Page 121 of White Wolf

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 smellsrotten.”

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 smellswrong.”

“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.

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