1
The Ingraham Institute
Queens, NY
Five Years Ago
For a moment, clutching the address tight in his left hand – his bad hand, his bad side – staring up at the clean, white façade of the building, he had allowed himself a rare sense of hope.
The ad he’d torn out of the paper with painstaking care, left hand shaking the whole time, had promised hope for wounded veterans, and that’s what he was, wasn’t he? He wasn’t the sort who put stock in hope, not anymore, but he’d been half-drunk and not thinking with his usual dire cynicism when the paper came tumbling down the sidewalk and snagged on the toe of his combat boot. He’d picked the paper up with the intent to throw it away, when a half-page ad caught his eye. Soothing blue font on the heading. Words had jumped out at him: new drug trial, looking for participants, $250 per person.
Two-hundred-and-fifty bucks would buy a lot of cheap bourbon.
But more tantalizing than that, even to his alcoholic mind, was the idea of a trial. A radical new treatment, it said, believed to be incredibly effective.
He couldn’t see well, vision blurred from drinking, and not enough sleep.
He made his way into the closest Starbucks, plugged his phone into a wall outlet, and turned a blind eye to the uncomfortable glances shot his way by the student crowd. He Googled the Ingraham Institute from the ad, and lost half an hour down the rabbit hole, scrolling through article after article praising the Institute’s breakthroughs in trauma research and medical advancement. The VA spoke about the place in glowing terms. Smiling photos of vets were posted next to quotes talking about changed lives, a return to normal thought processes, an increase in mobility and quality of life.
Rooster finally set his phone down on the table, stared at the cardboard sleeve of his small black coffee, and asked himself some hard questions. Was he capable of getting better? Of thinking normally again? Was normal qualitative anyway? And, most importantly, did he deserve the chance to get better?
That was something his therapist had told him, when he first got out. You deserve to get better, Corporal Palmer. Yeah. Sure. He hadn’t been a person to that quack, just another rank, name, and serial number. (That was what he told himself, in the moments when his guilt for turning away from her kind eyes and helpful smile stabbed him in the gut.)
But there were kids with cancer languishing in hospital beds, mothers dying in childbirth, innocent teens T-boned by drunk drivers. Why, of all the wretches of the world, did he deserve to get better? Because he’d served his country? That’s what his therapist had said. Before he stopped showing up.
He sat leaning against the steam-fogged window of a Starbucks, ignoring the whispers and glances of a group of kids in NYU sweatshirts at the next table, and he realized, for purely selfish reasons, that he did want to get better. Deserving it had nothing to do with it…he just wanted to be whole again.
So he’d called the toll free number, and set up an appointment. And for a moment, on the sidewalk, a brisk afternoon in Queens, leaves tumbling in the gutters, he’d allowed himself to feel hope.
He’d been one of five in the waiting room. All men. All clean cut and well-groomed, in clothes that fit well. One man with a prosthetic lower leg had his wife with him, and the two of them talked in low tones. Rooster had become uncomfortably aware of his own scruffiness. The way his boot soles were starting to peel off, the dirt crusted into the wrinkles of his jeans and jacket. He looked homeless, which wasn’t far from the truth.
Then had come the examination. First a physical, to test his limitations. His body had been so badly damaged by the bomb, had been hacked and pieced back together by so many doctors, first in Germany and then in the US, that he no longer felt shame when he stripped naked and allowed someone to pass gloved hands down the pocked, scarred skin of his arm, and side, and leg.
Then came the psych eval. That’s not what the bright-voiced doctor called it, but Rooster had endured enough to know that’s what it was. Question after question, designed to catch him off his game, tough ones that could shake loose his fragile framework of lies.
When it was over, all hope had bled out of his system, and it was his old friend resolution who took up the hollow space in his chest.
“Alright, Mr. Palmer,” the doctor said, straightening the paperwork in his lap and shooting Rooster a perfunctory smile. “You’ve given us a lot to consider today.”
Rooster took a deep breath and let it out slow. “That means no, right?”
The doctor, a soft-in-in-the-middle man with glasses and a premature bald spot, glanced up with obvious surprise, maybe even a little affront. “I beg your pardon?”
The scar tissue on his left hand – mottled, and lumpy, and tight – made simple, everyday tasks obscenely difficult. Rooster fumbled with his shirt buttons and tried to keep his tone civil. He didn’t know why he was angry; he’d expected it to go this way, after all. Holding onto hope was about as useful as trying to catch soap bubbles.
“You said you need to consider,” he said, flatly. “That means you won’t take me.”
“Oh. Well. Um. Of course not,” the doctor said, flustered. “We receive a wealth of applicants every day, and we consider each one carefully before we make our selection.”
Which meant jack shit. Rooster snorted and managed to get the rest of his buttons secured. He wished he’d worn a pullover instead. He wished he gave enough of a damn to be polite, but he just didn’t, not anymore.
The doctor adopted an annoyed expression. “As with any intensive medical procedure,” he continued, lifting his head to a lofty angle. “A prospective patient’s circumstances must be taken into consideration. Eligibility is key.”
“Yeah,” Rooster said, sliding down off the paper-covered exam table with only minimal wincing. The pins in his left knee had preserved his ability to walk, the VA docs had told him, but when his foot hit the floor, bright sparks of pain moved down his entire leg. Hot as fire in his knee, bringing tears to his eyes that he quickly blinked away. “I bet.”
The doctor exhaled through his nose and fixed Rooster with the sort of look every doctor and therapist had fixed him with over the past year. “Corporal Palmer, it’s very important that–”
“Thanks, doc. I’ll see myself out.”
The doctor didn’t protest.
Rooster didn’t expect him to.
He limped back through the mazelike hallways, following the laminated signs that steered patients back to the waiting room.
If he’d cared about aesthetics, he would have said it was a beautiful building, in the way that a medical facility can be eye-catching. The walls had been painted a warm taupe, the terrazzo floors looking more like those of an upscale hotel lobby. Rather than harsh overhead tubes, glowing wall sconces provided the light. The air held a subtle floral smell. The effect was miles from the glaringly-bright, bleach-scented hospitals he’d cycled through after he was blown up.
Not just a place of healing, but a well-funded one. A place not intended for the likes of him, with his unwashed hair and grungy jacket.
In the waiting room, a new group of hopefuls occupied the chairs. All of them still with buzzed hair and immaculate dress. Several guys had spouses. An athletically-built woman in head-to-toe Nike sat upright, right arm cradled in her lap in a way Rooster knew too well – it was the same way he held his own bad arm in public, holding it close, guarding it.
She glanced up as he walked past, eyes flashing dark and guarded. Stay away from me, her expression said.
That was fine; he figured his own face said something similar.
He was in the air lock when the alarm sounded.
As it did every time something like this happened, his brain split in two. A clean, metaphorical cleaving that left him of two minds.
Part of him – the half that had been pierced and pitted by shrapnel, burned and beat up, fractured and pinned back together again – wanted to curl and cower. But the other part of him, the dutiful Marine, the well-trained military killer, picked up the limp, frightened half of his psyche and kicked into action.
He turned back to the lobby, was in the process of tugging open the door when a uniformed security guard loomed on the other side of the glass, waving him away.
