“How is that possible?” Trina demanded. “Rasputin’s been dead for seventy-five years!”
“Yes, ma’am, he has,” the vampire said…in a Russian accent. “So have I. Or at least I thought so. But he turned me before the assassination.”
Her insides turned to ice. Her skin pebbled into goosebumps. “What assassination?”
“Of the royal family, ma’am,” he said, politely.
“Tell her who you are,” Sasha growled, pressing on his windpipe.
The boy – and he really was just a boy; young and sweet-faced, smooth-skinned – swallowed with obvious difficulty, but managed a nod. “My name is Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, last tsarevich of Russia.”
41
THE HEIR WHO CRAWLED OUT OF THE PIT
Nikita hated police precincts, and he liked to pretend it had nothing to do with the teeny, tiny kernel of rightness he felt deep in his black soul whenever he walked inside one. His years of pretending to be a cop – actually being one, if he allowed himself to admit it – were far outweighed by his years as a mechanic, as a grocer, as a forklift operator, as a jobless bum, as a short-order cook, but those years in Russia, when he’d been a hopeful idiot, trying to make some bit of difference had stamped him indelibly. He was a cop, at heart, and he guessed he always would be. It didn’t matter that it was American, that it looked and sounded nothing like the old Cheka headquarters he’d called home in 1942, the buzz of the place where his great-granddaughter worked stirred up old impulses. His fingers itched for a smoke, and his stride loosened a little, and by the time he sidled up to Sasha in the lobby he felt very much like his old clear-eyed, cruel-faced self from three generations ago.
Sasha was leaned back against a bare patch of wall between a DUI poster and a corkboard decked with fliers of all sorts. One booted foot propped against the painted cinderblocks, arms folded, watching the foot-traffic from under his lashes like a pissed-off millennial. His head lifted and his eyes brightened when he spotted Nikita.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” Nikita leaned his shoulder against the wall right beside him, turned so he could watch the comings and goings at the desk. Sasha leaned into him, briefly, a press of his side down Nikita’s front, a brief duck of his head, his face ghosting into the hollow of Nikita’s throat. A submissive, wolflike seeking of comfort, and an intimate packmate greeting.
Nikita cupped the back of his neck, briefly, gave him a quick squeeze. Sasha whined once, softly, and then straightened, and they pretended to be human again.
“It’s really him?”
Sasha nodded. “Yeah. I made sure.” He scrubbed a hand over his mouth and that confirmed what Nikita had suspected when he walked up: he smelled vampire blood.
Curiosity got the best of him. Voice too low for passing humans to make out clearly: “Does he taste like me?”
Sasha gave him an offended look.
“We have the same sire.”
“Rasputin tasted evil. You taste like you.”
Nikita bit back a grin. “So I taste evil, then.”
“Ugh,” Sasha said, “shut up.”
He chuckled, but was touched, in a way. He laid awake at night sometimes, thinking of Rasputin’s curse in his veins, imagining it as black sludge clogging the pathways of his heart. Was there such a thing as a good vampire? He didn’t know. Maybe. But he knew the one who’d sired him wasn’t, and that had to mean that he in turn wasn’t either.
But then he would shut his eyes, and remember Sasha’s stricken face, his mouth red and dripping, the monster’s neck-meat caught between his teeth. Evil blood, but given with love, by someone undoubtedly good. And maybe that kind act had been the thing that kept the taint at bay. After all, when he passed a razor blade down the tender inside of his arm, the blood always ran red, the way it had before Sasha kissed a madman’s blood into his mouth and made him immortal. It wasn’t the black, nightmare stuff of his worries.
If Sasha said he didn’t taste evil, then he must not. Sasha was still as honest as the trembling, brave boy they’d stolen from Siberia seventy-five years ago.
“What’s he said?”
“I don’t know. Trina said–”
And then she appeared, stepping around the corner and catching sight of them. She looked dead on her feet, eyes half-closed and smudged with dark circles as livid as bruises. But she scraped up a smile and a quick wave as she came to them.
