27
WAKE THE SLEEPER
It was a long, uncomfortable, grueling trip back to the Ingraham Institute just north of Stalingrad. Sasha apologized to Monsieur Philippe, but there was something strained there, a subtle shift in power that Nikita thought irrevocable. Once a dog stopped respecting its master, the balance never shifted back the other way.
But though long, the trip wasn’t horrible. Moments – catching Katya’s eye and smiling, laughing with his brothers over an unpalatable meal – were even wonderful, in the way that small, stolen, precious things are wonderful in the middle of a war.
And on June first, they reached their destination, Grigory Yefimovich’s lifeless form in tow.
Nikita wanted a shower, figured he ought to have a hot meal, and then he wanted a warm bed, and Katya. But first things first.
Dr. Ingraham was about to wet himself with excitement. “Oh,” he kept saying. “Oh. Oh my. Oh…this is wonderful!” He hovered around the metal table where the wrapped body had been laid out, hands leaping like birds, starting toward the starets but not brave enough to actually touch. “How should we proceed, Monsieur Philippe?”
The old man looked truly old, the journey having taken its toll. Lined, gray, and tired. And, Nikita thought, every time the man’s eyes went to Sasha, the smallest bit less confident.
“It will all depend on Sasha,” he said, sounding pained. “He’s been practicing the words.”
He had been, and held the sheet of paper on which Philippe had written out the Latin phonetically now, brow crinkled as he studied the phrases, lips moving silently as he tried to commit them to memory.
Last night, their final night on the road, Nikita had pulled Sasha off to the side. “Okay, be honest with me. If this feels too awful to you, if you don’t want to wake the bastard up, just tell me, and we’ll find another way.”
Sasha had looked shocked, mouth falling open. Then he’d smiled, grimly, and gripped Nikita by both shoulders. “Thank you, my pack brother,” he’d said, quietly, reverently. “That means…thank you. But no. We’ll go ahead with it. I’ll do it.”
Nikita had been filled with a painful sort of relief. He had no idea what their Plan B could be, if Sasha backed out of this crazy scheme. But at the same time…he had little faith in the idea of waking a Rasputin, notoriously opposed to Russia’s war endeavors, who would side with them, and help them win back the empire from the Communists.
Now he felt sick, sweating under his clothes, covered in goosebumps as he contemplated the shrouded figure on the table.
Philippe looked around the room, making eye contact. “If we could have some privacy,” he started.
“No,” Nikita said, right away. “You send out all the lab rats you want, but we’re staying.” He gestured to his boys, ranged alongside him, propping up a blank space of wall.
Philippe lifted his bearded chin. “I–”
“You’re asking Sasha to do something important, and from what I hear, dangerous. He needs his pack here, and we’re staying.”
Ivan’s snort said, deal with it.
Philippe held his gaze a long moment, then gave a sharp nod and glanced away. “Very well. Dr. Ingraham?”
“Oh.” The doctor wilted. “I had hoped that I might watch.”
“You may. But please ask your staff to wait outside, and to be prepared, as we discussed.”
“Of course.” The doctor hustled his team out with murmured apologies.
When the door closed, it sounded like the shutting of a tomb.
Dr. Ingraham came back to the table. “Everything’s ready,” he said, quiet and deferential.
Nikita hated him.
“Sasha?” Philippe asked.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” He folded up the paper and shoved it into his pants pocket. Exhaled shakily, glanced up and met Nikita’s eyes, offered a shaky smile.
“You’re fine, puppy,” Ivan said, and Sasha’s smile got a little wider.
“Thank you, everyone.”
“Be quick about it,” Feliks said. “I’m hungry.”
Sasha chuckled, and Nikita could have hugged his boys for doing that.
“Let us know if you need anything,” Katya said.
Sasha nodded, and grew serious. It was time.