Rooster opened the door anyway, and the alarm was louder then. Not an air raid siren, not the fire alarm wailing he remembered from drills at school, but something softer and politer. An unobtrusive sort of siren, meant to catch your attention, but not to send you into a panic.
The guard, face set in a scowl, held up a flat palm. “You can’t come back in here, sir. Please make your way out of the building.”
Behind him, two other guards were herding the waiting patients up out of their chairs and toward the door. The door that Rooster was blocking.
“Sir,” the guard said, firmly.
“What’s going on?” Rooster asked. He felt a hard tug in his gut, that sense of responsibility he couldn’t shake off or drink away. There was no such thing as an ex-Marine, and all his training and instinct was kicking in now. Something was wrong, therefore he needed to act.
But the guard was having none of it. “Sir,” he said, edging forward, openly hostile now. “You need to leave. Now.”
The other potentials were closing in, peering at him curiously…and suspiciously. They were all vets, they would assume a man blocking the door was up to no good.
The alarm continued to ring, on and on. Something wrong, something amiss. A fire? A gas leak?
Not his business, really.
Rooster nodded and turned away.
The hopefuls followed him out onto the sidewalk, murmuring questions to one another, wondering aloud what might be happening. Evening was fast approaching, bringing a cold breeze with it, fat gray clouds piling up on the horizon.
Rooster zipped his jacket with stiff fingers, shoved his hands – one smooth, one ruined – into his pockets and walked to the bus station.
~*~
He’d just brought his third glass of bourbon to his lips when he heard the front door open and then shut above him. He was in that good space, where the buzz was fresh, floating but not flying, deliciously warm, his pain fuzzed at the edges so he felt almost human. His muscles, the ones that hadn’t been shredded and harvested to try to repair his broken body, had relaxed, and he was melting slowly down into his secondhand sofa.
Drinking helped with the anxiety, too. When he was buzzed, he stopped listening for footfalls, waiting for disaster. When he was buzzed, he didn’t worry about the rest of his life, the disaster it was becoming. Sure, he’d wake up sweating and nauseas at two a.m., heart pounding out of his chest, blood in his mouth because he’d bitten his tongue in the midst of a nightmare.
But for now, he drank.
Overhead, high heels rapped across the hardwood floors. From the foyer to the kitchen, followed by the hurried thumps of a child’s sneakers. Two voices – one young and high, one grown and patient – conversed. Slap of the fridge door. Scrape of a chair’s legs.
He was sitting forward to pour his fourth drink when the door at the top of the basement steps opened and the high heels clicked down into his lair.
Ashley stepped around the corner wearing what had become her patented you-can-do-better expression. She folded her arms and propped a shoulder against the wall, fixing him with a look. “Number three?” she asked, nodding toward the glass in his hand.
“Four.”
She nodded, because she’d expected to find him like this, but her jaw tightened, because she hated it. “How’d your appointment go?”
He shrugged. “It was a waste. I didn’t make the cut.”
She sighed deeply. It was the same sound that followed her six-year-old daughter’s worst transgressions: jumping off the back of the sofa, and playing with the makeup. Serious stuff. “Rooster,” she said, in that voice that made grown men – her husband among them – run for cover. “You’re fucking up.”
He let his head flop back so he didn’t have to look at her anymore. “I know, I know.”
“So do better,” she said, like it was simple as that.
She knew it wasn’t, though, and so Rooster heard the note of sadness in her voice.
He recalled something her husband, Deshawn, had said to him once, reaching up to tap the photo of Ashley he’d taped above his bed. “She’ll chew your ass out,” he’d said, his smile broad, “but it’s only ‘cause she loves you. When she stops fussing, that’s when it’s time to get scared – that’s when she’s decided she’s done with you.”
She clearly hadn’t given up on Rooster yet, so that was something.
She pushed off the wall and came into the central room of the basement, going to the coffee table and collecting empty glasses and greasy paper plates, consolidating everything so she could take it to the kitchenette in one trip.
“Ash, you don’t,” he started, half-rising. His knee, and his back, and his neck grabbed, lightning flashes of pain that forced the air out of his lungs in a low hiss.
“Sit your ass back down,” she said, her sigh fond and worried now. “Have you eaten anything? You can’t drink like that on an empty stomach.”
Slowly, sweat popping out on his temples as he fought the pain, he eased back down to the couch. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you look fine.” She carried the plates to the trash and dropped the glasses into the little shallow sink that he only used once he’d dirtied all his glasses and was forced to at least rinse them out before he filled them again. “I’m making spaghetti for Desiree. Come upstairs and have dinner with is.” It wasn’t a suggestion.
“Ash–”
“Twenty minutes,” she said, firmly, leaving no room for argument, and shot him her best drill sergeant glare on her way out.
Rooster listened to the gunshot sounds of her high heels going back up the stairs and knew that, somehow in the next twenty minutes, he’d get himself upright and drag his carcass upstairs for spaghetti and Desiree’s exuberant eight-year-old brand of conversation. He might drink himself to sleep every night, take too many painkillers, and be a walking disaster in general, but there were some lines he wasn’t willing to cross, and displeasing Ashley Spencer was one of them.
A year ago, Deshawn had been taking point when they infiltrated the house where they’d finally pinned down the al-Qaeda boss they’d been hunting for weeks. Rooster had heard the faint click echo off the stone walls. Had thought of the photos of Ashley and Desiree taped over his friend’s bed. And he’d grabbed Deshawn by his pack and dragged him back, thrown him around the corner, behind the wall. Had shielded him with his own body.
Deshawn had walked away with minimal scrapes and bruises.
Even now, Rooster could only remember the pain burning through his body like fire, the blurred view of faces crowding over him, shouts and curses. The thump of the rotors and the wind on his face as he was strapped down and loaded on the helo.
He’d known he was dying, and really, he was glad. He was tired of the sand box, of the death, and the blood, and the gore, and being terrified all the time. He was getting out, finally, and he’d saved his friend, had kept a good man alive to go home to his wife and daughter, and that was a sacrifice he was happy to have made.
But then he’d woken up in a hospital in Germany, the pain a restless, living thing inside him, tubes in his nose and his elbows, machines beeping all around him.
“At least your face still looks handsome,” a kindly older nurse who reminded him of his mother had said, and patted his scarred arm. Like being pretty was his biggest worry.
His home, before the Marines, had been Virginia, but his folks were both dead, and he had no other family to return to. He’d wished, for a little while, that he hadn’t survived, because he walked with a limp, was covered in scar tissue, had no support system, and no idea what to do with himself now. Deshawn had stepped in, had insisted he could live with them in Queens, in their finished basement.
“It’s not much,” he’d said, “but it’s comfy.”
It had been offered as a gift, but Rooster had insisted on paying rent. “Just ‘til I get on my feet,” he’d said, and meant it literally and figuratively.
And now here he was, dreading the effort it would take to get upright again. Deshawn was on another deployment, and Rooster was cluttering up the poor man’s basement.
Something had to change, but he didn’t know what, or how.
He leaned forward and gritted his teeth, pulled himself along by the coffee table, and got to his feet with minimal cursing and only a little swaying; Ashley was right that he needed to eat, unfortunately.
His knee got looser as he moved, and so by the time he got to the top of the basement stairs he was only puffing a little, and he forced a smile across his face when Desiree spotted him and shouted with delight.