“Sasha’s catching you up, I see,” she said, and to her credit she sounded more confident than she no doubt felt.
Nikita straightened up, spine going rigid, heels snapping together out of old habit. He linked his hands behind his back, and he was a Chekist again.
Trina noticed, throat moving as she swallowed.
“I’d like to see him.”
She nodded. “It’s gonna take some creative lying, but yeah, I want you to be the one to talk to him. Follow me.”
~*~
She and Lanny had a few nervous witnesses to the Chad Edwards murder who wanted to talk off the books; that was what she told Delgado in the break room when she went to get coffee for everyone. Lanny had secured the back-corner interrogation room they used for CIs, the one right by the emergency exit for a quick getaway. Given that their captain wasn’t in, that it wasn’t even nine in the morning, and that everyone around here seemed as zombified as she did, she was hoping they could have at least fifteen good minutes to talk before anyone got suspicious and poked their head in.
She took an old empty donut box down off the top of the fridge to use as a tray and, armed with coffee, went to begin the strangest interview of her life.
Lanny was holding up the wall outside the interview room, eyes shut. She’d seen him nap standing up before, and she wondered, in the moment before his eyes opened, if he was doing so now.
“You left them in there alone together?” she asked.
He shrugged and reached for one of the coffees. “Not like we can really stop them if they want to kill each other.”
She sighed. “Guess you’re right.”
She was too tired for this interview. Past tired. She was starting to see little flickers of colored light at the corners of her vision. She couldn’t remember when she’d last eaten and all her muscles felt like overcooked pasta.
“We can throw ‘em all in a holding cell,” Lanny offered, voice going gentle. A gentleness that, given her current state, almost undid her.
She wanted to lean her forehead against his chest, feel his heart beating, breathe in the musky smell of his drying fear sweat and shut down for a minute.
Instead, she squared her shoulders the best she could and said, “No, I want to get it over with.”
He opened the door for her and she walked into a room that was achingly silent. Like a pane of movie prop glass waiting to shatter.
Sasha stood against the far wall, arms folded, face a tight, angry mask. On sentry duty. He was young, and handsome, and sweet-looking, so it surprised her to see the way aggression hardened him into a man…and something beyond that. Something inhuman that sent fast chills skittering down her back. She could have put him in a lineup, she thought – which one of these men is a werewolf – and any stranger off the street could have picked him out.
Nikita sat across the small table from Alexei, his chair at an angle, legs crossed, one negligent arm braced on the table edge. He held an unlit cigarette between two fingers, his gaze unreadable in the moments when it shifted from the window to the tsarevich.
Alexi, by contrast, was pale and distressed, his emotions playing across his face with childlike innocence and unselfconsciousness. If it was an act – and she’d seen plenty of those – then it was a good one.
All three of them looked at her when she entered, and for one heart-stopping moment their gazes said, we’re not like you. She was walking into a den of literal monsters.
But then Alexei ducked his head and the spell broke.
“Here.” She set the makeshift tray down. “It’s not Starbucks, but it’ll ge
t the job done.”
Nikita reached for one, and Sasha stepped up to get another. Trina set one out for Alexei and then sat down in the chair next to Nikita with all the grace of a puppet with cut strings. She heard Lanny’s shuffling footsteps behind her, the rustle of his coat as he braced his shoulders back against the wall. It was a great comfort to know he was back there, and it gave her the strength to pull on her detective persona and fix Alexei with the steadiest look she could manage.
“You’re telling me you’re Nicholas and Alexandra’s son,” she said, without judgement. When he nodded, she said, “Explain how that’s possible.”
He chewed at his lip with one white, sharp fang, and darted a glance to Nikita.
“It’s alright,” she said. “I have it on good authority he was a big fan of your dad.”
Nikita snorted. “Can I smoke in here?”
“No,” Lanny said.
Trina said, “Sure, go ahead.” She prompted, “Alexei. Please.”
He cleared his throat. Nodded. Looked down at his pale hands where they rested on the tabletop. “The wolf,” he started.
