13
Nikita got within five feet of Colette’s front steps and froze. He smelled the feral wolves, and Sasha. Which he’d expected. Trina stood at the top of the steps, though, expression one of careful control; the face of a police officer about to deliver unfortunate news.
“What?” he asked, heart hammering.
Trina took a deep breath. “Okay. I need you to promise that you’re not going to do something incredibly stupid.”
He growled, and her brows shot up.
“Nikita.”
“Tell me.” He could already predict what she’d say, though. That was the beauty of being a chronic pessimist: you were so rarely proven wrong.
She was brave enough to look him in the eyes when she said, “Sasha wandered off about an hour again, and he hasn’t come back.”
Nikita let the words hit him, took them in, interpreted them. And spun away from her, following the fading scent trail on the sidewalk. Already an hour old; where was he now? How far had he gotten? Had he found the wolves? And had they–
“Nikita,” she snapped. “This counts as something stupid!”
He ground to a halt, almost staggering. It felt like someone was sitting on his shoulders, pressing down on his lungs, constricting his breathing, driving him right down through the sidewalk. He opened and closed his hands, fists so tight his nails scored his palms. The pain was good; it grounded him.
He half-turned, speaking over his shoulder, voice jagged and full of glass. “Why did you let him leave? You were all supposed to stay here.”
“Let him? I’m not his keeper, and he sure as shit didn’t ask for permission.”
It wasn’t her fault. He took a deep breath and tried to tell himself that. “Stay here. I have to go and find him.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“No.”
“I’ll go,” Alexei said. When Nikita turned all the way around, he saw that the tsarevich had joined her on the porch. “I know you don’t care if anything happens to me.” He gave a small, rueful smile as he loped elegantly down the stairs and came to stand beside Nikita. “Two is always better than one, yes?”
Nikita sighed. “Yes. Thank you.” He glared at Trina and jabbed his finger toward the building. “Go back inside.”
“Don’t disappear,” she shot back, and, thankfully, slipped back through the door.
Nikita set off down the sidewalk, following Sasha’s scent, not caring if Alexei had any trouble keeping up.
“He seemed restless,” Alexei said, and though his voice was pleasant, comforting even, Nikita didn’t want to hear anything he had to say about Sasha. “I don’t think he likes being cooped up.”
Nikita growled at him, which startled a group of teenagers passing the other way. “Freak,” one of them accused.
“I didn’t chase him outside,” Alexei said in his own defense, snorting. “It was your order he disobeyed.”
“I don’t give him orders. He isn’t my pet.”
“He’s your Familiar.”
“No, he…” Nikita choked on another growl and it hurt to swallow. “We are friends. Brothers. Equals.”
Alexei murmured something disagreeing to himself.
“What?”
“I hope that he’s alright, I said.”
Nikita hated him…but not in the cold, all-consuming way that he hated these feral wolves. Their scents lay like toxic waste beneath the fresh pine-and-earth scent of Sasha, unnatural and twisted.
“I wonder–” Alexei started.
“Shut up.” And he actually did.
Sasha hadn’t gone far. The scent trail turned right at the light, went a block, and took another right in an alley. Where the scent just stopped. Nikita smelled humans, lots of them. And chemicals. Sasha was gone.
But.
The afternoon sunlight glinted off something against the base of a dumpster, and he knelt to pick it up. It was a 10cc syringe. Empty. And it reeked of a drug that wasn’t the kind humans injected into their veins for fun.
“There’s another one over here,” Alexei said, bending for it. “Junkies, probably.”
“No.” Nikita brought the needle to his nose and inhaled: Sasha. And blood. “They injected him with this.”
He stood up slowly, shakily, his pulse thundering in his head. He thought he might faint, and for once it had nothing to do with his constant hunger.
Alexei looked at him, regal brows knitted together. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Nikita curled his hand tight around the syringe. “It was a trap.”
~*~
“Next time, use a handkerchief,” Trina said, picking up the syringe with a bit of tissue.
“What,” Lanny said, “you’re gonna take this to the lab?” He snorted to show what he thought of that idea.
“Well, I…” She sighed. He was right. You couldn’t print a syringe your immortal great-grandfather found in conjunction with the unreportable kidnapping of his werewolf best friend. “Nikita,” she started, but he wasn’t listening to their exchange.
He paced the width of Colette’s second floor, hands knotted behind his back, head tipped down, face an expressionless mask. If he’d had his black coat, he would have looked like an enraged Chekist commander about to hand down a death sentence. He reached the couch and spun back, closed the distance to the kitchen table with a few long strides, and did the whole thing again.
“Nikita,” she said, louder this time, “we’re going to get him back.”