Ashley stood at the stove and shot him a smile over her shoulder.
He definitely didn’t deserve these people, but he was glad he had them.
~*~
He woke with the phantom tastes of blood and sand in his mouth, choking on them, gasping into his pillow. He propped himself up on his good elbow and scanned what little he could of the dark room, trying to get his breath back.
The nightmares were always shapeless, an indistinct collage of light, and sound, and sensation. He woke aching all over, sore thanks to the clenching of all his ruined muscles as panic worked on him while he was defenseless. He was getting better at coming back from them. Bourbon helped.
He sat up with a groan and swung his legs over the side of the bed, wriggled his toes against the smooth, industrial carpet squares underfoot. The digital clock on his nightstand said it was just after two in the morning.
He was raking his fingers through his too-long hair, gathering the strength to stand, when he heard it: a faint tapping. Four soft raps, and then it stopped.
“What?” he asked the dark room around him.
Probably he’d just imagined it. His brain didn’t work quite right anymore. Probably–
There it was again. And it wasn’t coming from the stairs, which would have been the most logical place, but from the narrow window set just beneath the ceiling. Technically, it was a legal point of egress, one which let out onto the front yard, but you had to stand on a chair to access it. Sometimes, Ashley came down when he was out and cranked it open to let in some much-needed fresh air, but Rooster always closed it again, unable to sleep with the rumble of traffic wafting in.
It was shut tonight, and when he glanced toward it, he nearly leapt out of his skin. There was a face peering in at him, pale in the wash of the porch light, eyes huge and bright and flashing.
“What the fuck?”
The tap repeated, and a small hand waved at him from the other side of the glass.
It was a girl. Staring in the window at him.
“Okay,” he said, panic washing through him in familiar waves. “Sure. Why not.”
For a moment, Rooster convinced himself that it was Desiree, that she’d snuck out of bed, somehow gotten out the front door, and…
But no, she wouldn’t do that. She was a freakishly obedient child, the kind that made single people want children of their own someday. And besides, this kid’s skin was too pale to belong to his goddaughter.
“Hello?” her voice called, muffled by the window. “Sir?”
He heaved himself upright with a groan and a crackle of protesting joints, tugged on the t-shirt that lay across the foot of his bed, and made his way to the window.
He did the maintenance work around the house – when he was mostly sober and when Ashley would let his half-crippled ass do it – so the window was well-oiled and opened easily. The girl moved back out of the way as he did so, and then popped her face into the opening. There was a cool breeze coming in off the street, bringing with it the scents of early autumn…and of a hospital: industrial strength cleaner, the harsh detergent they used to wash the sheets and gowns.
She had a cherub face, rosy-cheeked and sweet, and her hair, when the porch light hit it, sparkled like a tumble of flames. It was red. Not carrot-orange, but the deep russet of an Irish Setter, shot through with the copper of new pennies.
“What are you doing out there?” he asked, for lack of anything more intelligent to say.
Her eyes – pale green – widened. “I followed you,” she said, without beating around the bush. Her expression was guileless as a baby deer. “From the Institute.”
He stared at her a moment, stupefied. He would have loved to blame this on a bourbon hallucination, but his head was pounding and his joints were throbbing, and he knew he was sober.
“You mean…the Ingraham Institute?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I ran away.”
“Oh.” Like that was a normal thing to hear.
“You looked like you were running away, too.”
“I…wait. You ran away from the hospital? Why?” She didn’t look like a wounded vet to him, not at all. No way was she old enough, for starters. And she was too perky to be someone who’d been turned away from an experimental study that was attempting to correct significant battle injuries.
No, not turned away. She’d run away, she said.
“Look, kid,” he said, willing himself to be patient. She was just a little thing, and Ashley had been on his case about being kinder to the people around him. “I dunno why you ran away, but your mom’s probably real worried.”
If it was possible, her eyes got even wider. “Oh. I don’t have a mom.”
Shit. “Your dad, then. Your grandma. Whoever took you to that place.”
She shook her head. “Nobody took me. I was born there.”
“Born?”
“At the Institute.”
“You were…born at the Institute.”
“Yes. I’m one of the LCs.”
Something ugly was churning in his belly, the same dark premonition that had accompanied him into that room on his last deployment, on the day he’d saved Deshawn’s life and lost most of his own.
“Are you alright?” he asked her. “I can call somebody. Or you can use my phone.”
Her expression grew almost comically solemn. “I don’t want to go back.”
He had no idea what so say. So he said, “Okay.” Like an idiot.
They stared at one another. At another point in his life, when he’d actually had his shit together, he might have done the right thing. Or, at least, the Responsible Thing. Called some sort of authority; offered to take her somewhere.
But he was tired, and confused. So fuck it.
“Uh,” he said. “You wanna come in?” He pointed toward the stairs, intending to go up to the front door and let her in.
But, quick as a little mouse, she chirped, “Yes, please,” and dropped down through the window to land on the floor.
Rooster reacted badly.
That was a nice way of putting it.
He startled back, tripped over his own feet, and landed on his ass on the thin, industrial carpet of the basement floor.
As quickly as it happened, he berated himself, which sent him into one of his now-normal shame spirals. He’d been strong once. Physically; mentally. Fit, tan, hardened, deadly. He’d been a model Marine – for so long that he no longer knew how to be anything else.
But then he’d gotten blown up, and he was a ghost of his former self. Weak, stiff, staggering. Vulnerable. And so he flinched, when he’d never flinched before, and he drank, and he worried, and was a piece of shit in general.
Oh. He’d gotten stuck in his head again. The girl stood over him now, her lips moving. She was talking to him.
“What?” he asked, and his voice faded from a strange echo to something that sounded halfway normal – given his situation on the floor.
Now that she was standing, he could see that the girl did indeed wear hospital scrubs, white and too thin for the weather outside. She held her hands clasped together in front of her; her hair fell in two thick curtains on either side of her narrow, freckled face.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yeah. Um. Yeah.” He got laboriously to his feet, wincing, cursing internally. He grabbed for a handhold that wasn’t there, felt his core muscles crunch and strain.
The girl stepped in close, too close. “Oh,” she said. “You’re hurt.” And before he could react, she reached out and laid a hand on his bad arm.
In Iraq, when the IED went off, he hadn’t felt any pain. That was one of the things that had always struck him as odd: he hadn’t felt his body break. Instead, he’d felt the rush of heat, and he’d felt the force of the blast, a surge of energy. He imagined that was what it felt like to be hit by a truck: that tremendous shove moving through his skin and bones.
When the girl touched his arm, he first felt the heat, and then the force. A whip-crack of electricity that shot up his arm, burst like ordnance in the depths of his shoulder, and showered through his nervous system, bright chasing sparks.
He knew that he pitched forward, that he gasped, but these were helpless physical reactions, and nothing conscious. The sparks bloomed inside his head, in his eyes, clouding all thought and vision and fear. It must have been only moments, but it seemed to take hours for the starbursts to unfold. In their wake, a pleasant heat stole through him; filled him head to toe, even all the numb parts of him where doctors had harvested tissue and left him disfigured.
For the first time since the explosion, he felt present in the left side of his body. Like a whole man, and not a partial one dragging around a dead half.
