44
EAT YOUR HEART OUT
Should have known, Trina thought with an inward snarl of frustration. If they hadn’t been exhausted and caught up in their own personal bullshit drama – Lanny dying wasn’t bullshit, she corrected, not really – one of them would have been sharp enough to think that, at some point, Chad Edwards would go running to his girlfriend. And give her the scare of her life.
The door to her apartment had been torn off its hinges and lay broken in two pieces on the floor of the front hall. A starburst of cracks in the sheetrock of the entryway marked a place where a fist or a head slammed into the wall. A shattered plate lay in the divide between kitchen and living room.
Chad’s girlfriend, Christa, sat on a couch that had been shredded at one end, stuffing and foam spilled out onto the rug. A paramedic dabbed at a nasty cut on her face and someone had draped a shock blanket across her shoulders. Her gaze was vacant, fixed in the middle distance. She didn’t blink, or twitch, or react to the sting of alcohol on her wound.
A middle-aged man, presumably the neighbor who’d called in the disturbance and then rushed to the rescue, sat on a stool at the kitchen island, a second paramedic bandaging his right arm. He looked dazed and spooked, but more together than Christa. His boyfriend hadn’t come back from the dead, after all.
“I’ll take him, you take her?” Lanny asked.
“Yeah.”
Trina went to Christa and knelt on the rug in front of her, setting a tentative hand on the girl’s knee. Christa didn’t react.
Trina made brief eye contact with the paramedic, who shook her head, eyes wide. The woman’s voice was calm, though, when she said, “We’re gonna take her in. Make it quick.”
“Yeah. Christa? Can you hear me? I’m Detective Baskin. We spoke a few nights ago.”
No reaction.
Trina heard Lanny asking the witness/good Samaritan questions behind her at the island. “Christa,” she said, “can you tell me what happened tonight?”
No reaction.
Trina shared another glance with the paramedic, who shrugged. Then she turned to glance at her partner over her shoulder. “Maybe we should–”
There was an almighty clatter on the fire escape.
Trina’s heart jumped up her throat. “He’s still here!”
“On it,” Lanny said, and charged toward the window.
“Lanny, don’t–”
But he was already throwing open the sash and clambering out onto the fire escape.
“Shit,” Trina said, and followed him.
It was the deep, black dark of just before dawn, and the fire escape seemed an illusion made of shadow – that was her initial, terrifying thought as she swung her legs over the windowsill. I’ll fall, she thought, but then her boots touched the metal with a clatter, and she started down the ladder after her partner, who was, judging by his curses, losing ground on their perp. Vampires were faster than humans, after all.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lanny chanted, one level below her, and she ran to catch up, one hand skimming the rail, the other clamped to the butt of her gun. At some point after seeing the impossible security footage of Edwards walking out of the morgue, she’d decided she’d shoot him, if given the chance. She hadn’t trusted him when she thought he was dead, and certainly didn’t now that he’d killed a boy.
Thoughts of Jamie Anderson’s face – peaceful and childlike in death – made her sick, so she pushed them away, and kept running.
“Goddamn it all to hell,” Lanny said, and she heard the slap of sneaker soles on pavement: Chad had reached the alley; they’d never catch him now.
Above her, Trina heard a soft woof sound, like a flag caught in a sudden breeze. Then she felt a breeze, down the side of her face, whipping her hair, and a dark blur fell past her through the open air.
“What?” She paused and glanced over the railing just in time to see the blur land on its feet, lightly, graceful as a gymnast, in Chad Edwards’s path. The alley’s security light caught hold of shaggy, platinum hair, and she knew it was Sasha.
“Holy shit,” Lanny breathed.
The kid had just leapt off the top of a four-story building and landed on his feet like it was nothing. Yeah. Holy shit.
Trina pelted the rest of the way down and landed beside Lanny on the ground, drawing her gun. “Freeze, Chad! Hands in the air where I can see ‘em!” she called, and realized she didn’t want to approach him. Damn it, she was scared, and she hated herself for it.
