26
A WARM BODY
Monsieur Philippe had known it as Petersburg, in his time as advisor to the royal couple. Nikita and the boys called it Petrograd, the more Slavic name that Tsar Nicholas had given it as the Revolution loomed, and the citizenry grew more resentful of its Western-seeming monarch. Its name now, in the year 1942, was Leningrad.
In Katya’s eyes, it was hell on earth.
Moscow had been bleak and soot-smudged, eerily empty of civilians, its streets ringing with the throb of tank and truck engines. But there had been a certain sense of accomplishment: the Germans had been beaten back. The capital was secure.
But in Leningrad, the blockade was still in effect. The Germans still bombed. According to their boat captain, a grim-faced man of forty, a citizen brave enough to risk the bombers, the citizens unable to evacuate the city had eaten first the zoo animals, then their pets…and then each other. The police had established a unit specifically dedicated to combatting cannibalism.
Katya shivered hard and ducked down into the collar of her coat. If it boiled down to only two choices, she’d take a bomb over being eaten by starving refugees any day. Jesus.
Nikita appeared beside her at the rail, a comforting hand settling at the small of her back, his gaze fixed on Leningrad across the wind-chopped waters of Lake Ladoga. The once-dazzling pinnacle of the empire loomed dark and jagged on the skyline, the vast Asiatic sky blurry with smoke.
She was so afraid her teeth were chattering.
“The captain says we have three hours,” Nikita said, speaking quietly despite the whine of the breeze across their ears. “He’s nervous as a cat. Philippe managed to magic him into taking us aboard” – before the mage had stepped in, the captain had been adamant that he wasn’t taking any “fat police” across, and especially not any with eight live wolves in their company; Philippe’s powers were the only reason they were aboard now; Katya thought the purse Nikita had tossed him might have had something to do with it too – “but we won’t be able to get him to stay. Three hours to dig up a body and get back to port, or else we’ll be stuck here.”
Stuck. With the starving masses, and cannibals, and air raids.
“We’re gonna go at a run,” he said.
“I’ll be ready.” She hitched the strap of her rifle a little higher up her shoulder.
The rest of the guys joined them. Ivan tall and imposing at her back. One of the wolves nudged his way forward and asked to be scratched behind the ears.
She wasn’t doing this alone, she reminded herself, and took immeasurable comfort in their proximity.
Nikita leaned in close to say, “When the war’s over, I’ll bring you back one summer to see the Nevsky Prospekt. Lunch and shopping and the best hotels.”
She shivered a little – not because she believed the fantasy, because the city was bombed to hell and would take years to regain its glory, but because he’d said “when the war’s over,” and that meant he expected them to be together still, then.
She closed her eyes and said a little prayer, as the scent of ash and dust drifted across the lake toward them.
The barge turned into the Neva River, and here the destruction became more visible: great craters in the earth where the Germans had tried to bomb supply ships and trucks. The smell of put-out fires intensified as they got closer to the city itself.
The trip up the river seemed to take forever, the tension onboard silent and stifling. And then, suddenly, there it was. Leningrad, a sad shadow of itself, the shoreline crouched defensively, unlit, unwelcoming.
She felt a hand close around hers, cool and rough: Nikita. He laced their fingers together and gave her one fast squeeze before he let go and unslung the carbine he carried. They were here.
The barge fetched up to the dock with the help of a handful of skinny men in patched clothes who waited on the dock, eyes sunk deep in their heads, gazes wary as they noted the Chekists who waited to depart.
Then they caught sight of the wolves.
“Shit!” one of them shouted, leaping back and dropping the rope he held.
One of his comrades cuffed him on the back of the head. “Tie up the boat, fucker! You want to starve?”
“Three hours,” the captain reminded Nikita, and his look suggested he hoped they didn’t come back.
“Right. We’ll be here.”
Katya imagined a stopwatch, the click as it started their countdown.
Three hours wasn’t a very long time to dig up a man.
Ivan got off first, and Katya let him lift her out and set her on the dock. He did the same for Philippe, guiding the old man with a hand at his elbow, and then the others jumped over, wolves included. The tie-up crew staggered back, exclaiming.
The bravest of them scowled and said, “You could’ve at least butchered them before you brought them over.”
“They’re not for eating,” Nikita said, his captain’s bite in his voice, hat tipped at a stern angle. “Get the fuck back or I’ll confiscate the gold teeth out of your head.”
The man grumbled, but complied, ducking his head and stepping aside. Everyone was afraid of the Cheka, even starving men.
Sasha and his wolves led the way, and they proceeded up the dock to the ruined city, Ivan and Feliks lugging an empty footlocker between them, everyone else with a gun cradled in their arms.
The worst of the bombing had taken place in the west of the city, where the Germans were trying to break up the Red Army lines, and along the lakeshore, where the trucks had driven across the frozen water in the middle of winter. But even the intact parts of the city, such as this, bore the marks of war. The boarded-up Bronze Horses – a desperate attempt to preserve art. The ash like smudged fingerprints on the gaily painted building facades. Ash in piles, drifts like dirty snow against the building foundations. They walked past ruined and stripped cars, nothing but empty shells. Looted storefronts, their glass broken out, and never replaced; inside a few tattered bits of furniture that hadn’t yet been used for firewood.
It was late afternoon, and overcast, a fog rolling in off the river. Katya glanced back over her shoulder after they’d gone a ways and couldn’t see the barge anymore; a cold shiver skated down her back, and she faced forward again, jogging to keep up.