The acute sensations faded, leaving him warm and in less pain than he could remember. His vision cleared, and when he blinked away the last flashes, he saw that the girl stood in front of him, her hand still on his arm, her pupils wide black pools, no sign of the bright green irises he’d seen before. Her skin shone, pale like the moon.
Rooster shuddered. “Hey.” He reached to cover her small hand with his own.
She gasped and jerked away from him, staggering back, swaying like she might fall.
Rooster stood up and caught her by the elbows. “You okay? Hey, don’t pass out.”
And then it hit him: he’d stood up from the floor without any of his usual grunting, swearing, and grabbing for handholds. His bum knee had held; his muscles had worked; his re-stitched tendons and ligaments hadn’t brought tears to his eyes.
A different kind of panic flooded his system. “What was that?” he asked. “What did you do?”
She tipped her head back, exposing her throat, the movement slow, almost like she was drugged. She blinked, and her pupils began to recede. “I…I…” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp in his arms.
Rooster caught her, and marveled that he had the strength to do so.
~*~
Ashley stood in her pajamas and silk robe, one hand propped on her hip, the fingertips of the other massaging a spot of tension between her brows. She breathed a sigh that Rooster knew well. “Explain it to me again, but make it make sense this time. Why is there a little girl on my couch?”
Rooster could deliver a sitrep that would make any gunny proud, so he knew Ashley – like him – wasn’t so much misunderstanding him as she was dumbfounded. The whole thing sounded ludicrous.
“She knocked on the window,” he said. “Woke me up. Said she ran away from the Institute – you know, where I went today? And that she didn’t want to go back. She touched my arm…” He curled his left hand into a fist and felt it flex almost normally, the pain a faint echo in the joints. His breath hitched in his chest, and for once it had nothing to do with discomfort. “Something happened.”
For the first time since he’d carried the girl up here – he’d carried her, holy shit – Ashley looked away from her unconscious form and turned a sharp look on Rooster. “What do you mean ‘something happened’?” Her gaze moved down his body, sharp and assessing, down to where his weight was distributed evenly between both feet. Her eyes widened. “Shit. You’re–”
“Yeah. Something happened.”
She cocked a single brow. “Did this chick pop you with a steroid shot or something?”
“What? No. Come on, she’s just a kid.” A very small one, who breathed shallowly, like a little unconscious rabbit. She was probably cold. Ashely kept extra blankets in the closet down the hall–
“Roger.” Oh, she’d been trying to get his attention.
“What?”
“We need to call the police.”
“Yeah.”
But she’d touched him, and the pain had gone away. She had run away from that awful, brightly-lit place with the smiling staff who’d been too cowardly to outright reject him to his face when they had no intention of helping him.
The hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood up on end because something was wrong. Just as he had the day of the IED, he felt the low vibrations of danger.
“Ash, something’s not right.”
“No shit,” she said with a snort, but then sighed. Shook her head. “Yeah. Okay. I know what you mean.” She contemplated the girl, lips pursed, arms folded. “Who is she?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Well.” She squared her shoulders, and again Rooster felt like the Corps has missed out on the perfect recruit when she’d decided to go for her law degree instead of joining her then-boyfriend, now-husband in the Marines. “Let’s find out.”
She leaned in and laid her hand on the girl’s forehead. Frowned.
“What?”
“She’s cold.”
“Well, yeah, she was outside in nothing but those.” He gestured toward her thin, short-sleeved scrubs.
“No, she–” Ashley started, and the rest of her sentence turned into a bitten-off curse when the girl’s eyes flipped open. No slow fluttering back to awareness; no, they snapped wide like one of those dolls you tipped back and forth.
Ashley stepped back and took a deep breath. “Okay. Um. Okay. Hi,” she said to the girl, who was currently sitting up and swinging her legs over the side of the couch, red hair falling around her face. “Can you hear me?”
The girl looked up, and Rooster watched the awareness return to her eyes, the blankness fading to confusion, to fear, to panic. Her mouth opened and she sucked in a breath through it, rattling on the exhale. A shiver stole over her, jacking her thin shoulders up around her ears.
Ashley softened. “Hey, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, sinking to her haunches in front of the couch. “You’re safe here.” She lifted both hands and then froze, palms suspended over the girl’s knees. Something happened, Rooster had said, and he saw now that Ash was afraid to touch the girl. She did, though, after a moment’s hesitation, resting her hands on the small, bony kneecaps. “My name’s Ashley.” Even softer now, the maternal voice she used with Desiree. “And that’s Rooster. Can you tell us your name?”
“I…” She breathed rapidly through her mouth, quick breaths that ruffled her hair. Like a frightened animal. “I don’t…”
“It’s okay,” Ashley said. “Take your time.”
The girl swallowed with an audible gulp. “I don’t have a name. They call me LC-5.”
Ashley sat back, brows scaling her forehead, but didn’t break contact with the girl. “Who is ‘they’?”
Something cold and ugly turned over in Rooster’s gut. He crouched down beside Ashley, and the girl glanced at him; he suppressed a sudden, protective urge to reach up and tuck her hair behind her ears. “Hey, kid. Who called you that?” He felt Ashley staring at him, but he stayed fixed on the girl, noting the way her lower lip trembled.
She said, “Doctor Talbot. And Doctor Fowler. And all the nurses. Everyone.”
He and Ashley traded a look.
“Are they doctors at the Institute?” Ashley asked, voice going careful.
The girl nodded.
Ashley said, “Honey, where are your parents?”
“I don’t know. I never met them.” She took another unsteady breath, blinking against the gathering tears in her eyes. “Please don’t make me go back.”
Ashley patted her leg. “It’s okay, sweetheart. We won’t.”
~*~
“Either this kid is yanking our chain and happens to be a really good actress,” Ashley started.
“I don’t believe that.”
“Neither do I. Which means some weird shit is going on.”
Ashley had found some clothes for the poor girl, some sweats of her own that swallowed the little redhead whole, but were warmer than the scrubs. She already wore a pair of white, soft-soled shoes without laces, the kind prisoners might wear. That was the dark conclusion Rooster was beginning to come to: she was a prisoner of some sort. Someone who, without a name or parents, had been held captive at the very place that was offering assistance to wounded vets. The idea made him sick.
They stood in the kitchen, both of them taking turns to peek into the living room where they’d set the girl up with a blanket and a mug of hot cocoa. Ashely held her phone in her hands, thumbs flying over the screen.
“Okay, here,” she said, and Rooster glanced away from the girl – she stared down into the cocoa and its bobbing raft of mini marshmallows like someone seeing the face of God – and turned back to his landlady. “I’m on the Ingraham Institute website, right? Well, once you get past all the shiny front page stuff, miracle drugs and all that, there’s a page dedicated to the weapons technology they’re developing for all the branches of the military.”
“’Cept the Corps,” he said with a snort.
She tipped her head in acknowledgement. “Y’all will get it in fifteen years, I’m sure. But listen to this. There’s a list of their projects. Project Royal. Project Kashnikov – I don’t know about you, but that sounds super Russian to me – and some others. Then, down at the bottom: The LC-W Initiative.” She looked up from her phone, face illuminated by the screen. “Didn’t she say she was called LC-5?”
He swallowed. “Yeah.”
Ashely sighed and slipped the phone into the pocket of her robe. “What the hell’s going on over at that place?”
