23
The Ingraham Institute
Virginia
Val exhaled, shivering with the bone-deep cold that always came with dream-walking, and opened his eyes on the reality of his situation. The dim, damp stone confines of his prison, the weight of the silver cuffs on his wrists. He heard a low, steady sound, felt a vibration against his leg: the cat, curled up in a ball at his hip, purring contentedly and kneading the outside of his thigh.
He smiled, faintly, and reached to trail his fingers through her soft fur. Her purring intensified, eyes closing in bliss.
On the other side of the bars, Baroness Strange sat with her back against the wall, legs drawn up, arms propped on her knees. A plastic bag rested on the floor beside her.
She smiled when Val met her gaze. “Out visiting?” she asked, not accusatory, but curious. Almost fond.
“In a fashion,” he said. “Have you been waiting long?” His skin prickled with unease; he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of anyone watching him when he was projecting himself, when he was at his most vulnerable – even if that someone was her. He almost trusted her. Almost. In the sense that he could trust anyone, which was fractional at best.
“Just a few minutes,” she said. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”
“You’d be the first,” he said, with only a small amount of bitterness. Before her frown could blossom, he said, “What’s in the bag?”
“Oh.” She reached for it and pulled out a four-pack of glass bottles. “I brought you more Frappuccino.”
“Hmm.” He tried not to show much reaction, but his mouth watered in anticipation.
Annabel grinned like she knew it. “Yeah, you like your coffee. Here.” She got up and fed the bottles through his meal slot one at a time.
Val lined them up beneath his cot, in the shadow, where hopefully his guards wouldn’t spot them. He opened one now, sipped it slow. “Where is your esteemed husband this afternoon?”
She settled back against the wall and flapped a hand. “Moping, probably. Growling at Doctor Talbot.”
“Helping to reintegrate my brother?” Val guessed, and her expression turned guilty.
“Not because he wants to.”
“Yes, he hates all vampires. He’s made that quite clear.”
“Your brother–” she started.
He silenced her with a wave. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Alright.” She didn’t seem affronted – he hadn’t seen her anything but sympathetic or agreeable – but she seemed to withdraw. “I can leave you alone if you want.”
It was a trap, and he knew if: if he told her to go, he would confirm himself as the asshole he was; if he asked her to stay, he’d reveal his vulnerability. The set of her mouth told him she already knew exactly how fragile he was, and he didn’t like that at all.
He sighed out a breath through his nose, and she smiled, self-satisfied.
“Brat,” he accused, and her grin widened into its usual sweetness. “I have…” he started, and hesitated. “Something to ask you.”
She perked up, the movement uncannily wolfish. He forgot sometimes what she was; dangerous, that.
“You and your baron drove here, yes?”
“I showed you pics of the Caddy,” she reminded.
“Yes. Beautiful machine. I don’t suppose” – he took a quick sip of his drink, feigned casual, slouching back against the wall – “you could give anyone driving directions to this place. Could you?” Careful to sound bored. Just curious. Just speaking to fill the time.
Her smile grew sharklike. “Planning your escape?”
“Maybe,” he said, flippant, shrugging with one insolent shoulder.
She stiffened a little, the smile sliding away. “Shit. You’re serious.”
He raised his brows. “How could I be? I have no hope of escape.” He tugged at his chains with one arm, the links clanking together.
“Val.” She stuck her legs out straight, and then folded them up, leaning forward to brace her forearms on her thighs. Her eyes flashed, just a second, the sheen of an animal caught in a lantern at night. “What are you scheming?”
“I hate that word,” he spat. “Like I’m some sort of villain.”
She lifted her brows.
“I’m not the slaughterer of thousands. That title goes to the prince you allow to walk free.”
She snorted. “He’s not chained up, but trust me, your brother’s not even a little bit free. Now. Stop avoiding the question. What’s going on?”
He stared at her – glared, really – for a long moment. She didn’t flinch.
Oh, what choice did he have? It was either ask her help, or be unable to assist the New Yorkers in their quest to come retrieve Sasha. If he was even here.
“There’s a new wolf here,” he said, and it wasn’t a question, because he had been able to smell a third wolf presence. Faint, but unfamiliar. He hadn’t known it was Sasha Kashnikov, though. He thought of a little tow-headed boy in the snow, fur hat tied beneath his chin, looking up at Val with awe and asking if he was a prince.
She nodded slowly. “Yeah. I haven’t seen him. They’ve got him under lock and key–”
“Aleksander Kashnikov,” Val said, weary suddenly. And strangely, thrillingly electrified at the same time. All this time he’d been kept locked up, but now…things were happening.
“You know him?”