He started muttering in Russian, the harsh consonant sounds emphasizing his furious panic.
“What’s he saying?” she asked Alexei.
“Um. He’s very angry.”
He stopped then, and spun to face them. “I’m going to gut them with my bare hands,” he hissed – actually hissed, like an enraged puma, hands leaping up to shoulder-height, curled into claws.
“Dude, that’s kinda dramatic,” Lanny said.
Nikita took an aggressive step toward him.
And Trina got to her feet, slapping her hand down on the table. “That’s enough. Everybody, that’s e-fucking-nough, okay? Someone drugged Sasha, and took him, and that’s terrifying and awful, but we have to do something about it. We can’t do anything if we’re bickering and getting theatrical about it. Okay?”
Surprisingly, Nikita backed down first. He went back to pacing, without the Russian cursing this time.
Lanny looked at her. “How do you want to play this?”
A smile touched her mouth before she could help it; she didn’t want to smile, not when things were so serious and Nikita was so upset, and Sasha was God knew where. But it was so much like the old Lanny, the guy who’d never had a problem deferring to a woman and who’d always said she had better ideas than him.
He smiled back, faintly.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. Then, warming to the notion: “I need a notebook. And a pen.”
“I’ll get you one,” Colette said, and Trina had no idea how long the psychic had been standing in the doorway.
“Thanks.”
“A notebook?” Nikita asked, voice mostly a growl.
“Don’t knock the process,” Lanny said. “We can’t all just barge into a house with Stalin’s blessings and steal everybody’s vodka.”
Nikita said something soft and vicious under his breath.
“What the hell did you guys drag me into?” Jamie asked, but he seemed to be talking to himself, and sounded resigned besides.
Colette returned bearing a leather-bound journal that seemed too special to write in, and an honest-to-goodness fountain pen.
Trina opened up the cover and started a detailed case outline, from the night she and Lanny found Chad Edwards’ body in the alley to just a half hour ago, and Sasha’s abduction. Everyone save Nikita – who kept pacing like a madman – crowded around her chair and studied the notebook over her shoulder.
“Okay,” she said when she was done, sitting back and reviewing her tidy notes. “I’m going to assume that Chad isn’t the first person Alexei’s taken too far.” She glanced at him for confirmation and received a tight, blushing nod. “But I think he must be the first person who’s made the news for getting up off a morgue slab and walking out into the street. That got the Institute’s attention. They had their pet wolves start sniffing around, and they found not just one, but several vamps in town, and a wolf. Which, judging by their own wolves, and their ‘Project Kashnikov,’ they’ve been trying unsuccessfully to create some mentally-sound, fully-functional wolves for a while now.”
She glanced up, giving the others a chance to chime in. Nikita had come to stand at the far end of the table, she saw, arms folded, scowling down at the wood grain of the tabletop.
“Okay, so,” she continued. “They tracked us here. Colette’s wards worked, obviously” – she would have loved to know how, after watching the burning herb ritual Colette had performed – “but they knew we were close. And if they had tranqs, that means they had a trap. My question is this: did the mean to catch Sasha? Or is he just the first one to take the bait?”
“My question,” Nikita said, “is where is he?”
“I think it’s pretty obvious he’s at the Institute,” Trina said, careful to keep her tone neutral. “What sort of containment unit would they need to hold him?”
Nikita made a face, shook his head. He looked like a man struggling to think in the midst of mind-numbing rage. “Concrete. Strong metal. He can take most doors down – silver.” He glanced up at her, and the look in his eyes made her want to shiver. “You can control immortal things with silver.”
“The old silver bullet trick, huh?” Lanny said.
Trina elbowed him. “Not helping.”
Nikita started to pace again.
Trina said, “I’m going to call Dr. Fowler and set up a meeting.”
That got a reaction. “What?” everyone said in unison.
All but Lanny, who nodded beside her. “Yeah.”
“You can’t–” Nikita started, the same moment Jamie said, “That sounds like a really bad idea.”
Trina sliced a hand through the air, and, miraculously, they fell silent. “Hear me out. I’m going to meet with Dr. Fowler alone, in public, while the rest of you get into the Institute and see if you can find Sasha.” When there were no immediate protests, only thoughtful silence, she offered a bare smile. “I can’t sniff anyone out, or Jedi Mindtrick anyone, but I can cause a distraction. And get some useful intel out of the idiot. What do you say?”
Lanny sent her an approving look.
Jamie buried his face in his hands.
Alexei looked at her appraisingly, head cocked to the side.
Nikita sighed, and finally nodded. “Carry a gun.”
She felt her smile widen. “I’m never not carrying a gun.”