“I don’t–”
The back door flew open with a shower of splinters and the muted thud of a police-issue battering ram busting the lock to pieces.
Years of training honed to instinct compelled him to move, and for the first time in over a year, his body actually responded. He picked Ashely up around the waist, tucked her in tight to his chest, and launched into a tuck-and-roll that carried them up over the breakfast bar and down to the floor on the other side. Through it all, Ash didn’t make a sound, so he heard the thump of the door landing on the kitchen floor, the bark of angry male voices, the treads of a dozen pairs of boots crunching over debris, and the particular click of riot gear shifting on the human body as suited-up men poured into the house.
He took a moment to get his bearings, kneeling on the tile with Ashley caged in by his arms. She’d dropped her phone, and had one hand clapped over her mouth, breath whistling through the gaps in her fingers.
“I need a gun,” he whispered in her ear.
She pulled her hand away enough to say, “Upstairs.”
Shit.
“You two behind the wall, get up,” one of the intruders commanded. “Nice and slow. Hands behind your heads.”
Weaponless, and probably harboring a fugitive, there was nothing to do but comply.
Rooster stood up first, slow as ordered, hands clenched together behind his head. He kept himself between the men and Ashley, a barrier they didn’t like.
Facing off from them was a knot of guys in helmets and all-black tac gear, armed with a combination of rifles, handguns, clear riot shields, and batons. Facial details were lost behind the clear face shields of their helmets. Too many for the small kitchen to hold, they spilled out into the hallway and the attached living room – where the redheaded girl had been only moments before. She wasn’t there now, and Rooster was strangely glad.
“Separate,” the closest guy, the leader, said, motioning to Rooster and Ashley with the end of his baton.
Rooster didn’t move; he’d shielded Deshawn before, and he would shield his wife now.
But Ash hedged away a few steps, palms facing the cops, and said, in her calmest, most commanding voice, “Problem, officers?”
“Where’s the girl?” the leader asked. He motioned over his shoulder and three of his boys broke off and headed down the hall, toward the front of the house, floorboards popping under their boots.
Rooster wasn’t a cop, so he would admit that he didn’t know the ins and outs of raid protocol, but several things stood out to him:
For starters, the girl was just that: a girl. Young and slender as a reed, and so obviously not a threat, and these guys were tricked out like they were busting up Taliban spider holes. An unarmed teenager in white pajamas shouldn’t have brought out the big guns.
Then there were the cops themselves: there was no lettering on their vests. Whether Homeland, or FBI, CIA, DEA, or even just NYPD, they should have had their agency printed in bright white across their backs.
Then there was all that stuff Ash had found about the Ingraham Institute on her phone.
Throw in the fact that Rooster’s internal alarms were going off like air raid sirens, and none of this sat right with him.
“Are you people deaf?” the leader asked. “Where’s the girl?”
“What girl?” Ashely asked, smooth as silk. “It’s just us, and my daughter. You’re the ones who broke down my door, so maybe you’d like to show me a warrant, or the next time we speak, we’ll be in court.”
Desiree! Rooster remembered with a jolt. Shit, those three guys were at the foot of the stairs. Surely they wouldn’t…
The leader took an exaggerated, aggressive step forward, baton just a handspan from Ashley’s face. “Shut up,” he said, calm, expecting to be obeyed, and all the more threatening for it.
More of his men branched off. In the living room, Rooster heard a chair overturn.
He said, “Which agency are you with?”
The baton came to his face, and hung there, a silent warning.
This wasn’t right.
“Found her!” someone called, and a moment later two men came back down the hall into the kitchen, dragging the girl between them. She resisted like a little wild cat, thrashing and struggling, kicking at them with her socked feet. They overpowered her easily.
She lifted her face and looked right at Rooster through a screen of tousled red hair, her green eyes huge and terrified. Help me.
“Be careful with her,” the leader said, turning to look over his shoulder at his men. “She burned Simmons back at the lab.”
Rooster felt Ashley step on his foot.
This wasn’t right.
He was going to do something about it.
He nodded his head, one slow, careful movement, and the girl’s brows lifted: she understood.
“Get down,” Rooster whispered to Ashley, and grabbed the baton that still wavered in front of his face. He snatched it loose, flipped it around, and the man who’d been holding it didn’t turn around fast enough.
Rooster caught him with it at the vulnerable place where the corner of his jaw met his throat, and the leader fell sideways into his own men, sending four of them down in a tangle.
The redheaded girl went up in a blaze of fire.
Fire.
Shouts. Flailing arms. Clap of riot gear crashing together.
If she was on fire, Rooster would get the extinguisher from under the kitchen counter. After he dealt with these idiots.
He slid into the old dance of hand-to-hand with the ease of long practice, and a freshly painless body. He cracked another in the shoulder with the baton, hard enough to send him staggering, and ripped the man’s gun from its holster in the process.
Another took a swing that he ducked, and he heard the crack of a gunshot that he prayed didn’t find a mark. He didn’t know where Ash was, but didn’t have time to check. He grabbed a man by the wrist, tugged him close, and pressed the muzzle of his stolen gun under his arm, fired off a shot that sent a jolt up his own arm. The man screamed and went down.
Rooster couldn’t risk a wild shot. He moved in close, and tight, baton in one hand, gun in the other. Muzzle to skin, to fabric, close shots that burned.
There were more screams than he could account for, and always fire, leaping and dancing at his periphery. Was the house burning? Why weren’t the smoke alarms going off?
Rooster dropped a body to the floor and suddenly, they were all bodies. No one was left standing but him…
And the girl, fire rippling around her like a shroud.
Slowly, she turned to face him, and the fire winked out. He expected her to be a blackened and ruined version of herself, but not even her clothes or hair were singed. Her skin glowed a faint pink, almost like a sunburn, but she appeared otherwise whole.
Rooster cast a glance around the room, the bodies slumped on the floor, and, in one case, across the breakfast bar. They all bore that particular limpness that comes with death. Some of them were burned, skin red, and black, and blistered.
“Holy shit,” Ashley said behind him, creeping back in on tiptoes.
Rooster shot a look to the girl that he couldn’t manage to make stern.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted for the second time that night.
~*~
They had to call someone. Mike Cartwright, Ashley suggested, an old service buddy long-since retired and now working as a vice detective.
“You can’t stay,” Ashley told him, voice heavy with sadness, and he knew she was right. The house was full of his fingerprints and DNA, and there would be no choice for her but to tell the cops what had happened. It was the only way to keep her and Desiree safe.
“I can’t leave you,” he protested, though, gesturing to the bodies.
“What about her?” They stood over the redheaded girl, again laid out on the couch. “I can look after myself, but what about her?”
Because turning her over to someone, after what had just happened, wasn’t an option, not for either of them. So Rooster stuffed his meager belongings in his duffle bag, crammed a hat down on top of his head, and told Ashley how sorry he was.
She shook her head, firm. “What woulda happened if you hadn’t been here?”
“They wouldn’t have shown up at all.”
She tilted her head to a stubborn angle. “That poor girl needs someone looking out for her.”
So.
Here he sat, the sunrise molted beyond the fogged-up glass of a diner window on the way to Connecticut. He sipped his coffee slowly, enjoying the warmth of the mug against both his hands, watching the girl seated across from him.