Monsieur Philippe stepped forward and produced a small, sharp knife from his sleeve, and began to cut away the linen shroud that bound Rasputin. Slow, sure movements. Soft snick of the knife. Faint rip of the rotted linen. He moved around the body, cutting a clean line down to the feet and back up the other side. Then slowly peeled the shroud away, revealing the infamous starets at last.
Katya made a small, shocked sound, but it was otherwise silent.
Nikita held his breath.
Rasputin lay with his hands folded on his breast, eyes closed, mouth set in a pained snarl. Unmoving. His face, under his thick, coarse beard, was sunken, cheeks hollow and gray, the blue tracks of veins visible in his temples and eyelids. The gunshot wound had been cleaned of blood, but was a pink and pulpy, ugly mess on his forehead. He breathed shallowly, impossible to detect, unless you looked close.
It was him. It could be no one else.
Everyone exhaled at once.
Kolya, always so quiet, said, “My God.”
“You didn’t believe?” Philippe sounded amused.
No one answered him, because of course they believed, it had just seemed so ludicrous, though.
The mage fussed around the body a moment, sweeping back stray hairs, ensuring the linen shroud was folded at his waist, preserving some sense of modesty. Finally, he stepped back, hands folded together, clearly ecstatic. “We’re ready.”
Nikita’s skin felt too tight. His stomach clenched and he swallowed hard, tasting bile. Should he pray? He didn’t think anything holy could get to them in this room. God probably wasn’t listening.
“Sasha,” Philippe said, “proceed.”
Sasha took a deep breath, visibly shaking, and stepped up to the head of the table. Philippe handed him the knife and he studied its blade a moment, light glinting down its length, before he drew it down the center of his left palm, blood welling in its wake. He didn’t flinch or hiss; tipped his hand over the slumbering vampire’s face. Thin trickles of red ran down his palm. Dripped, dripped, dripped. Onto Rasputin’s exposed, yellow teeth.
There was something obscene about it, the shocking, unexpected intimacy of fresh blood.
Sasha began the invocation to wake, slow and stumbling at first, unsure, but relaxing into it as he went. His Latin had a distinct Russian accent, but Philippe had said that wouldn’t matter. It was the words themselves, and, most important, the blood. The wolf blood.
Finally, in forceful Russian: “Thus I command you to wake, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.”
A last runnel of blood sluiced from Sasha’s palm, a grisly splatter across Rasputin’s face.
And his eyes opened.
They were huge, and gray, and wild. The hypnotic eyes that all his devoted female followers had spoken of, filled now with confusion and terror.
Nikita was overcome with a sudden, intense revulsion. He hated this man – this creature. The ruin of the Romanovs. The laughingstock of a nation perched on the eve of revolution.
Alive and in the flesh.
Their only hope for a White revolution of their own.
The starets opened his mouth on a gasp, the sound ancient and dusty. He wheezed and hissed. Licked the blood from his lips, eyes sliding left and right. He attempted to turn his head, and let out a hoarse shout, face screwing up with pain. His moan raised all the hairs on Nikita’s arms, sent hard chills skating down his back.
Sasha looked horrified. He took a few quick steps back, pulling his injured hand into his chest, smearing blood on his shirt.
Rasputin tried to speak, but the words were garbled. He sounded like his throat was full of grave dirt.
Nikita cast a glance to his right, and saw his brothers and Katya all in similar states of shock and disgust, eyes huge in pale faces.
Dr. Ingraham breathed something in English that might have been a prayer or a curse. He was openly gaping.
Philippe was the one who stepped forward, rather than away, face radiant with something that looked, sickeningly, like love. “I’m here, Grisha, I’m here.” He put a hand on Rasputin’s shoulder and smiled down at him. “It’s me, Philippe.”
Rasputin moaned again.
“Dr. Ingraham, the blood, please.”
“Oh! Right!” The doctor rushed to the door and put his head out into the hall, fired off rapid orders to his assistants.
Two assistants used a rolling cart to push the door wider, wheeling in stoppered glass bottles of blood.
