28
Buffalo, New York
There were plenty of beds, but Nikita never sought one. The idea of sleep was laughable.
Dawn saw him on the back patio, sitting with his back to the dew-damp wood of the house, one leg pulled up and the other dangling over the rail. He’d lost count of the number of cigarettes he’d smoked, the butts dropped in an empty soda can, the smoke curling upward in lazy swirls against the indigo backdrop of the fading night sky.
“Smoking will kill you, you know,” Alexei said somewhere behind him, and Nikita’s fingers spasmed on the filter in his hand. “That’s what all the advertisements say. And the doctors. And people on the street.”
Rustle of fabric, click of a cheap lighter, quick inhale. The first drag. Audible relief in the exhale.
“You and I,” Alexei went on, wandering into view, coming to lean against the rail a few feet down from Nikita, arms dangling over it, “we come from a generation in which everyone smoked. All the time. Just to keep from going crazy.”
Nikita took the last drag from his own smoke and dropped it into the can. “We’re not from the same generation,” he reminded, and for once, the words weren’t laced with contempt or leashed fury. They were just words. He was starting to think that though he’d never like Alexei, never trust him, maybe never even respect him, it required too much energy to continue hating him. His hatred, he’d decided, would go toward the people who’d taken Sasha from him. The people who he was going to enjoy killing with his bare hands when the time came.
“That’s right,” Alexei said, the faint light of pre-dawn flashing off his teeth as he smiled. “I’m older than you.”
“Only in years. Not in any way that counts.”
Alexei chuckled. “You are very stubborn. It’s a pity you didn’t work for my father. Things might have gone differently for your sheer stubbornness alone.”
Nikita hummed a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement. He wasn’t so sure he would have been any better than a puppet in Nicholas’s time – same as he had been in Stalin’s.
“Did you sleep?” Alexei asked.
“What business is it of yours?”
“In general? It’s not. But given our mission, it’s important that you’re rested. That you’ve fed. That you don’t faint.”
Nikita growled at him, quietly.
Alexei tsked. “You don’t take care of yourself, bratishka.”
“I am not your brother.”
“We are both vampires. Both Russians. Both Whites. Both united in a similar cause. One could argue that we are brethren,” Alexei said.
“No.”
“Very well. But I’m right about the rest, and you know it. You live like you already have one foot in the grave, Nikita. Like your own life doesn’t matter. Wearing yourself down until you have to eat, to feed, to sleep. Do you take pleasure in anything?”
Nikita freed another cigarette from his pack and lit it. “I was enjoying the quiet before you came out here.”
Another chuckle. The asshole. “Very well. I can take a hint.”
“Can you?”
“Yes. I’m much more amenable than you.” He raised his cigarette to his lips, took a drag, and started to withdraw.
“Why are you here?” Nikita asked, and Alexei froze, turned to him with raised brows and wide-eyed innocence.
“Lanny drove us here in his car.”
“You know what I mean.”
The tsarevich smoked a long moment, glancing out across the yard.
“Don’t look out there; there’s no answers there,” Nikita said. “Why are you coming along? Why are you helping?”
He took a deep breath, shoulders lifting and dropping. When his gaze returned, he seemed younger somehow; the polished, charming royal veneer had vanished, and he looked now like a lost child. “It’s…it’s been lonely,” he admitted, haltingly. “No one ever…there have been times when – when turning wasn’t an accident. When I just wanted a companion. But they never stayed.” His eyes flicked up to Nikita’s, his smile small and melancholy. “Everyone I ever turned left me. I think there’s something – something in the blood. It turns people…wrong, somehow.”
A spike of anxiety tightened Nikita’s gut. He’d confessed as much to Sasha before…or had tried to. Every time he expressed his fear that Rasputin had tainted him somehow, Sasha grew frantic with worry and guilt, whining and curling up in his lap, asking for a forgiveness that wasn’t owed because he’d never done anything terrible in his whole sweet life. So Nikita had learned how to keep such thoughts to himself, all of them festering like a sore that would never come to a head.
“It’s only blood,” he said, tersely. “We were already the people we were going to be before it was given to us. If they left, that was on them, and not you.”
“You make me want to believe that. When I look at you and Sasha, together all this time.” His smile flickered, unsteady. “It shows me what I’ve been missing all this time.”
“And what’s that?”
“A family.”
Nikita’s hand shook when he lifted his cigarette.
“I’m not so foolish that I think you’ll ever let me be your family,” Alexei went on. “But I guess…I have nothing better to do. I might as well help you. And then we’ll see.”
Nikita looked away from him, the painful hope shining in his eyes. Along the horizon, the first matchstick flare of pink to herald the sunrise. “Yeah,” he said, breath quivering as he exhaled. “I guess we will.”
~*~
Trina could only nibble at breakfast, mind already on the strategizing that would come after. Nikita would have gone charging off on his own if they’d let him, but Trina had put her foot down: they would make a plan of action, and they would stick to it.
Dad had a recent atlas full of maps that he went to fetch, and Lanny went to get the old whiteboard and markers from Trina’s room while Trina helped her mom load the dishwasher.
So far, Rachel seemed to be taking all of this well. Too well, in Trina’s opinion. She’d always been a practical, accepting sort, but everyone had limits. Trina realized her mother had reached hers when she carried a stack of dirty plates into the kitchen and found Rachel standing with a white-knuckled grip on the counter, staring at the window above the sink and blinking furiously.
She set the dishes down gently. “Mom?”
Rachel jerked as if startled, and straightened. Plunged her hands back into the sudsy water in the sink and began scrubbing a skillet in earnest. “What, sweetie?” she asked, too-brightly, unable to keep the waver from her voice.