Three hours. They were running.
At least until they hit the first police checkpoint.
For a city so large, it was unnervingly quiet. People were keeping indoors for safety. Drapes were drawn in all the upper windows, some covered with patchwork quilts, some with blackout curtains. None of the streetlamps were lit, and it was an eerie gray twilight they walked through, the wolves halting suddenly, growling low in their throats.
Sasha froze and flashed his teeth, tested the air with his nostrils.
A voice called out, “Who’s there?”
The wolves fanned out and disappeared into the gloom, circling, Katya knew. They weren’t as foolish as humans; they never walked abreast up to a threat, like their two-legged pack members were about to.
The fog swirled, and the beam from a shuttered lantern blasted through it, revealing three uniformed officers who recoiled visibly when they spotted the Chekists in their trademark black.
The one who’d spoken before, the leader of their little band, did an impressive job of gathering his composure, though his authoritative frown was wobbly. “If you’ve come raiding from the capital, there’s not shit for you to take,” he said with a snarl. “I suggest you go back the way you came.”
The other two glanced at Katya, her uniform, the hefty Mosin-Nagant in her hands, much more sinister than the others’ carbines.
Sasha slid in beside her, and the officers went goggle-eyed at the sight of his white wolf pelt, the snarling upper jaw with its teeth poised above his face.
“We’re not a raiding party,” Nikita said smoothly, producing their paperwork from inside his coat. “We’ve come to retrieve a particular artifact on Stalin’s direct order. We’ll be gone in three hours.”
The man stared at the papers a long moment before he took them. “What sort of artifact? Shit and rubble? That’s all we’ve got here.” Except for the art they’d hidden from the Nazis, which they were now no doubt fearful the Cheka might take, too.
Katya wanted to reassure them, but this mission was too dangerous and important, so she kept quiet, squirming inside.
Nikita was the picture of cold, unfeeling impatience. “You won’t miss it, I assure you. Some sentimental trinket for one of the generals; we’re just his errand boys and we don’t have time for this.” He gave a move aside gesture with one hand.
The officer’s frown deepened.
“But if you’d like, I can report back that you stood in our way.”
The man gave way with an angry sigh, knowing there was no way to refuse, but unhappy to have done so.
“Thank you,” Nikita said, tucking the papers away with a curt nod.
They started off down the street again.
“There’s cannibals,” the officer called after them. “You’d better watch yourselves.” Because no citizen or police officer would come to the aid of the Cheka.
The wolves melted out of the fog, joining their ranks once more, and Katya had never been so glad of their company. If there were cannibals, the wolves would scent them well before they appeared.
Still.
The army was present, T-34 tanks and troop transport trucks rumbling through the streets. But not the street where they walked, the echoes low and deep, coming up through the soles of their boots. But otherwise silent, the fog blanketing everything.
“You’ve been awful quiet,” Kolya said to Monsieur Philippe, a threat evident in his voice.
“Yeah,” Ivan grumbled. “You couldn’t do a little magic intervention back there?”
The old man was puffing a little, thanks to their quick pace. “I rather thought…it would be beneficial…to save my strength…as it were.”
“Well, unless your magic can dig a fucking hole–”
“Quiet,” Nikita said. “Listen.”
They all froze. Katya heard her pulse throbbing in her ears, loud as a kettle drum.
“What?” Pyotr said, voice wavering.
But there was nothing save the grinding of truck gears a few streets over, and the relentless cadence of her heart beating.
“Nothing,” Nikita said. “Keep moving.”
They walked in a tight bunch along one side of the street, up against the curb, but not so close to the broken-out first floor windows that someone could leap out and onto them. Their heads swiveled, scanning the desolate streets. Katya saw a few curtains twitch in upstairs windows; tattered bits of cloth on the street, an unwearable and abandoned shoe. She heard the others breathing through open mouths around her, quiet little anxious gasps. They were brave men, all of them, but there were so few of them, walking deeper and deeper into the maze of a ruined and desperate city.
She itched for a sniper’s nest, some high perch from which she could watch their progress and guard their backs, but she didn’t have the luxury. She’d chosen this band of rebels over the Red Army, and thus become a foot soldier in an even more impossible war.
The body the Bolsheviks had burned years before had not, Philippe had assured them, been Rasputin, but an unfortunate lookalike that Philippe’s ilk had planted on the (valid) fear that the corpse would be disturbed. The real Rasputin lay – sleeping, and not dead, according to the mage – in the grave whose stone proclaimed it belonged to a long-dead minor noble in a churchyard just off the Nevsky Prospekt. That was where the they headed now, Nikita consulting a map as they jogged.
They moved quickly, but the fog seemed to tighten. The evening came on quicker, and quicker, almost exponential. It seemed too good to be true that they didn’t encounter anyone, skirting around the army and keeping to the quiet streets.
The church loomed, old-fashioned, the top of its pointed stone façade sheared off, a pile of rubble blocking the entrance to the front door.
“Here we are,” Philippe said. “This is it.”
“You’re sure?” Nikita asked.
“Quite.”
The graveyard was crowded with stones and choked by weeds. Two ravens looked down at them from the gnarled branches of a tree that had just started to bud for spring, croaking at them, ruffling their wings and looking displeased by the interruption.
“Better fly off before someone eats you,” Feliks grumbled, flapping his arms at them.
