4
This was a bad idea.
“This is a bad idea,” Nikita said, because he wanted it on record that Trina’s plan wasn’t likely to go the way she wanted it to.
She nodded. “Maybe so, but it’s the best I got, and I want everything out in the open. No secrets, no more rooftop chases in the dark. New York isn’t gonna lie down and keep quiet while we sort our shit out. Lanny and I need to go back to work and handle the real criminals in this city.”
She squared up her shoulders and sent him a brave smile that, for a moment, reminded him of her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking play at confidence.
Nikita reached, quick but soft, and cupped her cheek in one hand. Her eyes widened, startled. He pulled back. “Alright. Let’s do it then.”
She stared at him a moment, confused, searching his face, then nodded again and turned. “Sasha!” she called.
They stood on the hot, cracked pavement of a rundown self-storage complex, surrounded by roll-top doors and concrete walls stained by years of polluted rain. Trina’s car sat at a slant in one corner; Sasha opened its rear door and reached inside, dragging out an unresisting Alexei by the shirt collar. Doubtless Rasputin’s spawn could get away if he wanted, but was choosing to play along for the moment.
Nikita saw him there with Sasha, close enough to hurt him, and a growl bubbled to life in his chest.
“Okay, you can’t get all territorial,” Trina said. “I need somebody to be the other adult in this situation.”
He let his growl swell – a deep, dark jaguar pulse of sound – and then nodded and pulled it back. Took a deep breath, the stink of a rival in his nose.
Sasha sent him one of his pack looks as he marched Alexei up to them, meant to be concerned and comforting and loving.
“Lanny,” Nikita called.
He’d left his charges around the corner, and they walked around it now, Lanny and Jamie, both full of blood and, hopefully, in good control of themselves.
Nikita grabbed hold of Trina’s elbow, ready to tug her away, and beckoned to Sasha with a flick of his fingers. His wolf came, coming close on his opposite side, rubbing their shoulders together and whining softly.
“Shh,” Nikita murmured, leaning into the pressure of his shoulder.
Then Lanny caught sight of his sire.
His eyes flashed. A growl exploded out of him, half a roar, and when he opened his mouth, Nikita saw that his fangs had extended.
“Hello, Lanny,” Alexei said.
Lanny attacked, fingers curled into claws.
Nikita put an arm around his great-granddaughter and his wolf each, and towed them neatly to the side.
“Shit,” Trina said.
“It’s okay,” Nikita said, but didn’t know if he believed that. He hoped it would be, but in any event, he had hold of the only two people in this scenario he cared about. So.
Alexei seemed to have been taken by surprised, but recovered quickly. He was the older, stronger, more experienced of the two; he knew his own strength and speed and weaknesses.
But Lanny was a cop used to handling high, drunk, and volatile suspects. And he’d been a boxer before that; one on his way to televised matches, if Trina was correct.
Alexei braced his feet on the tarmac and caught Lanny’s headlong rush with both hands clamped around the other man’s wrists. Lanny roared again, muscled through, and laid Alexei out flat on his back. He hit hard, head landing on the pavement with a crack. And then Lanny straddled him and started throwing punches.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Sasha said, and made a little involuntary move toward the brawl.
Nikita held him fast, hand pressed tight to his sternum, and gave a quiet warning growl. No.
Sasha huffed in annoyance, but subsided.
The meaty sounds of fists meeting a face echoed off the storage lockers around them. Something crunched.
“He’s going to kill him,” Trina breathed.
“Not that way he isn’t.”
She turned to glare at him. “My plan was for us to talk all of this through. What was your plan: let them fight to the death?”
“Should we be…um, helping somebody?” Jamie asked.
Nikita sighed and turned loose of his charges. “Fine. All of you stay here.” He gave them an admonishing wag of his finger for emphasis.
Sasha grumbled under his breath.
Trina said, “Fucking do something already.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Neither combatant noticed him as he approached, and why would they? Lanny kept hitting, and hitting, his knuckles shiny red with blood, spraying droplets of it across the pavement. Alexei had both hands fisted in the front of Lanny’s shirt, but was otherwise incapable of resisting the attack, his face a lumpy, bloody, pulpy mess. It was hard to look at, and Nikita had looked at his share of awful things in his century of life.