“Mom,” Trina said again. She moved to stand beside her mother, rested a hand on her shoulder.
Rachel ducked her head, hair shielding her face, and took a tremulous breath. “I’m alright.”
“No, you’re not.”
She gave a weak chuckle. “Do you think any mother would be, in my position?”
“Oh, Mom, I’m sorry.”
Rachel shook her head, and tucked her hair back, turned a watery smile toward Trina. “Don’t listen to me: I’m just a crier.”
Trina frowned, because her mother was a lot of things, but she’d never thought she was someone who cried easily or often.
“A secret crier, maybe,” Rachel amended. “I blubbered like a baby the day you graduated from the police academy. I was so proud of you, and scared out of my mind. My little baby off to arrest people. I felt like I was sending you off to war. Like I was letting you do something dangerous and not trying to stop you at all.”
“You couldn’t have stopped me.”
“I know that, honey.” Her smile twitched, widened. “I never wanted to be an obstacle in your path. You’re your own woman. Always have been. And I know there are things in life that you have to do. I won’t ever try to talk you out of them. But.” Fresh tears filled her eyes and she tried to blink them away. “I’m going to be scared. And I’m going to cry sometimes.”
Trina couldn’t respond, filled with overwhelming love and gratitude. So she pulled her mother into a tight hug, and they clung to one another in the bright bar of sunlight that beamed through the window.
“Come home safe,” Rachel whispered.
“I’ll do my best.”
~*~
“Bit of an enthusiast,” Trina’s Uncle Raymond said, lifting his ball cap to scratch at his receding hairline, gesturing to the interior of the outbuilding with his hat.
She’d known that he was, but enthusiast was too delicate a word for all of this. The shed, secured with a heavy padlock, held rack after rack, trunk after trunk, all of it loaded with weapons of every type. Long guns, handguns, great cases of ammo. Knives, and emergency flares, and MREs, and tactical vests and pants. Targets, and scopes, and safety glasses, and headgear.
Trina stared agape at her uncle.
He shrugged. “We all knew the stories. We thought an arsenal might come in handy someday.”
Lanny whistled. “That is some arsenal.”
Nikita stepped into the building without hesitation, going straight for the wall-mounted case of handguns.
Trina made to follow, but felt a tap at her shoulder. She turned to find her grandfather standing behind her, in his usual uniform of jeans and flannel. She’d always thought he’d looked so much like her dad, and now she knew that he looked like his own father, too.
He motioned over his shoulder back toward the house. “I’ve got something in my closet I think you ought to take with you.”
~*~
He laid it out on the patchwork quilt that covered the bed, and it gleamed in the sunlight: faint and diffused on the wood, bright and sharp on the blue of the barrel.
Katya’s Mosin-Nagant.
Trina held her breath until she felt light-headed, and then let it out slow, hand shaking as she reached to touch – to almost touch. She stopped at the last moment, pulled her hand back.
“Go on,” Kolya said.
“Is it…?”
“Hers? Yeah.” When Trina glanced at his face, he was smiling fondly down at the rifle.
Slowly, carefully, she set her fingertips to the stock, felt the smooth cool wood and marveled at the knowledge that her great-grandmother had touched the same place. Had snugged the butt tight into her shoulder and looked with one eye down the barrel; had taken a Nazi commander in the head, right through the swastika on his cap.
“She kept it in working order right up until the arthritis got too bad, and then I took over,” Kolya explained. “When we were children, she would clean it at the kitchen table, at night, after the dinner dishes were cleared. Father – Pyotr,” he stumbled over the name. He’d always known about Nikita, but Pyotr was the man who’d raised him. “Would sit and keep her company sometimes. They would pass a cigarette back and forth, and talk too low for us to hear. I remember standing in the doorway, thinking they couldn’t see me.” His voice grew distant as he remembered. “But then Papa would turn and see me, and I’d squeal and run, and he’d chase me.”
He shook himself and cleared his throat. “It was normal at the time. Mama and the target practice. Keeping it clean. But now, I think – well, I think she was waiting for another war. She had ghosts in her eyes. I don’t think she ever could have exorcised them. And maybe she didn’t want to.”
He looked up and met Trina’s gaze. “You’re so like her, Trina. You carry too much on your shoulders.”
“Gramps–”
“You do. You’re a warrior, like she was. Warriors need wars. And warriors need weapons.” He gestured to the gun. “You should take hers with you.”
“But…but it’s an heirloom,” she said, feeling dizzy, helplessly knocked off her guard. “What if something happens to it? What if I break it?”
“Weapons need wars, too,” he said, patiently. “Take it, Trina.”
“Shouldn’t Nikita have it instead?”
He shook his head, smiling. “Nikita never needed a sniper rifle. He needed a sniper.”
~*~
She’d fired shotguns and rifles before, but the Mosin-Nagant was heavier than she’d anticipated. It belonged to an age when everything from cars to household appliances were made of solid, clunky metal. A weighted age.
She took a deep breath and snugged the butt into her shoulder, willed her arms to support the rest of it. Pressed her cheek to the stock and closed her left eye. Ignored the strange echoing rush of her pulse against the ear protectors; let the fields and the people around her fade away. Until it was only her, and the rifle, and the target: a water-filled coffee can set on a tree stump at an alarming distance.
Inhale. Hold–
Katya had saved her men, saved her country, saved herself.
Slow pull of the trigger.
An explosion of sound. A vicious kick against her shoulder. A shower of water as the coffee can exploded.
–Exhale.
Trina lowered the rifle and pulled down her headgear to the sound of applause.
Lanny wolf-whistled.
She twisted around and saw her grandfather beaming at her.
And behind him, arms folded, the faintest hint of a smile gracing his lips, Nikita gave her a single nod. Well done.
She nodded back.