Page 94 of White Wolf

Philippe lifted his head from his breakfast, licked a bit of rabbit grease from the corner of his mouth, and glanced around their circle, gaze cautious. He knew what Nikita was thinking, and his face took on that careful expression he wore whenever he told them something he thought they didn’t want to hear. “Right then.” He wiped his hands on the bit of rag he’d spread across one knee – because he was the kind of asshole who used a napkin in the middle of the woods – and cleared his throat.

“As you’ve all probably guessed,” he said. “It was important that Sasha meet his wolves on their turf, and have a chance to learn how to work together with them as a pack. It’s been a successful endeavor, I think we can all agree.” He looked at Sasha almost proudly.

Sasha, by contrast, was staring off through the trees, humming quietly under his breath and scratching the omega wolf behind the ears, unconcerned.

“Get to the point,” Nikita prompted.

“Very well. I’ve told you that I can see things that are coming. Not distinctly, and not exactly. But I do know that battle is coming to Stalingrad. It will be long, and it will be brutal. It will be chaos…and chaos is always a very good time in which to accomplish extraordinary things.”

Everyone around the fire sat up straight.

Katya dropped the rabbit leg in her hand; it tumbled to the pine needles and one of the wolves slunk in to gobble it up unobtrusively.

Sasha had turned a narrow-eyed look on the old man. “You mean–”

“Take the city,” Philippe said.

“Christ,” Ivan said. “Are you serious? He’s serious, isn’t he?”

“This is what you’ve all wanted,” Philippe argued, spreading his hands to include all of them. “You want to take down the Bolsheviks, well, it starts with a city, my friends. And then another city follows, and then another.”

Katya, white-faced, said, “Generally, when someone overthrows a government, they have their government planning to replace it.”

“Quite right, my dear. And there will be one, but all of us here are soldiers or servants. Not leaders, to be sure.”

“Hey,” Feliks protested.

“Your master,” Nikita guessed, a grim sort of dread settling in his belly. “You want to wake him up and put a crown on his head, don’t you?”

Philippe grinned at him. “And what’s wrong with that? He’s more devoted to the Romanovs than even you, my dear captain.”

Nikita snorted. “Who is he?”

But he knew…in some way. An awful, crawling sort of certainty. The sort of thing that he’d suppressed because it was too terrible to consider.

His hand went to his pants pocket, the hard, cool shape of the bell there, a talisman that was proof of what the old man was about to say.

“You haven’t guessed, yet?” Monsieur Philippe asked, smiling – always smiling, damn him. “The most famous of Russian vampires. My master, and now Sasha’s. Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.”

~*~

Night before last, Kolya had pulled Nikita aside before bed, when the others were settled down, and the fire had been doused. Only the barest hint of moonlight had lit his face, his eyes shining like onyx in his shadowed face. But Nikita had been able to read his disquiet well enough.

“You told her,” Kolya had said, and it hadn’t been a question.

“She’d already figured it out.” Which had been only partially a lie.

Kolya snorted. “She’s Red Army, Nik. And a stranger.”

“She’s an orphan. She has nobody but us now.”

Kolya tilted his head. “You think she cares for you so much she would betray her country?”

“The country betrayedher.”

“If you say you trust her, then that’ll have to be good enough for me.” It sounded threatening, though.

Nikita swallowed, throat dry. “I trust her.”

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