They cawed and stayed put.
“Let me see, let me see…” Philippe kindled a small flame in his palm and held it up to gravestones like a candle, searching for the right decoy name.
Katya reminded herself that she was supposed to be on watch and put her back to the old man, pinning her gaze on the street beyond the wrought-iron graveyard fence, squinting against the haze of fog for signs of a threat.
A gentle huff of breath announced that one of the wolves had joined her, the strong beta male with the shaggy black fur. She spared him a scratch behind the ears and they watched together.
Behind her, she heard muttering and clanking as shovels were pulled from the footlocker and distributed.
“Aha!” Philippe said, triumphant. “This is the one. Here.”
Spades struck earth, and now it was a race to exhume the body.
No, not a body. Body implied the spirit had passed on. What they dug up now was a sleeper, very much alive.
Katya shivered and the wolf pressed against her leg, offering comfort.
Sasha stepped up beside her, face hidden beneath the cowl of his cloak in the half-light, more wolf than boy. His voice vibrated, a low undercurrent of a growl. “Something’s not right.”
Katya swallowed hard. “What do you hear?”
He shook his head a fraction. “I feel something. Something wrong.”
“It’s a war zone,” she pointed out, but couldn’t quite manage to sound critical. “Everything’s wrong.”
“Yes, but–”
A long, rising wail filled the air all around them. Loud enough to hurt her ears.
Air raid sirens.
All the wolves immediately threw their heads back and added their howls to the din. Sasha did too, head tipped back, a purely lupine sound coming out of his mouth. It wasn’t a man mimicking a wolf – it was all wolf, and nothing human about it.
Katya’s scalp prickled.
Was that the drone of German bombers?
“Move!” Nikita shouted, as forceful as she’d ever heard him. “Dig, damn it!”
“I can dig!” Sasha spun around, and when Katya glanced over her shoulder, she saw that he and his wolves had fallen on the grave, digging with paws and hands, flinging dirt and weeds. All save the beta who stood guard with her, his ruff erect, growling low and threatening.
She caught Nikita’s gaze across the distance, his frightened but determined. She nodded, and he nodded back, and then she turned back to her watch duty, the sirens blaring.
She thought she heard shouts, the distant scuffle of feet across pavement. Behind her, the digging sounded rabid, furious.
The siren screamed, and every part of her wanted to lie on the ground, curl up, cry. The Nazis were coming, the Nazis were coming…
“Hide, Katya, hide!” Her father’s voice, echoing through her memory.
Mama’s scream.
Her sister Sofia’s pleas.
Dead, all of them dead, all of…
The wolf at her side growled, and then lunged –
And then she was tackled to the ground.
She landed flat on her back and all the breath was knocked out of her. Her lungs clenched and she couldn’t take a breath, gasping for air as a man with a face like a skull drove his knees into her stomach and clawed at her throat with bony fingers.
In that first horrible moment of stunned paralysis, dizzy from lack of oxygen, she noted the way the man’s hair was lank and patchy; the open sores around his mouth from malnutrition; the wild, hungry gleam in his eyes.
He made a low, moaning, hissing sort of sound.
No longer a man at all anymore, but a creature that ate men’s flesh. A cannibal.
Her lungs open and she sucked in a huge, pained breath, and it gave her the strength to twist hard and buck the man off to the side.
He gave an outraged bellow, hand flashing for her throat again…and the beta wolf’s jaws clamped down on the join between his neck and shoulder. The bellow turned into a pained scream, just audible above the cry of the air raid siren, and then it was pandemonium.
The cannibals were a whole pack, at least a dozen, melting out of the fog, falling on their well-fed and healthy group like the starving animals they were. They swarmed over the fence, grabbing the iron rail with skeletal hands covered in sores. All their eyes had the same rabid, inhuman look in them. These were no longer beings that lived: if they survived the war, when the blockade was lifted…there was no going back to before for someone who’d eaten their neighbors. There just wasn’t.
That was what Katya told herself, rather than think about the fact that it was a Russian citizen – a compatriot – that she shot to save herself and her friends.
Her rifle cracked, and another gun echoed it: Nikita on the other side of the grave, a cannibal crumpling at his feet.
“Keep digging!” he shouted. Ivan and Feliks worked furiously, pitching shovels full of dirt over their shoulders.
Three hours. Or was it two now?
She snugged the butt of her rifle into her shoulder and took aim again. Fired. Crack.
Behind her: crack.
Click-clack to eject the cartridge. Another shot. Crack. Three more shots, and then she’d have to reload, or, since there wasn’t time, switch to her pistol instead. The knife at her hip felt terribly heavy, suddenly, weighty in its expectation of use.
“Jesus,” she whispered, lining up her next shot. It was so easy. She could hit a target across a field, and they were coming right at her, spilling over the fence, rifle rounds taking them at almost point blank range. “Oh, Jesus.”
Overhead a low flash, like lightning embedded in the clouds. And then the ground shook, and it wasn’t thunder all around them, but the rumble of a German bomb exploding a few streets over.
Katya had her finger on the trigger, ready to pull it, when Sasha leapt into her sightline. She gasped and let her hand go slack, heart hammering wildly. He ran at the cannibals with his head down, hands held out like claws, snarling like the devil, his cloak the vivid white of snow against the gray-on-gray landscape of the foggy street. He led his four-legged pack at the cannibals, and Katya turned away, not wanting to watch.
