Page 260 of Golden Eagle

The limb severed. The vampire fell, what was left of his leg gushing blood. He twisted over onto his back, snarling, hands lifting.

Val stood, smooth and unwavering, and lifted his bloodied sword; pressed the tip to the vampire’s chest, right above his heart. He smiled. “Apologies. I feel it’s important I tell you my blade is called Mercy.” And pressed down.

Blood welled up and overran the vampire’s mouth. He gasped wetly, jerked a few times, and stilled.

Nikita wanted to chastise Val for enjoying this – but he was enjoying it, too. He’d examine that feeling later.

Will and Lanny returned. Lanny’s arm was oozing blood, but he didn’t seem badly hurt, and he’d managed to obtain one of the riot shields. “You boys mind if I lead the way?” he asked, hefting it.

Val motioned toward the open doors with his bloodied sword, still grinning. “By all means.”

~*~

For some reason, it seemed strange that a place as sinister as the Ingraham Institute received regular deliveries of things like toilet paper, and frozen meals on trays, and new bed linens, but they did, and tonight was delivery night for a frozen food truck. It was already backed into the loading bay when Alexei, Dante, and Severin approached. They’d gone the long way around, wrapped up in their dark jackets, arranged – not purposefully – according to height, so that their shadows slanted across the pavement in slender stair-steps, shortest to tallest, with Alexei in the center.

The truck’s headlights were on, and all the little running lights along the roof and body of the trailer. A roll-top door up on the platform beamed out the cool white light of an industrial complex; long, plastic flaps designed to keep out birds held back ropes.

They walked down the length of the truck without slowing, until they reached the back of it, and startled the trucker as he was loading boxes onto a handcart.

“Hey, what are you–”

“It’s fine,” Alexei told him, voice resonant with compulsion, and the man subsided, standing still, hands lax, gaze going unfocused.

They went single-file up the narrow concrete stairs to get to the dock itself, and through the pulled-aside flaps. They entered a wide staging area, with cinderblock walls and concrete floors, a square drain in the center. Crates were stacked along one wall, and several employees in work pants and smocks were carting frost-crusted boxes along on handcarts, through a second set of plastic flaps into what Alexei knew – from Severin and the blueprints – was the kitchen.

“Excuse me,” Alexei said, and, when heads turned toward him, he said, “please evacuate the building. Everything is fine.”

The hand carts were rocked down off their wheels, and the glassy-eyed employees trooped out onto the loading dock in an orderly line.

As they proceeded into the kitchen – a typical industrial kitchen, lined with stainless sinks, ovens, stovetops, centered with long stainless and butcher block prep areas, floored with grubby clay-colored tile – Alexei was aware of a low buzzing in his back teeth, in his bones, even, that was totally internal. The humming of adrenaline barely suppressed. If he thought about it, fixated on the task at hand – the enormity of what they were attempting, larger and more dangerous than anything he’d attempted since killing a pack of Bolsheviks in a Siberian wood – he’d be reduced to a crouching, shaking ball of nerves, keening quietly, a useless child. It didn’t matter how strong vampires were, or what powers they possessed: humans were always more plentiful, often more vicious. They had technology, and innovation, and he’d seen what they’d done to Dante, seen him chained, and shaved, and clapped in silver, helpless to their every whim. He couldn’t survive that; hecouldn’t.

So he didn’t think about it. Pushed all his anxiety ruthlessly down, and followed the script. He was born a royal; he could have followed a script in his sleep.

He compelled the kitchen staff with a few words and the force of his will – with Rasputin’s gift – and sent them to the loading dock, too. The kitchen led into a dining room, and that was where Severin had promised they would find his siblings, sitting down at the metal cafeteria tables for a supper laid out in the compartments of a tray, one of their doctors/tutors/minders trying to make polite chitchat they wouldn’t understand because they lacked all the proper cultural references.

A set of swinging doors gave them access, and they pushed through–

To find the dining room empty. The lights had been cut down to half-brightness, and the tables gleamed faintly beneath them, all empty.

He turned to Severin, his adrenaline starting to lap up his insides like water as a storm came in, toward a level too high to suppress. He had an angry question poised on his tongue, but he swallowed it when he watched Severin’s eyes widen, face paling further beneath his scattering of freckles.

“They’re not here,” he said, with more emotion than Alexei had ever heard in his voice. “They’re supposed to be here. But they’renot.”

Alexei very carefully didn’t sayduh.

“They knew we were coming,” Dante said, grimly.

Alexei strained, and wondered if he heard the staccato cracks of gunshots somewhere deeper in the vast facility. “Why have the regular delivery made?” he asked.

Dante said, voice haunted, “They needed us to have a point of entry.”

It was a trap.

Alexei shivered. “Where to next?” he asked Severin.

The boy swallowed, and considered a moment. “Our room,” he said. Softer: “I think.”

“Lead the way.”

---