Page 193 of Golden Eagle

37

The morning had dawned cold and overcast, clouds piling up as the sun crept up between the buildings. Now, just after ten, a cutting, frost-tinged wind cut down the alleys, tumbling bits of paper trash and a few sad, tattered leaves. Sunlight filtered sadly through the gloom, and the air smelled strongly of precipitation; it would rain soon.

Alexei buttoned his long wool coat up to his chin and flipped the collar up to protect the back of his neck. He was shaking, and determined to pretend it was only the wind, and not mostly nerves.

“It’s not too late to change your mind,” Dante said beside him, voice low and soothing. He looked mostly like a Basil this morning, his hair loose and whipping around his face in long, un-pomaded tendrils, catching at his mouth. His coat was thick, and shapeless, his jeans tucked into utilitarian boots. He looked like an entirely different person than the sleazebag who haunted Nameless most nights.

His face, when Alexei turned to him, held no small amount of pleading, his mouth pressed into a thin, tense line.

It was awfully tempting a moment, the idea of calling this off. But he forced the thought away with a vicious mental shove, shaking his head. “No. They’re already here. And I – I need to do this.” He shoved his hands in his pockets so Dante wouldn’t see the way they curled into tight fists, and looked away across the water.

They were on the river, in an old, rutted lot ringed by piles of gravel, alongside a low, rusting warehouse that had housed a construction company that had been shut down a few months before. A few sad bulldozers crouched in the weeds along the timber-walled drop-off into the water. It felt very cliched, very like being in a primetime cop show, but that was the thing about living in New York: those old clichés existed for a reason, and this wasn’t the sort of meeting that begged for mortal witnesses. He’d scented a few humans, but they smelled of chemicals – drug dealers or drug buyers, and they didn’t pose any kind of real threat.

“Lex,” Dante said, even lower, and he turned again, surprised by the way Dante’s face had gone even paler, even more grave.

“What?”

He took a short breath, and let it out through flared nostrils. “I didn’t really ever think you’d…well, anyway. Before Gustav gets here, I need to tell you something.”

~*~

Trina lowered her binoculars and let them dangle around her neck. “They look awful twitchy,” she said, lifting her chin toward the duo standing down below amidst the puddles and old bulldozer scrapes of the equipment lot below. They were all ranged along the edge of the roof, the lip of it just tall enough to provide good cover from anyone looking up from below. The perfect vantage point, though she knew Gustav and his Familiar would smell them once the wind shifted. For now, it blew toward them, off the water, ripe with East River stench.

It had been a surprising morning – to put it mildly.

Nikita and Sasha had come by the apartment earlier to meet up with them so they could all make the trip together, and they hadn’t been alone.

Because she’d been inside Nikita’s head, and seen his memories, she recognized Kolya immediately. But she hadn’t believed it was possible. Even after all she’d glimpsed through Nik’s memories, all that she now knew about vampires, and wolves, and mages, the idea that Kolya was here, real, in the flesh, that he looked like he had when he’d died – plus a scattering of silver-pink scars on his face and hands…that she hadn’t been able to grasp; the knowledge ephemeral as a smoke trail, wisping through her fingers when she reached for it.

She went, embarrassingly pliant, when Lanny eased her down to sit on the couch and brought her a mug of coffee, hot and black. The first few sips, the shocking heat of them, the reality of the fragrant steam in her nose, grounded her. Allowed her to finally take a breath and croak out, “Really?”

Kolya had stood in her living room, stiff and straight, clothed in a long black jacket, the hood pushed back off tangled dark hair that was longer than she remembered, his expression only visible at the edges of the blankness he’d pulled into place: distress along the straight line of his mouth, and something like wonder in his eyes.

“I had the same reaction,” Nik had said, rueful, as Lanny passed him coffee.

Sasha had snorted. “Only much worse.” Then he’d explained it to them, what Val had told him about the Necromancer, a mage named Liam.

So it hadn’t been a miracle at all, which, while depressing, made it feel more real. Of course no benevolent entity had given Nikita and Sasha a member of their old pack back; of course it had been the machinations of yet another cruel person who would use them. Kolya was a walking manipulation.

But he was here, and no longer the thrall of the mage who’d raised him, and when he spoke, his voice rusty as an old blade left out in the rain, there was true life in his voice, even if choked-back. “You look like her,” he’d said to Trina, and she’d blinked.

Nikita had tipped his head, silently. Like Katya. Nikita had told her the same thing, right after they’d met.

It had been the sort of morning that beggared belief, the kind that rendered everyone touched by it semi-conscious and drifting. They could have spent a whole day sitting around the apartment, drinking coffee, and then vodka, talking in hushed voices, grappling with the sheer impossibility of it.

But they had a meeting to get to, because living this kind of strange life didn’t give you time to sit and ponder things, only two choices: act, or react. She’d always been one for acting, personally.

“He’s not used to standing his ground,” Nikita said, with some contempt. “And God knows about the other one.”

“He cares about Alexei,” Jamie spoke up, voice thready, nearly snatched off by the breeze. When Trina craned her neck to look at him, he hunched down into his coat collar, the blush he’d been wearing all morning deepening.

When he’d shown up with Alexei and Dante, Lanny had sniffed loudly and said, “An orgy, kiddo? Really?” Jamie’s cheeks had been stained like ripe apples ever since.

When Nikita glanced at him now, Jamie shrugged and said, “I’ve spent more time around him than you guys. He’d not – he’s notbad.”

“What a ringing endorsement,” Nikita quipped.

Trina glanced back toward the driveway that led in from the main road. “Hush. They’re coming.”

---