Page 208 of White Wolf

“You can’t control yourself.”

“No! No, I can, I…” His shoulders slumped further. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I don’t know what to do with you,” Nikita admitted. He knew that, in any other situation, he would have already dealt with the murderer. But this was Alexei Nikolaevich, and Nikita was adrift.

“Do with me?” Alexei’s head lifted, showing a little rebellion for the first time. “Are you the lord of all vampires?”

Trina’s words came back to him, in a wry twist of his subconscious. “I’m someone interested in justice,” he countered.

Alexei drew himself upright, visibly bristling. “And this is justice? Chekist murder?”

“Is it murder if it’s a monster you’re killing?”

The tsarevich frowned. “Humans eat animals. Are we any different in that aspect?”

“They don’t eat themlive.”

“Because they think it’s wrong? Or because they can’t? We are stronger, faster, we live forever – are we not the superior species?”

“We aren’t a species, we’re a curse,” Nikita said, some of his low panther growl bleeding into his voice.

Alexei took a step back, chin kicked up to a defiant angle. “You’re in denial about what you are.”

“I’m not the one killing and turning innocent people because I can’t control my hunger. Your majesty,” he tacked on, sneering.

“Sasha said I’m a disappointment to you.” His face became soft, sympathetic. “I think maybe everyone is.”

“Just greedy blood-drinkers.” But was that true? Hadn’t everyone disappointed him at some point? Everyone save his brave Katya, and his Sasha, his dead brothers. His Trina, who a part of him wanted to pull into a crushing hug –my baby, my baby– save for his worry that he would indeed crush her.

He shoved all sentimental thoughts roughly aside. “Immortality isn’t a blessing, Alexei. I suspect you don’t know that yet, but you’ll learn it, in time.”

Alexei shook his head. “Immortality beats dying early. Take it from the boy with the terminal illness: the burden of forever far outranks the burden of never.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Maybe. But maybe not.” Alexei spared one last glance to the fires – the body and the heart burning separately, crumbling to ashes that Nikita would gather in his pockets and throw into the Hudson. “I expect we’ll see each other again.”

“Yeah.”

Alexei bowed, formal and courtly, then turned and leapt through the open window, the tarp nothing but scraps that slid across his shoulders and head as he disappeared from sight.

Nikita exhaled, his insides empty and shaking afterward.

45

LIVE FOREVER

To Trina’s surprise, Lanny offered up his place to Jamie, somewhere to lay low until they could figure out what he should do next. He’d looked crestfallen when he realized he couldn’t go home to the place he shared with his roommate, a roommate who thought he was dead. Trina had promised to get all his canvases and paint supplies to him as soon as she could, and Sasha offered to stay with him for a little while, get him settled, make sure he had something to eat – “not blood,” he whispered to Trina as they left.

Once she’d collapsed onto her sofa next to Lanny, leaning against his side, she said, “He seems sweet, doesn’t he?”

She felt him nod, his head rustling against hers. “Yeah.”

“I have a feeling life is only gonna get more complicated from here,” she said, and shoved away the sudden spike of pain, pretending Lanny would be here for all of it, ready to nod and gasp and curse at all of it with her.

He squeezed her hand. “I think so, too.”

~*~

---