Page 265 of Golden Eagle

It was. On the screen, footage showed the mage walking alongside a woman in a white coat, followed at a hesitant distance by two men in surgical scrubs.

“Where’s Alexei?” Nikita asked, voice coming out rougher than intended. Shit, if that damned tsarevich had gotten himself–

“There.” Will pointed to the neighboring screen, where two limp figures on gurneys were being wheeled down another hall. They passed directly under the camera, Alexei’s face unmistakable.

“Fuck,” Lanny said, a bit numbly. “Now what? Now we’ve gotta go rescue the kids?” He cast a look across them. “Do wegottaeven rescue the kids?” he asked, in an undertone.

If had just been Nikita, he would have said no. What was a little more guilt on top of what he’d carried his whole life? And they were, after all,magekids, and not regular humans.

But Will said, “Yes,” in an unusually firm tone. “They’re Red’s brothers. I won’t leave them here, not after this.”

Val had produced a cloth from his pocket and was wiping his sword down, whistling a tuneless scrap of song. “It shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Yeah,waytoo much fun.

“Can you find the other children?” Nik asked.

“I’ll look.” He put his fingers to the keyboard and began clicking through camera feeds, revealing hall, after hall, after hall, after lab space, after office, after exam room. Privacy hadn’t been spared, even in the big multi-stall restrooms – though at least it was only a view of the sinks.

Two things became apparent.

One: the building was even larger and more complex than they’d anticipated, halls and rooms appearing that hadn’t been on the original blueprints from the building’s previous life.

Two: the place was a ghost town.

“Where is everybody?” Lanny asked.

Will clicked past the bodies they’d dropped, limp and lifeless, save a few of the vampires, who twitched and tried feebly to roll over – those who hadn’t fallen into healing comas.

But nothing living moved through the halls, save the people moving Alexei and Dante, and the people moving Severin.

“Here we are,” Will said, and pulled up a feed that showed a room as white and sterile as every other in his hellscape, only this one held three metal-framed single beds with white linens. One was empty. Two held boys, younger than Severin, both of them sitting up and looking toward the door, like they could hear someone coming.

As they watched the door swung open, and Severin and the woman in the lab coat entered.

The smallest boy got up on his knees, and reached out toward Severin.

“They’ve evacuated,” Val said, walking down the long bank of monitors, gaze flicking from screen to screen. “Or hidden.” He glanced over his shoulder at Nikita, a strange gleam in his eyes. No longer the high of a fight, but something darker, edged with a fear that struck Nik as old, and maybe not even related to this moment. “In my experience,” his voice tightened, “an army only pulls back for two reasons.”

Nikita lifted his brows, too wired, suddenly, to be impatient with the theatrics.

“Because you’ve lost, and the city’s been taken,” Val said, a shiver in his voice, now, “or because you’re scattering your shock troops to make way to–”

“Guys,” Lanny said.

“–give your artillery a go at the enemy.”

Nikita went to Lanny’s side, where he stood staring goggle-eyed at a monitor.

“What in the ever-lovingfuckare those?”

Everyone crowded around to get a look.

It was a cell. An unpainted concrete rectangle with a drain in the center, and a heavy door with a small, barred window that could be nothing else. And inside…

There were five of them. Men. Dressed in rotting rags that had once been clothes, rather than the sterile white scrubs the mages wore. Their hair was wild, and snarled, and they had patchy, unkept beards. They looked like people dressed up for Halloween; like the paid frighteners in a haunted house. No one went around looking like that, mortal nor immortal.

Two stood at the door of the cell, beating at it with their fists, scrabbling with dirty nails at the edges. One slammed his shoulder against it again, and again, and again.

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