9
I CAN HANDLE THE COLD
Their train pulled into the Yaroslavsky Station after eight p.m. Nikita wasn’t sure he’d ever been so glad to see the lights of Moscow. In the dark, he couldn’t see the anti-tank trenches, the chewed-up mud that had been assaulted by German panzers…and then had frozen in stiff peaks. The capital was encircled by signs of battle, a ring of devastation that went on and on out of sight.
But in the dark, all he could see were the lights of the city, amazingly untouched, victorious over the Wehrmacht. The train slid through the war wounds in the dark, and into the station.
Nikita stood up and shrugged into his coat, settled his hat on his head.
Sasha scrambled to do the same.
“This is the coldest winter on record here,” Nikita warned him. “Make sure you’re buttoned up.”
“I can handle the cold, sir.”
Damn it, Nikita was starting to like the kid. He could have blamed it on proximity – trapped in a train for thirty-six hours could make for strange bonds. But really, he knew that he found the boy’s peasant stubbornness charming. It was true what they said about Siberians possessing their own brand of snobbery: they weren’t used to answering to anyone besides their mothers and wives, and they chafed beneath the yoke of Moscow’s caste system.
At least Sasha did. He was scared, and he was deferential because of it, but during the length of the journey Nikita had watched him unwind bit by bit. There was still something of a cornered animal in his eyes, but he’d smiled a time or two. Had laughed, once, because it was impossible to keep a straight face around Ivan sometimes.
So he liked him. And he probably wasn’t going to live very long.
The brakes squealed and the train gave a quiet lurch as it slowed…slowed…stopped with one last hiss and shriek.
Sasha’s eyes darted toward the window, wild and white-rimmed.
“Welcome to the capital,” Nikita said, voice colder than he’d intended. He was angry, he realized, because he didn’t like to like people. It made it difficult to do his job properly.
And what job is that? his mother’s voice asked in the back of his mind. The bell felt like a grenade in his pocket.
“Boss, you coming?” Feliks called from farther down the car.
“Yeah!” He put a hand on Sasha’s shoulder and steered the kid ahead of him. “Come on. Do you have everything?”
“Yeah.” He was distracted, craning to look out the windows as they walked down the aisle.
Nikita noticed with a moment of disquiet that the boy was a shade taller than him.
Not that he planned to come to blows with him.
He never planned that sort of thing.
God, he hated this assignment.
The station wasn’t as crowded as it would have once been, the disembarking passengers from the back of the train comprised of young, wet-behind-the-ears boys from Siberia come to bolster the front lines that had been cut down during the Battle. Sasha glanced toward them, fleetingly, and then his gaze traveled upward – and stayed there.
He stared up at the painted ceiling, craning his neck, strap of his satchel sliding down his arm. He struck Nikita as hopelessly backward, wrapped in fur and rough brown fabric, his face too-open, enthralled as he stared at the train station like it was the inside of the Kremlin.
To a trapper kid from Tomsk, it probably seemed like a palace.
“Ha!” Ivan laughed. “Look at him.”
Sasha blushed, but grinned, and kept looking. “It’s beautiful.” Wondrous. Exhilarated.
The others laughed.
Monsieur Philippe looked on with a smile that curdled Nikita’s insides.
He said, “Pick up your tongue and come on, pup.”
~*~
Sasha’s neighbor back home, Andrei, had been to Moscow before – it was where he’d learned his stories about the Cheka, which he’d then horrified all the children of Tomsk with – and had described it to Sasha. But no story could have prepared him for the spectacle of the capital.
“This is just the train station,” Nikita said, voice dry. But when Sasha darted a glance toward him, he saw the beginnings of a smile tucked into the corners of his mouth. “Wait until you see the Kremlin.”
“The Kremlin?” Sasha echoed, disbelieving, before the vaulted, painted ceiling drew his gaze again. It was unbelievable.
“I imagine the major general will want to see his new weapon,” Nikita said, now with distaste in his voice.
“I’m hungry,” Ivan announced.
Feliks said, “You’re always hungry.”