Lanny stalked forward, gun trained, but she heard the faint note of fear in his voice, too, and felt better for it. “Hands up, asshole!” he barked.
Trina went with him, the two of them a united front as they approached Chad from behind.
He didn’t put his hands up, frozen with his arms down by his sides, weight shifted onto one foot. Ready to bolt. There was just enough light for Trina to see that the muscles in his back, his arms, hell, his whole body, clenched and twitched, like a spooked horse about to take off. He was squared off from Sasha, who had his head down, filling the alley with a low, threatening growl. That sound made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up; nothing on two legs should have been capable of making a sound like that.
“Chad,” she said as they approached, trying for calm and reasonable. “There’s only one good way out of this, and that’s by cooperating with us. I know you didn’t mean to hurt Christa.” She didn’t believe that, but certain scenarios called for stretched truths in the line of duty. “And you probably didn’t mean to hurt Jamie Anderson either.”
Chad flinched and Sasha’s growl went deeper, louder, a vicious snarl. “Don’t move,” he snapped.
“I know what you are,” Trina said, voice getting even softer. “I know what happened to you must have been terrifying, and that you’re feeling all these crazy things. We can work with you, help you find a really great lawyer, but you have to cooperate so no one else gets hurt, okay? I know you don’t want that.”
Slowly, his head turned a fraction, so she could just make out his profile, bright white in the glare of the security bulb. “I meant to,” he said.
Something in her mind faltered. “What?”
“You said I didn’t mean to hurt them, but I did, didn’t I? I wanted to bite them, turn them, and I knew that would hurt.”
“Okay…”
“I had to try it first. That’s why I followed that guy – Jamie, you said? – to see if I could make it work. Then I was gonna turn Christa, so we could be together.”
Shit.
Lanny said, “Shit.”
Trina’s heart was pounding, but she managed to keep talking, steady and curious, not freaked out and furious. “Why Jamie?”
Chad shrugged. “He was all alone. Figured nobody would miss him.”
Sasha snarled.
Lanny said, “Wow, what a piece of shit you are. Hands up, let’s go. Behind your head where I can see ‘em.”
Chad sighed, shoulders dropping, and lifted both hands –
He whirled.
Sasha was on top of him before Lanny or Trina could blink – or pull the trigger. They watched, stunned mute, as Sasha tackled the vampire to the ground and bit him hard in the back of the neck, white hands like talons in the meat of his shoulders.
Chad screamed, half-pain and half-anger, and tried to twist out from under Sasha. But Sasha was stronger, doubling down. Chad’s shirt ripped where Sasha’s fingertips were dug in; shiny pearls of blood rolled down the side of his neck.
“Shit, is he gonna kill him?” Lanny asked.
“I have no idea.” And a part of her wondered if that would be such a bad thing, a thought she immediately struck as unethical, and possibly evil. But. She’d thought it.
Sasha gave one last violent snarl and then stood upright, dragging Chad with him. He disengaged his teeth from the back of his neck and spat on the pavement. Licked the blood off his lips and teeth and spat again. “Don’t fucking move this time.” His accent came out thick and guttural amidst his growl.
Chad look dazed, eyes sweeping the alley back and forth, glazed and unfocused.
“How about putting your hands up for real this time, huh?” Lanny said, motioning to him with the barrel of his gun. “Nice and high, behind your head.”
Chad complied this time, hastened by a little shove from Sasha.
Trina took out her cuffs. “Um. Are these gonna work on him?” she asked Sasha.
The wolf sighed and shook his head. “Probably not.” Then he glanced up, over the top of her head, grin tugging at one corner of his bloody mouth. “But don’t worry, we won’t need them.”
She heard a faint rustling behind her, and twisted around just in time to see Nikita land ballerina-light, like Sasha had, his hair still settling as he started toward them.
“You guys make a habit of jumping off buildings?” she asked.
“Only when we have to.”
“It’s fun,” Sasha said.
When she looked back at Chad, she saw that he’d spotted Nikita, and that he was trying to shrink down into his shirt collar like a turtle hiding in its shell.
