ghost of oranges on my tongue taunted me. “I could’ve just paid for it without getting mouthy. I screwed up, not you. It’s not your fault.”
    I mean, what else could I say? It’s not like he did it on purpose. I was the responsible one. I’d just failed. Again.
    He shut up, but he kept hold of me. Crouching on the seat like that probably wasn’t comfortable, but I had enough to worry about. The sobs juddered to a stop, and it took forever, but when we bumped out into the meadow I heaved a sigh of relief. Gran’s house stood on the far end, lit by garish flashes of lightning, and it took me halfway across the meadow to realize something was wrong.
    The flickering orange light from inside wasn’t right. It was open flame, shining out through the windows and sending gushes of billowing black smoke up into the drenching blanket of water falling from the sky.
    Gran’s house was burning. And my mother’s locket was a chip of ice against my chest. The owl turned in a tight, distressed circle in front of the car, veering sharply away just before it hit the windshield, and I began to get a very bad feeling.
    Just then, slim black shapes boiled out of the undergrowth, and I reached for the shift lever as if in a slow terrible nightmare. The lightning showed their slicked-down hair and ivory-gleam teeth, the eerie quickness of their movements, and the hatred blurring around them made the
touch
ache like a sore tooth inside my head.
    Vampires. They’d found us. But I didn’t taste the wax-orange foulness that usually warned me of them. Just that ghost of citrus, like orange juice you’ve forgotten you drank an hour ago.
    There was no time. I couldn’t hope to get us down the ridge before they hit the car. I couldn’t even make the tree line.
    Ash howled and pitched himself aside, fur rippling up over his dirty skin. The passenger window, only partly rolled up, shattered. Thank God he hit the ground outside before changing, because otherwise he’d’ve gotten stuck halfway through. Fur boiled up over him, his bones crackling as he swelled, his boy voice deepening and swelling into a wulfen’s roar.
    I sat there, one hand numb on the wheel and the other in midair, and the only thing I could think of were the
malaika
in the cargo compartment. I popped my seat belt, grabbed the lever that would put my seat all the way back, and started scrambling for my life.

C HAPTER E IGHT
     
    The rear hatch opened; I hopped out and my sneakers sank into mud. The rain was an immediate battering against every inch of me, and the
malaika
were heavy in my hands. The
aspect
poured over me in a wave of smooth-oil heat, fangs prickling my lower lip. I jerked the wooden swords free of the leather harness and pelted around the corner of the car.
    Ash hunkered down in the rain, almost-eight feet of werwulf with huge shoulders under a mat of wiry fur. The streak on his head gleamed, rain slicking everything down and outlining muscle under his pelt. His claws dug into mud with tiny splorching sounds lost under a roll of thunder, and the vampires skidded to a stop, throwing up sheets of mudlaced water. The grass exploded like jackstraws, and they snarled.
    Eight of them. All male, all burning with visible hatred under the lash of rain, hourglass-shaped pupils sending black threads out into their irises as the hunting-aura took them. It’s like the
aspect
, that aura, but it’s made of pure revulsion. They just