Page 207 of White Wolf

“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 believesomething. 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.”

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