~*~
In his former life of university studies, and hunting with Papa, cozy evenings around the fire and laughing with his friends at the market, Sasha had never thought he would ever kill a man. Soft boys like him couldn’t have stomached it – that’s what he’d thought. But he was killing one now, and he was glad to do it.
A small part of him wondered if his aggression was a direct reaction to the threat to his pack – or if, somehow, under his sweet and smiling exterior, he’d always had the capacity for violence.
Now, though, this moment, these kills, were because of his pack. His pack versus theirs, and he was the alpha, and he would dirty his fangs and claws before he let his vulnerable humans bloody theirs. And the humans he fought weren’t much in the way of humans anymore. He could smell the abomination on their skin, taste it in their blood. They’d eaten the flesh of their own kind, and so he felt no remorse as he clawed open a throat, bit through a tendon.
His wolfpack surged around him, snarling, snapping, working together.
The man in Sasha’s arms died with a strangled, choking gasp, and he let him fall to the ground, limp like a broken toy.
The siren hurt his ears, and he cringed from it now, shrinking down into the hood of his cloak, fighting the urge to clap his bloody hands over his ears.
“Sasha,” a hesitant voice said behind him. Katya.
He turned and she was staring at him with large, frightened eyes.
“They’re dead,” she said. “Nik wants you to help dig.”
He nodded. Spat a glob of blood onto the ground. “Yeah. Okay.” He scanned the street one last time, but all was quiet save the siren.
~*~
He should have told her to go back to her post, that the siren was still wailing and more fucking cannibals could come streaming out of the twilight at any moment, but Nikita was grateful to feel Katya sidle up next to him, and so he didn’t. She trembled slightly; he could feel it where their arms touched. But when he asked if she was alright, she said “yes” right away. His brave sharp-shooter.
He wondered if the sight of Sasha – blood on his lips, running down his chin, his throat, staining his shirt, dripping from his fingers – had rattled her as badly as it had rattled him. He was going to see him like that in his nightmares from now on, he knew.
Now, with the awful din of the siren providing a soundtrack, with the distant thumps of artillery fire, Sasha had his wolves help with the digging. Dirt clung to the wet blood on Sasha’s hands as he dug with his fingers, pulling up chunks of earth faster than Ivan and Feliks could dig with shovels. It took a long time to dig a grave – whether to put something in it, or take something out of it – and Nikita didn’t know if they could have it done in time.
But with Sasha’s help…
“Almost there,” Philippe said on Nikita’s other side. The mage held a ball of flame in his linked, cupped hands, no brighter than a lantern. “Almost–”
The siren cut off, and in its absence, the silence buzzed and crackled. Or maybe that was just his eardrums. He realized now that they were all breathing through open mouths, panting, terrified, harsh echoes off the gravestones around them.
“- there,” Philippe said, smiling.
Ivan’s shovel thunked against something solid.
Sasha growled.
Nikita’s nerves were already drawn tight as a bowstring, but he felt them, impossibly, tighten another fraction. “What is it, Sashka?” He sounded afraid, and there was nothing to do for that. Sue him: he was.
Sasha growled again, lower, deeper. He reached up and pushed his hood back, the white of the wolf’s ruff giving way to his own platinum hair, bright against the mud all around him. If he’d had true hackles, they would have been standing on end, like the ruffs of all the four-legged wolves.
“It’s…” he started, and broke off to growl again. “The smell…”
“A vampire smell,” Philippe said. “It’s alright, you’ll grow accustomed to it.”
Sasha looked up at the old man, eyes glowing in his face, lips pulled back off his teeth so the sharp points of his canines showed. “It smells like old blood,” he snarled, face screwing up with disgust. “It smells rotten.”
Ivan, and Feliks, and Kolya, and Pyotr watched him, faces pale, expressions pinched.
“I don’t like this,” Ivan said.
“We must hurry!” Philippe said, emotion cracking through his façade, finally. Cannibals hadn’t fazed him, but the delay did.
Nikita ignored him. “Sasha, does he smell dead?” Because like hell was he putting a rotted, putrid corpse in a footlocker and toting it through the bombed out streets.
Sasha leaned down into the hole and inhaled deeply. He sneezed and made a face. “No. But he smells wrong.”
“We don’t have time for this!” Philippe burst out. “Open the coffin! Hurry!”
Ivan gave him an unimpressed look, and turned to Nikita. “Boss?”
Sasha was looking at him too, almost pleading. Rotten. Wrong. What the hell did that mean? He didn’t know, and his belly squirmed with nerves, but they didn’t have time for a debate now.
He nodded. “Open it up. We need to move.”
Sasha gave a snort of obvious distaste and stepped back.
Ivan and Feliks scraped off the last of the dirt, uncovering the edges of the coffin. Swept the loose bits of soil from the lid.
“It’s locked,” Feliks said, fingering a padlock crusted with dirt, rusted at the edges.
Sasha leaned down, took the lock in one hand, and ripped it off, bringing a chunk of rotting coffin lid with it.
“Okay then,” Feliks said.
Ivan used the blade of his shovel as a pry bar, put all his bulk and strength behind it. The lid stuck a moment, then gave with a splintering sound, flipping back.
Nikita braced himself for the stink of decomp, but it didn’t come. He didn’t smell anything, not even when he leaned over the grave and breathed deep. A little dust, a little musty wood. But no stink of death.
