Page 165 of White Wolf
Rasputin’s hands were very warm as they gripped his neck, tilted his head.
His fangs didn’t even hurt when they pierced his throat.
~*~
Everyone was on fire. Everyone was dying.
Ravens clawed at his face.
Sasha had never been so angry. It was no longeranger– it was a fundamental kind of rage that was a part of him, something instinctual that tugged hard at his insides.
He, he, he, he…
“Shift, you idiot,” Val said beside him, and suddenly he knew.
He was a werewolf, yes. And what good was a werewolf in the shape of a man?
He let the rage fill him, boiling up, rushing into all his corners, through the secret pathways of his darkest veins. It hurt, for a moment, a sweet agony, a fierce ripping apart. And then everything was sharp, and bright, and intense. And he had paws, and jaws, and he was furious, and he wasstrong.
He snarled and ran past the burning, twisting, dying bodies of his friends, his brothers, the smell of magic and hate strong in his nose. His wolves ran with him.
Monsieur Philippe raised a flaming torch of a hand, tried to repel him with his mind.
But Sasha was beyond that. He was himself again, maybe for the first time, and he leapt at the man who’d started all this.
They attacked as a pack. Sasha heard the yelps of his wolves, felt their pain, smelled their blood…but he felt their determination, too. The fire scorched him, but he pressed in anyway. Closed his jaws around fire, sank his fangs into flesh.
It seemed an eternity, but finally he tasted blood, and he tore out the old man’s throat.
The fire went out with a sucking sound, and Philippe lay dead in the snow, blood splashed in wide arcs.
The ravens flew off, his hold on them broken.
In the silence, Sasha looked, and found his pack dead. Killed by fire, by magic.
Animal grief welled within him.
And then he saw Rasputin.
Thestaretsstood holding someone as tenderly as he would a lover, cradling his skull, face pressed into his throat. A figure utterly still, black coat flapping around him. A black fur-trimmed hat lay behind him in the snow, where it had been knocked off.
Nikita. Cold, heartbeat slow and fading.
And Rasputin, hot and pulsing with new power, the bones cracking and popping as the hole in his skull started to repair itself.
The vampire lifted his head, mouth steaming, blood running down his chin. He sighed with deep pleasure, smacked his lips, licked them. Then he opened his hands and Nikita fell back across the snow, limp as a doll, gray-faced. Drained.
Sasha growled, and pounced.
The blood had given Rasputin strength, but hatred, Sasha found out, was stronger.
They toppled to the snow, and though Rasputin flashed his awful silver eyes, Sasha was self-possessed now. A wolf without a pack, without a master, without second thought.
Blood hot and copper on his tongue, electric vampire taste. He tore out his throat. Opened his belly with his fangs. Savaged him until he lay twitching and moaning.
It would take decades underground and weeks of strong blood to heal those wounds.
It would…
