19
Buffalo, New York
It was a long driveway. A trio of black mailboxes, hand-painted with the Baskin name, marked the head of it; two well-worn grooves in the heat-burned summer grass led down a slight incline, across a wide expanse of empty field, and then began climbing again toward the compound. That’s what her dad always called the place: the compound. With three main houses, half a dozen smaller domiciles that housed her cousins who wouldn’t fly the coop, two workshops, and three warehouses, it certainly looked and felt like the sort of place someone would call a compound.
Nikita slowed the Barracuda as they started to climb the long, gradual hill that would take them to the main house, his gaze darting between the windshield and the windows to either side. He made a snorting, choking sort of sound when they passed the first warehouse: a massive steel building painted classic barn red.
“You didn’t tell me your family’s a bunch of farmers,” he muttered, and she couldn’t decide if he sounded disgusted…or uncertain.
“Furniture makers,” she corrected, filled with a strange mix of emotions herself. Turning into the driveway, going over those first ruts where rainwater had carved the gravel away from the shoulder of the road, had always tugged at the knot she seemed to carry with her when she was away from home. Whether it was the drama of high school, or the stress of community college, or the rigors of the academy, patrol, and finally her detective work, the world outside these fifty acres fed tension into her body. A transfer so gradual she never noticed it until she started down the old familiar tire tracks in the grass of the front field and realized she could breathe again, her chest loose and her heart light.
She felt that now, the relief so sudden and strong it was almost dizzying – that’s how crazy things had been. But she knew trepidation, too. Her dad had met Lanny, but no one else had. And it wasn’t just her lover – her immortal lover – she was bringing to meet her entire family. She had no idea which would be stranger to everyone: the return of the prodigal great-grandpa, or the presence of the former heir to the Russian empire.
It was a toss-up.
“How much farther’s the house?” Nikita grumbled.
She checked the rearview mirror and saw Lanny and his Expedition keeping pace behind them. “One of the houses, you mean. And not much farther. Up past those trees.”
“One? Jesus…”
The driveway curved through a copse of ancient, towering oaks, their wide trunks limned in the dazzling, dew-drenched gold of first light. They’d stopped and waited, on the way up, choking down burgers at an all-night diner; Lanny and Nikita smoking cigarettes in the parking lot as the breeze from passing eighteen-wheelers tried to blow out their matches. Exhausted, dreaming of her bed in her old room, and her mother’s strong embrace, Trina had wanted to drive straight through. But she’d realized, considering the company she was bringing, that turning up at four in the morning, in the bewildering dark, wasn’t the best idea. And it turned out that she’d needed to see the place in the sunrise light, smiling as they cleared the last of the trees and the main house came into view.
It was low and sprawling, built by hand by her grandfather and his half-brother when they’d first come to America, an unremarkable brown board and batten siding with a gently sloped roof. There’d been no blueprint, and the inside was gloriously confusing and unconventional, rooms leading into other rooms, going on into seeming forever.
Her grandparents’ new place looked down on it from the hill above, and off to the right, her uncle had built a midcentury stone ranch whose windows caught the orange fire of the rising sun. Beyond lay the other outbuildings, the cottages, the rest of the warehouses and the workshops, all of it threaded down narrow tracks that wended through trees older than her entire family lineage; but those three houses were the heart of the place.
Trina let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Home sweet home,” she murmured. When she glanced over at Nikita, his mouth was set, his knuckles white on the wheel. “Don’t forget we’re Russian. This isn’t even gonna be close to the weirdest thing they’ve ever heard.”
He looked like he tried to smile, the expression pained.
They parked both cars in the gravel in front of the house, beside her dad’s truck, and Trina registered surprise and nervousness on everyone’s faces.
“Dude. Farmer Baskin,” Lanny muttered.
“Not a farmer,” she said. “Also, why do you guys sound like that’s a bad thing?”
Jamie chafed at his arms as if he was cold, jaw trembling slightly. “You told them we were coming, right?”
“I did,” she hedged. She’d texted her mom about an hour ago that she was coming and bringing friends – she’d just failed to mention who said friends were.
He nodded, looking unconvinced.
Alexei was the only one who seemed unbothered. He surveyed the land around them with a small, pleased smile. “I like it. Reminds me of holidaying in Poland.”
“Glad the tsar approves,” she said, only half-joking. “Okay, so–”
She heard the front door of the house open behind her, and her mother called, “Trina?”
She turned around with a smile ready, heart pounding. “Hi, Mom.”
It was clearly a workshop day, her mother dressed in an old, patched pair of her husband’s overalls, the ankles cuffed, the front pocket holding a pair of yellow leather work gloves. Her hair was pulled back, little auburn wisps framing her face. Trina hadn’t inherited her eyes – warm brown, expressive and nothing like the cold, calculating Baskin blue. Eyes that moved across their little group with open curiosity. “When you said ‘friends,’” she started, “I didn’t think – oh, hi, Lanny.”
