Page 40 of White Wolf

Nikita suppressed a shudder and told himself it was because of the cold. “Why can’t you use anothervolunteer?” He said the word mockingly. “Why not someone who’s already strong? Already battle-trained? Like Ivan.”

“It’s a complicated procedure, I’m afraid. It relies less on physical strength and more on the spiritual. The volunteer must be incredibly self-possessed, and have certain psychic inclinations.”

Nikita sighed. “Sounds like bullshit.”

“I imagine it does. But trust me: it has to be Sasha. I’ve been waiting a long time for him.”

Red Square was full of tanks and lorries mounted with machine guns, ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice. Other lorries trucked in crates of ammunition, freshly pressed and still-warm from the factory. The preparedness for war had consumed every aspect of the city.

But also.

The silver sunlight smoothed lovingly over the onion domes of St. Basil’s; turned to stardust on the clumps of melted snow gathered in its window ledges. Cast deep, rectangular shadows along the crenelated tops of the Kremlin wall. Gleamed off the white façade of the GUM. The red star at the top of the Spasskaya Tower winked.

There were many things an outsider could have said of his city, but no one could claim she wasn’t fiercely beautiful.

“Oh,” he heard Sasha say behind him, soft and reverent, and a cautious warmth bloomed behind his ribs.Ohwas right. There really weren’t words on a morning like this.

Nikita’s mother, though she’d lived amid the splendor of Petrograd, had always said she felt small and awed when she stood in Red Square. After having been to Nicholas’s capital himself, now, Nikita could agree with the sentiment. Petrograd’s elegance was distinctly Western in tone. But Moscow’s red brick and Italianate architecture smacked of Ivan the Terrible. There was something visceral about its silhouette against the white sky. A punch-to-the-gut feeling when you thought of the vastness of time.

“Are we…going in?” Sasha breathed as they charted a course for the Kremlin’s main gates.

“Yes,” Nikita said, and felt a twist of fear in his belly. Not for himself, but for the boy.

He’d stopped worrying about his own fate years ago. When someone finally rolled his corpse into a muddy hole in the ground, it would be a good day.

~*~

The major general received them with a smile, standing up behind his desk as the doors opened, waving his secretary off to the side. “Let’s see what you’ve brought!”

But then he got a look at Sasha.

Nikita wasn’t sure what he’d expected of this interaction, but it wasn’t the sudden, almost comical way the major general’s face collapsed, slack-jawed and gaping. He turned to look at Sasha himself, wondering if they’d made a glaring error this morning, overlooked some deformity or flaw.

But no, Sasha looked the same as he had since that first moment in his family’s wooden house in Tomsk. Tall, a little too thin, shoulders broad like he might fill out some day, white-blond hair standing up in messy cowlicks now that he’d pulled his wolfskin hat off and held it between his white, long-fingered hands. If he’d been properly groomed and wearing real clothes, he might have looked like a ballet dancer. And–

Oh. That was the problem, then.

“What is this?” the major general asked, and when Nikita looked back at the man, he saw that his brows and jaw had set into a dark scowl.

“What you asked for,” Nikita said, tone flat, and caught the way Kolya darted a glance to him from the corner of his eye.

“Good morning, Major General,” Philippe said, stepping forward with his constant smile fixed in place. How he managed to look and sound genuinely happy, Nikita didn’t know. Maybe that was the most powerful of his magic. “I’m pleased to announce that our trip to Tomsk was a success. I’d like you to meet Aleksander Ivanovich Kashnivkov.” He motioned to Sasha with a flourish.

The major general paced slowly around his desk, so that he stood in front of it – and in front of Sasha. Sasha who swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple jumped in his throat, pulse fluttering just under his skin.

Nikita felt his hands curl into fists at his sides and forced them open again.

The major general looked at Philippe with mixed anger and disbelief. “This is him?This? Look at him! He’s just a boy. You promised me aweapon.”

“And he shall be.” Philippe held his ground. “During our last conversation, I told you that it would be a lengthy process, and that it would require a special sort of volunteer. That volunteer is Sasha. But.” He sighed, regretful. “I understand that you might have changed your mind–”

“Changed my mind? Ha! We threw all the boys in Moscow at the Nazis – and half the ones from Siberia too! – I can’t afford tochange my mind. But you bent my ear for months about someweapon, and now you bring me this boy-heathen wrapped in wolf skin. One man can’t change the tide of war, Monsieur Philippe. It isn’t possible.”

Philippe’s smile was closed-mouthed and hard-edged. “I think you’ll find that it’s entirely possible, major general, if you’ll just have a little faith.”

~*~

Sasha felt sick. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed that the major general found him lacking, or if the spike of nausea in his belly was pure relief because he might be going home. Or, rather, the oily tang of dread, because even if he wasn’t suitable for Monsieur Philippe’s weapon, there was no way a young, able-bodied man would be allowed to return home when there were all those tanks sitting outside and the Red Army was in need of new recruits to fill them.

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