White Wolf

by Lauren Gilley

  “Jesus,” she said again, just a whisper this time.

  Slowly, the room righted itself and her vision cleared. The awful dizziness seemed to pass. The chills eased.

  Sasha had said something, just before the connection was lost. We want to meet you. They were here, in the city.

  There was just enough light to make out the small, familiar shape of the bell on the floor beside her. She reached for it now with no hesitation; of all the things she’d learned, this bell was the least of it. She lifted it to her face, close enough to make out all its dings and scars. It felt the same – smooth from years of handling, cool from sitting out – but heavier almost. It held meaning now. This was a family heirloom, yes, but before that had always lent itself to vague ideas of dusty old men smoking in fancy pre-Revolution Russian salons. Now, she could see the faces of the people it had belonged to before her: the ruthless mage, Monsieur Philippe; the troubled tsarina, Alexandra; her great-great-grandmother, keeping it hidden and safe, a talisman against the Communists. And then Nikita. With his beautiful blue-gray eyes, and his deep sadness, and deep love, and the sound of his tired heart breaking in a clearing where the snow ran red.

  A lump formed in her throat and she curled her hand tight around the bell. We want to meet you. She was going to meet them. Right the hell now.

  Her cellphone dinged, and she got unsteadily to her feet to retrieve it from her bedside table. She had a new text message from an unfamiliar number.

  This is Sasha. Followed by a string of smiley faces and the wolf face emoji.

  Her smile started deep in her gut and bloomed across her face with an accompanying joy that made her teeth ache. She clapped her hand over her mouth, trying to keep it from growing even more. They were real. They were real.

  Where can I find you guys? she sent back.

  He sent an address that instantly brought to mind a tired brick façade with unchecked ivy growing over the ironwork bars on the ground-floor windows. She knew that building, could be there in ten minutes.

  She was in the process of tapping out a response when she heard her couch springs creak in the other room.

  Lanny.

  Oh shit, how had she forgotten Lanny? She hadn’t, not really, but when she heard him roll over, heard the soft sound of the knitted throw sliding to the floor, the last vestiges of her vision faded away and she was left staring down the barrel of cold reality.

  Her great-grandfather the vampire, and his werewolf BFF were currently living in New York…and one of them might be her murder suspect.

  Shit.

  Her partner was a) hungover, b) not going to believe this shit, and c) dying.

  Double shit.

  She let out a shaky breath. And then her phone rang. Thankfully, her voice was steady. “Baskin.”

  “Trina, this is Harvey,” the ME said, and her normally no-nonsense tone sounded off. “I don’t know how to say this and not sound like an idiot. But. Well. Your DB from the club with the bite wound? Yeah, it’s missing.”

  ~*~

  She took a hot, fast shower that went a long way toward waking her up fully, and then popped a K-Cup of dark roast into the Keurig for good measure.

  “Fuck off,” Lanny mumbled when she shook his shoulder, turning his face into the back of the couch, eyes squeezed shut tight.

  He had both arms flung over his head, his shirt riding up to reveal a stripe of lean, taut belly that was pale in comparison to his arms and face. No shirtless sunbathing this summer, apparently.

  Trina teased her nails across the exposed skin and he grunted and tried to pull his knees up. “There’s coffee.”

  “Go away.”

  She slapped his hip. “Get up, or I’ll pour the coffee on you.”

  “Ugh, you suck,” he said with great feeling, but struggled to a mostly-upright position, eyes still shut.

  “Lanny, Harvey called,” Trina said, kneeling down to dig under the sofa for his boots. He’d managed to kick them underneath in his sleep. “Our DB’s gone missing from the morgue.”

  That got his attention.

  He sat the rest of the way up with a gag and a moan, wiping his hands down his face. “What?”

  “Chad Edwards’ body is no longer in the morgue,” Trina said, setting the boots up side-by-side at the edge of the couch. “Put your shoes on and I’ll get the coffee.”

  She went to do so and heard him swing his legs over the couch with a heartfelt groan. “Wait. What?”