A human-shaped bundle swaddled in moth-eaten linen lay in the coffin, and somehow that was better than having to see the man’s face.
Sasha let out a rolling, barking snarl that startled Pyotr so bad he fell backward and landed hard in the dirt.
“Aleksander, that’s enough!” Philippe roared.
Silence.
Philippe lifted his head, expression superior. “We don’t have time. We have to leave, and leave now.”
Sasha stared at him a moment, not blinking, then stepped back from the grave, turning his back to them.
Nikita was very tempted to throw the old fucker down into the coffin.
Instead, he said, “Pyotr, help me get the footlocker.”
Feliks yelped, and Nikita swung his gun toward the shape in the coffin.
“What?”
Feliks’s face had gone from white to gray. He looked sick. His hand hovered over the body’s wrapped shoulder. “It…it’s warm.”
“He is,” Philippe corrected. “And yes, he is, because he’s alive.”
“God,” Ivan said, as he bent to take the figure’s bound feet in his hands. “Holy fucking shit.”
Not holy, Nikita thought. Not in the least.
~*~
It was dark out when they reached the dock, the barge’s lanterns burning through the fog, a welcome sign of escape.
The captain stared at them, goggle-eyed, when they set the footlocker down on the dock.
“Three hours,” Nikita said, grimly triumphant. “As promised. Now get us the fuck out of here.”
The captain looked at the locker. “What’s in there?”
“You don’t want to know.”
The man sighed. “Fair enough. Vanya! Turn us loose, we’re leaving.”
~*~
The fire looked warm and inviting, but Sasha wouldn’t go to it. He felt, with a determination that he knew wasn’t human, that his place was between his pack and the canvas-topped troop transport truck they’d procured, the one in which the footlocker containing Rasputin’s sleeping body rested. He sat on the ground behind the truck, watching his pack as they passed around tins of salted fish, and SPAM, and dried meat, hunks of hard cheese and stale bread. Content, for the moment, to serve as protector and pack alpha.
They hadn’t dared try to find an inn, or even a generous family willing to take them in. Not given how valuable their cargo was. No one could know what they carried, not until they were back in Stalingrad, safe and sound at the Institute, and Rasputin was awake again.
Sasha dreaded that moment with every fiber of his being.
He was still trying to classify what he’d felt when they’d opened the coffin. A surge of revulsion and fear so strong it had turned to anger. He’d wanted to lash out, to feel flesh tear under his fingers, to taste blood in his mouth. Violent impulses that shocked him. And, even worse, an overwhelming urge to duck his head and submit, grovel on his belly, one that felt unnatural and oppressive and just…just…
He felt too hot under his skin even now. Restless and furious and frightened and so, so confused. Which wasn’t any way for an alpha to feel.
His initial horror had dulled to something more manageable and blunt, but it wouldn’t go away. As he sat cross-legged in the dirt, he wanted both to take off running through the trees, and to open the footlocker, peel back the linen, and see Rasputin’s face.
The beast, some detached voice whispered in the back of his mind. Rasputin smelled like dust, and earth, and blood. Maybe all vampires smelled a little of blood the way mages smelled of ash and smoke. But this one smelled…evil. That was the only way he could describe the acrid tang of wrong and rotten and get away that made the hairs stand up on Sasha’s arms.
He was so consumed by his thoughts that he didn’t notice Pyotr approaching until he was almost on top of him.
“I thought you might be hungry,” he said, dropping down to sit beside Sasha. He offered over a hunk of bread that had been slit open, toasted over the fire, and stuffed with salty tinned sardines.
“Thank you.” His stomach was still cramping with nerves, but he made himself eat, choking it down one bite after the next.
He expected Pyotr to leave, but he stayed, dropping his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “What did you smell?”
Sasha, mouth full, sent him a questioning eyebrow lift.
“That got you upset. What was it?”
The memory of Monsieur Philippe’s shout – Aleksander, that’s enough! – sat jagged and painful in the center of his mind, and he flinched away from it, not wanting to answer Pyotr. It hadn’t just been impatience, or fear of bombs or more cannibals; Philippe had known what Sasha smelled, that it wasn’t right or natural. He’d turned Sasha so that he could be this vampire’s right hand – his servant, more or less – and Sasha had hated the smell of him. That sort of infighting would jeopardize the plan, and no one wanted that.
Sasha huffed a sigh and licked the grease off his fingers. “Nothing.”
“Sasha.” Pyotr wriggled closer across the pine needles of the forest floor, gaze intense, a little spooked, the fire a twisting curl of brightness in his eyes. “You can sense things we can’t. What did you smell?” It was a frightened plea, and Sasha wasn’t proof against it.
“I don’t really know,” he admitted, frustration bleeding into his voice. It was a relief to be able to tell someone. “When we got down to the coffin, I could smell that he was a vampire – that he wasn’t human, or wolf, or mage. I could tell – and I don’t even know how – that he drinks blood. But that…I don’t think that’s why it was so awful. There’s something else. Something that makes me feel…violent.”
Pyotr breathed a quiet laugh. “Yeah, we noticed.”
“I don’t know if all wolves feel that way about all vampires. I’ve never met one before.” He shrugged.
“Or maybe,” Pyotr said, hesitant. “Maybe it’s like when a dog decides he doesn’t like someone, but no one knows why. Maybe it’s that.”
“Maybe. What then?”
Pyotr shook his head. “I don’t know.”