Ashley had tucked her bright hair beneath one of Deshawn’s old winter stocking caps, but little pieces kept working their way free, bold as flame down her neck and shoulders. She wore dark smudges beneath both eyes, signs of exhaustion, but she shoveled pancakes into her mouth with almost frantic energy, hand unsteady on the fork.
“Not too fast, kid, or you’ll be sick,” he cautioned.
She grunted a response, but did slow the movement of her fork, actually swallowing before she brought the next bite to her lips.
Rooster let her eat – he knew well the look of someone who’d gone hungry for a long time – and planned a route in his head. They needed to get out of the state and lay low, probably for a long time. Ashley could work miracles, but Rooster knew it would take nothing short to clear him of multiple murder charges. He had no idea which branch of law enforcement those guys had answered to, but someone would want retribution.
Worse, someone would want the girl back. Their pursuit proved that she was valuable. Her little fire routine proved she was dangerous.
Rooster entertained ideas of dropping her off at a hospital, or a children’s home. Even a school. Putting some cash in her palm, spinning her around in the parking lot, and telling her to go find someone else to look after her until she was old enough to go be homeless on her own.
But she acted like she’d never tasted pancakes before.
And she was just a little thing.
And she’d touched him, and suddenly he was sitting in a booth and his hip wasn’t caught in a bind; blinding pain wasn’t shooting down his leg, and arm, and spine.
The waitress stopped by and topped up his coffee, asked if they needed anything else.
“Two breakfast plates to go,” he requested, because he didn’t know when they’d have another chance to stop for food.
When she was gone, the girl finally pushed her plate away, wiped her sticky mouth with the too-long sleeve of her borrowed sweatshirt, and met his gaze with a level one of her own.
“I’m sorry,” she said, solemnly.
“That’s alright.” He set his coffee down. Kept his voice low, so the old man two booths over couldn’t hear them. “Who were those guys?”
She took a big, shuddery breath. “They’re from the Institute, they…I’m sorry.” She blinked hard.
“What were they gonna do if they took you back there?”
“They…Dr. Fowler said…” Her narrow shoulders jerked up and down as she breathed. Color bloomed in her pale cheeks, and not in a good way. “It was time…I was ready…for breeding.”
Rooster’s breakfast turned to lead in his stomach. “Breeding?”
“I started bleeding, which means I’m a woman now, and they need more of us, and the best way is to…” She babbled, twisting her napkin between her hands until her knuckles turned white.
“Hey,” Rooster said, and she looked at him gratefully. “That’s not gonna happen, okay?” Inwardly, his heart pounded. Breeding? What in the ever-loving shit were those people doing over there? “We’ll figure something else out.”
“Thank you.” She blinked some more, but the tears were determined, and a few slipped down her cheeks. She brushed them away with her sleeve. “I know it’s my – my responsibility.” They sounded like repeated words, something an adult had told her that had never set right; a little line appeared between her brows as she frowned. “I was made for this, and I should be grateful for the chance to help, and–”
“Hey,” he said again, and this time, reached across the table to cover her little hand with his own.
She jumped at first, and then settled, her expression a miserable blend of guilt and exhaustion.
He decided on a different line of questioning. “Do you know how old you are?”
“Fifteen.”
Older than he’d thought. “Okay, so, you’re fifteen. And I think it’s fair to say you like pancakes.”
A shy little smile touched one corner of her mouth.
“And you don’t have a name.”
She shook her head, and another ribbon of red hair slid from beneath the cap, unraveling down the length of her throat.
“How about Red? At least until we figure out something better.” He’d never been good at naming things, and really, Red was stupid. Red was what kids named dogs.
But her smile stretched, wide and sweet. He heard the heels of her borrowed sneakers thump the booth as she swung her legs in a little circle. “I like that.”
“Okay. Red it is.” He held his hand out to her across the table. A formal introduction. “Hi, Red. I’m Roger, but all my friends call me Rooster.”
She slid her little hand against his, her skin warmer than it should have been. “Hi.”
“So,” he said, reaching for his coffee again. “You can set stuff on fire, huh? What’s that like?”
2
Manhattan, New York
Present Day
A phone was ringing. The gentle chiming of the iPhone’s alert was far preferable to the shrill call of the landline it had replaced, but it was still an unwanted disturbance at – Nikita cracked his eyes open a crusty millimeter and read the dial on the bedside clock – four-thirty in the morning. As Sasha would say: ugh.
Speaking of Sasha.
Nikita could feel his warmth and weight down near the foot of the bed, curled up like a puppy on top of the covers. That happened often; he had his own bed – his own room, even, small though it was – but he didn’t like to sleep by himself. He snored soundly now, comforted by proximity and the safety of pack.
The phone stopped, and was silent a moment. Then started up again.
Nikita nudged Sasha with his toes. “Sashka.”
He got an unhappy whine in protest.
“I know you can hear that. It’s yours.”
Sasha huffed, and snorted, but sat up and fished his phone from his hoodie pocket. “Yes, hello?” he mumbled sleepily without checking the screen. And then his eyes popped open and he straightened his spine.
Nikita felt a thrill of nerves go down his back and sat up too, swiping the sleep from his eyes. “What?”
“It’s Trina,” Sasha said. “You better talk to her.” He passed the phone over like it was a bomb about to go off.
Nikita took the phone with no small amount of trepidation. “Hello?” he asked when he put it to his ear.
Trina breathed raggedly through her mouth, suppressed panic clear in her voice. “I can’t find Lanny.”
~*~
Trina wasn’t an alarmist – she was Russian, for God’s sakes – so when she woke and found that Lanny was no longer in bed beside her, she didn’t panic. When she didn’t find him in the bathroom, or in the kitchen, though, and he didn’t come back after an hour and didn’t return any of her calls…then she started to fret. When she’d showered, nibbled on some toast, and checked in at the precinct, and there was still no sign of him? Then she panicked. A little.
And she called Nikita. Well, Sasha, really.
Her great-grandfather, it appeared, was not a morning person. (Though if myth and legend was to be believed, no vampire was.) He stood with one shoulder propped against the façade of his building, in rumpled clothes and unlaced combat boots, sporting bedhead and mirror-lensed shades, a Starbucks cup in one hand.
By contrast, Sasha looked bright-eyed, his own sunglasses nestled in his shiny, freshly-washed hair, his boots laced tight and his iced coffee down to the dregs.
“He came to you?” Trina asked, and felt her brows scale her forehead. “He asked you to” – a woman laden with shopping bags and two yelling children passed them on the sidewalk and she dropped her voice to a whisper – “turn him?”
Nikita shrugged, and the gesture struck her as so completely Russian – and so completely familiar. It was the same one-shoulder shrug her grandfather used when he wanted to be evasive. Not just her grandfather, she reminded herself – Kolya Baskin was Nikita’s son. Maybe one day that would stop sounding strange.
“He asked,” he said, voice gravelly as it had been on the phone a half hour ago. “I said ‘no.’”
“You said no?”
“Don’t shout.”
She took an aggressive step forward, figurative hackles lifting. “He’s dying, Nik. Why the hell would you tell him no?”
His mouth set in a way that suggested he was glaring at her. “I’ve never turned anyone, not for any reason. Why would I turn him?”