Sasha’s hunger was a dull murmur deep in the pit of his stomach. He’d been so exhausted from the constant swaying of the train, but now, standing on unsteady legs, the thrill of being somewhere new had given him an adrenaline boost. He felt wide-awake now. He wanted to explore.
“You should see Kazan Station,” Philippe said, appearing at his elbow. “It’s even more impressive.”
Sasha sent him a disbelieving look and he laughed.
“It’s true, I promise. Moscow is a beautiful city.” He made a face. “She’s a bit battered at the moment. But. Beautiful.” He laid a fatherly hand on Sasha’s arm. “Come, Sasha, and we’ll see about supper.”
Around them, disembarking passengers headed for the doors. Young men from Siberia in rough homespun and furs, as dazed and curious as Sasha felt. Soviet officials in heavy coats, faces set in unreadable masks, jowly and red-eyed from vodka. Cheka officers, the badges flashing on their chests, several of them cutting glances toward their small group. One in particular nodded, and Nikita nodded back.
A thought struck Sasha, suddenly. “Why were we alone on the train car?” he murmured, not intending anyone to hear.
But Philippe said, “Those officers were checking in with local GPU officials in the villages.” Collecting grain, and arresting those who tried to hide it under floorboards. “But Captain Baskin and his men were on a special assignment.”
“Me,” Sasha said, belly clenching.
“Quite right,” Philippe said, oblivious to his discomfort. “So we had special accommodations.”
“But…” He turned to face the old man. “Why?”
Philippe smiled at him, eyes dancing. “Because you’re going to save the country, Sasha.”
He gulped.
“Don’t worry. I’ll explain everything in due time.”
~*~
As a boy, Sasha had traveled by both horse and dog sled, in the winter, with his father to deliver pelts to some of Tomsk’s smaller satellite villages. By comparison, those primitive cottages made Tomsk seen like a metropolis, bustling with university students, eastbound travelers, miners, trappers, and craftsmen. Thanks to the permafrost layer, Tomsk hadn’t suffered the farming collectivization that had ravaged the more western, agricultural areas of Siberia, and so the city had remained somewhat prosperous under Soviet control.
So Sasha thought he knew what a big city looked like.
He was wrong.
Even in the dark, Moscow gave an impression of vastness: all clashing rooflines, twisting alleys, and the smell of too many people. Filthy snow, scurrying rats, crumbling stonework. The factory belched powdery smoke against the black sky, and crouched at its feet were a half-dozen wooden buildings with open, glassless windows, sounds of voices and crying babies coming from inside: barracks for the factory workers.
The building looked new: flat-faced white concrete lacking all the charm of the imperial-era buildings. Utilitarian and featureless, half of its windows lit up in checkerboard pattern all the way up its ten stories.
“We’re on eight,” Nikita said, leading them to the building’s main door. It boasted a fresh coat of black paint, glimmering faintly with condensed moisture in the glow of an overhead electric light. Sasha thought of the intricate detail on the front door of his home and found this one flat and foreboding by comparison. There was no decoration on this door, no love. No life.
Nikita let them into a dim concrete stairwell that smelled of dampness and garbage. Sasha’s breath caught in his throat. Nothing in Tomsk smelled like Moscow had so far. Nothing looked like it, either, the sheen of more condensation on the stair treads and walls, the crawling patches of mildew.
Nikita kicked aside a bundle of cloth that looked like a holey, discarded jacket and started up the stairs, unaware of the horror blooming inside of Sasha behind him.
Their footfalls rang loud, echoing off the concrete, and the walls seem to tighten fraction by fraction as they trooped up the stairs. Every other landing fed out into a long hallway lined with doors. Sasha heard the high, thin wails of several babies crying, and the rough shouts of grown men, the words muffled by the walls. Garbage and broken furniture was piled up outside apartment doors, and the smell seemed to intensify as they climbed.
On one landing, a family of five sat huddled in rags, their faces sooty and their knuckles scraped. They ate beans straight out of the can. The mother held a two or three-year-old child on her lap, and his eyes, enormous and blue, followed Sasha as he walked past, caught between averting his gaze and staring back.