But Sasha knew. He would have to swallow any violent impulses for the good of the cause. Of the country. Try to get past it.
It was an unpleasant train of thought, one that kept him twisting inside long after the others laid out their bedrolls and settled in to try and catch some sleep. It was a warm night, muggy, air thick with mosquitoes. Sasha offered to keep first watch and sat at the back of the truck, his wolves ranged around him, some sleeping, some keeping watch with him.
He smiled to himself when Nikita and Katya slipped off into the trees, probably thinking they were being stealthy. They didn’t go far, so he didn’t worry too much.
It was quiet, eerily so, no sounds save the buzzing of insects, so he thought later, in hindsight, that he should have expected some sort of disturbance. He just didn’t think it would be of the astral projection variety.
His alpha female growled once, and then Val stood before him, fair hair glowing faintly in the moonlight, catching on the sharp points of his teeth when he smiled. As usual, there was no scent whatsoever.
“Hello, Sasha.”
Sasha was proud of the fact that he didn’t startle. Outwardly. “Hello, Val.”
“Dug the old creep up, I see.”
Sasha snorted…and then straightened. “Did you ever meet him?” He had no idea if the vampire prince was friend or foe, but he undoubtedly knew more than Sasha did about the immortal starets.
“Who, me? No. You forget I’ve been locked up for ages. But I’ve seen and heard some things. None of them pleasant.”
“You didn’t ever visit him like you do me?”
Val made a dismissive sound in his throat. “I’m bored out of my mind, but I’m not insane. There’s no such thing as conversation with that one.” He tilted his head toward the truck. “Raving lunatic.”
This wasn’t helping with Sasha’s mounting worry. “Well that’s…not comforting.”
Val smiled again, wicked and charming all at once. “Yes, well, as I understand it, those who didn’t find him quite comforting found him terrifying.”
“Because he was a vampire?”
“Because he’s damn unsettling. Just look at his face.”
“I haven’t.” But his heart lurched thinking about it. That strange urge again: he had to lay eyes on the man. Vampire. Whatever he was.
“Ah, but you want to.” Val paced around him slowly, moonlight working to his advantage, revealing more and more of his smiling face. Sasha had the vague thought that he was showy, self-aware in a way that no one he’d ever encountered had been. “Understandable. The man’s become a part of Russian folklore. Is he the holy man? The political advisor? The depraved sex demon? The seducer of the tsarina? Maybe he’s all of those, and maybe he’s none.” He chuckled. “Who could resist a peek?”
“I hate him,” Sasha said, surprising himself.
Val nodded. “Sometimes it’s like that. Just because a mother wolf suckled Romulus and Remus willingly, out of love, doesn’t mean all wolves feel that way about all vampires. Though I’m sure our good Philippe has told you as much.”
“I…” Sasha bit his tongue. He shouldn’t be having this conversation; it was disloyal to the others, and he had no proof that anything Val said was worth listening to. But he was just so…frank about it all. So much more appealing in his explanations than Philippe’s there there, you’re just a boy approach.
Val smoothed his long, pale hair with a long, pale hand and settled on the ground beside Sasha. For a moment Sasha worried for his fine clothes, but then remembered that he wasn’t actually here in corporeal form.
“He doesn’t want you to look, does he?” he guessed. “Afraid you’ll accidently wake the bastard up?”
“Yes.”
“You understand that’s not something you can accidently do, right?”
“I…it’s not?”
Val sighed. “You have to cut yourself and offer some of your blood. There’s a whole invocation in Latin, very tedious. And even if you did wake him up, he’ll be weak as a kitten and not able to harm anyone. He’ll have to be spoon fed for weeks.”
“Really?” Sasha felt his brows leap. He’d feared, from the moment Philippe had started talking of waking, that Rasputin would leap up off the table and grab someone by the throat. But what Val said made sense. Someone sickly and healing would doubtless need bed rest, and food, plenty of time to gather his strength.
Val smiled at him, up close, gleaming white fangs. “Shall we have a look?”
Sasha got to his feet.
~*~
Nikita knew, long before he lay down in his bedroll, that sleep wasn’t going to come tonight. Not quickly, at least. He’d managed to choke down a little dinner, fighting nausea every bite, and it eased the strain in his belly, but couldn’t dispel the nervous tension thrumming beneath his skin. As the others settled around him, and Ivan began to snore, he kept hearing Philippe’s furious, terrified shouts; heard Sasha’s awful snarling; heard Katya’s shocked gasp as a cannibal tackled her; and above all, he remembered the wail of the air raid siren. His ears still needed to pop.
Beside him, he could see Katya’s huddled shape outlined by the dying fire. He could tell she wasn’t anywhere close to being asleep because she kept twitching, and suddenly, he needed to make sure she was unharmed. Not just with a question, like he’d asked earlier, but with his own eyes and hands. Had she been bitten, scratched? Bruised? He felt vulnerable and needy, desperate to know.
She flinched when he first touched her, but then relaxed, remembering it was him.
He leaned in close, so he could whisper in her ear, her hair tickling his face. “Come take a walk with me.”
She nodded, and wordlessly slid from her bedroll. When they were both standing, he took her hand and led her off a ways through the trees. He glanced back, once, and saw Sasha sitting vigil behind the truck. The boy smiled at him.
Katya surprised him. The second they were out of view of the others, she slumped against his side, grabbing at his shirt.
