Red Rooster (Sons of Rome Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  “What can?” Lanny was starting to feel panicked.

  “Enchantment,” Alexei explained. “Rasputin could enchant others, which is why I can, and why Nikita can.”

  “You can too,” Nikita said, clicking away on the keyboard. “Ah, here we go.”

  “But…I don’t want to.”

  “I’ll teach you how,” Alexei said with a wink. “You might like it.”

  “What? Ew, no–”

  “Hand me the flash drive,” Nikita said, snapping his damn fingers again. “Quickly.”

  “Bite me,” Lanny said as he handed it over, then chuckled. “Shit, you probably will. God, what is my life now?”

  Alexei grinned.

  Nikita turned around slowly; the chair squeaked as it spun. His gaze was downright hateful. “Sasha,” he said, forcing the enunciation, “is locked up somewhere having God knows what done to him. You two idiots can crack jokes about your horrible lives on your own time. We need to find him. Now.”

  Unless the teller was his ma, his captain, or Trina, Lanny didn’t, as a general rule, like to be told what to do. But beneath the harsh mask Nikita wore, abject terror flickered in his pale eyes. Whatever panic Lanny might have felt about his theoretical brainwashing abilities, Nikita was feeling ten times that – because his best friend, probably his only friend in the world, who he probably loved more than regular people ever loved their friends, had been kidnapped. And, okay, yeah: Lanny got that.

  He schooled his features and nodded. “Yeah. Alright.” He jerked his chin toward the screen. “What’d you find?”

  Nikita closed his eyes a moment, took a deep breath, nostrils flaring. “I don’t smell him.” Just a whisper. “He’s not here.”

  Lanny hadn’t smelled him either, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. “What does the computer say?” he pressed.

  Nikita lingered a moment, eyes shut, like he could will the horror away. Then he turned back to the screen. “Um.” It was the first time Lanny had heard him utter that syllable; it was rattling to hear. Fearless leaders didn’t show hesitation. “This is a schedule. A shipping one. Lots of dates here – including this afternoon. ‘Live specimen’ it says. I think…” He took a rattling breath. “I think they sent him to Virginia.”

  “Okay. What’s the address?”

  “It’s a post office box. It isn’t…there’s not…” He was hyperventilating.

  “Hey.” Lanny rested a hand on his shoulder and felt the hardness of muscle clenched tight as bone. Nikita was strung so tight it was a wonder he didn’t crack apart like marble. “We’ll find him. You’ve got two cops and some serious freaky weirdos on your side.”

  Nikita snorted.

  “So we’ll find him. Save all that to the drive and then we’ll sniff around a little more – literally. If we can’t find anything, we’ll hook back up with Trina, have another meeting, and go from there.”

  “Yeah. I…okay. Yeah.” The last just a murmur, quiet and scared.

  That was when Lanny understood: this wasn’t about a job, or about preserving the life he’d had before. He was in this now. This world he hadn’t known existed. Hell, he was related to it. He’d been dying, and now he wasn’t; now he had an obligation to the family of the woman he loved.

  “Alex and I are gonna go see what we can find,” he said, patting Nikita’s shoulder.

  “Alex?” Alexei asked, scandalized. “Oh no. I don’t like that.”

  “You turned me into a vampire; I’ll call you whatever I want.” He stepped back. “Meet us out in front in fifteen,” he told Nikita.

  “Yeah.”

  Lanny peeled away and headed out the door.

  Alexei followed.

  Funny, he thought: the prince had always been just that – a prince. He’d never led, and wasn’t about to start now, no matter how bratty and entitled.

  Mona stood at the end of the hall, so Lanny turned the other way, toward an EXIT sign and a stairwell. “If you were hiding a werewolf hostage, where would you keep him?” Lanny asked.

  Alexei said, “The basement, of course.”

  ~*~

  A guard stood at the bottom of the stairs in front of the door to the basement.

  “Watch,” Alexei said. “Learn.” He smiled and his voice turned sugary and soft. “Let us through,” he said, and the man in uniform tugged the door open and stood aside as they entered.

