Page 73 of Red Rooster

And then Nikita caught the scent: scorched paper, singed hair. The scent of flame made flesh that all of his ilk shared.

Horror warred with fury. He snarled, and felt his lips peel back, his fangs dropping. “He’s a mage,” he growled.

Lanny blinked.

Alexei, though, took a hasty step back, hissing.

“Get out, both of you,” Nikita said, and for the first time in hours he felt a welcome sense of calm close over him. Being without Sasha – having any distance between them at all – made him want to claw at his own face. But this…this he could handle. This stirred up only one emotion: cold hatred.

For once, Alexei didn’t argue. He grabbed Lanny – “Hey, wait, what’s going–” – and dragged him back out through the door.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” the boy said, looking up at Nikita without fear, or anger, or any emotion at all.

“No.” Nikita lifted his hand, and settled it around the boy’s throat. “I’m not.”

~*~

Trina knew when they trooped in that that news was bad. If they’d found Sasha, they would have called her. Their long faces confirmed what she’d already thought: that Sasha was gone.

“No luck, huh?”

Alexei shook his head. “There was no sign of his scent there.”

Nikita threw the flash drive onto the table, expression hard to read as he stared at it. “I found a shipping address in Virginia. It’s a P.O. box.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, at least that’s a start.” She tried to inject a little hope into her voice.

He snorted and dropped into a chair, head tipped down.

Lanny came to stand in front of him, arms folded in a way she knew was intended to make his already-impressive biceps look even bigger. “You gonna tell her what you did?”

“No.”

“What did he do?”

“We found this creepy fucking kid in the basement,” Lanny said, voice tight with anger, tendons leaping in his neck. “And this one’s all ‘I’ll take care of it.’” His Russian accent was horrible. “And hekilledhim!”

“Youwhat?” When Nikita continued to stare down at his lap, she glanced at Alexei, who shrugged. “Nik, did you kill achild?”

“Real badass, your gramps,” Lanny said.

“Hush. Nikita.” He deigned to flick her a sideways look. “What did you do?” If he was this upset over Sasha…if he was growing unhinged…

“I didn’t kill a child,” he said. “I killed a mage.”

“Oh.” Surprise knocked her back in her chair. “They have a mage?”

“They don’t anymore.”

“Because youkilledhim,” Lanny insisted. “Jesus, is no one else disturbed as fuck about this? He killed a little kid.” He looked to Jamie, to Alexei, finally to her, betrayal in his eyes. “Christ, Trina, say something!”

She took a deep breath. “You didn’t see Philippe. Not the way I did.”

“Oh my God. You’re…you’re okay with this? You’reokaywith this.” He scrubbed a hand back through his hair. “How are you okay with this?”

“I didn’t say I was.” But, oddly, shewas. She felt that dissonance inside herself again, the part of her that had urged Lanny to seek vampirism as a means of staying alive. She’d always thought that she was reasonable, and moral; shocked by all the things that were supposed to shake her. Properly repelled. But she was finding, more and more, that her hard moral line wasn’t so hard; it shifted. A startling, unwanted realization, but an undeniable one all the same.

Nikita sighed. “Mage or not, he was a witness – a witness we couldn’t enchant into forgetting he’d seen us. A witness who could tell everyone in that building that we’d been there, and then come set us all on fire. Is that what you wanted? You’re a cop,” he said, disgusted. “Think like one.”

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