“Oh. Hey.” He turned so he could pull her flush against him, wrap both arms around her. She pressed her face into his chest with a small, pained sound. “It’s alright.” He smoothed a hand down her disheveled braids and felt helpless; he couldn’t offer her anything besides a little body heat and some empty reassurances.
“Are you hurt?” he asked. His heart throbbed. He wanted to bundle her up like a child and carry her somewhere safe. “Katya. Sweetheart.”
She trembled a long moment, hands knotted in the back of his shirt, his chest growing warm and damp where she hid her tears. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, sniffling, pulling back a fraction. “I’m alright.”
Her hands loosened, and he knew she meant to wipe her tears, so he did it for her, smoothing his thumb carefully across the soft skin beneath her eyes.
Her gaze lifted, wide and watery, a little embarrassed, and full of an emotion he didn’t dare try to name. Vulnerable as spring flowers in the moonlight.
“What are you sorry for?” he asked.
She offered a thin, sad smile. “I cried all over your shirt.”
“It wasn’t a clean shirt.”
Her smile widened and she finally let go of him – a small but painful loss – so she could smooth her hand across the damp fabric over his heart. “Still. Sorry.”
He cupped her face, while his thumb was still wet with her tears. “Are you really alright, though? Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m fine.”
He smoothed his hands down her arms, chasing the fine tremors that coursed through her, brows lifted in silent question.
She sighed and leaned in again, temple resting against his shoulder. “I was scared,” she admitted, voice heavy with shame.
He rubbed her back. “I was too. But you didn’t show it. That was good shooting.”
“Being scared isn’t an excuse for bad shooting,” she said, scandalized, and he chuckled.
“No, I guess it’s not.”
She took a deep breath and let it out in a warm rush against his shirt, the tension finally bleeding out of her. “God,” she murmured, dazed-sounding. “I keep thinking cannibals, and then I think that’s probably not the most awful thing I’m going to see.”
“I know.” He had a bad feeling the thing they were taking south in the back of the truck was much, much worse than anything in Leningrad.
In the glow of moonlight, he could just make out her face, pale and fragile-seeming in the dark, her lashes long against her cheeks. And he didn’t want to think of Rasputin or the poor wretches they’d killed that day.
“Katya.”
She heard the change in his tone, lifted her face, gaze searching his.
They met halfway, lips already parted and open, wanting. A kiss to chase the fear away. One that slid quickly into something deeper, hotter, the searching kind of kiss that made his heart race. He wanted to pick her up and lay her down on the forest floor, open her clothes and sink into her, feel the bite of her nails in his skin, lose himself in the quiet sounds she made.
But he couldn’t, not now.
She gave a quiet, strained laugh when he pulled back. “I knew you were going to do that.”
“We can’t.” But he ached, because he wanted to.
“I know, I know.”
He rested his forehead against hers and they breathed in the warm air between them, taking small, fleeting comfort in body heat and mutual longing.
“Do you–” she started.
The bell in his pocket rang.
~*~
It was cave-dark in the back of the truck, but Sasha could see a little, with his wolf eyes. His four-legged pack stood or sat at attention on the ground below, strained and waiting. Sasha knelt on one side of the footlocker, Val on the other. Even though he wasn’t truly there, Sasha was glad of his company.
“Good God, is he folded up in there?” Val asked, sounding almost delighted.
“We, uh, had to bend his legs, a little. But we didn’t break them.”
“Wonderful.”
Sasha opened the lock with the key – he’d lifted it neatly from Nikita’s satchel – and then carefully eased the footlocker open. He bit down hard on the urge to snarl as the scent flooded his nostrils: old, blood, wrong, dark.
“Why does he smell like this?” he asked through his teeth.
Val shuffled around so he could look inside the box, shoulder-to-shoulder with Sasha. “Like what?”
“Like…” And it came to him, finally. “Like hell.”
“As in actual hell? With Satan?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“Interesting, that’s all.” He motioned toward the head of the wrapped, crumpled form. “Get on with it, then, let’s see.”
Sasha reached for the rotting line and paused, hands hovering over the body. It was warm, just like Feliks had said.
Not it, but he. He was a person, and he was alive.
And warm.
Sasha took a shaky breath and hooked his fingers in the linen. There was a knot at the back of its – his – head and it took a long, tense moment to work it loose, the old fabric shredding under Sasha’s touch. Then he drew it down, inch by inch, until it was gathered at the base of the body’s neck.
Val whistled.
Sasha had seen enough grainy black and white newspaper clippings at the university library to know that this was Rasputin, without question. He looked like he had in the morgue photos, battered and bruised, lips pulled back in a pained grimace. His forehead was a raw and pink mess, the residual ruin of the gunshot he’d taken at point blank range.
Sasha touched his cheek with trembling fingers. Warm, alive, a slow but steady pulse beating inside him.
He snatched his hand back, chills chasing across his skin. “How could he survive that?”
“Vampires can survive almost anything,” Val said, “save the loss of their hearts.”
Sasha glanced at him, and saw that, for once, he wasn’t mocking.
“Rasputin’s killers were industrious, but they didn’t know what he was, and they didn’t know about the heart. They failed.”
“Will I be able to wake him up?” Sasha asked, already dreading the prospect.
“Oh yes. You will–”
Val disappeared.
Monsieur Philippe stood at the truck’s tailgate, expression thunderous. “What are you doing?” he shouted.
Sasha blinked at him.
The mage lifted both hands, and fire leapt to life in his palms. “Sasha!”