He’d seen families camped out in reindeer-hide tents back home, wood smoke billowing through ventilation holes rigged carefully at the tops, but even that sort of life seemed preferable to camping in a concrete stairwell. More dignified, for sure.
“Better than the barracks,” Kolya muttered.
Sasha thought of the long wooden building he’d seen outside the steel factory and shivered.
Behind him, Monsieur Philippe began to huff and puff as the stairs switched back, and then back again, over and over.
“Not as young as I used to be,” he lamented, wheezing. “I wasn’t built for apartment living.”
“Where do you live, then, Dedushka?” Feliks asked.
Philippe made a breathless sound and didn’t answer.
Finally, they reached the eighth floor, another hallway like all the rest, smelling strongly of cramped humanity, the air cold enough to turn their breath to white plumes. Dim electric bulbs set at intervals down the ceiling cast their shadows in monstrous shapes, hump-backed and long-fingered, like something from a folk tale.
Nikita fished his keys from his pocket with a jingle and let them into the third door on the left. There was a quiet click and the room filled with light.
It was small, that was the first impression. And sparse. A narrow living room fed through a propped-open doorway into a narrow kitchen with one window, greasy panes smearing a haze of light from outside across lino floors and metal-faced cabinets. Two stacked mattresses on the floor behind the sofa clearly served as someone’s bed, heaped with blankets and crumpled pillows.
Sasha spotted a radio, an oddly dainty table, a few solid wooden chairs. The sofa boasted a folded stack of blankets at one end, like someone slept there also. A hallway turned a corner, leading to what must be bedrooms and a bathroom.
Someone closed the door behind him, and for a moment he knew claustrophobia, trapped in such a small space with six men who were essentially strangers…and essentially the enemy. He hadn’t been brought up a proper White, but his parents weren’t Bolsheviks, and neither was he. He…he…
A hand landed on his shoulder, solid and grounding. “Home sweet home,” Ivan said, cheerfully, and the sudden surge of anxiety eased.
Sasha took a deep breath and smelled the faint musk of dried sweat, a hint of melted snow, and the echo of tea. Human, lived-in smells.
And then he began to see the small signs of such things: the dog-eared paperback book on the table. The row of socks hung up on a line to dry over the radiator. The homely clutter of pots, and pans, and tea kettle and tin cups beside the kitchen sink. Dried mushrooms on a string above the stove. A row of polished, knee-high dress boots beside the door – city boots. The hooks for coats and scarves.
“Do you all live here?” he asked.
“Yes,” Kolya said. “Thankfully we don’t have families.”
When Sasha turned to glance at him, he found Pyotr’s gaze instead.
“Sixteen people live next door,” he explained, sadly.
Oh.
Oh.
“I’m hungry,” Ivan announced, stepping away, dropping onto the stacked mattresses with a relieved-sounding sigh.
“What else is new?” Kolya said, kicking his boots as he stepped past him. “It’s Feliks’s turn to cook.”
Feliks groaned.
“There’s bychki,” Nikita said. “Bread. Maybe some eggs left. And kielbasa.”
“Bychki,” Feliks said, reverently, and hurried to hang up his coat and hat and go into the kitchen.
Sasha shrugged out of his own outerwear when Kolya reached to take it from him, toeing off his boots as he watched his things go up on the wall hooks beside the other men’s.
Monsieur Philippe, he noticed, hung up his hat, but kept his fur coat pulled tightly around him as he walked deeper into the room. “What a lovely home,” he said, smiling, as always.
Ivan snorted. “Yeah. Lovely.”
“Pyotr, show our guests where they’ll sleep,” Nikita said.
“Right.”
Pyotr seemed even smaller and younger out of his coat, gangly like Sasha, but with narrower shoulders and smaller hands, a slight twist in his spine somewhere that caused him to hunch forward just a little as he walked. His clothes seemed too big for him, shirt baggy at the waist, the cuffs folded over. Hand-me-downs.