Dr. Ingraham seemed electrified, bustling to the counter along the wall, pouring blood into a tin mug.
Philippe took it from him and wedged his free arm beneath Rasputin’s head, lifting him. The starets gave a wordless shout of pain, eyes rolling.
“Here, this will help. Fresh and warm,” Philippe murmured, bringing the mug to his lips.
Nikita realized he couldn’t watch. He turned his head away, and his gaze landed on Sasha.
Sasha, who’d performed a miracle, who now sat slumped against the wall, cradling his injured hand, eyes wide and frightened – ignored by all the excited people rushing to tend to the newly-awake starets.
Nikita went to Sasha. Knelt at his side, blocking his view of what was happening on the table. “Sasha.” He pushed his damp hair off his forehead, thumbed at skin that was cold and clammy. “Sashka. You okay?”
His teeth were chattering, and now that Nikita was close, he could hear that he was whinin, softly, a lupine sound. He didn’t answer, instead brought his hand to his mouth and tried to lick the wound.
“No, no. Here.” Nikita caught his wrist and pulled his last, grimy handkerchief from his pocket, pressed it into Sasha’s bloody palm. “Let me get something–”
Katya knelt beside him, with a handful of clean gauze and cotton batting. Roll of bandages. A swab damp with what Nikita could smell was alcohol.
“Hello, sweet boy. Can I see?” she asked, smiling at Sasha.
Nikita loved her for that tenderness. Among other things.
Then Pyotr was there with a glass of cold water.
Kolya, and Ivan, and Feliks stood over them, a human wall. And a shield.
“You alright, puppy?” Ivan asked, more than a little worry in his voice.
Sasha looked at all of them, their faces, and slowly awareness returned to his eyes. He was still shivering and pale, but he knew them. “Is he…?”
Nikita refused to look over his shoulder. “Let’s worry about you right now.” He couldn’t get them – their pack – out of the room fast enough.
~*~
When the fog in his head finally cleared, Sasha realized that he was afraid. Very much so. In the midst of the invocation, an unnatural calm had come over him.
Yes, a voice had said in the back of his mind. This is your place, this is your task. You were built to serve. Some part of him, deeply suppressed, had railed against the idea. But the fog had rolled in, obliterating thought and feeling, until he was nothing but a tool, awaiting his vampire master’s pleasure.
When Rasputin’s eyes opened, he’d felt a pull in his chest, something awful and relentless, and he’d fought it. It had taken every ounce of his strength to stagger back from the table and sink to the ground, but he’d known he had to do it. He’d known he couldn’t allow himself to fall into the awful urge to bend his head, and show his neck, and submit.
He was the alpha, and he didn’t submit.
Now, a little ways down the hall in an empty exam room, Katya’s fingers gentle and cool against his skin as she bandaged his hand, the foggy sense of resistance was giving way to outright fear.
He glanced at his surroundings. Shelves full of beakers, test tubes, and stoppered bottles of unidentifiable liquids. Boxes of bandages and gauze. He sat on a table, and Nikita stood beside him, one hand braced on his shoulder, holding Sasha up.
His mouth felt full of cotton when he spoke. “What happened?”
Katya tied off the bandage and secured it with a safety pin. Her expression was careful when she met his gaze. “Do you remember cutting your hand?”
He nodded, and then winced, because the movement sent pain arcing through his skull. “I know I woke him up. I just. It’s fuzzy.”
She traded a look with Nikita.
Nikita said, “Did he hurt you?” His tone was that of the protective big brother Sasha had never had, and he sagged sideways, leaning into him, whimpering before he could check the impulse.
Nikita’s arm went around his shoulders.
“No,” Sasha said. “I’m okay. It was just…strange.” He straightened, not wanting to appear weak, wanting to be the strong pack alpha, but Nikita’s hand lingered on his shoulder, and he was grateful for that. “He’s really awake?”