“Hi, Mrs. B.”
“…that you meant…” And then her gaze found Nikita. And widened, mouth opening a fraction in shock.
Trina knew exactly what she was thinking of. In the Russian tradition, there was a short stretch of hallway in the house, between the den and the kitchen, that was completely dominated by family photos: a variety of posed school portraits and candid shots. In the very center was a blown-up black and white snapshot of her grandfather, Kolya, and his wife, their arms around one another, standing on the building site of the house, before they’d even broken ground. In that photo, her grandfather looked Hollywood handsome: lean and broad-shouldered, with a narrow, sharp-edged face, and light eyes; his smile just a little wicked. In that photo, Kolya Baskin was the spitting image of his father: Nikita.
“Mom,” Trina said, holding up a hand. “Please don’t freak out.”
Her mother brought a hand up to her throat…but only swallowed a few times, nodding, eyes pinned to Nikita who stood frozen like a deer about to bolt. Finally, she nodded. Blew out a deep breath. “Okay. So. I guess the stories were true.”
“What?” Trina said, and felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “What stories?”
Her mother’s eyes flicked to her briefly, then back. “Your grandpa knows them better than me, obviously. But.” She took a deep breath and managed a shaky smile. “Hi, Nikita.”
Nikita swallowed, throat bobbing, but said nothing.
“Do vampires eat breakfast? ‘Cause we’re making a literal ton of food.”
“I dunno about him, but this one does,” Lanny said, and smiled wide enough to show his fangs.
Mom blinked at him, then sighed, expression becoming resigned. “Young lady.” Her gaze came back to Trina. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”
~*~
He shouldn’t have come here. That thought pounded inside Nikita’s head like a heartbeat as he sat at a long, handmade plank table in Steve and Rachel Baskin’s kitchen, an awful, cold numbness overtaking him like frost creeping across a statue. After Sasha was taken, every conscious thought had been dedicated to worrying about the horrifying possibilities that lay there. Sasha wounded; Sasha held captive; Sasha tortured. Food tasted like ash; breath felt like the scrape of knives in his lungs; all he’d cared about was finding him, freeing him, getting him back and looking over him with his own eyes and hands to make sure he was whole. And then ripping the throats out of the bastards who’d taken him. He’d been compromised by his worry, and that was why he’d let Trina talk them into coming here.
Which he now knew was a horrible mistake.
“So let me get this straight,” Steve Baskin said, turning away from the counter to set a heaping plate of bacon on the table in front of them. “You,” he said, speaking to his daughter, “managed to find your great-grandad, and Alexei Romanov, and get Lanny turned into a vampire all in one go. Right?”
Trina glared up at him. “And you knew he existed” – she gestured toward Nikita – “and just decided to never mention it?”
Steve propped his hands on his hips. “We didn’t know. Nobody did. It was just stories my grandmother used to tell.”
“Why didn’t I ever hear any of them?” Trina asked hotly. She vibrated with anger.
Her mother came to the table, a plate of bagels in her hand. “Well, honey, they weren’t nice stories. Monsters, and the war, and all that blood.” She made an elegant face of distaste. “They weren’t the sorts of things I wanted to tell my little girl.”
“Unbelievable,” Trina muttered.
“Lanny,” Steve said, brows knitting in concern. “How did this – are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah.” Lanny shrugged, and Nikita could tell his bravado was entirely fake – in the part of his brain that was managing to catalogue all of this and read emotions. “I’m cool. I mean, I wasn’t. This guy” – he jerked a thumb at Alexei beside him – “didn’t even ask, or anything. I was pissed. But. Yeah, so I had cancer…? Was kinda dying. I guess it all worked out.” He shrugged again, inelegant caveman that he was.
Steve opened and closed his mouth a few times, traded a helpless look with his wife. “Alright…”
In the awkward pause that followed, Nikita’s brain latched onto one small, important detail. The only thing capable of breaking through his fog.
“Wait,” he said, voice coming out rusty, and all eyes turned toward him. It was the first word he’d spoken since they arrived. “You said…your grandmother.”
Steve turned to him, expression full of so much unselfish, freely given sympathy that Nikita had to turn his head away, pulse flaring hot in his throat, stomach churning. “Yeah,” Steve – his grandson – said quietly. “Katya.”
Nikita stared at a knothole in the wood of the table and forced his lungs to work. Inhale. Exhale. “Is she…?” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“No, I’m sorry.” The room had gone silent, no sound save the gentle tone of Steve’s voice. “She passed last year.”
Last year. And all the time up until then she’d been here, in Buffalo, a car trip away. If Trina had found him a year ago, if he’d thought to look…
He couldn’t breathe.
