Page 36 of White Wolf

Outwardly – he’d caught a glimpse of his reflection in the fogged kitchen window pane – he looked the same, perhaps with a glint of wildness tucked into the corners of his eyes. But inwardly, he snapped and hissed like an unmoored electrical wire, shaking and tender just beneath his skin. His mother was too young to have been at Alexandra’s court during Philippe’s tenure with the royal family, but other ladies in waiting had seen the man and described him vividly. Armed with her description, and now having seen the fire trick with his own two eyes, Nikita had no doubt that the man sitting across from him was indeed the Monsieur Philippe of Tsar Nicholas’s doomed Asiatic dreams. The conjurer they’d called “Our Friend” – before they gave the title to a holy man from Siberia.

Feliks and Ivan had taken the boys to one of the bedrooms; Nikita could hear Pyotr reading aloud from one of his books, voice tight with nerves, but clear and sweet as ever. He kept his own voice low when he spoke, more from shame at its roughness than any real desire for privacy.

“My mother gave me this,” he said, pulling the bell from his pocket and setting it on the table. It gleamed faintly beneath the light.

Philippe smiled sadly at it, but made no move to touch it – a restraint that left Nikita relieved. He knew his attachment to the thing was a type of obsession, but it couldn’t be helped at this point.

“I remember the day I gave it to Alix,” Philippe said, his smile flickering, wanting to become a grimace. “Nicky didn’t want to dismiss me, but he had to. After the pregnancy–”

“There was no pregnancy,” Kolya said, a simple statement of fact. “The doctor said there wasn’t a child.”

“Ah, yes, but there was. A boy child. I felt it.”

“How?” Kolya pressed.

Philippe turned an amused look to him. “I can conjure fire from thin air, and you want to know how? I know these things. Just as I know you are the oldest son of seven, Kolya Ivanovich Dyomin, and that your youngest sister has bad lungs, that the money you make from the state you use to buy the medicine she needs from a doctor who meets you out behind the hospital on his smoke break.”

Kolya’s face went carefully blank, lips pressed to a thin, white line. He flicked a glance to Nikita, and through the stoic mask of disinterest, Nikita could read his friend’s sudden fear.

Philippe turned to Nikita, next, and he clenched his hand tight around his mug, knowing what would come. “Just like I know what happened at that last village, when you were looking for artifacts, when your friend Dmitri–”

“That’s enough,” Nikita said, throat tight. “We get it. You have…”

“Abilities?”

“Magiya.”

“Yes, that.” The old man took a thoughtful puff on his cigarette. He looked so ordinary: old, and soft, and tired. Completely unremarkable. But he’d madefire. “Your mother was at Alix’s court?”

“You already know that, don’t you?”

Philippe smiled sadly again. “I would like to hear you tell it, Captain. I can know things, yes, but hearing it from a man’s mouth helps me understand it better.”

Nikita sucked down his cigarette all in one go, stubbed it on the tabletop and lit another, pausing to gulp vodka in the breath between. His throat burned, and that was better than the closing-up sensation.

“Yes, she was one of her ladies. Only a girl herself. She was terrified at the end. One of the palace guards – Viktor – helped her escape the night the family fled. He had false documents for her. She changed her name, married a peasant, and disappeared.” He wished he’d brought the bottle with him, hand closing around his empty cup. Kolya saw and got up to fetch it. “It was stupid of her to raise me White. Always a risk. Who can trust a child to hold his tongue?”

“But you did,” Philippe said.

“I did.” Kolya topped up his mug and he nodded his thanks, took a grateful sip. “She knew it was wrong, but she took the bell from the tsarina. She wanted me to have it. To remember what themagicmen had done to ruin the Romanovs.” She’d raised him, ironically enough, to believe fiercely in the occult…and to hate it with every fiber of his being. She could have told him it was all silly parlor tricks – but she hadn’t.

Philippe didn’t appear to take insult. “You’re referring of course to Rasputin.”

“Both of you.”

“I’m afraid we’re not the same sort of animal. I am a mage, yes. But Grigory Yefemyvich was a holy man. Astannik.”

“Whateveryou are, you made them look foolish.”

“Dear boy, we didn’tmakeanyone doanything. People fear the things they cannot understand. They didn’t understand me, and they certainly didn’t understand Rasputin. They didn’t even understand what Nicholas was trying to accomplish.”

“Which was?” Kolya said.

“Expand the empire all the way to the east. Russia could have been so much more. It could have beeneverything.” He sighed and tapped ash from his cigarette. “But that’s over now.”

Nikita swirled the contents of his mug. Vodka always had a way of making him light-headed right away, but the more he drank the more settled he became. It always felt like his soul was tethered just outside his skin, hovering at the very limit of his body. Drinking pulled him back in, grounded him deep in the heavy bones of his shoulders and hips, caged him up like he ought to be.

He took three long swallows and reached for the bottle again. Kolya watched him with that assessing, fatherly gaze he’d adopted since Dima’s death.Did he eat enough? Is this too much?How very un-Russian of him.

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