  For once she was glad for the tininess of her apartment, dumping spoons of sugar into his coffee while she explained over her shoulder. “His body’s gone missing from the morgue. Which means.” She slid a mug for herself under the drop and popped in another K-Cup; turned to carry his coffee to him. “Either we’ve got a body snatcher on our hands. Or…”

  “We’ll watch the security tapes.” He squinted up at her when she tapped his shoulder, reached with two shaking hands to take the mug. “Wait. Or what?”

  She shrugged. “Or…he got up and walked off.”

  Lanny snorted into his coffee and took a tentative sip. When it appeared to go down alright, he took a more aggressive one. “Right. Okay.”

  Trina took a deep breath, worn out already just thinking about explaining it to him. “Lanny, something happened while you were passed out.”

  That got his attention. He lifted his head and opened his eyes all the way, bloodshot and exhausted, but fixed on her face. “What? Did somebody–”

  She waved him to silence. “It wasn’t a bad thing, I don’t think. I learned some things. And I need you to listen without interrupting me. Okay?”

  He stared at her a moment, then finally nodded.

  She took another deep breath, and began.

  She told him about the bell ringing, about touching it and finding herself somehow in the body of her great-grandfather, a sweet-faced werewolf kneeling at her feet, knowing her real name, urging Nikita to show her what had happened in 1942, when the world was at war…and changing forever. She told him about the band of secret Whites hidden within the Cheka, their mission to retrieve Sasha and take him to Stalingrad. Told him about Monsieur Philippe, about the horrifying, violent moment when Sasha was turned. About the girl sniper Katya, whom Nikita had loved, and who’d loved him back – her great-grandmother. Told him about Rasputin. About all the blood. The grief. About the copper tang of blood filling Nikita’s mouth, his devoted wolf making him immortal.

  Told him they were just a few blocks over, and wanting to meet her.

  Through all of it, Lanny drained his coffee and his eyebrows climbed steadily toward his hairline, forehead crinkling up like an accordion.

  When she was done, silence reigned for a full minute. A minute in which Lanny didn’t blink.

  Finally, he took a huge breath and said, calm and rational, “So. Okay. You are very drunk.”

  She smacked him in the shoulder.

  “Ow!”

  “I’m sober, you asshole. Look at me. Do I look drunk?”

  He peered at her with bloodshot eyes.

  “Oh, like you could tell,” she huffed. “I’m being serious. I know it sounds insane, but it’s true. You know my family’s Russian. I showed you the bell before. It – it kinda makes sense. In a way.” Even though it sounded ludicrous to her own ears as she tried to explain it.

  Lanny extended his empty coffee mug toward her, expression considering. “How ‘bout a little more?”

  ~*~

  They needed to get to the morgue; Harvey would have bodies in need of drawers backing up if they didn’t get down there and have a look at the scene. Trina ought to at least fire off a text to let the doctor know they’d be along soon.

  But the two of them sat at the tiny café table in her kitchenette and Lanny smoked two cigarettes while she explained it again. In the wash of early sunlight, his face looked a wreck, but he seemed awake now, after the second cup, his cig burning down to embers in the hand he had braced on the tabletop.

  “Be
lieve me or don’t,” Trina finally said, breathless and worn out from talking. If anything, going through it a second time had only made it that much more real in her mind. “Here.” She pulled out her phone and showed him the text from Sasha. “That’s Nikita’s…friend, or whatever he is.” His wolf.

  Lanny’s eyes moved over the text twice and he nodded, stubbing his cigarette out in the little decorative plate she’d set out for that purpose. He seemed to choose his words carefully, voice threaded with smoke. “So your great-granddad is a vampire. Who lives with a werewolf. And they want to meet you.”

  Her heart pounded in her throat. “Yeah. That’s the gist of it.”

  “Let’s say I believe you…”

  She snorted and he shot her a look that said hold up.

  “…let’s say I do. Now.” He was using his Interrogation Voice on her, the one that got all the weepy women to spill their guts; it pissed her off. “Let’s think, just for a minute, about what that might mean to our case. The one where a guy got all his blood drained outside a nightclub.” His brows went up meaningfully.