“We’re taking him in,” Lanny told Nikita. “Douchebag already confessed to killing the Anderson kid.”
“Hmm,” Nikita said, drawing up in front of a now-shivering Chad, face impassive. “And do what with him? Handcuffs won’t hold him. Neither will a cell – not in the long run. Too many chances to overpower guards and other prisoners.”
“Yeah, well,” Lanny huffed. “That’s the system we got.”
“Ineffective,” Nikita said, dismissively, all his attention on Chad. “Did you turn that boy?” he asked.
“I…”
“Did you?”
“Yes,” Chad said. His teeth were chattering he was so scared. “But please, I didn’t…”
“Mean to?”
“No, well, I did, but–”
“You’ll do it again.”
Chad sighed, deflating a little further into Sasha’s grasp. “It isn’t a bad thing. That guy was sick, okay? I saw him use an inhaler. He was some geeky loner with no friends, and now he’s gonna be super strong. I made him better. This is – this is amazing! Who wouldn’t want to feel like this?” But his voice was not that of an enraptured holy man – it was that of a petulant child. Mean-spirited and entitled. “I did him a favor,” he repeated. “And he’s not even dead – he’s gonna wake up – so it’s not murder.”
Nikita nodded. He shared a look with Sasha. Nodded again.
Trina sucked in a breath. “Wait, no–”
Nikita grabbed the boy’s head in both hands and snapped his neck with one clean jerk.
Chad slumped forward, knees and ankles going soft, and Sasha held him upright.
“What the fuck?” Lanny roared. “You can’t just – you just – what the fuck?”
When Nikita turned to them, he looked exhausted. “You wouldn’t have been able to contain him, and he wouldn’t have changed. I did what had to be done.”
“You broke his fucking neck,” Lanny seethed.
Nikita turned his gaze on Trina, quietly imploring.
She waited for the revulsion to hit her. The hate. The fear.
Instead, she felt…relief. Chad was no longer her problem, or anyone else’s.
She nodded at Nikita, and he nodded back. Yes, she understood. This had to be done, even if it left a bad taste in the mouth. Even if she wound up with nightmares.
She became aware that Lanny was talking to her.
“…say something?”
“What? Oh.” She turned to him. “I don’t.” Sighed. “What do you want me to say?”
Lanny stared at her, disappointed, then threw up his hands and turned away, making a disgusted sound.
She turned back to the others. “I’ll call this in. We can say he fell off the fire escape.”
But Sasha made a face. “Actually…”
“I’m not done,” Nikita said. “I need to make sure.”
“Make sure…” And then her stomach rolled. “Oh my God.”
He looked even more tired than before. “Say you lost him. Say…I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He ducked his head and slung Chad’s limp form across his shoulders, like a hunter hoisting up a deer. Chad’s hands flopped and Trina swallowed the urge to gag…even as her mind was already accepting it and making allowances. Her disgust was superficial and physical. Mentally, emotionally, she’d already forgiven her great-grandfather for the act.
“Okay,” she said.
Lanny turned around. “Okay? Are you serious?”
“What do you want me to say? It’s already done.”
He turned his back again, muttering curses under his breath.
“The one he turned,” Nikita started.
“I’ll go and check on him.”
“Like hell,” Lanny said over his shoulder.
“He wasn’t like this one,” Nikita said, tilting his head to indicate the body across his shoulders. “Was he?”
“Not before he died, no. Not if Chad and the roommate are to be believed.”
He nodded. “Alright. Be careful. Take Sasha with you.”
“I don’t think–”
“Take him with you.” And that was an order. If anyone besides her boss or her family had delivered it, she would have bowed up her back.
Instead, she sighed and said, “Yeah, alright.”
Nikita gave her one last serious look, flicked a glance to Sasha, then hiked his burden a little higher and started down the alley, into the shadows. Just before he disappeared from sight, she had the absurd thought that, from behind, carrying a body, his silhouette looked like a cross.
