Page 240 of Golden Eagle

“What was that?”

“Is someone there?”

“Where’s Sergei?”

“Wolves,” one said in a panicked voice. “Must be. There’s wolves out there!”

“Sergei! Answer me!”

Slowly, as a unit, they crept up to the edge of the pit, lanterns held high, squinting out into the darkness beyond it.

They didn’t look down. Didn’t see the dead-looking hands that reached up over the edge, knuckles smeared with blood and dirt. Didn’t see the boy that crawled up, using exposed roots and rocks for handholds, fingers digging in like claws.

“Lex,” Dante said, low, urging.

Alexei stood rooted. Watched himself scuttle up out of the pit like something not at all human, and grab one of the Bolsheviks by the ankle.

The man looked down, and screamed. Tried to turn and flee. Young Alexei pounced, and tackled him to the ground. The man screamed as his throat was torn out, the hot copper stench of fresh blood filling the clearing.

Chaos erupted among the others. Shouts, curses, wild prayers – Soviets, it turned out, were atheist until they came face-to-face with a demon, and then they screamed for their Lord and Savior.

One pulled a pistol, and cracked off a shot.

Young Alexei’s shoulder kicked up a spray of blood; the bleeding was too much, too quick, crimson spreading across the back of his dirty white shirt.

But he was feeding now, too, draining the man he’d tackled dry, gulp after gulp.

“Lex,” Dante tried again.

But Alexei kept watching.For Olga, he thought, as his younger self grabbed a man by the jacket lapels and reeled him in close, savaged his throat.For Tatiana. One tried to climb into the lorry and start it, and he dragged him out, screaming, firing his gun wildly into the air. He snapped his neck and fed at his leisure, as the body went limp.For Marie. One tried to grapple with him, and Alexei shoved him down, gouged his eyes; he screamed so loudly it made the veins in his throat bulge, and Alexei sunk his fangs.For Anastasia.

The last he had to chase, his shoulder still bleeding, running fleet and bare-footed over the frozen ground, following the rustle of leaves, and the exhausted panting of the man’s breath. He took him down like a wolf takes a deer. Drank, and drank, until, finally, his own wound started to knit closed.

For Papa.

For Mama.

He stood, bloody, dirty, heaving for breath, skin blue with cold – blood steaming on his mouth, and down his neck, his chest.

“God,” Dante murmured beside him.

Alexei’s younger self turned, head whipping around, eyes glimmering in the dark. Almost as if he saw them.

But then it was another tilt, blur, and they stood in the deep, white snow of a small yard behind a house, its fence too tall to climb, its boards too tightly-overlapped to see through.

Siberia, still, the house where they’d lived in exile, just before the massacre. He and his sisters played, laughing despite the pall of depression he remembered even now, shivering in their coats; nothing they owned was warm enough to keep out the Siberian chill.

Papa stood watching, laughing – though his eyes were sad. Young Alexei whirled and tossed a snowball at him, and Nicholas ducked only a little; he let it hit him. “A marksman,” he declared, the fondness in his gaze tinged with melancholy.

A glance up revealed Mama’s face in the window; she felt too poorly, again, to be outside. She watched them with exquisite sadness.

“The world thought they were monsters,” Alexei murmured. “And maybe they were. But they were my parents, and they loved us.”

“I know,” Dante murmured back.

The next dizzy moment came, and then Alexei stood in the corner of a room, one richly appointed with thick, elegant drapes, ornate scrollwork on the wall paneling. The palace at Tsarskoe Selo. His nursery room; the rocking horse with the real horsehair mane and tail; his collection of toy soldiers, his favorite blocks, stowed neatly on the shelves to the side. He hadn’t played with them in days; had lay quietly in bed, while Monsieur Gilliard read aloud to him, and while Mama bathed his fevered forehead, and prayed over him, and whispered words of love and comfort into his ear, barely registered through the haze of illness.

His younger self rested now in his narrow bed, head propped up beneath a stack of snowy pillows, his skin nearly as pale as the linens, circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes.

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