  “Lanny, am I drunk? Or do you think my great-granddad’s our murderer? It can’t be both.”

  “I think,” he said, still careful, “that your dad told you a lot of wild stories when you were growing up, and you haven’t been getting enough sleep lately–”

  “How can I when I’ve got drunk idiots banging on my door in the middle of the night?”

  And then it hit her all over again: Lanny was sick, Lanny was dying, Lanny wouldn’t seek treatment for the big lump in his throat. He…

  She was hyperventilating. She clapped a hand over her mouth to cover the sound of it.

  Lanny sat forward. “Hey, hey.” Reached for her. “It’s not–”

  Trina surged to her feet, hip catching the edge of the table and rattling it. “We’ve gotta get to the hospital,” she said. “Harvey…the morgue…”

  She took the two small steps to her sink and peered out the window above it, trying to compose herself. Her upstairs neighbor’s cat, Snickers, sat on her fire escape, bent in an impossible pretzel, washing her back legs with her tongue. A cute cat, calico, with one tattered ear. Sometimes, Trina passed her mostly-empty tuna cans out the window, little bits of burned bacon. She focused on the soothing, unremarkable movements of the animal, tried to get her breathing under control.

  Behind her, she heard Lanny’s chair scrape back, the scuff of his socked foot on the linoleum as he walked up behind her; the unsteady sniff of a deep breath, because when he drank too much his several-times broken nose puffed up on the inside and he sounded like a bear crawling out of hibernation the next morning.

  “Trina,” he said, low, quiet, full of gravel. His hand landed on her shoulder and his warm breath fanned across her cheek. “Sweetheart–”

  “You need to brush your teeth,” she whispered, and he stilled. “And then we need to go.”

  It was silent a moment, neither of them breathing.

  Then his hand fell away. “Alright.”

  It was another long moment before she could move.

  37

  A PACK OF TWO

  Nikita’s last concrete memory of the night before was of dropping down into their piece-of-shit corduroy chair out in the living room and lighting a cigarette. The TV had been on, one of those awful reality shows Sasha loved because they “showed him how to be an American,” the scent of cheap, greasy food wafting up from the brown paper bags Sasha thumped down on the coffee table. Nikita remembered being hungry, a little, but not wanting to eat. And then he remembered…

  Ekaterina.

  He stared up at the blades of the slow-turning ceiling fan and let the ache wash through him. He’d gotten only one distinct look at her, in the white-washed void between their minds, one quick glimpse of her startled face. She looked so much like his Katya – her great-grandmother. He didn’t think of her often, and when he did, it brought with it a physical pain, the grief – all his pent-up grief – flowering red and deadly behind his breastbone.

  He rubbed at his chest with the heel of his hand and found it bare. He craned his neck and a quick look revealed that Sasha had put him to bed, taken off his shirt, and jeans and socks, left him in his underwear, covers pulled up over his waist, a fresh pack of smokes, a lighter, and a glass of water waiting for him on the nightstand.

  God, he’d had her inside his mind. Had shown her things, all the bloody, horrible things that happened in ’42. Her family history, he guessed, and maybe she had a right to it, but he felt like the sort of shithead who told ghost stories to children before bed.

  He had no idea what time it was, but early light came in through the windows, lazy stripes of it through the blinds and across the bed. Nikita hitched himself up higher against the pillows with a groan – he was weak, shaking, dizzy – and reached for the cigarettes, noting as he did so that he could smell some sort of meat sizzling on the stove, and hear singing – that bad falsetto Sasha used on all the club songs he loved.

  The singing – and Nikita was embarrassed he recognized a Rihanna tune – cut off the moment he had his cigarette lit, and a few seconds later Sasha pushed through the half-open door, smiling and eager like a puppy.

  “You’re awake. Good!” He flopped down on the end of the bed and grabbed hold of Nikita’s foot, cradling it in his palm the way he would hold someone’s hand. He’d been worried, then, always most tactile when Nikita spooked him. “I’m making breakfast.”

  Nikita grunted and exhaled smoke. “Not hungry.”