He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled. The sound went off in the enclosed space like the whistle of a steam engine, loud enough that he knew Sasha had to have flinched behind him.
Lanny grunted and paused, bloody fist hovering in midair, twisting around to search out the source of the noise. He panted, breathing through his open mouth, fangs showing, pupils wide and black: the bloodlust had hit him, more potent than any paltry human drug.
“Get up,” Nikita ordered.
Lanny regarded him a moment with flat shark’s eyes, unseeing. He stood slowly, movements deliberate, but tense. Ready to pounce. He stared flatly at Nikita a moment, then snarled and attacked.
Lanny might have been a cop and a boxer who’d carried his strength and ferocity with him into immortality.
But Nikita was Cheka. It wasn’t a contest, really.
He side-stepped at the last moment, darted out his hand, and caught Lanny by the throat. He squeezed just hard enough to cut off his air and draw little pearls of blood with his nails, but not hard enough to snap vertebrae or pierce the jugular.
“Stop,” he said. “That’s enough.”
Lanny struggled a moment, coughing and sputtering, and then he returned to himself, blinking, his pupils receding to a normal diameter.
“You back?” Nikita asked.
Lanny kept coughing, but managed to nod.
“Don’t do that again,” Nikita said, and opened his hand.
Lanny dropped to his feet, and then his knees gave and he went down on all fours, coughing wetly and dragging big gulps of air through his bruised throat.
A pained groan drew Nikita’s attention and he glanced over to see Alexei sitting up, slow and unsteady, cradling his ruined face in both hands. He would heal, of course he would, but it would take ungodly long unless he fed.
With a sigh, Nikita brought his own wrist to his mouth and made a surgical-precise cut with one fang. “Here,” he said tersely, closing the gap between them and offering his hand to the former tsarevich. “If you can even work your mouth.”
Through the bloody wreck of his face, Alexei’s eyes shone bright and hurt.
“Drink,” Nikita said. “I don’t have all afternoon.”
Alexei took his hand in his own, leaving smears of blood, his touch eliciting unpleasant shivers – and memories of snow, and smoke, and the cawing ravens of Moscow. Nikita almost jerked away when Alexei’s mouth closed over the oozing wound on his wrist. Then came the pull and the draw, his blood going to nourish another. A completely foreign sensation. He’d never, Nikita realized with a little shock, allowed anyone to feed from him. He’d never been close with another vampire and had never had a reason to. In his life, he’d only ever taken.
Unable to watch, he turned his face away and saw that Lanny was on his feet again, massaging at his throat with one bloody hand. His knuckles were split to the bone, but already starting to repair themselves.
Trina hovered an arm’s length away, expression guarded, arms folded across her chest. She was afraid of her lover now, and even if that was for the best, Nikita ached for her. And for Lanny, too – he knew what that felt like: to look into the eyes of the person you loved, and find only fear. But that’s what happened when you became a monster.
A familiar body crowded in against his back, and Sasha’s warm hand landed on his arm, just above the place where Alexei gripped him with white-knuckled desperation. An understated warning growl stirred in his chest; Nikita could feel it move through his back where they touched.
“That’s enough,” Sasha said, snapping his teeth with a threatening click for emphasis.
“It’s alright,” Nikita soothed, but Sasha was having none of it.
“No, it’s too much. Stop.” He reached down and took a fistful of Alexei’s hair, and yanked his head back. It was a disturbing sight: slack mouth dripping blood, dilated eyes, the dreamy haze of bloodlust satisfied.
Was this what Nikita looked like when he drank? When he took from his poor wolf again and again? He shuddered.
Sasha pushed himself between him and Alexei, shooing the tsarevich back on his heels with a stream of irate Russian, herding Nikita back behind him, shielding him.
Nikita elevated his injured wrist and clapped his other hand to it; he could feel it starting to knit beneath his palm. Blood trickled out from between his fingers, but then the accelerated clotting factor kicked in. Too late though, maybe, as a rush of static filled his head and he swayed dangerously to the side. Oh. Yes, it had been too much.
Sasha’s arm caught him around the shoulders and steadied him. “Let’s go sit down.”