“Because I’m your family!”
“Guys.” Sasha wedged between them with a wriggle of his shoulders; it wasn’t quite a human gesture. “Don’t fight. Please. Let’s just find him, and then we can talk. Yes?”
Trina stared at Nikita a long moment, wanting him to know that she was pissed, that they would talk about this later, while her heart pounded and sweat gathered between her shoulder blades. If she let it, the fear would choke her, so she focused on the anger instead.
“Fine,” she bit out. She forced her expression to soften as she turned to Sasha. “Can you do the old nose trick again?”
He smiled. “It’s what I’m best at.”
With Sasha in the lead – his head up, nose lifted fractionally as he tested the air – they headed down the sidewalk, following the trail of scent Lanny had left behind. Trina wondered what her partner smelled like to a werewolf’s senses; was it the same sweat-bourbon-cologne cocktail she smelled when she pressed her face into his neck? Or were those superficial things swamped with the specific, biological scent of age, gender, and health?
Nikita walked beside her, and when she glanced down at her feet, she noticed that their strides were evenly matched. They both walked like people who didn’t have the patience for slow pedestrians. A purposeful, out-of-my-way kind of walk.
And it wasn’t a coincidence – it was genetic. She’d inherited the walk of a Chekist.
It was hard to stay angry with him in any real way when she thought about who he’d once been, and all that he’d lived through and seen. “Did you explain it to him?” she asked, in a more neutral tone this time. “Why you wouldn’t turn him?”
He snorted. “I might be a monster, but I can express myself, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.” She sighed, and some of the tension in her chest eased. Worrying about Lanny was taking up all her energy; it was nice not to have to hold a grudge, too. “So?”
“Immortality is not a gift,” Nikita said. “No matter what spoiled Russian princes might think.”
“That sounds like a story.”
“Yes, well, I told your Lanny that it’s not a decision he should make lightly – living forever.”
Ahead of them, Sasha cocked his head a fraction, and Trina thought he must be listening to them.
Nikita took a breath and continued, lighter. “But I told him I could make him healthier. Help fight the cancer. Better, and surer, and not painful, like the chemo.”
“Wait. What?”
“I gave him a few sips of my blood.” He reached with the hand holding the coffee and tugged up his opposite sleeve, revealing a faint, silver-pink scar on his wrist. “It’s not permanent, I don’t think. But it will help.”
Trina ground to a halt, twisting her head so she could really see him.
One corner of his mouth lifted in a little facial shrug. It was hard to tell, with the glaring morning sun, but she thought he blushed. “You love him. I couldn’t just let him die.”
She wanted to hug him, but didn’t think that would be a good idea.
Sasha turned around, beaming. “We’re getting along again? Good!”
Nikita sighed. “Sasha.”
“Right. Yes. Tracking.” He went back to work and they followed him again.
It was a gorgeous, albeit sticky-hot day. One of those last hoorahs of summer, when the asphalt sizzled, but the air held the first faint whiff of September. A day when the kids ran and whooped and swung around lampposts, trying to wring that last precious drops of freedom out of each day before the new school year started. The air smelled of hot dogs, soft pretzels, and warm garbage.
All of this was lost on Trina, whose worry ratcheted up another notch with each step. Every moment they didn’t find Lanny was another moment he could be in danger, lost, hurt, or in lock-up.
That was the most-likely possibility: that he’d gotten drunk and passed out and been dragged into a holding cell until he sobered up. That was the least-frightening option, to be honest. At least then he’d be safe, and in the company of their own.
She’d just decided that must be it when Sasha didn’t just halt, but froze. All that moved were the ends of his hair, tossing gently in the breeze, and his nostrils as they flexed and tested the air.
“What?” Nikita said, and then he took a deep, audible breath and said, “Oh shit.”
“Vampire,” Sasha said, and shivered like a dog shaking water off its fur. Then, low and angry: “Alexei.”
“He was here?” Trina asked, trying to ignore the way her pulse tripped.
“With Lanny,” Sasha said.
Nikita said, “There was blood.”
“But…” An image of Chase Edwards’s drained and lifeless body popped into her mind and her breath caught hard and sharp in her lungs. “But we talked to him. He wouldn’t hurt Lanny. Would he?”
Nikita turned to give her an unreadable look through the lenses of his shades. “A vampire would do anything.”
Sasha took off at a run down the sidewalk.
They could only follow.
Trina kept in good shape, but Sasha was an unnatural kind of quick. He looked like he was only jogging, but no matter how fast she accelerated – dodging pedestrians with a muttered “excuse me” – he continued to pull away from her, nothing but a bobbing patch of bright hair.
Nikita kept pace with her, though. Steadied her arm when she tripped. Steered her around a newsstand with a few deft movements.
She was a cop, and not an optimistic one, so she knew what they were going to find. Still, it was a shock.
Sasha ducked into an alley. Trina skidded and nearly fell when she did the same, catching herself against the side of the building.
In the alley stood a dumpster.
And behind it, boots sticking out, lay Lanny.
~*~
It hurt when Alexei bit him. Sharp like a bee sting, like the needle teeth of his grandmother’s old Pomeranian who liked to nip ankles. But the pain seemed unimportant, distant, like a memory. It was something he couldn’t flinch away from.
The night around him tilted, a warm blur of light and dark, all its varied scents peeling back from the spicy cologne that filled his sinuses. The heat of the night paled beside the wet heat of Alexei’s mouth on his throat. The warmth of his body where their chests were pressed together. Hot touch of skin where Alexei’s palm cupped the back of his neck.
It should have disturbed him, this closeness with a stranger, being held by a man who was neither brother, nor friend. But Lanny knew only peace. A fuzzy, welcome sort of contentment. He felt a pull at his throat, and his eyes slipped shut, and the black velvet of the void welcomed him with open arms.
He slept. Dreamless and endless, as his cells broke apart and knitted back together in stronger, healthier shapes. Somewhere deep inside his body, a low hum started, like the purring of an expensive imported car. Blood coursed thick, and red, and glossy through his veins, bathing the tumors, eating them away like acid. The legends and the novels had gotten it wrong, over and over, every time: he did not die. No. He transformed. The vampire cells made room for what they needed, and dug deep. Made him their home. Altered his DNA.
He slept.
And when he woke, it happened slowly, and in stages. He became aware of the heaviness of his limbs, the pounding in his head. He felt a shakiness steal through him, like the jitters from too much coffee. Felt his lungs work, and his stomach clench, empty and hungry.
He lay on something soft and he twisted onto his side, blindly seeking the light that he could sense but not see. He opened his mouth and it tasted like he’d been sucking on car keys; traced his teeth with his tongue and got snagged on something sharp – on his fang. The copper heat of fresh blood bloomed on his tongue, filled his mouth, and two things happened.
His stomach growled, and something that hadn’t been there before in his throat answered. A jungle-cat roar that startled him fully awake.
The sound tapered off into “…holt shit!” as he bolted upright.
The light was too bright, and he squinted against it, just making out his surroundings. He was in Trina’s apartment, on her sofa. And the place…smelled. Not bad, but very much like her, and coffee, and the clean laundry in the bedroom, and his own sweat on the sheets, the musk of sex, soap and shampoo in the drains in the bathroom and…
Oh. The smells. So many of them, and so intense. He shut his eyes like that could somehow block them up, brought his hands to his tender head. He could smell the bowl of apples sitting on the kitchen counter, the bits of tuna clinging to a paper plate in the garbage that she’d fed to the neighbor’s cat.