  It was, Lanny had to admit, a handy skill.

  And then all such thoughts were swept aside as he got a good look at the open expanse that stretched before them.

  White walls, white floors, and table after table. Some that looked normal, more that looked like doctor’s office exam tables, elevated and covered in paper. Some with, he noticed with alarm, gynecological stirrups at the ends.

  “What the fuck?” he said to himself.

  A boy appeared in front of them, not there one minute, and right in their faces the next. Lanny almost hit him.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his voice flat, his hair bright red.

  Alexei startled a moment, but recovered admirably. “Sure we are,” he said, smiling at the boy, leaning forward to put his hands on his knees so the two of them were on eye level. “What’s your name? Why don’t you show us around?”

  “You aren’t supposed to be here,” the boy repeated, frowning.

  “Um…” Lanny started.

  Alexei’s smile turned brittle, teeth bared. “Show us around,” he commanded.

  The boy tilted his head. “Who are you?”

  “Fuck,” Lanny said. “We’re fucked.”

  Alexei held up a staying hand. “Hello,” he said, trying again. “We’re looking for a friend of ours. Maybe you’ve seen him. His name is Sasha.”

  The boy blinked at him. “Yes,” he said, toneless. Creepy as one of those fucking kids from The Shining. “He was a bad wolf.”

  “Where is he?” Lanny demanded, half-elbowing Alexei out of the way.

  The boy blinked some more. “Gone.”

  ~*~

  Nikita clicked through files in a rush, scanning each only briefly before rejecting it or saving it to the flash drive. Most were useless. But words jumped out at him here and there: wolf, subject, volunteers. This wasn’t just about Sasha, in all likelihood: Trina would want as much information about the Institute’s operation as possible. She had that look on her face, that mulish set to her mouth that reminded him so much of Katya. This place had offended her, and she wanted to pick it apart.

  But for him, it was entirely about Sasha.

  His heart lurched and skipped, his pulse erratic and loud to his own ears. His palms and the soles of his feet itched with anxiety. Sweat slid in slow beads down his spine, gathered in the dip of his lower back. A panic attack, humans would have called it. That sounded about right.

  Every time he blinked, he saw Sasha laid out on a table in a secret lab north of Stalingrad. Saw the delicate blue tracks of veins beneath his skin, the youthful knobbiness of elbows, the finger-wide gaps between ribs. And he saw Philippe’s knife driving into his heart. He replayed the sound, over and over, of the blade pushing through skin, and meat, and ribs, and finding home.

  He used to think that being turned was the worst thing that had ever happened to Sasha; a stupid hope that had been dashed the moment he realized he was missing. There were worse things, much worse, and he imagined them all, breathing in short little gasps through his mouth, as he finally abandoned the computer and went to find the others.

  He took the long way. Walked through every floor, from one end to the next, nostrils flared, searching… But really he’d known the moment he walked into the lobby that Sasha wasn’t here. He’d never been here. He clung to some sort of feverish hope, though, until he finally reached the basement, waved a security guard aside with a look, and found Lanny and Alexei standing in front of a red-headed little boy looking like a couple of cobras who’d been charmed by a mongoose.

  “What are you idiots doing?”
<
br />   Their gazes darted to him. Alexei seemed frightened. “I can’t – he won’t listen – there’s no–”

  The boy turned his head slowly, his expression one of glazed indifference, reptilian and shiver-inducing.

  And then Nikita caught the scent: scorched paper, singed hair. The scent of flame made flesh that all of his ilk shared.

  Horror warred with fury. He snarled, and felt his lips peel back, his fangs dropping. “He’s a mage,” he growled.

  Lanny blinked.

  Alexei, though, took a hasty step back, hissing.

  “Get out, both of you,” Nikita said, and for the first time in hours he felt a welcome sense of calm close over him. Being without Sasha – having any distance between them at all – made him want to claw at his own face. But this…this he could handle. This stirred up only one emotion: cold hatred.