Little brother, the others had called him. He must be wearing his brother’s clothes.
“This way,” he said, motioning for Sasha and Philippe to follow him down the short hallway and through a door on the left into a bedroom. It was small, the walls painted a dirty white, two twin beds shoved into opposite corners. Between them, a night table topped with a brass lamp and an empty ashtray. Another book, its pages yellow and tattered.
“I sleep there,” Pyotr said, pointing to the bed on the left. “Kolya sleeps there. We make Ivan sleep out in the living room because he snores.” A soft smile touched his mouth, there and then gone again. “Feliks sleeps on the sofa. They let me have a real bed because of my back.” He twisted his hands together self-consciously. “But you can, um–”
“We won’t steal your bed, dear boy,” Philippe said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
Pyotr’s eyes widened. “But–”
“You can bunk with me,” Nikita said from the threshold, and they all turned to look at him. He stood half in shadow, his face concealed.
Pyotr swallowed audibly. “That’s…that’s Dima’s bed.”
“And now it’s yours. Get your things, bratishka.”
“Yes, sir.” Pyotr got to his knees and pulled a battered suitcase from beneath the bed. Grabbed the book off the nightstand and opened the drawer to pull out three more.
“So you’re the bookworm,” Philippe said. Every observation the old man made came out full of affection and approval. “How are you enjoying Anna Karenina?”
Pyotr blushed as he stood, balancing the books in an awkward, one-armed hold, shoulders pulled askew by the weight of the suitcase. “Very much.”
Philippe nodded. “I think it’s every Russian’s duty to read Tolstoy.” He turned to Sasha. “Perhaps he’ll let you borrow it, Sasha. A wonderful novel.” His eyes were bright and multi-faceted as tiny gemstones.
“It’s very good. I think you’d like it,” Pyotr told Sasha, then blushed again. Said, “Um, okay,” and left them room in an awkward, embarrassed shuffle.
Philippe sighed when he was gone. “I fear that one’s not hard enough for this war. Men like that don’t normally fare well in battle.”
“But you think I will? I’m not a soldier, Monsieur Philippe.”
He gave Sasha a level – for once unsmiling – look, and said, “Not yet, you mean.”
~*~
Supper was bychki on stale black bread, topped with a fried egg apiece. It was salty, and hearty, and hit Sasha’s belly like a rock – in a good way; he didn’t realize he was hungry until he took his first bite. Nikita and Kolya sat at the table, while the rest of them sat on the sofa or cross-legged on the floor. Pyotr was at Sasha’s elbow, on the floor, and Sasha could smell faint traces of the other boy’s sour sweat. He was nervous.
So was Sasha.
Feliks was telling a story about a woman named Natalia – “when you put your head between them, you could rest them on your shoulders, I swear” – that made Sasha’s face feel hot (Pyotr stared down at his half-empty plate, cheeks flaming), when Nikita interrupted.
“That’s enough,” he said, and Feliks’s voice cut off abruptly. “Our guests don’t want to hear about your exploits.”
Sasha hiked his shoulders up around his ears. He wasn’t about to admit to being a virgin.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Philippe assured. “We’re all men here. I’m no stranger to these kinds of stories.”
But the air had shifted in the room, grown heavy and fraught. Tension skated up Sasha’s arms, went rippling down his back, winding his spine up tighter and tighter as each silent second ticked by.
Nikita pushed his plate away and the scrape of it across the table was too loud. He turned his head slowly, gaze going to Monsieur Philippe, the slate gray of storm clouds. “I bet you know lots of stories, don’t you?”
Philippe lowered his cup slowly, expression calm. But careful. “I do know a good many stories, yes.”
“Some ghost stories, I think,” Nikita said.
“Yes.”
The entire apartment seemed to be holding its breath. There were no sounds save the soft scrape of metal against leather as a knife was drawn: Kolya.
“Monsieur Dyomin,” Philippe said, “I hardly think that’s necessary.”
“Why don’t you tell us a ghost story?” Nikita said. A muscle in his jaw twitched, the only outward display of agitation. “Maybe your own.”