~*~
The fluorescent lights of the morgue had a way of making the living look like the dead. There was something eerily corpse-like about the bags under Dr. Harvey’s eyes when she flicked her gaze up from her paperwork and said, tone flat, “You what?” She looked like a woman at the end of her patience, and Trina knew the feeling.
“The lab came back about some fibers and I wanted to check the body,” she said, rolling her eyes and pretending it was an imposition, commiserating, while inside her heart pounded what was fast-becoming a normal panicked rhythm. “Total bullshit, I know.”
Harvey sighed and checked the time in the corner of her computer screen. “Oh. It’s morning.”
“Rise and shine,” Trina said with a hollow chuckle.
Harvey snorted as she got to her feet, swaying a little with exhaustion. “You look like I feel.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Pretty bad.”
They walked down to the cold storage room, where the dead waited in their metal drawers.
“I’ve got his autopsy scheduled for later today,” Harvey said as she found the right drawer and slid it open at waist-level, revealing the sheet-draped body. “This couldn’t have waited?”
“No, sorry.”
“Hmm. It’s alright. I was about to fall asleep in my” – she lifted the sheet, and Jamie Anderson, pale and bruised-looking, opened his eyes – “coff - eeee!” The last turned into a shriek, followed by an angry, terrified shout of, “Stop doing that, you assholes!”
~*~
Lanny rustled up some scrubs from a linen closet somewhere, and Sasha bought coffee and a sandwich at the cafeteria – in the upstairs, non-dead part of the hospital. In a small, out of the way, deserted waiting room, Jamie Anderson held the sandwich in one hand, coffee in the other, and looked between the three of them.
“Um,” he said.
“Yeah. ‘Um’ about sums it about,” Lanny said.
Jamie took a big breath that jacked his narrow shoulders up to his ears and let it out slowly. “Okay. So. I’m not dead.”
“Definitely not.” Trina smiled at him, and it was genuine. She’d been a little afraid that being turned changed a person irrevocably. Maybe Chad had been a nice guy, and the change had morphed him into someone callous and violent.
But to her immense relief, Jamie had awakened scared, confused, but polite and gentle. He was a slender, almost-physically delicate boy, saying “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir,” ducking his head in deference and reaching to nudge at glasses that were no longer there. Trina found that she liked him immediately. He was shy, and nervous, and very cute, cheeks flushed from nerves and fright. Nothing about him was monstrous.
“What do you remember?” she asked him.
He frowned and shook his head, looked down at his feet. And then pulled back, clearly marveling. “I can see,” he said, awed. “How…” Shook his head again and looked back up at her. “I could tell someone was following me.” He sighed and looked disappointed in himself. “Maybe I shoulda, I dunno, called 9-1-1 or something. But I didn’t want to be, you know…” He scowled down at his hands. “I know I’m small, and yeah, okay, maybe I’m not all muscly and macho.” Covert glance toward Lanny. “But I wanted to think that maybe I could look out for myself. Not be the wimp who had to call the cops because he thought he heard footsteps. And I was only a block from home.”
“Anybody can get jumped,” Lanny said, “doesn’t matter how big or how strong. Beefed up gym rats get stabbed and mugged, same as everybody else.”
“Yeah, well.” Jamie shrugged. “I got inside my building and thought that was it. The door was locked, no big deal. But then.” He shivered and chafed his hands together. “I was taking my shoes off and somebody knocked on my door. Jessica was out for the night, but she forgets stuff all the time, comes back to get it. I thought it was probably her, and I just opened the door.”
He winced. “It’s fuzzy after that. I invited this stranger in, but I don’t know why. I let him take me into the living room and sit down on the couch. Let him all up in my personal space, even though I’m not into guys like that. I just.” He shrugged. “I wasn’t me. And everything was all warm and good and I just didn’t care. And then my neck hurt.” He touched it now, reflexively, fingers skating over the healing bruise there, the little scabs where Chad’s fangs had punched through the skin. In some ways, the way the bite healed was the biggest proof that he was in fact alive; dead skin didn’t knit itself back together.
