Page 272 of Golden Eagle

“Do any of you have a flame thrower?” Severin asked.

Val said, “He does make an excellent point.”

Sasha sneezed, and Nik knew it was an urging.Let’s hurry!

“Lead the way, then,” Nik said with a sigh.

~*~

Alexei was going to bleed to death. He understood that now. And what a joke: a vampire bleeding to death. The thing that had tried to kill him all his mortal life would finally succeed, more than a century too late.

This time, it did not hurt as it had when he was a boy; the blood wasn’t trapped beneath his skin, swelling, pressing, pinching. He’d asked his mother once, he remembered distantly, his head all a gray fog, if the pain would stop when he was dead. He’d wanted to be dead, a few times, like at Spala, when the pain was boundless and vicious.

Here now, he was only cold. He shivered uncontrollably, and his vision swam in and out, and he heard Mama’s voice, that tender voice from his boyhood sickbed. She was singing to him, soft and sweet, her hand reaching now and again to press to his forehead, checking for fever, though he couldn’t feel her touch.

And someone was whining, still. An ugly sound, like one of the dogs when they’d been stepped on. His spaniel Joy, or Mama’s old Scottish Terrier – what was his name again? Ah, Eira. Someone needed to pick the dog up, to soothe it and tell it to hush. It just keptwhining…

Another sound intruded on his sluggish drifting – aloudsound.

He heard shouts, and a rush like a hard wind, and then a scream. And then footsteps.

Dangersome rapidly fading part of his hindbrain yelled at him.Get up, get up, danger.

But he couldn’t get up. Could only lift his head, weakly, his eyesight blurred and dim.

Someone hurried toward him. Mama? But no, Mama had been right here beside him a moment ago. Papa? The long coat…but, no, Papa didn’t have red hair, or a boy’s freckled face, or…

“Alexei.” A hand touched his shoulder, and it was real, real enough that he knew Mama’s hand had only been a dying hallucination. “Alexei, can you hear me?”

He thought he mumbled something, but it was very hard to move his mouth.

Severin, he thought, finally, putting a face to the mop of red curls, and the big, worried green eyes. His little mage boy. The rushing sound had been his fire.

Another voice spoke up, somewhere off to his right, weak and threaded with pain and wooziness. “He’s a hemophiliac,” this person –Dante, his brain screamed,that’s Dante!– said, slurring a little. “You have to stop the bleeding, and then he needs to feed, or he’ll go into a coma.”

A coma? Yes, that was right. Vampires didn’tdie– not unless you took the heart out.

That was how Rasputin had died: Sasha had ripped out his throat and then clawed the still-beating heart out of him. Had fed it to Nikita, because he loved him, and wanted him to live.

Why had he ever hated them for that? For what they’d done to Grisha?

Why was he thinking of thisnow?

He scraped together what voice he could. “Dante?”

“I’m here,” he answered. And cleared his throat. Chains clinked together. “I’m right here. Sev,put pressure on the bleed.”

“Right, right.” The boy’s face stood out stark white above Alexei, the veins visible in his eyelids, and at his temples.

Alexei’s arm lifted; he could barely feel it. Pressure came down on the inside of his elbow. Severin breathed raggedly through his mouth, he smelled of acrid panic, but his hands didn’t fumble. He stacked up gauze pads, and then wound surgical tape over it. “The key,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Let me…”

He went away – Alexei closed his eyes a moment, just to rest, so tired – and returned. The cuffs opened,clink, clink, clink, clink. Severin tried to haul him upright.

A very bad idea.

“Oh,” Severin said, on a gasp, and after a whole lot of swaying and choking down of bile on Alexei’s part, he was back flat on the table. “You need to feed. Right.” When Alexei slitted his eyes, he saw Severin pushing up one sleeve.

“Wait,” Dante said. “Sev, if he feeds from you, will it dampen your magic?”

---