A low grow pulsed through the room, followed by another. Sasha, and then Nikita, echoing him.
“Sasha,” Alexei amended quickly, glancing between the two of them, head ducked down between his shoulders in deference. “Sorry. Sasha said that I…that my blood tasted like Rasputin. So you all know Grigory, I guess.”
“We do,” Trina said.
He nodded. “It wasn’t just rumor, back then. He really did save my life. Multiple times. But it wasn’t through prayer.”
“When did he turn you?” Nikita asked. “At Spała?”
“No, it started before then, I think. But it wasn’t one incident.” He frowned, expression growing faraway as he remembered. “I used to bleed, you know,” he said, softly. “I still do, more than I should, if you cut me just right. It won’t kill me now, but I guess being turned didn’t take away the impulse of the flesh.” He shook his head as if to clear it, eyes closing a moment.
“I was in the nursey,” he continued, staring at his hands again, “the first time it happened. I was playing with Olga and Tatiana, and I tripped, and fell. Normal playing, you know? It wasn’t a big thing at all. Just a bump. But that night the bleeding started, under my skin, big bruises like flowers down my arm.” He rubbed the right one, shivering. “Our Friend Grisha had come to pray with Mama, and he came in to see me. I was shaking in my bed, teeth chattering. I was so cold. And frightened. It hurt to bleed like that, when it was trapped and couldn’t get out. It–” He bit his lip again, a flash of a fang. “When Grisha walked into the room, it was like a warm blanket wrapping me up, the way I was suddenly calm, and it didn’t hurt as badly.
“He came to the bed and sat on the edge of it. Mama stood in the doorway, and watched, and her face was heartbroken. ‘We will pray, My dear Little Boy,’ Grigory said. He pulled the covers down and opened my pajamas, so he could see the bruises on my arm. ‘We will pray, and God will answer, and you will feel better.’ And then he bent his head and it hurt, just a moment, when his fangs went into my arm. But then it felt better. So much better.”
Trina risked a sideways glance and saw that Nikita sat perfectly still, the lit cigarette clenched between his teeth vibrating, betraying the fine tremors that coursed through his body.
“After,” Alexei said, “he opened a little cut on the end of his finger and pressed a drop of his blood onto my tongue. To help me heal, he said.” He shrugged. “It worked. Again and again, it worked.”
Nikita took a deep drag and exhaled smoke through his nose. Took the cigarette between his fingers again. “He turned you a little at a time.”
“Yes. I think he did. All I know is…” He hesitated, took a deep breath. When he spoke again, his voice sounded brittle, ready to crack. “The night they…the night they came to the house–”
“When the Bolsheviks shot you all,” Nikita said with a toneless matter-of-factness that Trina thought disguised his own horror pretty well.
“Y-yes. Then.” Alexei swallowed hard. “I remember the bullets ripping through me. I remember the pain, and bleeding. I even thought, ‘This is it. I’m dying.’ And it was black for a while. Probably a long while.
“But then I woke up. There was still pain, but…there was also strength. I could smell mud, and earth, and skin. They were all round me, my family, and they were all dead but me.”
Trina crammed her cold hands into her armpits, suppressing a shudder.
Alexei smiled, small and grim. “Everyone likes to hope it was Anastasia who lived, but it was me. I crawled out of that pit, and I wasn’t a sick little boy anymore. I was a vampire.”
It was silent for a long stretch.
Lanny said, “But, wait, weren’t you a little kid when you died?” Trina suspected the rustling behind her was because he lifted his arms to put air quotes around died.
“I was young, yes.”
“Vampires grow,” Nikita said. “It isn’t like in the movies, where turned children stay children.”
Lanny didn’t respond.
Light-headed, Trina leaned forward to brace her elbows on the table. “While I’m sure your story about coming to New York is fascinating, let’s skip ahead a few decades. I need to know why you turned Chad Edwards.”
“Oh,” Alexei said, caving in on himself like he’d been punched. “Poor Chad.”