“Nik,” Trina said, sad and soft, but he was already moving, shoving up from the table and stalking back through the house to the door.
Last year. Another chance to torture him.
~*~
“I should have told him,” Trina said, a blanketing guilt replacing her anger. She took a deep breath that did nothing to ease the tightness in her chest. “Things have been so crazy, and it hasn’t come up. I just.” She shook her head. It was just blow after blow for Nikita. He’d survived a lot – survived horrors – but everyone had a breaking point. Even ex-Chekist vampires. She wondered if they were nearing the edges of his.
“I’ll go check on him,” Jamie offered, rising.
He wouldn’t be much comfort, but Trina let him go, knowing she had to stay here and keep hashing things out with her parents.
Both of whom studied her with unusual expressions. Part regret, part sympathy, part fear.
She felt very tired, suddenly. “Were you ever going to tell me?”
They sighed together.
“Not unless we had to,” Dad said. “We were betting on that being a really, really slim chance.”
“So none of this is a surprise to you?” She gestured to Lanny and Alexei beside her.
Her dad winced.
Her mother said, “Well, it’s a little bit of a surprise.”
“God, Mom…”
“You didn’t expect us to believe vampires, and werewolves, and all those existed, did you?”
“Ouch, Mrs. B,” Lanny said, deadpan. “That hurts.”
“You know what?” Trina held up a silencing hand. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry. So. Whatever. Just assume I’m going to be pissed about this for a while.” And she would.
“Sorry, bug,” Dad said, his smile genuinely apologetic. Then he seemed to realize something, gaze sweeping back and forth across the kitchen. “Hey. If Nik’s real…then where’s Sasha?”
Trina blew out a breath. “That’s actually why I dragged these guys up here.”
~*~
Sasha always said that Nikita liked to punish himself. He said it as sweetly and supportively as it could be said, but still. Nikita always denied it, because that wasn’t the sort of thing a person could own up to and continue to do. He was in denial – was it really punishing yourself if everything truly was your fault? He didn’t think so. He’d done terrible things in his unnaturally long life, for the Soviet Union and then for himself afterward, and he thought a little guilt was his due. Or a lot of guilt, in his case.
Sasha would have had something to say about this, the way he stood amid the sparkling dew and twittering birds of early morning, digging his nails into his palms until his hands bled, hating himself.
Warring with himself.
When he’d awakened propped against a tree on a snowy November morning in 1942, and Sasha told him what he was now, had seen the way Katya recoiled from him, he’d known that any future he’d envisioned for the two of them was gone. The possibility starved out the moment Rasputin’s heart crossed his lips. He wasn’t a man anymore, but a beast. A thing. A creature with insatiable cravings and too much strength in his hands. One who would, inevitably, kill the woman he loved in a fit of lust, or rage, or thirst. The most important thing was to keep her safe, and he was the greatest danger of all. Clean cuts always healed the fastest, so he’d never allowed himself to search for her. When he started to imagine what it could have been like, he sliced the thoughts away, never letting them fester, never letting them haunt him.
(A few had festered anyway, digging deep, impossible to weed-out roots in his mind. Portraits of what could have been: staying with her, holding his child when it was born; sinking his fangs into a pillow in bed so he wouldn’t be tempted by Katya’s throat. She would grow old, and he would stay twenty-seven, smooth-skinned and unchanging. Would he turn her? Would he sentence her to the cold, terrifying depths of forever out of the selfish need to keep her with him?)
But now. Now that she was gone. Last year. He faced the truth: he hadn’t cut anything away, had only stowed it in a locker somewhere deep, and now the lock was busted, and all of it was spilling out, slick and dangerous as oil. He could have seen her again, but he’d never looked. Had she ever missed him? Had she grieved for him? Or was she glad he never showed his face again?
None of those questions mattered, because she was gone now. Just like Sasha was gone.
Christ, Sasha…
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind him, a slow approach, and there came a quiet clearing of a throat. Jamie.
Nikita stood with one hand braced on the trunk of a dogwood tree, staring unseeing at the dew-drenched field, clenching his teeth, shaking, choking, hating, aching. He would have turned around and roared at Jamie. Sent him running. But he didn’t have the strength to do so.
Sasha would have cupped a gentle hand around the back of his neck. Told him he needed to feed. Told him nothing was his fault, that he’d done his best.
But Sasha wasn’t here.
Behind him, Jamie took a breath, preparing to speak, and there was nothing he could say that Nikita wanted to hear.
But he said, “I was madly in love with my roommate.”
Nikita stilled, for just a moment.