A beat passed in which no one moved or breathed. And then Philippe smiled. “Is that what’s been bothering you, Captain? You’re afraid I’m a ghost?”
“I know you are.”
“Ah. Well. I’d be careful, if I were you, Captain Baskin. What’s a good and patriotic officer like yourself doing telling stories of the empire?”
“They aren’t stories!” Nikita sprang to his feet, his chair skidding backward across the floor. It happened so fast it took a moment for Sasha to realize he’d pulled a gun – and was aiming it at Philippe.
“You’re very upset,” Philippe observed mildly, unperturbed. His level gaze was somehow more frightening than the gun, the way he didn’t seem to care that he was about to be shot.
Nikita took a deep breath through his nostrils. Sweat had beaded at his temples, and a lock of hair, now-damp, fell across his forehead. His eyes were electric. But his hand didn’t move, the gun unwavering. “Convince me you aren’t the Monsieur Philippe the Black Crows brought to Nicky and Alix.”
Kolya groaned quietly. “Nik…”
Ivan stood up, his towering height bringing his head almost to the ceiling, and moved toward the old man as if he meant to hold him down and force answers from him if he wouldn’t explain himself.
But he did explain. Philippe sighed and said, “I’d hoped not to have this conversation so soon.”
“Too bad,” Nikita said.
“These confessions are dangerous.”
“So am I.”
“I have no doubt,” Philippe said with another sigh, this one weary. He studied his hands a moment, and when he lifted his head, Sasha felt a sensation like a finger running down the knobs of his spine, a physical touch of excitement and dread.
What’s happening? he thought. He glanced at Pyotr and got a skittish shrug in return.
“Yes, I am that Monsieur Philippe,” he began. “But I’m not a ghost – I’m very much alive. My death was a rumor that dear Militsa helped me spread because it was better if I disappeared for a while.”
Still holding the gun, Nikita said, “Keep talking.”
And Philippe did.
~*~
It was half-fable, half-anti-Bolshevik dream. And apparently it was true. It went like this:
Philippe Nazier-Vachot was introduced to the last tsar and tsarina of Russia by the royal couple’s close friends, the Montenegrin sisters Militsa and Stana: the Black Crows.
“What beautiful, good-hearted young people they were,” he said, smile turning faraway and dreamy. He didn’t look at the gun as he spoke, instead passed his gaze around the group, meeting each man’s eyes, a storyteller with a talent for drawing in his audience. The radiator hummed and Sasha imagined its heat was that of a bonfire, that they were victorious hunters settled in for the night, on seats of felled logs, their dogs sleeping and licking at reindeer bones at their feet. “Brave, ambitious Nicholas. And dear sweet Alix, so fragile, but so gracious. I could never repay the sisters for introducing me to them. It was a gift to know them.”
Nikita snorted.
For the first time, Philippe’s voice took on an edge of anger. “Did you ever meet them? Or were you a child who heard stories of them at your mother’s teat?”
“Keep going.”
“Fine. I loved the Romanovs. That was never a secret. I thought of them as my own family. I wanted to help them in any way I could.” He drained the last of his tea and leaned down to set the cup on the floor. “Let me explain.
“The problem with leadership is that not all men wear it the same way. On some it’s too tight, on others too loose. Nicky wore it cautiously. He was young, and not ready to lose his father. Because he was nervous he tried harder than most – but there was always doubt in the back of his mind. He always questioned himself. Not openly; a tsar can’t be seen doubting.
“He needed an heir, and he needed a trusted advisor who could help him with matters of state. Militsa knew of my experience, and introduced us.”
“Experience?” Kolya asked, skeptically.
“With psychic fluids and astral forces. Communicating with the dead through séance and meditation. Predictions, foresight – that sort of thing.”
Ivan coughed a single, hard laugh.
“Do you doubt me?” Philippe asked. “I can also do this.” He lifted a hand, palm held out flat – and a flame leapt to life from its center.
“Holy Jesus,” Ivan breathed.
Feliks fell off the sofa.
Pyotr crossed himself, murmuring prayers under his breath.