“No.” Nikita shook his head, and some of the static cleared. He would have to feed, and soon, but he could soldier through for the moment. No different than all his dizzy spells back during the war. “I need to do this.”
Sasha snorted in clear disapproval, but stayed where he was. “I’ll hold you up, then.”
Nikita smiled. “Don’t you always?”
~*~
There really wasn’t anywhere to sit, so they stood in a rough circle on the pavement. Sasha refused to take his arm away, and though Nikita rolled his eyes, he was secretly grateful; he wasn’t sure his knees would hold at this point, as the underfed shivers started moving up and down his limbs.
Trina had had a water bottle in the car and with it they’d cleaned most of the blood from Lanny’s knuckles and Alexei’s face. Alexei wore a fading black eye, and the wide split in his lip was in the process of disappearing, but he seemed otherwise alright, boosted by a healthy dose of Nikita’s blood. Lanny kept stealing glimpses of the tsarevich, outwardly shocked as he watched his face stitch itself back together; then he would look down at his own hands and see the same thing, clearly marveling.
Poor Jamie Anderson looked like he wanted to run as far and as fast away from all of them as possible. He stayed, though, shifting his weight from foot-to-foot, chewing at his lower lip. Nikita had learned a long time ago that there was bravery in the simple act of staying, no matter how badly it frightened you.
Alright. Down to business.
Nikita fixed Alexei with a look. “If you don’t stop turning people, I’m going to put you down.” No frills, no pleading. “I will snap your neck like I did Chad Edwards’, and I’ll drag you up to that warehouse, cut the heart from your body and burn it. Do you understand?”
“Shit,” Lanny muttered.
Alexei cocked his head, attempting a bored air. Fear caught the light like new pennies in his eyes, though. “Do you think you could?”
“I know I could, you pampered little shit.” Nikita heard the coldness in his words, each falling like a stone. He didn’t sound angry, he knew; he sounded heartless. “You and your summer dachas, and your nannies, your little sailor suits. I’m one of Stalin’s killers, and I’ll kill you without breaking a sweat.”
“I left the nursery a long time ago,” Alexei shot back. “You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
“I know Lanny just put you on your ass.”
“Boys,” Trina said, quietly.
Right. Focus.
Nikita took a deep breath. “You will not terrorize this city,” Nikita said.
“Lanny was dying,” Alexei said, indicating him with a wave. “He was sick – I know you could smell it, too. I didn’t terrorize him; I saved his life.”
“Without his consent,” Sasha said.
“You might think immortality is a gift,” Nikita said, “but you can’t go around handing it out like it’s Christmastime. And you can’t turn someone just to cover up the mistake of drinking too much.” Nikita felt his face harden into a scowl. “I can’t decide if you have no self-control, or if you like it. All the chaos. Changing people.”
“I don’t…” Alexei’s frown dissolved, revealing the panic and anguish underneath. Maybe he was a good actor. Maybe. “I don’t like hurting anyone,” he said, sad but fierce. “I don’t. Sometimes I get too hungry. Or I get hurt, and I bleed too much. And sometimes, I just…” He gusted out a breath. “I’ve been alone a very long time,” he whispered.
And Nikita understood a little better. He sighed. “You can’t make yourself a family, Alexei.”
Alexei’s lips twitched upward in an unhappy smile. “Well, it hasn’t worked so far, has it?”
Sasha’s hand tightened on Nikita’s shoulder, a silent question.
One Nikita didn’t have an answer for.
He was saved by the bell, as it were. Trina and Lanny’s phones both started ringing.
~*~
“I told Captain Abbot you were sick. You didn’t have to come,” Trina offered, in what she hoped was a diplomatic tone.
Dispatch had been as close to worked up as she’d ever heard on the phone: three DBs, an unimaginable amount of blood, and a hysterical witness blubbering about animals ripping her neighbors apart. And the address? Lanny’s building. The apartment next door to his.
It was their case, and they had to go; there had been a tumble of voices and some flailing of arms, and now here they were in the car, Lanny a fucking vampire who couldn’t control himself, and they’d left all the other vampires looking shiftily at one another.
This whole thing was officially a bad idea.