  For once, Alexei didn’t argue. He grabbed Lanny – “Hey, wait, what’s going–” – and dragged him back out through the door.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” the boy said, looking up at Nikita without fear, or anger, or any emotion at all.

  “No.” Nikita lifted his hand, and settled it around the boy’s throat. “I’m not.”

  ~*~

  Trina knew when they trooped in that that news was bad. If they’d found Sasha, they would have called her. Their long faces confirmed what she’d already thought: that Sasha was gone.

  “No luck, huh?”

  Alexei shook his head. “There was no sign of his scent there.”

  Nikita threw the flash drive onto the table, expression hard to read as he stared at it. “I found a shipping address in Virginia. It’s a P.O. box.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well, at least that’s a start.” She tried to inject a little hope into her voice.

  He snorted and dropped into a chair, head tipped down.

  Lanny came to stand in front of him, arms folded in a way she knew was intended to make his already-impressive biceps look even bigger. “You gonna tell her what you did?”

  “No.”

  “What did he do?”

  “We found this creepy fucking kid in the basement,” Lanny said, voice tight with anger, tendons leaping in his neck. “And this one’s all ‘I’ll take care of it.’” His Russian accent was horrible. “And he killed him!”

  “You what?” When Nikita continued to stare down at his lap, she glanced at Alexei, who shrugged. “Nik, did you kill a child?”

  “Real badass, your gramps,” Lanny said.

  “Hush. Nikita.” He deigned to flick her a sideways look. “What did you do?” If he was this upset over Sasha…if he was growing unhinged…

  “I didn’t kill a child,” he said. “I killed a mage.”

  “Oh.” Surprise knocked her back in her chair. “They have a mage?”

  “They don’t anymore.”

  “Because you killed him,” Lanny insisted. “Jesus, is no one else disturbed as fuck about this? He killed a little kid.” He looked to Jamie, to Alexei, finally to her, betrayal in his eyes. “Christ, Trina, say something!”

  She took a deep breath. “You didn’t see Philippe. Not the way I did.”

  “Oh my God. You’re…you’re okay with this? You’re okay with this.” He scrubbed a hand back through his hair. “How are you okay with this?”

  “I didn’t say I was.” But, oddly, she was. She felt that dissonance inside herself again, the part of her that had urged Lanny to seek vampirism as a means of staying alive. She’d always thought that she was reasonable, and moral; shocked by all the things that were supposed to shake her. Properly repelled. But she was finding, more and more, that her hard moral line wasn’t so hard; it shifted. A startling, unwanted realization, but an undeniable one all the same.

  Nikita sighed. “Mage or not, he was a witness – a witness we couldn’t enchant into forgetting he’d seen us. A witness who could tell everyone in that building that we’d been there, and then come set us all on fire. Is that what you wanted? You’re a cop,” he said, disgusted. “Think like one.”

  “You aren’t supposed to kill kids.”

  “I didn’t.” Nikita met his gaze, eyes dangerous and pale. “I killed a monster.”

  Trina cleared her throat. “Guys?”

  They took a long moment to turn toward her, staring one another down.

  “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking while you were gone, and the address confirms it: Sasha’s in Virginia.”

  Nikita nodded. “I’ll–”

  “We’ll,” she insisted, “need to all be working together on the same page. No heroes, no running off half-cocked. We need to go to Virginia, and we need to find the facility. Maybe you guys can track Sasha by scent, but maybe not. We need some intel, and lucky for us, we’ve got a man on the inside.”

  Everyone stared at her.

  “Val.”

  Nikita said, “No.”

  “Yes. He’s there. He’s our only source of information, and unlike these Institute people, he’s never actually tried to hurt any of us. In fact, he’s been a help. So. We need to call him up and have a conversation.”

  Lanny snorted, face screwed up like he’d bitten into a lemon. Disgusted with all of them. “Yeah? How you gonna do that?”

  “Philippe conjured him with a séance once.”

  “You a witch now?”

  “No.” She smiled a little. “My grandmother is.”

