color. Flecks of white bone gleamed as another duo of teenage-looking Kouroi probed in the mess

with shiny surgical tools and dropped fragments of something in a metal pan. Another djamphir

with curly hair stood by with paddles, and I saw the electricity trembling in them like drops of water

spattering on a hot griddle.

I’m in bad shape, I thought. It didn’t seem particularly important. I just stood and watched as Bruce

wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Don’t do it, Reynard. We can’t afford to lose—”

“I will not lose her. Get OUT!” The yell shook the walls, but nobody moved.

Christophe lifted his wrist to his mouth. He bit down hard, the aspect flickering over him. A flash of

red down near his feet, shocking in the black-and-white movie the world had become, was the fox

I’d seen before. It was puffed up, baring its teeth and hunching down, ready to spring.

He lowered his wrist. “This is usually private. But if you insist.” Something dark dripped down his

hand—he was bleeding now, too.

He pressed the ragged wound in his wrist to the mouth of the body on the table. “You can hear me,”

he whispered, bending down. “You’re in there, skowroneczko moja. You’re fighting. Fight just a little harder. Take what you need.”

Oh, gross. A shiver went through me. My body twitched. I remembered what it was like, that night

in the woods, fire and smoke and Christophe’s fangs in my wrist. The awful pulling, tearing, ripping

sensation as bits of myself—something I would call my soul—were torn away. I couldn’t do that to

someone else.

But the body on the table stirred weakly. Lighter highlights slid down the tangled curls, and I saw

the fangs in my own mouth grow with an imperceptible crackling. The machines were going crazy.

“She’s going to strike,” one of the djamphir said breathlessly.

My body twitched.

Don’t do it. I struggled to open my mouth, to say something. Don’t. Don’t do that to someone else.

Because when it got right down to it, sucking someone else’s blood made me one of the things Dad

would have hunted. Didn’t it? Especially when I knew what it felt like. When I knew how it hurt to

have something invisible inside you scraped away an inch at a time.

The body on the bed jerked. Fangs drove into Christophe’s bleeding wrist as I struggled to scream,

to move, to stop myself. But the body didn’t listen. It took a long, endless gulping swallow.

Christophe had gone an alarming shade of gray, pale skin ash-colored and sickly. The curly-headed

djamphir swore softly. Bruce levered himself up from the floor, dabbing at his mouth with the back

of his hand. A thin trickle of blood traced down his chin, black in the weird directionless light, and I