“I know he’s been abducted. It only seems likely that he’s here, now. Little Sasha,” he said, sighing. “A secret Soviet weapon on the Eastern Front. He woke Rasputin, and then killed him. Used his blood to turn his companion.”
“Rasputin,” she said, and then her eyes flew wide. “That’s what that French bastard wanted with the book! Damn it.” She clapped her fist into the opposite palm. “I told Fulk not to sell the thing.”
“He takes orders well, obviously.”
“Shut up,” she said, without malice, leaning even farther forward. “Okay, so, this wolf. He’s someone’s Familiar?”
“Unofficially.” He shrugged. “I don’t think Captain Baskin likes the term very much, but more or less, they are bonded. It’s a miracle they aren’t fucking, actually,” he added, under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ve spoken to them – his people. They want to stage a rescue, as unlikely as that is.”
Her eyes widened. “Jeez.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why you asked about directions. You…” She smiled, bright and guileless as a child. “You’re trying to help them.”
“Hush. You’ll ruin my bad reputation saying things like that.”
She chuckled. “What do you need from me?”
He gave her a doubtful look.
She rolled her eyes. “Do you honest to God think I want to help these Institute assholes? Come on, Val, you’ve gotta trust someone.”
“Well,” he said, “you do have a point.”
~*~
Intellectually, Annabel understood why Fulk would always hate this house. The duke lingered in every ornate bit of woodwork, the intricate metal workings of sconces that once held candles, and now held electric bulbs. Before Fulk had claimed it as his own, put his own name in iron above the gates, it had been his prison, and he wasn’t the sort of man who let things go.
But to her, it had always been a wonder. The sheer number of things: hallways, bedrooms, candelabras, windows. So many windows. It was a Gothic wonderland of overwrought Victorian delights, from the conservatory to the portrait gallery; from the medieval kitchen to the dining room with its table as long as a bowling alley. It was always full of busy scientists now, yes, but for the most part they stayed in the basements, leaving only a skeleton crew of security guards, housekeepers, and cooks in the main part of the house. If she pretended they weren’t wearing laminated ID badges, Annabel liked to imagine herself the lady of a lavish British household; one who traipsed across the Oriental carpets in her motorcycle boots.
She walked down the richly paneled hallway now, the heavy wood doors gleaming faintly in the light of the retrofitted sconces, steps soundless on the red hallway runner. They’d been given one of the nicest bedrooms, one with its own bath, and a door that locked. That part was all for show, she knew, frowning as she turned the knob and let herself in. The guards could kick their way in at any time if it was deemed necessary. But. It was a gesture; sometimes gestures were all you had.
Fulk lay across the width of the bed, head hanging off the edge, hair a shiny black waterfall that spilled onto the carpet below, earbuds in, iPod held loosely against his chest, expression caught somewhere between thoughtful and miserable.
Anna leaned back against the door after she shut it, smiling.
His eyebrows jumped – jumped down, since he was upside down at the moment.
She shook her head and went to stretch out beside him.
He pulled out the near earbud and held it out to her; she plucked it from his fingers and wedged into her own ear.
He was listening to Rush. “Tom Sawyer.”
“You’re in a mood,” she said.
“When am I not?”
“Even more of a mood,” she corrected with a chuckle, rolling her head to the side so she could see his profile. Maybe at some point in the future she’d stop marveling at his beauty, but she hoped that day never came.
“You’ve been paying a lot of visits to the dungeon,” he murmured, and the music shut off.
“I have.”
“Why?”
“At first it was curiosity.”
He made an unhappy sound in his throat, a low, wolfish whine.
She reached up to slide the backs of her fingers down his cheek, the cruel line of his jaw. “I know,” she murmured. Then pressed on: “But he’s lonely. He needs the company.”
“Fuck what he needs,” Fulk said coldly.
“Are you jealous, or just being an asshole?” she asked.
He turned his face away, jaw clenched so tight the tendons threw shadows down his neck. Both, then, but mostly jealous, she thought.
“I know that you have…complicated feelings…about vampires.”
He growled.
“I know, baby, I know.” She shifted onto her side so she could study him without craning her neck. “But I feel sorry for him at least. I don’t think he’s as horrible as everyone thinks.”
“That’s because he’s lying to you. Putting on a show to make you think he’s some poor, misunderstood wretch.”
“Don’t call me naïve” The first bit of heat crept into her voice. “I know you think I am, but I’ve got instincts too, you know. You’re not the lone genius in a world of idiots.”
“Darling, that’s not what I meant.”
“Hmph. That’s not what I wanted to talk to you about anyway.”
“Alright.” His eyes slid toward her, curious but cautious.
“Now, if I tell you this, you have to keep it to yourself.”
He turned his head then, brows drawing together. “You doubt me.” A statement, not a question, delivered with the sort of characteristic mildness that meant she’d wounded him. Caused him to doubt himself – or at least her trust in him.