  Sasha gave him The Look.

  “What? I’m not.”

  Sasha snorted, unimpressed. He reached with his free hand to push his hair back off his face, so The Look would have maximum impact. “You’ve been sleeping for almost twelve hours. You had no dinner, and your brain got hijacked.” He tapped his own temple for emphasis. “You’re hungry. For food, and you need to feed.”

  Nikita rolled his eyes.

  “You feel like shit, I can tell. I can always tell.”

  Obnoxious little shit.

  “It took a lot out of you, showing her.”

  Nikita choked on his next inhale, coughing smoke. Sasha patted his foot until he’d got his breath back. “That…it really happened, didn’t it? She was here.”

  Sasha crawled up the bed so he could sit beside him, leaning back against the headboard. He was still smiling, eyes touched with sympathetic sadness. “Yes, she was really here.” He reached over and touched Nikita’s temple. “In there.” He perked up, grin widening. “I sent her a text message.”

  “Ah, Sasha…” Nikita groaned and took another drag.

  “She’s family!” Sasha insisted. “You have to. She has all these questions now. And besides, she gave me her phone number – or, well, technically you did, or she did through you, I don’t know – but that means she wants to meet us.” He grinned his toothiest, most manipulative grin, eyebrows waggling.

  Nikita sighed. “When?”

  “Oh, yay! Hold on, let me get your breakfast.” He bounded up off the bed and out the door.

  “Still not hungry,” Nikita called after him.

  “I don’t care, you’re eating!”

  His stomach growled a feeble protest, but his hand shook badly when he brought the cigarette to his lips. Yeah, it was time to eat. And feed.

  Sasha returned bearing a plate heaped with bacon, scrambled eggs, and heavily-buttered English muffins. Though the sight and smell left him faintly nauseas – low blood sugar, someone had suggested to him once, and it made sense – he had to admit that the food, plentiful and tasty, was one of the best things about this new century.

  Sasha climbed back onto the bed and put the plate in his sheet-covered lap. “Here.” All proud, like someone’s mother.

  He was pretty good at being Nikita’s mother, when he needed to be.

  “I won’t eat all of this.”

  “Try,” Sasha urged, and then stole a piece of bacon.

  Ni
kita hated the sound of his own chewing, and Sasha knew that, so he launched into an entertaining story about this morning’s trip to the bodega while Nikita ate. The man behind the counter knew their names now – potentially dangerous – not because Nikita had ever bothered to introduce himself, but because Sasha was the sort of person who could make friends everywhere. Nikita teased him that he was more dog than wolf, but it was true. At least as far as friendliness went. The people he smiled to in shops and on the street had never been on the receiving end of one of his angry snarls.

  By the time Sasha had talked him through his new favorite drink at Starbucks, and the new couple that had moved in on the first floor, Nikita had managed to work his way through both halves of the English muffin, most of the bacon, and some of the eggs. The food filled the middle of his stomach, but the edges remained sharp and bright, a hunger that buzzed restlessly under his skin, made his teeth rattle in his head. Blood hunger. The fierce kind that, if left unchecked, could lead to disastrous happenings out in public.

  He tried, as a rule, not to think about the slip-ups he’d had in the past. He hadn’t had one in a very long time.

  Something in his face showed it, because Sasha stopped talking and eased the plate away from him, braced a hand on the mattress and leaned across him to set it on the nightstand. Almost in his lap. Close enough for Nikita to hear the steady thumping of his heart; close enough for the scents of wolf, and shampoo, and dryer sheets, and soft human skin to bloom inside Nikita’s sinuses, saliva filling his mouth in response.

  Blood.

  Yes, blood.

  He hated this; hated every part of it. Hated what he’d become.

  He took a shaky, shallow breath, and then another, hands clenching tight on the sheet.

  “Shh, I know, I know,” Sasha murmured as he sat back on his heels. “It’s alright. It’s only natural.”

  Nikita closed his eyes and fought it a moment, like always, the awful craving. Then swallowed again, and again, panting. This must be what junkies felt like, he thought. Or maybe it was worse; this was stealing.