“Yes, and they’re all making a big fuss about him,” Katya said. She frowned to herself as she stowed the leftover bandages.
“Sasha,” Nikita said, looking at him critically, “what happened to you?”
“I don’t really know,” he said, because he wasn’t sure how to describe it in a way they would understand. “It was – he wanted something from me, I could tell.”
Nikita looked alarmed. “Wanted what?”
“For me to submit to him.”
Nikita’s brows jumped.
The door opened and Ivan stuck his head in, expression grim. “The old fucker wants to see Sasha. Hey, you alright, pup?”
Sasha took a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m coming.”
His legs didn’t want to hold him, but he made it down the hallway. The door to the lab was propped open, and assistants in white coats bustled in and out, talking to one another under their breath. The area buzzed with the busy excitement of a kicked anthill.
Dread began to build in Sasha’s stomach, dark and heavy as a stone, making him vaguely sick.
The exam table had been traded for a hospital bed, and there lay Rasputin, propped up on pillows, a bandage wound round his head, over the lingering gunshot wound. He was gray, but awake, listening to what Philippe was saying to him. His lips were the only spots of color, dark red – from the blood, Sasha realized, and shuddered.
The back of Sasha’s neck tingled. It hurt – like a bee sting. The urge to bow his head, to get down on his knees, was instant and unwelcome. He gritted his teeth and fought it.
His stomach rolled, and sweat popped out along his temples, and under his arms. He thought he might vomit.
No, he thought savagely. And then the discomfort eased. He took a deep breath. He could do this. He didn’t have to be anyone’s puppet.
He came to a halt a few feet from the end of the bed, and Rasputin turned to him. Whether they loved him or loathed him, everyone who’d ever written about Rasputin could agree on one thing: his eyes. The intensity of his gaze was legend, and, Sasha realized now, completely true. A perfect silver shade of gray, bright, almost glowing, otherworldly. He wondered if they’d always been like that, or if being turned was the cause for the penetrating stare that rested on him now.
The starets extended a thin and trembling hand. “My child.” His voice was a rough croak. “You have saved me. Come here so that I can kiss you and thank you.”
Sasha had never wanted to do anything less. But he was caught, he knew. He’d agreed up to this point; if he suddenly pulled back, and refused to cooperate, he would be seen as abandoning the plan.
And he couldn’t let Nikita down. His pack. Hell, his country.
Slowly, hating it, he walked to the side of the bed, Philippe smiling at him with teeth the whole way.
“Hello,” he said, stiff and formal.
Up close, Rasputin was horrible. Painfully skinny, starved-looking, his skin the color and thickness of cheap paper. He smiled up at Sasha, revealing long, yellow teeth, eyes unnaturally bright in his pallid face. “Hello, blessed child. The wolf who woke me. You’re a strong one.”
Sasha didn’t know what to say, so he kept silent.
Philippe’s hand landed on his shoulder, a light touch that turned to a pinch. “Young Sasha here is from Siberia, Grisha. From Tomsk.”
The hold man’s face lit up – as much as it could in the situation. “Siberia! Wonderful! Have you seen Pokrovoskoe? What of my family?”
Philippe smiled at him. “One moment, friend.” Then, pinching hard at the tendons in Sasha’s neck, marched him over to the door.
Sasha shrugged his touch away.
“Outside,” Philippe said, no longer smiling.
Nikita waited for them in the hall, arms folded, leaning against the wall.
Philippe made a frustrated sound, rounding on Sasha. “He doesn’t know what year it is yet. He thinks it’s only been a few weeks since his murder. Attempted murder.”
Nikita snorted. “That’ll be fun to explain.”
“Captain,” Philippe said, sighing, “if you please–”
“Oh, I’m going, don’t worry.” He straightened. “And so is Sasha. We’re going to get dinner.”
Sasha wanted to hug him.
“But,” Philippe protested.
“Later, Monsieur,” Nikita said, firmly.
Sasha went to his friend’s side and didn’t look back.