Nikita said, “How are you doing that?”
The flame was discreet, a twisting tongue of orange-and-yellow that danced in the air above Philippe’s hand. Sasha couldn’t look away – and he couldn’t see any oil, or a spark, a match, a flint. Nothing. Just skin…and fire.
He tapped at his temple, his grin sly. “I wanted the fire to exist, and I made it so.”
“Ivan,” Nikita said.
The big man closed the distance to the couch and swiped at the flame with one of his giant paw hands. “Shit!” he hissed, and snatched back. “It’s real!”
“Of course it’s real,” Philippe said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell your captain.”
Nikita said, “Your magic is what got the tsar killed.”
“No. The Bolsheviks killed him. The same Bolsheviks you pretend to serve until your moment for revenge comes.” He tipped his head to the side, imploring. “We want the same things, Captain Baskin. I promise you that. It’s time for the Whites to take their country back.”
“In the middle of the war?”
“While the iron is hot.” He closed his hand, and the flame disappeared with a quiet pop.
Slowly, with obvious reluctance, Nikita holstered his gun.
~*~
He rinsed out the teacups and filled them to the brim with vodka. Stuck three cigarettes in his mouth and lit them all at once. Sat down at the table beneath the glare of its overhead bare bulb and passed the drinks and smokes to Kolya and Monsieur Philippe, taking a hard drag and a sip of his own to bolster his nerves.
Outwardly – he’d caught a glimpse of his reflection in the fogged kitchen window pane – he looked the same, perhaps with a glint of wildness tucked into the corners of his eyes. But inwardly, he snapped and hissed like an unmoored electrical wire, shaking and tender just beneath his skin. His mother was too young to have been at Alexandra’s court during Philippe’s tenure with the royal family, but other ladies in waiting had seen the man and described him vividly. Armed with her description, and now having seen the fire trick with his own two eyes, Nikita had no doubt that the man sitting across from him was indeed the Monsieur Philippe of Tsar Nicholas’s doomed Asiatic dreams. The conjurer they’d called “Our Friend” – before they gave the title to a holy man from Siberia.
Feliks and Ivan had taken the boys to one of the bedrooms; Nikita could hear Pyotr reading aloud from one of his books, voice tight with nerves, but clear and sweet as ever. He kept his own voice low when he spoke, more from shame at its roughness than any real desire for privacy.
“My mother gave me this,” he said, pulling the bell from his pocket and setting it on the table. It gleamed faintly beneath the light.
Philippe smiled sadly at it, but made no move to touch it – a restraint that left Nikita relieved. He knew his attachment to the thing was a type of obsession, but it couldn’t be helped at this point.
“I remember the day I gave it to Alix,” Philippe said, his smile flickering, wanting to become a grimace. “Nicky didn’t want to dismiss me, but he had to. After the pregnancy–”
“There was no pregnancy,” Kolya said, a simple statement of fact. “The doctor said there wasn’t a child.”
“Ah, yes, but there was. A boy child. I felt it.”
“How?” Kolya pressed.
Philippe turned an amused look to him. “I can conjure fire from thin air, and you want to know how? I know these things. Just as I know you are the oldest son of seven, Kolya Ivanovich Dyomin, and that your youngest sister has bad lungs, that the money you make from the state you use to buy the medicine she needs from a doctor who meets you out behind the hospital on his smoke break.”
Kolya’s face went carefully blank, lips pressed to a thin, white line. He flicked a glance to Nikita, and through the stoic mask of disinterest, Nikita could read his friend’s sudden fear.
Philippe turned to Nikita, next, and he clenched his hand tight around his mug, knowing what would come. “Just like I know what happened at that last village, when you were looking for artifacts, when your friend Dmitri–”
“That’s enough,” Nikita said, throat tight. “We get it. You have…”
“Abilities?”
“Magiya.”
“Yes, that.” The old man took a thoughtful puff on his cigarette. He looked so ordinary: old, and soft, and tired. Completely unremarkable. But he’d made fire. “Your mother was at Alix’s court?”