He leaned forward and dropped his head between his knees, and that was when another scent hit him, the most overwhelming of all. Trina. Alive and vibrant in a way he’d never understood before. He could hear her heart beating. And faint, beneath her skin, he smelled her blood, and something inside him clenched.
Slowly, he opened his eyes and lifted his head. There she stood, leaning against the opposite wall, Nikita and Sasha flanking her. He’d smelled them too, he realized, but their scents had kicked off very different sensations. Whereas Trina stirred something like longing…and hunger…Nikita left him bristling. And he had the strange urge to pat Sasha on top of the head.
“Try it,” Nikita hissed through his teeth, “and I’ll take your arm off.”
He’d been staring at Sasha, and dragged his gaze away, over to the vampire – the other vampire. Shit. “What?” His own voice held the low rumblings of a growl.
Nikita lifted his lip and flashed his fangs. “You may be a vamp now, but he’s not your wolf. Don’t look at him like that.”
“I’m not.” But he had been. Something instinctual in him knew that wolves were meant to serve and help vampires. Combine that with his human history of fighting, and he wanted to challenge Nikita, throw down right here and battle it out for supremacy the old-fashioned way.
He realized his mouth was open, that he was panting, fangs showing.
Nikita lowered his head, eyes hooded and aggressive. “You’d lose,” he said, dark and certain. “Sit down, boy, before you get hurt.”
Was he standing? When had that happened?
“Lanny,” Trina said, and stepped forward. Tried to, anyway; Nikita grabbed her arm and held her in place. She sighed, but didn’t shake him off. “Lanny,” she started again, “sit back down, okay? Take a deep breath.”
He sat.
He didn’t take a deep breath, because the sensory overload was making him both sick and hungrier.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Trina said. She was giving him the sort of bland-but-guarded look that she used on suspects during interrogation: not picking sides, but listening; concerned, but not actually caring. He didn’t like having that look directed at him…but he did like watching her pulse beat in the soft skin just under her jaw, that little hollow in her throat where her flesh was thin enough he imagined he could see the faint blue trails of veins. Imagined he could smell the blood, hot and salty and–
“Lanny,” she snapped, brow furrowing. “We know Alexei turned you. But how?”
He shook himself – mentally and physically – and tried to focus.
Nikita gave him a sharp glare that said he knew exactly what Lanny had been thinking.
“I left,” he started, frowning. The memories were fractured, sharp at the edges and painful to grab hold of. “I left you guys’ place, and I was walking back…and I felt great. I mean, like I was twenty again. And then all of a sudden Alexei was there. Right in front of me. He said…he said he could help me. If I wanted.” He could feel his frown deepen, digging grooves in his forehead. “And I just…shit, I just walked up to him. And he bit me.”
“He enchanted you,” Nikita said grimly. “Rasputin was a master at that, and he was Alexei’s sire.”
Trina’s face paled. “You mean – Lanny, you didn’t ask him to turn you?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t need him to. Not after I had the–” He mimed knocking back a drink. “So no.”
Sasha gave a small, unsettled ruff. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Nikita wore the weary, but unsurprised expression of someone who’d long since given up on the small moments of decency in the world. “I shouldn’t have left him alive.”
Trina turned toward him sharply. “You can’t kill him.”
“He can’t control himself. Of course I can.”
“Yeah, but he’s not just some random vampire. He’s a Romanov.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Um, guys?” Lanny said. “What’s gonna happen to me?”
All three of them looked at him, then, all worried to an extent.
“We’ll figure something out,” Trina said at last, but she was a beat too slow, and her smile was a bit too forced.
~*~
“Sasha,” Nikita said, like a command, then grabbed Trina’s arm and dragged her around the corner and into her bedroom.
“Hey!” It was a token protest. Lanny’s eyes were all pupil right now, and it was freaking her out. And she couldn’t have pulled loose if she wanted to. Nikita didn’t crush her wrist, but his hand was locked more securely than any cuff.
He heeled the door shut when they were inside and then let her go.
Trina lifted her wrist to examine it: no marks; he’d been careful.
“You don’t need to be alone with him right now,” he said, matter-of-fact.
“I’m not afraid of Lanny,” she said, and it was only half a lie.
Nikita sighed and tilted his head, not buying it. “You saw him in there. He’s not in control.”
“He’s fine.”
“You don’t believe that.”
No, she didn’t, but she didn’t know what to believe right now.
Well, almost.
She turned away from him, massaging her temples and the headache gathering there. “Shit, this is all my fault.”
“Why? Because you sent him to me?”
She whirled back around, doing her best to shield her expression…probably failing. “Yeah, because I sent him to you. So you could–” She was hyperventilating. Chest heaving, pulse pounding. She made a gasping sound and bent double, hands on her knees. Shit.
Nikita stepped in closer, his shadow falling across hers on the rug. When he spoke, his voice was uncharacteristically soft. “He needs some time to adjust. It will be fine, Ekaterina. Don’t fret.”
She tipped her head back and caught something vulnerable in his gaze. “I didn’t want him to die,” she whispered.
“Of course you didn’t,” he said, his hand landing on her back, light and soothing. “And he won’t. We’ve just got to see him through this.”
“You’re not going to…put him down?”
He flashed her a crooked half-smile. “He’s your mate. Even if he’s an asshole.”
A laugh bubbled up in her throat, surprising and welcome.
His smile widened, a little strained; she’d only ever seen him smile naturally and easily when he was looking at Sasha. He patted her shoulder and stepped back, growing serious again. “This isn’t going to be easy for him, though,” he warned. “Whoever you are before you’re turned, that’s who you are after. Only everything’s more intense.”
She straightened and nodded. “You were all about denying yourself before,” she said, and he made a face. “And you still are. But Lanny’s always had a bit of an impulse control problem.” She pushed back against a sudden onslaught of fear, but little cold rivulets trickled through, like dead fingers walking down her spine. “Can we…” How strange, in this moment, that she trusted this man – this vampire – more than she trusted her own partner and lover.
“We can help him, yes. But he has to want to behave.”
Tears filled her eyes, sudden and hot, and she blinked them away. Her laugh was humorless this time, more of a cough. “That’s what I told him about chemo: he had to want to get better. And Jesus, Nik, I have no idea what he wants anymore.”
He waited a beat. “Well. He came to see me. So I think that means he wants to be alive for you.”
She nodded.
He studied her a moment, then his expression firmed, like he’d decided something. “Come. I’ll take him back to our place with me. Sasha can stay and watch you.”
“I don’t need watching.”
“Then he can help you track criminals. I don’t know. But I’m not leaving Lanny alone with you.” When she opened her mouth to protest, he said, “Get over it.”
“God, you’re a dictatorial asshole.”
“Yes,” he agreed, and opened the bedroom door.
On the sofa, Lanny was in the process of devouring a plate of runny scrambled eggs like a starving man.
Sasha stood at the stove, a fork in one hand, tending to a skillet full of bacon. “Who wants breakfast?” he called, and it was officially the strangest morning of her life.