Page 188 of White Wolf

“That one,” Trina said, shakily, pushing at his shoulder to get him to let up.

The other vampire had gone limp and pliant in Sasha’s grip, head bowing in obvious submission. Sasha leaned in close, like he was sharing a secret. He pulled back when Trina and Lanny reached the landing, and that was when she saw the bright flash of blood.

“What are you doing?” The question came out shrill and terrified, and she was too wired to care if that made her sound weak.

Sasha turned to her with blood on his lips, pulling a disgusted face, spitting a big red glob onto the floor. “He smelled familiar. Ugh! I had to make sure.”

“Make sure of what?” she shouted.

The vampire looked up at her, big blues eyes, contrite and cowed.

“He smells like Rasputin,” Sasha said, spitting again, coughing on the taste. “And he tastes like him too.”

“What the fuck?” Lanny said, in the bland tone that meant he’d reached his limit and was totally done with the whole scenario.

“How is that possible?” Trina demanded. “Rasputin’s been dead for seventy-five years!”

“Yes, ma’am, he has,” the vampire said…in a Russian accent. “So have I. Or at least I thought so. But he turned me before the assassination.”

Her insides turned to ice. Her skin pebbled into goosebumps. “What assassination?”

“Of the royal family, ma’am,” he said, politely.

“Tell her who you are,” Sasha growled, pressing on his windpipe.

The boy – and he really was just a boy; young and sweet-faced, smooth-skinned – swallowed with obvious difficulty, but managed a nod. “My name is Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, last tsarevich of Russia.”

41

THE HEIR WHO CRAWLED OUT OF THE PIT

Nikita hated police precincts, and he liked to pretend it had nothing to do with the teeny, tiny kernel of rightness he felt deep in his black soul whenever he walked inside one. His years of pretending to be a cop – actually being one, if he allowed himself to admit it – were far outweighed by his years as a mechanic, as a grocer, as a forklift operator, as a jobless bum, as a short-order cook, but those years in Russia, when he’d been a hopeful idiot, trying to make some bit of difference had stamped him indelibly. He was a cop, at heart, and he guessed he always would be. It didn’t matter that it was American, that it looked and sounded nothing like the old Cheka headquarters he’d called home in 1942, the buzz of the place where his great-granddaughter worked stirred up old impulses. His fingers itched for a smoke, and his stride loosened a little, and by the time he sidled up to Sasha in the lobby he felt very much like his old clear-eyed, cruel-faced self from three generations ago.

Sasha was leaned back against a bare patch of wall between a DUI poster and a corkboard decked with fliers of all sorts. One booted foot propped against the painted cinderblocks, arms folded, watching the foot-traffic from under his lashes like a pissed-off millennial. His head lifted and his eyes brightened when he spotted Nikita.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” Nikita leaned his shoulder against the wall right beside him, turned so he could watch the comings and goings at the desk. Sasha leaned into him, briefly, a press of his side down Nikita’s front, a brief duck of his head, his face ghosting into the hollow of Nikita’s throat. A submissive, wolflike seeking of comfort, and an intimate packmate greeting.

Nikita cupped the back of his neck, briefly, gave him a quick squeeze. Sasha whined once, softly, and then straightened, and they pretended to be human again.

“It’s really him?”

Sasha nodded. “Yeah. I made sure.” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth and that confirmed what Nikita had suspected when he walked up: he smelled vampire blood.

Curiosity got the best of him. Voice too low for passing humans to make out clearly: “Does he taste like me?”

Sasha gave him an offended look.

“We have the same sire.”

“Rasputin tastedevil. You taste likeyou.”

Nikita bit back a grin. “So I taste evil, then.”

“Ugh,” Sasha said, “shut up.”

He chuckled, but was touched, in a way. He laid awake at night sometimes, thinking of Rasputin’s curse in his veins, imagining it as black sludge clogging the pathways of his heart. Was there such a thing as a good vampire? He didn’t know. Maybe. But he knew the one who’d sired him wasn’t, and that had to mean that he in turn wasn’t either.

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