“You already know that, don’t you?”
Philippe smiled sadly again. “I would like to hear you tell it, Captain. I can know things, yes, but hearing it from a man’s mouth helps me understand it better.”
Nikita sucked down his cigarette all in one go, stubbed it on the tabletop and lit another, pausing to gulp vodka in the breath between. His throat burned, and that was better than the closing-up sensation.
“Yes, she was one of her ladies. Only a girl herself. She was terrified at the end. One of the palace guards – Viktor – helped her escape the night the family fled. He had false documents for her. She changed her name, married a peasant, and disappeared.” He wished he’d brought the bottle with him, hand closing around his empty cup. Kolya saw and got up to fetch it. “It was stupid of her to raise me White. Always a risk. Who can trust a child to hold his tongue?”
“But you did,” Philippe said.
“I did.” Kolya topped up his mug and he nodded his thanks, took a grateful sip. “She knew it was wrong, but she took the bell from the tsarina. She wanted me to have it. To remember what the magic men had done to ruin the Romanovs.” She’d raised him, ironically enough, to believe fiercely in the occult…and to hate it with every fiber of his being. She could have told him it was all silly parlor tricks – but she hadn’t.
Philippe didn’t appear to take insult. “You’re referring of course to Rasputin.”
“Both of you.”
“I’m afraid we’re not the same sort of animal. I am a mage, yes. But Grigory Yefemyvich was a holy man. A stannik.”
“Whatever you are, you made them look foolish.”
“Dear boy, we didn’t make anyone do anything. People fear the things they cannot understand. They didn’t understand me, and they certainly didn’t understand Rasputin. They didn’t even understand what Nicholas was trying to accomplish.”
“Which was?” Kolya said.
“Expand the empire all the way to the east. Russia could have been so much more. It could have been everything.” He sighed and tapped ash from his cigarette. “But that’s over now.”
Nikita swirled the contents of his mug. Vodka always had a way of making him light-headed right away, but the more he drank the more settled he became. It always felt like his soul was tethered just outside his skin, hovering at the very limit of his body. Drinking pulled him back in, grounded him deep in the heavy bones of his shoulders and hips, caged him up like he ought to be.
He took three long swallows and reached for the bottle again. Kolya watched him with that assessing, fatherly gaze he’d adopted since Dima’s death. Did he eat enough? Is this too much? How very un-Russian of him.
“Let’s say I believe you,” he said.
Philippe chuckled. “I know you do.”
“Yeah. Let’s say that. What are you trying to do here? What do you want with the boy?”
For the first time, the old man’s calm confidence wavered, something uncertain shining through. “In 1901, I conducted many séances with the tsar and tsarina. During most of them, I admit, I didn’t even try to contact anyone. I read Nicholas’s intentions and served as a mirror, if you will, reflecting back to him the things he was afraid to pursue without some encouragement.” He took a drag and the smoke left his lips in an uneven stream, stuttering as his breath hitched. “But there was one time. Only a few years ago…I made contact with another…entity. A powerful one. I was searching for someone to…someone like Sasha.”
The avoidance turned Nikita’s stomach sour.
“I asked for help from this entity, and it gave me a name. Aleksander Kashnikov. It took a long time to find him.”
“Probably because he was just a kid,” Kolya said, but there was an edge of something worried and frightened beneath his caustic tone.
Philippe ignored him and turned to Nikita, presenting him with his whole face, his earnest, searching eyes. “Captain Baskin, what are you prepared to do in order to reinstate the empire?”
It was probably the vodka – he was on his fourth mug, now – that made Nikita admit, “Anything.”
Philippe nodded, approving. “Then you need me. And I need this boy Sasha. And we are going to raise the dead, you and I.”
A shiver crawled down his back, shook through his arms and legs, filled up his empty, hungry heart with something wild and hopeful and crazy. Again, it was probably just the vodka.
“There’s only seven of us,” he reminded.
“Yes,” Philippe said, grinning now. “But there’s also magic.”