“Vampires,” Sasha started, and Jamie jerked hard, turning an incredulous look on him. “Can charm their, um, their victims. Some are better at it than others. You couldn’t have said no if you wanted to.”
Jamie looked at him, then at Trina, then at Lanny, blinking, blank-faced. “I’m sorry. Vampires?”
Trina gave him a sympathetic wince. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“It sounds fucked up,” Lanny said.
Sasha said, “But it’s true. And you are one now.”
“Oh my God.” Jamie looked like he tried to bury his head in his hands, then realized they were full. “Is this some kind of sick joke? Or are you guys having some kind of, I dunno, Twilight LARP that got way out of hand?” He looked almost as hopeful as he did terrified. “Is this a gang initiation? Am I–”
“No,” Sasha said, leaning forward in his chair, expression sympathetic. “It’s very real. Here: listen.” He gave one of his low, rumbling, obviously-not-human growls.
“Shit!” Jamie leapt to his feet, coffee slopping out of his hand and splattering across the tile. He dropped his sandwich and backed away from them, toward the wall.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Trina said, getting slowly to her feet. She held a hand toward him, empty, soft, non-threatening. “It’s not a trick, and we’re not a gang or nerds.”
Lanny snorted. “You’re kind of a nerd, honey.”
“Shut up. Jamie, it’s okay. I promise. I know it sounds beyond crazy, but it’s true. Let Sasha explain it to you, okay?”
His gaze moved from her, to Sasha, and back again. He breathed in little gasps, chest hitching under the too-big scrub top.
“Jamie,” Sasha said, face open, kind. “You wear glasses, yes? But you can see now perfectly fine without them. Better than you’ve ever seen. Yes?”
Jamie didn’t respond, save a little hitch in his breathing.
“You’ve always had trouble breathing, yes?” Sasha continued. “You’re gulping like someone who’s used to it. But it’s just reflex. Your lungs are clear. You’re getting more air than you ever have.”
Jamie’s eyes widened, big as saucers. “How…?”
Sasha stood up slow, so slow, easing toward the frightened boy a fraction at a time, hands held up in a defenseless pose. When he was within striking distance, he held up one flat palm. “Hit me. Hard as you can.”
“What? No.”
Sasha grinned. “Come on, I can take it.”
“No, I…” Jamie pressed his lips together, blushing. In a small voice: “I can’t hit very hard.”
Sasha’s grin widened. “Try. I bet you surprise yourself.”
Jamie stared at him a long moment, and, finding that he was serious, adjusted his stance and balled up a fist. “Don’t laugh,” he muttered, and then hit.
Sasha, supernatural and super-strong in his own right, didn’t get knocked back. But his hand jumped, and the smack rang through the waiting room. Trina could see that the punch had been forceful, that it would have sent even someone as tough as Lanny staggering back.
Sasha shook out his hand, smiling. “See?”
Jamie looked down at his own unimpressive fist. “I…okay. Wow. Okay.”
“Do you believe?” Sasha asked.
Some of Jamie’s amazement faded, replaced with a careful consideration. “I believe something. Just not sure what yet.”
“Okay. We can work with that.”
~*~
Nikita had lived in New York long enough to know all the good, hidden little spots to perform this sort of thing. It wasn’t the first vampire he’d put down in the city, and he suspected it wouldn’t be his last.
The warehouse sat between a parking lot and the kind of four-story apartment building that had slowly evolved into a combination crackhouse/whorehouse as families moved out and seedier elements moved in. It was the kind of place where everyone kept their heads down and no one looked too long at strangers.
This particular warehouse was his favorite. The second floor had once been comprised of wall-to-wall windows on all four sides, all of which had been removed or shattered in the intervening years since its closure, the gaping frames strung up with blue tarps that had all gone to flapping tatters by this point. Empty of everything save the humped fingers of old pipes dug into the ceiling, its floor cool stained concrete, light from the apartment building filtering through the shreds of faded tarp, this was the place where Nikita set down Chad Edwards’s body.
