Page 170 of White Wolf

Her heart pounded in her throat. “Yeah. That’s the gist of it.”

“Let’s say I believe you…”

She snorted and he shot her a look that saidhold up.

“…let’s say I do. Now.” He was using his Interrogation Voice on her, the one that got all the weepy women to spill their guts; it pissed her off. “Let’s think, just for a minute, about what that might mean to our case. The one where a guy got all his blood drained outside a nightclub.” His brows went up meaningfully.

“Lanny, am I drunk? Or do you think my great-granddad’s our murderer? It can’t be both.”

“I think,” he said, still careful, “that your dad told you a lot of wild stories when you were growing up, and you haven’t been getting enough sleep lately–”

“How can I when I’ve got drunk idiots banging on my door in the middle of the night?”

And then it hit her all over again: Lanny was sick, Lanny was dying, Lanny wouldn’t seek treatment for the big lump in his throat. He…

She was hyperventilating. She clapped a hand over her mouth to cover the sound of it.

Lanny sat forward. “Hey, hey.” Reached for her. “It’s not–”

Trina surged to her feet, hip catching the edge of the table and rattling it. “We’ve gotta get to the hospital,” she said. “Harvey…the morgue…”

She took the two small steps to her sink and peered out the window above it, trying to compose herself. Her upstairs neighbor’s cat, Snickers, sat on her fire escape, bent in an impossible pretzel, washing her back legs with her tongue. A cute cat, calico, with one tattered ear. Sometimes, Trina passed her mostly-empty tuna cans out the window, little bits of burned bacon. She focused on the soothing, unremarkable movements of the animal, tried to get her breathing under control.

Behind her, she heard Lanny’s chair scrape back, the scuff of his socked foot on the linoleum as he walked up behind her; the unsteady sniff of a deep breath, because when he drank too much his several-times broken nose puffed up on the inside and he sounded like a bear crawling out of hibernation the next morning.

“Trina,” he said, low, quiet, full of gravel. His hand landed on her shoulder and his warm breath fanned across her cheek. “Sweetheart–”

“You need to brush your teeth,” she whispered, and he stilled. “And then we need to go.”

It was silent a moment, neither of them breathing.

Then his hand fell away. “Alright.”

It was another long moment before she could move.

37

A PACK OF TWO

Nikita’s last concrete memory of the night before was of dropping down into their piece-of-shit corduroy chair out in the living room and lighting a cigarette. The TV had been on, one of those awful reality shows Sasha loved because they “showed him how to be an American,” the scent of cheap, greasy food wafting up from the brown paper bags Sasha thumped down on the coffee table. Nikita remembered being hungry, a little, but not wanting to eat. And then he remembered…

Ekaterina.

He stared up at the blades of the slow-turning ceiling fan and let the ache wash through him. He’d gotten only one distinct look at her, in the white-washed void between their minds, one quick glimpse of her startled face. She looked so much like his Katya – her great-grandmother. He didn’t think of her often, and when he did, it brought with it a physical pain, the grief – all his pent-up grief – flowering red and deadly behind his breastbone.

He rubbed at his chest with the heel of his hand and found it bare. He craned his neck and a quick look revealed that Sasha had put him to bed, taken off his shirt, and jeans and socks, left him in his underwear, covers pulled up over his waist, a fresh pack of smokes, a lighter, and a glass of water waiting for him on the nightstand.

God, he’d had her inside hismind. Had shown her things, all the bloody, horrible things that happened in ’42. Her family history, he guessed, and maybe she had a right to it, but he felt like the sort of shithead who told ghost stories to children before bed.

He had no idea what time it was, but early light came in through the windows, lazy stripes of it through the blinds and across the bed. Nikita hitched himself up higher against the pillows with a groan – he was weak, shaking, dizzy – and reached for the cigarettes, noting as he did so that he could smell some sort of meat sizzling on the stove, and hear singing – that bad falsetto Sasha used on all the club songs he loved.

The singing – and Nikita was embarrassed he recognized a Rihanna tune – cut off the moment he had his cigarette lit, and a few seconds later Sasha pushed through the half-open door, smiling and eager like a puppy.

“You’re awake. Good!” He flopped down on the end of the bed and grabbed hold of Nikita’s foot, cradling it in his palm the way he would hold someone’s hand. He’d been worried, then, always most tactile when Nikita spooked him. “I’m making breakfast.”

Nikita grunted and exhaled smoke. “Not hungry.”

Sasha gave him The Look.

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