Lanny snorted. “Tell him I made a miraculous recovery. ‘Cause. You know. I kinda did.”
“Yeah. Well.” She swallowed hard and told herself she wasn’t nervous about being alone in the car with him. She wasn’t. “This place is gonna look like an abattoir, apparently. Isn’t that gonna trigger…something?”
“I’ll be fine,” he said, too forcefully. That same voice he used when he insisted he didn’t miss fighting that much.
She cast a quick glance from the corner of her eye and saw that his jaw was clenched tight, tendons standing out stark in his throat. The bruises from Nikita’s fingers had already faded. “Lanny, I’m serious–”
“So am I. I’m coming with you.”
“Don’t pull any kind of chivalry bullshit on me,” she warned. “I’m about sick of Nikita doing it.”
“When have I ever been chivalrous?” But he was. His daddy had raised him to be, and even if he was an ass, he was the sort of person who used his body as a human shield and opened doors for ladies, even ladies who were his grouchy partner.
“Are you afraid to be around me?” he asked, and her hand tightened involuntarily on the wheel.
“No,” she said, fast. “Nik was worried, but I’m – I’m not.”
He sighed. “You know I’d never hurt you, right?”
“Lanny, please,” she scoffed. “Did you really just ask that?”
But it was a valid question, and they both knew it.
She turned right at the next corner and there was Lanny’s building, ambulances and patrol cars parked out front, yellow tape fluttering between two signs.
Her stomach somersaulted as she wedged the cruiser into a spot about twenty yards down the sidewalk and killed the engine. Every vampire she knew – and how crazy that she knew more than one – had been with her when this call had come in. So if an animal really had ripped three people apart, it was a new animal, some as-of-yet-uncatalogued threat.
“Ready?” she asked.
He took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
It seemed a lifetime had passed since that first bizarre case: Chad Edwards dead in an alley, an ugly bite mark marring his pale throat. Today, they flashed their badges, ducked the tape, and Trina walked up the stairs with a partner who was also an immortal creature of myth.
The second they crossed the threshold, Lanny ground to a halt, head thrown back, nostrils flared. “Wolf,” he said, voice a low, big-cat growl, his eyes flashing.
Trina suppressed a shiver. “How do you know?” But she didn’t doubt him, not really. Only marveled at the change in him.
He shook his head, eyes closing, face taut with concentration. “I…I dunno. I just.” Another deep inhale. “It’s wolves, I can tell.” His eyes popped open, coming to her, pupils huge. “Like Sasha, but not him.” He showed his teeth in a grimace. “These are…these are nasty. Sasha smells like pine needles. These smell like…something bad.”
“Okay,” she said. “I believe you.” She pointed to the staircase. “You okay to go up?”
“Yeah.”
He led, in fact, which was probably a bad idea, but she was tired of arguing. Halfway up, she heard him growl.
“Lanny,” she warned.
“Yeah.”
When they reached his floor, even she was hit in the face with the stink. God knew what it smelled like to him.
Thompkins met them in the hall, pale-faced and sweating. His hand shook as he reached to resettle his patrol cap. “Guys,” he greeted. “It’s bad in there.”
“What happened?” Trina asked, because Lanny had brought his arm up over his nose and mouth to block out the smell.
“The three vics are Angela, Ben, and Rebecca Meyers.” He shook his head. “A mom and her two kids. The neighbor across the hall called it in; said it was the time when Angela normally gets the kids home from school, and she heard the screaming.” Another headshake, expression caught between grief-stricken and sickened.
Trina patted his arm as she passed. “We’ll just take a look. Harvey’s on the way.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, dazed.
Even holding his arm up over his face like Dracula – and no, the irony was not lost on her – Lanny led the way the last few steps to the threshold of the apartment next to his, and crossed it first.
Trina had seen some nasty scenes in her career in law enforcement, particularly the Satanist cult slayings, but none of them had prepared her for what awaited them in that apartment. This was no human mutilation, no carving of organs in a fit of Hannibal Lector lust. Lanny’s poor neighbors had been set upon by wild animals. The carnage was unimaginable. Trina found she couldn’t look directly at any of it.