“Little too much to drink one night?” Lanny asked.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
~*~
Once upon a time, Nikita’s mother had owned a small newspaper clipping photo of the royal family that she’d kept pressed between the pages of the family bible; she hadn’t dared to take it out except for late at night, when the other families in their shared tenement flat were asleep, their snores carrying through the quilts they’d tacked up for walls. Nikita had memorized each face in that photo, grainy as it was, and so it was the reason he knew, without a doubt, that the young man sitting across the table from him in the police interrogation room was Alexei Nikolaevich, former heir of All the Russias.
Alexei had aged – he looked to be in his mid-twenties now – and had grown into his face a little, the jaw widening, the brows getting stronger. But it was him.
And Nikita wished it wasn’t.
He’d hoped the whole way down here that this was a prank, but face-to-face with the former tsarevich, he knew that it wasn’t.
He’d wanted this to be just another random vampire, like all the others who’d tried to attach themselves to their tiny pack, all the ones who’d smelled the fresh bite mark on Sasha’s neck and wondered what wolf blood tasted like. Those had been easy to turn away, to run from – to kill, in more than one case. But the heir to the empire…when he himself sat here with the Romanov crest stitched into his jacket…that presented a problem.
Chad had been an accident, Alexei explained. He’d gone days without feeding and was starting to feel weak, that hollow pit opening in his stomach that no amount of greasy diner food could fill. He’d sat at the bar of the club for hours, debating with himself, observing the dancing, laughing, drinking young people around him. Chad had been sitting with a girl cuddled up to his side, but he’d thrown Alexei a look across the room that spoke of interest, and things a girl couldn’t offer him. Alexei had downed his vodka tonic in two long gulps and jerked his head toward the alleyway exit.
Chad followed him.
In the alley, beneath the sleek glow of neon, Alexei had backed the human up against the wall and kissed him, ground their hips together, got him pliant and wanting – he explained all this with a dark blush staining his cheeks, embarrassed, knotting his fingers together over and over. When Chad was melting and gasping and begging, Alexei trailed his mouth down the mortal’s throat and then sank his fangs deep.
It was then, with the first bright burst of blood across his tongue, that he realized he was so, so hungry.
He drank, and drank, and drank. And wh
en he pulled back, gasping, the blood on his lips steaming in the night air, he’d realized that Chad was mostly dead.
He turned his left hand up on the table, revealing a faint pink line across his wrist. “I opened up my vein,” he said, voice starting to shake, eyes on the fast-healing scar. “He was so weak, he – I had to dip my fingers in the blood and put them in his mouth. He…” He closed his eyes, anguished – or at least pretending to be. “I thought he was dead.”
“So you just left him in the alley and took off, right?” Lanny said with disgust.
Alexei lifted his head, expression pleading. “I heard someone coming. I thought…they would find him, and–”
“You didn’t wanna get caught,” Lanny said. “Understandable.”
Nikita was starting to like the man. Not that he liked people, in general. He approved of his skeptical outlook. And the fact that he was so fiercely in love with Trina that it scared him – scared him more than the sickness Nikita could smell on him.
“No, I thought,” Alexei tried, and then gave up, rubbing at his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, eyes shielded behind his hand. “I didn’t mean to hurt him.”
“Maybe you didn’t mean to kill him,” Lanny said, “but you bit a big chunk out of his neck, so you damn well knew you were gonna hurt him.”
Alexei took a deep, shuddering breath.
Nikita’s cigarette had burned down to the butt and he dropped it into his untouched coffee and lit another. The hiss sounded ominous in the small room. “He came to you when he woke up, yes?”
Alexei nodded. When he met Nikita’s gaze, it was with a desperate sort of hope. Oh, little tsarevich, Nikita thought, you’ll find no friend in me. “He was very weak. It wasn’t a good turning.”
“You didn’t give him enough blood,” Nikita said, flatly, though his insides clenched around the remembered taste of Rasputin’s heart, the awful, wet, spongy meat of it, still hot, steaming in the frigid air. “Did you think to feed him again? After he turned up?”
“I…” Alexei’s breath hitched.
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