~*~
Sasha had only ever slept on a fur pallet in the woods on hunts. And in his own bed. And in between his parents, when he was little, when he had nightmares about clawed, fanged things crawling from under the bed.
Pyotr’s bed smelled like Pyotr, sweet and faintly stale with old sweat, the musk of skin when he turned over restlessly and pressed his face into a cool spot on the pillow. The radiator chugged with a manufactured heat that was nothing like the fires of home, and he was too hot, kicking the covers down and down again by increments.
Monsieur Philippe snored in the other bed, dead to the world, sleeping in a corpse pose with his hands folded over his breast.
Through the wall, Ivan’s snoring sounded like a bear snarling.
There was another sound, though, something soft and unobtrusive, but noticeable. Not something mindless, like a dripping faucet or the ping of the radiator. No, something alive.
Without realizing why, Sasha slipped out of bed and padded barefoot out into the hall, still in his heavy wool pants and nubby sweater.
Light from outside, ambient city light, still spilled through the window, fuzzy, grease-fire orange. Just bright enough for him to make out Ivan on his stacked mattresses, and Feliks on the sofa, a blanket draped over him, one arm flung up above his head. Both of them looked innocent as children in sleep.
The sound was coming from the kitchen. The window was open a crack, and Nikita stood with his elbows braced on the sill, staring through the smeared glass to the street below, smoking a cigarette with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hair falling limp on his forehead.
“You should be sleeping,” he said when Sasha passed through the threshold, without turning to look at him. “We have an early day tomorrow.”
Sasha edged a step closer. He didn’t know what to think of these men, but he wasn’t afraid anymore. “Are you really a White?” he asked, voice just a whisper.
Nikita exhaled a stream of smoke toward the gap between the window and the sill. “Do you think I’d admit to being one if I wasn’t?”
“No.”
He nodded. “I really am.” He twisted to glance at Sasha over his shoulder. “Planning to turn me in?”
“No.” And he wasn’t, but he tasted the sharp tang of panic on his tongue when he swallowed. “What’s going to happen now?”
“Something magic, Monsieur Philippe says.”
“Will it work?”
“I don’t know.” In a smaller voice: “I think we have to try, even if it doesn’t.”
Sasha nodded. He understood. Russia wasn’t Russia anymore. Its people lived in squalor…and fear. Despair.
“Go back to bed,” Nikita said, gently, like he was talking to a child.
“Okay.”
“Sasha,” he said, just as Sasha was about to leave the room. His eyes glittered in the dimness. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry it was you.”
~*~
Nikita smoked two hand-rolled cigarettes by the window, leaning low so he could feel the bitter cold of the night air against his face, hoping it would chase away the lingering haze of the vodka. But his brain felt like mud, too heavy for his head. All his thoughts were toxic.
Monsieur Philippe in the flesh. Unquestionable proof of magic. It was too much to think about this late – maybe at all.
He flicked the butt out the window and then closed it. Walked on silent feet back to his bedroom.
He paused a moment in the doorway when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone breathing. For a heartbeat, half-drunk and too exhausted to think properly, he was convinced the past few weeks had been a bad dream. That when he flopped down onto his bed, Dmitri would grumble from the other one: “Stop being so loud.” That the springs would squeak as he rolled over and put his back to Nikita, and that the morning would bring his cheerful best friend shaking him awake by the shoulders and announcing that he’d slipped out early before dawn and that they had (relatively) fresh fish for breakfast.
But it was just a heartbeat, and then Nikita saw the way the moonlight fell on the body in the far bed, the way it was too small and slender, curled up tight into a ball. Heard the way the breaths were too light and shallow.
It was Pyotr, and not his best friend.
Nikita folded his clothes up neatly and set them on the military-issue foot locker at the end of his bed. Crawled between the sheets and stretched out on his back, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling.
Sleep came slowly.
~*~
The thing was, they were the good guys. Good guys only pretending to be bad. And the good guys weren’t supposed to die until the end.
Every time he thought about the village, about what had happened to Dmitri, he questioned their goodness just a little more.
Monsieur Philippe was right: it was time.