Under the damp and decay, the sharp fresh notes of death and the lingering smudges of former vampire disposals, he could smell the oil and metal tang of the machinery that had once been stored here. He could hear the sounds of passing traffic, distant laughter, and shouting. He could hear, faintly, that Chad Edwards’s heart was still beating.
It wasn’t like in the movie, with wooden stakes and garlic, and crosses. But maybe the stake was the closest approximation of truth, because it all boiled down to the heart. That’s where the life was. It was the reason Rasputin had been shot, stabbed, poisoned, and drowned, and yet still lived, healing slowly in his tomb: they hadn’t removed the heart.
Nikita reached to the small of his back, the sheath tucked in his waistband. The knife he drew with a quiet sound had been Kolya’s, once upon a time. He touched the hilt, briefly, to his forehead. “Thank you, my brother,” he whispered in Russian. And then he knelt to his grisly task.
There were two separate fires burning on the concrete floor when someone climbed into one of the empty windows.
He knew it was Alexei by scent, so he didn’t acknowledge him right away. Alexei may have been a tsarevich in another life, but in this one, he was an impulsive child of a vampire, and he seemed to know it, approaching Nikita slowly, head and shoulders lowered in deference, respecting him as the superior creature that he was.
“You killed him,” Alexei said, voice heavy with sadness.
“I put him down like the rabid dog he was,” Nikita corrected.
The former heir stared into the flames – it was an ugly fire, the man-shaped center black and charred now, the smoke the thick, black greasy kind that left smudges on the exposed beams of the ceiling. The smell threatened to choke Nikita, but he stayed, needing to make sure that it was done.
“How many others have you done this to?” Nikita asked.
He didn’t answer for a long moment. Then: “I didn’t…I didn’t turn them. The others.” He wiped at his face, features drawn and miserable in the firelight. “I didn’t ever mean to.”
“You can’t control yourself.”
“No! No, I can, I…” His shoulders slumped further. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I don’t know what to do with you,” Nikita admitted. He knew that, in any other situation, he would have already dealt with the murderer. But this was Alexei Nikolaevich, and Nikita was adrift.
“Do with me?” Alexei’s head lifted, showing a little rebellion for the first time. “Are you the lord of all vampires?”
Trina’s words came back to him, in a wry twist of his subconscious. “I’m someone interested in justice,” he countered.
Alexei drew himself upright, visibly bristling. “And this is justice? Chekist murder?”
“Is it murder if it’s a monster you’re killing?”
The tsarevich frowned. “Humans eat animals. Are we any different in that aspect?”
“They don’t eat them live.”
“Because they think it’s wrong? Or because they can’t? We are stronger, faster, we live forever – are we not the superior species?”
“We aren’t a species, we’re a curse,” Nikita said, some of his low panther growl bleeding into his voice.
Alexei took a step back, chin kicked up to a defiant angle. “You’re in denial about what you are.”
“I’m not the one killing and turning innocent people because I can’t control my hunger. Your majesty,” he tacked on, sneering.
“Sasha said I’m a disappointment to you.” His face became soft, sympathetic. “I think maybe everyone is.”
“Just greedy blood-drinkers.” But was that true? Hadn’t everyone disappointed him at some point? Everyone save his brave Katya, and his Sasha, his dead brothers. His Trina, who a part of him wanted to pull into a crushing hug – my baby, my baby – save for his worry that he would indeed crush her.
He shoved all sentimental thoughts roughly aside. “Immortality isn’t a blessing, Alexei. I suspect you don’t know that yet, but you’ll learn it, in time.”
Alexei shook his head. “Immortality beats dying early. Take it from the boy with the terminal illness: the burden of forever far outranks the burden of never.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Maybe. But maybe not.” Alexei spared one last glance to the fires – the body and the heart burning separately, crumbling to ashes that Nikita would gather in his pockets and throw into the Hudson. “I expect we’ll see each other again.”
“Yeah.”
Alexei bowed, formal and courtly, then turned and leapt through the open window, the tarp nothing but scraps that slid across his shoulders and head as he disappeared from sight.
Nikita exhaled, his insides empty and shaking afterward.