Jamie sighed. “It was pretty pathetic. We met at school. Our first day. And she was just…” He exhaled in a way that spoke more eloquently than words could. “And I was the nothing-special friend. And her boyfriend was…well, he’s a lot like Lanny, actually.” His voice grew sour. “He doesn’t have an artistic bone in his body. Or, if he did, it got crowded out a long time ago by protein powder and muscles.”
It wasn’t funny, but Nikita snorted. “Pathetic.”
“I know.” Jamie moved up to stand beside him, on the other side of the narrow tree trunk. “The sad part is, now I’m strong, and I can breathe, and I don’t need glasses…and she thinks I’m dead, or that I’m a zombie she ran into in our favorite coffeeshop and…well.” Another sigh. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Nikita glanced over at him, suspicious…but found no trace of manipulation in Jamie’s features. Only wistfulness; the pain of a lost chance.
You don’t know anything, Nikita thought, and almost told him. A schoolboy crush was nothing like his own loss. If Jamie Anderson thought he’d been through something terrible, immortality wasn’t going to serve him well.
But he was too tired to voice those things.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie said after a long spell of quiet. “I know that doesn’t mean anything, coming from me, but I am.”
Nikita nodded, swallowed with trouble. “Thanks.”
Footsteps again. Loud and graceless, human.
“Hey, Nik.”
Nikita turned and found Steve Baskin standing behind him, within arm’s reach, close enough to kill him. If he’d wanted to. So he wasn’t afraid, then. Maybe he shouldn’t have been – what child feared his own grandparent?
“Nik,” Nikita said. “That’s awfully familiar.”
Steve had his eyes, just like Trina did. His smile was half-hopeful, half-rueful. “Sorry. I just feel like I already know you.”
“You don’t.”
Jamie looked between them, and then silently walked back to the house.
“If it helps,” Steve started.
“It probably won’t.”
“She had a good life. Lots of family. Nice place to live.” He looked so…so sad, and understanding. Nikita wanted to vomit. “She always missed you – she kept your memory alive – but I think she was content. Happy, even. She loved her kids, and–”
“Kids?” His breathing hitched.
Steve, if possible, grew even more sorry-looking, eyebrows crimping, frown one of consolation. “Yes. She had three – including my dad.”
Nikita tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. “She found someone else, then.”
“Nik – Nikita…she married Pyotr.”
Blankness.
For one blessed second, he thought nothing about that.
Then it was, Huh, well, okay.
Then, That makes sense.
Then it was…painful.
He dragged in a breath and pushed something like a smile across his lips. “Well. Good for little Pyotr.”
“I’m sorry–”
“I got his brother killed, you know. Did they tell you that? My best friend since childhood, Dmitri, and my lack of leadership got him stabbed to death by a fucking farmer in some fucking backwater village. I took Dima from him, so I guess it’s only fair he took my woman.”
Steve’s features settled into something harder, angrier. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Don’t tell me what it was like,” Nikita snapped. “I’m glad they had each other. They deserved every happiness, both of them.”
Steve took a breath. “I know it stings, though.”
“You don’t know anything. They should have never mentioned my name. I should have been the monster story that woke the children up with nightmares in the middle of the night. How dare they tell you who I was. What I was.”
The morning spun around him and he made himself take another breath, clutching at the bark of the dogwood tree for balance.
Steve gave him a flat look that Nikita had seen countless times in the mirror. “You need to get over yourself.”
“I–”
“Every family has its dark secret. Ours is you. And Sasha.” He looked sorry again. “Trina said they took him. Those Institute people.”
Nikita slashed a hand through the air, trying to silence him. He just…couldn’t anymore.
But Steve was a Baskin, after all, and he was good at pushing. “Grams would be glad that you two stayed together all this time. It’s good that you have someone.”
“Shut up!” Nikita roared – really roared, the snarling big cat sound punching out of his lungs, echoing off the front of the house. He kept growling, low and constant, the taste of blood filling his mouth as his fangs nicked his tongue. “I don’t have him,” he said viciously, “I lost him, and it should have been me. Why didn’t they take me instead? Why is it never me?”
Steve stared at him, gaze assessing, terrifyingly penetrating. “But it was you,” he said, softly. “Once. Sasha had your back then. And you have his now. Right?”
Nikita swallowed his growl and wiped a hand down his face.
“Trina says you guys need to have a séance,” Steve continued. “So let’s walk up to the other house and see if Mom’s got enough candles. Yeah?”
Slowly, Nikita lowered his hand, marveling. He’d just yelled at this man. Was his century-old grandfather, back from the dead, or from legend, or wherever. And Steve was inviting him in, accepting him, like…
Like he was family.
Nikita swallowed. “Your father…”
Steve smiled. “Kolya.”
Oh. Oh, didn’t that hurt.
“I think he’d really like to meet you, if you’re up for it.”
He didn’t think he was; would probably never be. But he nodded.
“Come on,” Steve said, gently, and he went.