She touched his face again, skimmed her thumb along his lower lip. “Not ever. Not for a second. I just wanted you to know that this isn’t something we can talk about out loud. No one can hear.”
His gaze moved over her face, measuring her seriousness, and eventually his pain looked smoothed…became another kind of pain. That constant worry and guilt that had plagued him since the Institute’s phone call months before. “Alright,” he agreed.
Anna shifted closer, leaned into the place he made for her, automatically, within his arms. She pressed her lips to his ear, because she had no idea who might be listening, and told him what Val had said about the others. The ones who were coming for Sasha.
24
Buffalo, New York
He remembered giving it to her: folding Katya’s fingers around it and noting the way he left bloody fingerprints on the back of her hand. He’d squeezed her grip tight around the bell, hard enough that he’d felt her bones shift, slender and fragile as a bird’s.
“Keep it,” he’d said, and he’d made the mistake of looking at her face, seeing, beneath the bruises and the scratches and the exhausted dark circles under her eyes, the fear in her gaze. Everything else he’d intended to say – that he loved her, that he was sorry, that he was doing this for her own good – had shriveled and blacked on his tongue, a mouthful of the best intentions gone to ash.
He smoothed his thumb over the dented bronze surface now. It had been tarnished the first moment his mother handed it to him as a boy, but had aged well since; it had obviously been kept safe in drawers and boxes.
It was Valerian’s? It made sense. And in some ways it was an easier truth to swallow than the one he’d assumed: that it had belonged to Philippe. Philippe may have given it to Alexandra, but it, like so many things, had had a life before that.
He clocked a human scent emerging from the back door behind him and was flooded with a sense that this day was going to be one unbroken chain of repetitions. First Steve, and now Kolya, his footfalls quiet, slow, but sure.
With his free hand, Nikita gripped the top rail of the split-rail fence he leaned against, gaze pinned to the view that stretched out below him: cascading green hills contoured with morning shadows, outbuildings and barns, a massive corrugated steel structure that must be a warehouse. All the while he hummed with awareness as Kolya came to stand beside him, mimicking his posture with his forearms braced on the rail.
For the past seventy-five years, Sasha had been his constant companion – his only constant companion. They’d experimented with their hair, their clothes, their overall aesthetic, but neither of them had aged a day. Immortality was a burden in the way that all constants were, but it wasn’t until now, standing beside his son who was an old man, that Nikita realized how fleeting time was.
Nikita didn’t think he would speak – he had no idea what to say – but suddenly the silence welled up around him, tight like arms around his ribs, and he said, “It’s beautiful here.” Which…how stupid. He wanted to kick himself. He felt…helpless. That was all he’d seemed to feel in the past forty-eight hours, and he hated it.
“Hmm,” Kolya murmured in agreement. “Mom and Dad paid a song for it in 1950. They couldn’t believe their luck. That was the original house, there.” He pointed off to his left, a small cabin of dark logs, half-screened from view by a stand of birch trees.
Mom and Dad. Nikita swallowed. “They were able to leave Russia?” he asked, hearing the waver in his voice.
Kolya nodded. “I was just a little thing, so I don’t remember all the details. But I think that we were snuck out. Some American friends they made at the end of the war. I remember Siberia, all the white, and the cold. Such cold. And the ship that carried us to Alaska.”
Splinters bit into Nikita’s palm and he forced his grip to ease.
Kolya turned to face him, then, with his lined face, and white hair, and his eyes the color of the Moscow sky in winter. He smiled a little brokenly. “I don’t know if it would help to hear, but he never tried to replace you. Pyotr was a wonderful father – to all of us – but he never asked Mother not to tell me about you. He used to tell stories about – you and Dima together, from his memories as a boy.”
Nikita couldn’t look at him.
“I always hoped I would get to meet you.”
Nikita snorted. “How could you believe the stories? That I was even real?”
He saw Kolya shrug in his periphery. “Boys believe more readily than men. By the time I was old enough to question it, it had already become truth in my mind.”
It hurt – hurt in a way that was thorny, and conflicted, and guilt-riddled, because a part of him didn’t wish that he’d stayed – but it eased something in him to know that Katya and Pyotr had acknowledged him. That he wasn’t a dirty, shocking secret.
He cleared his throat. “Do you know who you’re named for?”
“The dancer whose preferred partner was a knife,” Kolya said with sad fondness. “Of the three brothers you lost, Kolya’s death hit Mother the hardest, I think.”