The wolves started growling.
Philippe glanced at them, startled, on his left and right. They were all on their feet now, circling him. When he looked back at Sasha, he was still furious, but Sasha caught a whiff of fear, too. He didn’t trust or like the wolves, as well he shouldn’t.
Where had that thought come from? Sasha didn’t know, but he felt it lodge in his heart, and begin to fester.
“I told you,” Philippe said, spit flying he was so angry, “that Grisha wasn’t to be disturbed on the trip!”
Sasha had never been rebellious a day in his life, but he felt that way now. He shrugged.
“Did you – are you,” Philippe spluttered. “What the hell were you thinking? You could have awoken him!”
“No,” Sasha said calmly. “I wasn’t going to. I just wanted to look at him.”
“I ordered you not to!”
The wolves were still growling, not threatening yet, but warning. Siding with their alpha.
Sasha said, “You’re not my master. I don’t have to take orders.”
The mage made an enraged sound, pushed beyond words. In the glow of the fire he held, he was turning a mottled red. “You – you – you fucking brat! I made you! By God, I can unmake you, too.”
The alpha female’s growl changed, openly hostile now.
Sasha said, “I’d like to see you try.”
Philippe opened his mouth to speak –
And Nikita arrived, pushing past the wolves, taking a tight grip on Philippe’s arm. “What’s going on?” he snapped, all Cheka authority and coldness.
Pack, Sasha thought, and the wolves accepted Nikita’s presence, calmed under it. He himself felt calmer. He had no master, no, but he would bend to the wisdom and authority of his friend.
Philippe stared at Nikita a long moment, fire burning in his palms, and then the flame winked out and he sagged visibly, looking like nothing but a tired old man.
“Why are you screaming at him?” Nikita asked, and Sasha realized he wasn’t cold at all. No, he was angrier than Sasha had ever seen him. His captain’s mask was hanging on by a thread, and beneath, he was all violence.
Philippe’s own rage was barely suppressed. “I explained to him, at length, how important it was not to disturb the body until we were safely back in Stalingrad, and here he is touching it.” He turned his vicious gaze back on Sasha. “Were you trying to wake him?”
Nikita’s hand tightened on the old man’s arm, knuckles white with the effort. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“You can’t accidentally wake him,” Sasha said, a little thrill in his belly because, for once, he was the one with the information. “It takes blood. And a Latin incantation.”
Philippe’s face went gratifyingly blank. “How did you learn that? Did you–” His eyes widened. “Valerian.”
“He said for me to call him Val, like his friends do.”
Philippe bared his teeth. “That bastard–”
“Calm down, Monsieur Philippe,” Nikita said, and it was an order. He looked up at Sasha and rolled his eyes. “Cover the starets back up, Sasha,” he said, courteous, soft, “and come down here please before the old man has a stroke.”
“Here, Monsieur.” Katya appeared, Ivan’s vodka canteen in her hand. “Will you have a little of this? Come sit by me.” She towed him back to camp, but not before he threw one last murderous glance back at Sasha.
When they were gone, the wolves crowded around Nikita, licking his hands.
“Care to explain?” he asked Sasha, one brow ticking upward.
Sasha sighed. “Yeah. Just a minute.” He draped the linen back over Rasputin’s face, shut and locked the footlocker. In truth he was glad to hop down out of the truck and get away from the awful, invasive scent of the not-dead holy man, but he wasn’t going to be badgered around by Monsieur Philippe.
He landed lightly next to Nikita, the wolves nosing and snuffling him in greeting.
“So,” Nikita said mildly, “found your backbone?”
Sasha frowned at him.
“Oh, come on. You’ve gone along with everything he’s said. You let him stab you through the heart.” The narrow scar across his chest throbbed as if responding to the words, a little painful reminder. “Why the insubordination now?” Nikita wanted to know.
Sasha dropped his voice to a whisper. “Because I can’t stand the smell of him.” He waved toward the truck. “There’s something wrong with him.”
Nikita didn’t react the way Philippe had. “Of course there is,” he said. “He’s a sex maniac, and a khlyst, and he turned an entire country against its emperor. There’s a lot that’s wrong with him, the least of which is the fact that he’s a vampire. In fact, the vampire bit is the thing that makes the most sense, if you ask me.”
Sasha stared at him. “Philippe says all those things are just stories. Propaganda.”
“Some of it probably is, yeah.” Nikita shrugged. Reached out and clapped Sasha on the shoulder, gave a reassuring squeeze. “We’re all in this up to our necks, Sashka. It’s a little late to cry morality now.”
“Oh.” He sagged a little. “Yeah. It’s just…” He’d given in to his wolf side, let his senses rule his thoughts and actions.
“Whatever he is.” Nikita leaned in close, tone confidential. “He’s not worse than Stalin, right?”
“Right.” Sasha twitched a smile. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. It’s the old man you upset.”
“Yeah.”
“And who was he talking about? Valerian?”
“The prince I told you about. The one who visits, but isn’t really here.”
“Hmm.” Nikita stepped back, worry warring with disbelief in his eyes. “Well, don’t say anything too revealing to him, alright?”
“Yeah, alright.”
“Good.” He reached up and ruffled Sasha’s hair – and then froze, shocked. “Oh, uh…” Started to pull back.
Sasha grinned at him. “It’s okay. Wolves like to be petted.”
Nikita snorted. “I’ll remember that.”