Free Reckoning by Lili St. Crow Page B

hit chill-wet air. Steam twisted into sharptooth shapes and I gained my feet again with a lurch. Mud splattered and grass flew as I twisted aside, my foot flashing out and kicking another sucker with a crunch.
    The world was slow, and I moved through it with whispering, eerie speed. It didn’t even feel abnormal to be sidestepping through time and space this way. It wasn’t the plastic goop slowing everything down—no, this was just me tearing through the snarled fabric of the normal. Bloodhunger flamed all the way down my throat, exploded in my stomach.
    The malaika are meant for circles. This circle, here, is where you move. These circles are how the blades move to defend you. And this circle is how you attack against many opponents. Focus, now!
    So long ago, Christophe teaching a
svetocha
how to fight. I couldn’t tell, now, if the memory was Anna’s or mine. Lightning crawled inside my head, bloodhunger turning the wide wet lake of the meadow into shutter-click images. Whirling, my left-hand blade a propeller, smoking vampire blood flung like a gauntlet, splashing the rest of them. They circled, and I didn’t have to worry about which direction to strike out. I’d hit a
nosferat
wherever I swung, and they were going to tighten the ring. I was toxic, yeah, but there were so
many
of them, and weight of numbers would tell on me.
    “
DRU!
” he screamed, and lightning struck the top of the ridge. The blast of thunder hit at almost the same moment; I swear to God I felt the wall of air molecules cracking against each other press along my entire body as I leapt, spinning in midair and striking out with feet and blades. My heart hammered, because I knew who it was.
    He’d come for me. Of course he had.
    He
always
did.
    He tore through the vampires, blue eyes alight with terrible fire and the rags of his black sweater melded to his body, his own
malaika
blurring as I landed and struck out again. They choked, their faces flushing as my
aspect
burned. It used to be that only terror or fury would make that oil-soft heat lay itself against my skin, and I still felt the rage, wine-red and perfume-sweet, curling through me. Nobody was bleeding here, yet. Nobody except the vampires, and the thought of sinking my fangs in them wasn’t appealing.
    But if someone had been here, someone human and helpless, like Lyle—
    It hit me from the side, a thunderbolt of force. I flew, oddly weightless, holding onto the
malaika
as if they’d somehow break my fall. The sucker died in midair, choking on his own blood, but I hit the ground
hard
, all my chimes ringing and my head full of a flash of brief starry nothingness. The vampire’s body rolled to the side, convulsing as it shredded itself, toxic dust runneling through its flesh.
    My name, yelled hoarsely. Screaming, the glassy cries of furious
nosferatu
. Roaring, a werwulfen in full battlemode. It was a good thing there was so much thunder, I thought weakly, because otherwise we were making enough noise to be heard in the next county.
    Bloodhunger pulsed against my palate, wiping away the trace of oranges. Consciousness returned in a rush. I struggled up, vampire blood smoking on my clothes, and heard someone else screaming.There was no pain in that cry. It was a long howl of absolute rage, and when I shook the daze out of my head and made it to my feet, shoving aside a heavy weight of swiftly decaying sucker bodies, I saw him.
    Christophe bent back, his booted foot flashing up to strike the sucker on the chin. This was a female, her long hair matted with ice, hail suddenly pounding all the way across the violent shipwrecked mass of the torn-up meadow.
    Gran’s house was still burning fiercely, and a lean dark shape bulleted across the clearing, the silvery streak on its low narrow head actually smearing on the air. Ash hit the girl vampire from behind, and I realized this was the sucker who had birthed the storm. She
felt
old, a terrible weight of hatred and cold spreading out from