“We didn’t bury them,” Nikita said, and felt, to his relief, a creeping numbness begin to overtake him. His mind was throwing up a shield, and he was grateful for it. There was too much…of everything. His family, Sasha, the Institute – he couldn’t cope otherwise. He took a deeper, freer breath, the words coming out cold and impersonal. “Of all the horrible things I’ve done in my life, I think maybe that was the worst. Leaving them there like that.”
“It was a war zone,” Kolya said.
“That’s not an excuse.”
A faint chuckle. “Pyotr said you were like this. I guess nothing’s changed in seventy-five years.”
“Said I was like what?” He finally turned his head, and Kolya was looking at him with open warmth and amusement. A touch of nostalgia.
“Said you take the weight of the world on your shoulders…and then a little more after that. That you think everything that goes wrong is your fault somehow.”
“Isn’t it?” Nikita asked, only half-joking.
Kolya tipped his head to the side, growing serious. “I’m sorry about Sasha.”
Nikita looked away with a disgusted sound. “Why does everyone keep saying that? Do you all think he’s already dead?” Through the numbness, his stomach gave a painful twist. Oh, God, please no, please no– Before he cut it off and let the last bit of frost close over him.
“No. Sasha killed Rasputin and Monsieur Philippe all by himself. I have to think he’s only gotten stronger since then. I don’t think he’s dead,” he said. “I’m sorry because I think that rescuing him is going to damage you. I think it probably already is.”
Nikita snapped a sharp look toward him, searching for the lie.
Kolya stared back, sympathetic. “The people who took him from you will wish they hadn’t by the time you’re done with them.”
Nikita felt a cruel, humorless smile steal across his face. “Are you sorry for that, too?” he asked, mocking.
“No. Never for them.”
“I’ll burn that place to the ground,” Nikita said, hand tightening on the bell until his hand ached, growl threading through his words.
“I figured,” Kolya said. “I wish you luck.”
~*~
“I think that went well, don’t you?” Dottie asked, pulling teacups down from their shelf in the kitchen.
Trina accepted them from her and arranged them on a tray. “Well?” She noted the way her grandmother’s hands shook, teacups chinking together. “Is that what you’d call it?”
Dottie pursed her lips, determined. “Yes.”
“There was a Romanian prince in your living room, Grams. It’s okay to be freaked out about it.”
More cups came down.
But when Trina had them all lined up on the tray, Dottie gripped the edge of the counter hard, skin parchment-thin over the bones of her knuckles.
“I’ve hosted more séances than I can count,” she said, softly, gaze trained on the backsplash. “There have been a few times that – there were…murmurings. Voices. Once it felt like someone touched my arm.” She smoothed a hand down the sleeve of her dress. “But I never–”
She turned to face Trina, eyes wide, full of wonder. “Have you ever believed in something for so long, and then, suddenly, you have proof?”
Trina smiled gently at her. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
Dottie sighed. “I feel like a girl again.” She shook her head, smile dreamy, and then sobered. “But you have to tell me.” She opened up the tin on the counter and started plucking out tea bags. “What’s going on with you and Lanny?”
Trina groaned and laughed with surprise. “Grams. Bigger fish to fry.”
“No, no, no. I know you – you can multitask.”
“That’s not important right now.”
Dottie paused to give her a sharp look. “Trina. You’ve been pining away for him for years now. The man shows up here as a vampire, and you think there’s bigger fish to fry? Try again.”
Before Trina could answer, the back door opened and her mom poked her head in. “Knock-knock,” Rachel called, stepping in with a cling-film-covered plate propped on one hip. “I brought cookies.”
“Good,” Dottie said. “Trina was just about to tell us what’s been going on with her and Lanny.”
Trina groaned again, louder this time.
“Why do you think I brought cookies?” Rachel asked, setting them on the counter. “How’d the séance go, but the way?”
“Valerian,” Trina started.
“Fine,” Dottie said. “Now. Trina.”
They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, staring at her in a way that made her want to squirm. She felt thirteen, suddenly. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said.
“Yes there is,” they said together.
Trina turned her back to them and resumed putting the tea things together, anger swelling in her throat.
Or, at least it felt like anger. There was a good chance it was desperation, or fear, or some other, much more dangerous emotion that she did not have time for right now.
“We didn’t know he was sick,” Mom said, gentler now.
Trina breathed a sound that tried to be a laugh. “Neither did I. He told me when he was drunk, so there’s a good chance he was just never going to tell me at all.”
“Oh, honey.”
“But he’s fine now. So.” This time she knew the sound she made wasn’t a laugh, just a forceful push of air that hurt her throat. “We can go back to the way things were.”
“Honey, no.” Mom and Grams moved to flank her, supportive hands on her shoulders.
“Mom,” Trina sighed, turning to her. “Are you honest to God encouraging me to be involved with a vampire?”
Rachel blinked. “Well it just sounds stupid when you say it like that.”