A battle-hardened veteran of the force, Davis, walked them through the scene. Cause of death was safe to call, even without Harvey there yet: exsanguination due to evisceration. Trina breathed through her mouth, and they were in and out in under five minutes.
Ten minutes later, she stood on the sidewalk in front of the building, gulping down hot summer air and willing her stomach to quiet. “How you holding up?” she asked Lanny.
He leaned forward and braced his hands on his knees, breathing in loud gasps. “There were two of them,” he said, quiet enough that only she could hear. “Two wolves, and two humans. And the wolves smelled…dirty.”
She gathered her hair back and snapped an elastic off her wrist, tied it up off her hot neck, giving him a chance to elaborate.
And he did. “Like sweat, and BO. Like they hadn’t had showers in a long time, you know?”
“What do you think that means?”
“Dunno. We need to get Nik and Sasha in there.”
In the midst of her shock and disgust, Trina managed to scrounge up a smile.
He tipped his head back. “What?”
“You called him Nik.”
He frowned. “That’s his fucking name. So?”
“So I’ll call them.” She wiped her smile away, grateful to have found it at all, given the situation.
~*~
Trina was incredibly grateful that she didn’t have to attend the press conference, and was already dreading her next interaction with Captain Abbot. Pair their lack of decent leads on the disappearing bodies – there was just no explaining the truth to the man – with the new massacre, and she didn’t envy the captain’s job of fending off questions in front of the press.
She couldn’t do anything about Chad Edwards and Jamie Anderson, but she could figure out who – or what – had killed the Meyers family.
Harvey came and went, grim-faced, pale. “Parts are missing,” she told them. “The bodies looked like they were chewed on.”
The neighbor across the hall, stuttering and whimpering, claimed to have heard snarling and barking; she’d seen two huge, shaggy dogs leave the apartment, but no one on the street had seen such a thing.
“They shifted,” Nikita said when he joined them after nightfall. All the CSIs and uniforms had gone home save the token duo left to guard the scene. Trina and Lanny stood propped against the building, tired and sore from being on their feet. Nikita had walked up with the unconscious swagger of a gangster from an old movie, Sasha at his side, Jamie and Alexei trailing behind. He wore all black, and his denim jacket with the Romanov patch sewn on the collar. He finished the last quarter inch of a cigarette, dropped the butt, and ground it out beneath his boot, smoke mingling with his words when he spoke. “They shifted on the stairs and left the building as humans. As human as they’re capable of being, anyway.”
“Can you scent them?” Lanny asked.
“Oh, yes.” He tipped his head back and to the side, expression faraway. “Two. Ferals. Human handlers; one of them was bleeding – one of the wolves, I mean.”
Beside him, Sasha bared his teeth and growled unhappily.
“Ferals?” Trina asked.
“Not all turnings go well,” Nikita said, and she remembered, through the visions he’d shared with her, Monsieur Philippe talking about a Russian wolf named Mitya who’d been a drooling idiot. “Some minds can’t last it. They’re wild.”
“Okay, that’s terrifying. But that begs the question: did you know there were other wolves in the city?”
“There weren’t,” Sasha said, sounding strangled. “I would have found them by now.”
~*~
Trina walked them up. Nikita smelled wolf on the stairs, against the walls, the musk of dirty, mud-clumped fur and unwashed human skin caked with filth. Madness, he’d long ago learned, smelled of dirt, saliva, and noxious fear sweat. He smelled it here, thicker as they climbed; and he smelled traces of Jamie and Lanny, even himself, where they’d walked only hours before.
They’d just missed these animals.
Nikita wished they hadn’t; unlike the family who’d opened their door and stepped into a nightmare, he could have put a couple of rabid ferals down.
In the apartment, the bodies had long since been taken away, but he could still smell blood, and shit, and the hot meat of ripped-out organs. Blood had soaked the rugs, the floorboards; splattered across the walls and furniture.
Sasha stood in the center of the room, revolving slowly, mouth tight and brows drawn low. He whined, and said, “Why would they do this? Why?”
Trina stood against a patch of miraculously clean wall, arms folded. “You said they had human handlers, which means they weren’t here on their own.”
“No,” Nikita agreed. “They were used as hunting dogs.”
“What – or who – were they tracking?”
He sighed. “I think they were tracking us.”