  No one had been expecting that.

  “How about a trip to Buffalo?”

  ~*~

  Lanny was angry with her. He probably thought she was monstrous for not caring about the boy Nikita had strangled. But those were problems for her to worry about later. Now she had to pack.

  It had only been two days, but she thought there was a dusty stillness about her apartment, like it was already preparing for her to leave it for longer. For who knew how long. She’d already called the precinct and told them there was a family emergency – not a lie – and that she’d didn’t know when she’d be back in town. She wasn’t sure if she’d have a job when she got back; she wasn’t sure if she cared at this point.

  She dragged her suitcase out of the closet and started stuffing clothes in it, some for summer, some for fall, plenty of essentials.

  Nikita stood with his shoulder propped in the bedroom doorway, hands in his jacket pockets. “You don’t have to do this,” he said, quietly, and she paused.

  Trina set down the shirt she was holding and turned to face him.

  Away from the others, he looked younger. Less certain. No, scratch that: he looked terrified. He’d chewed at his lip until his fang drew blood, and the quickly-closing scab looked angry and painful. He’d been running his hands through his hair, and it fell limp and greasy on his forehead.

  She stepped closer, wanting to comfort him, not sure how. “You two have been together a really long time.” She tried to duck her head and catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at her. “I know you love him–” He flinched away from the word, and she put her hand on his arm; he flinched from that, too, but not as violently. He took a shivery breath. “No, it’s okay. I know. He’s the only person you’ve got in the world.”

  His eyes lifted, frightened and ashamed through the screen of his lashes. “I should have had him with me. I shouldn’t have–” His breathing hitched. “I shouldn’t have left him. If something happens to him…” He swallowed, throat clicking.

  “It won’t.”

  His mouth twisted.

  “He’s really tough. You know that. You showed me that. Have a little faith, and I promise we’ll get him back.”

  “You don’t have to,” he repeated. “Your job–”

  “Isn’t the most important thing in the world. My family comes first, and that includes you and Sasha.”

  He breathed shallowly a moment, then jerked a nod and pulled back.

  She returned to packing, marveling a little at her willingness to abandon the career she’d worked so hard to cultivate. But no, she told herse
lf with a mental shake. She loved her job because it was a way to help people – to right a few of the world’s wrongs. But the second that job prevented her from doing the right thing? Well, it wasn’t worth much after that.

  Her phone pinged with a text alert from Harvey: call when u can.

  Trina sighed. She needed to make one more stop after this, before she threw caution to the wind.

  Speaking of which…

  Just before she zipped her bag, she turned back to her sock drawer and contemplated the little bronze bell in its corner. The bell that had rung in Nikita’s pocket a lifetime ago.

  “Dark forces, huh?” she murmured, and slipped the bell into her own pocket. She had a feeling they would need all the help they could get.

  ~*~

  “Huh,” Jamie said when he caught sight of the car Lanny had stored in his building-supplied parking spot. It was a five-or-so-year-old Ford Expedition, plain gray, dirty and unremarkable.

  Lanny opened up the rear hatch and started stowing their things in it. “What?”

  “I was expecting something…more you,” he said, gesturing to the SUV.

  Lanny glanced back over his shoulder, frowning. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know.” Jamie shrugged. “Your apartment was all home gym, and protein powder, and every issue of Maxim ever. I guess I was expected a jacked-up Jeep, or a hot rod or something.”

  “A…hot rod? Wow.” He whistled. “First off: insulting. Way to stereotype. And second: you don’t know shit about cars, do you?”

  Jamie felt his cheeks heat. “I know…a little.”

  “Uh-huh.” Lanny resumed stowing their bags. “This is practical. I can fit my whole home gym back here, thank you very much.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t say ‘ah,’ like you know shit about me.” But it wasn’t said meanly. Jamie was beginning to learn that beneath the muscles, and the broken nose, and the intimidating cop routine, Lanny was actually kind of fun. And funny. “I’m offended you think I’m such a douchebag.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Uh-huh. This all your shit?”