White Wolf

by Lauren Gilley

  All the energy left him at once. He was so tired these days. The side effect of living too long. “You were a boy,” he said, voice hoarse and exhausted now. “You didn’t see everything as it really was. Don’t tell me that he was holy. He was just another monster – and the worst part is that I ever believed there was any hope.”

  His stomach clenched and he thought he might be sick. “I threw my life away for your family,” he told Alexei. “I won’t do it again, not even for you.” He slid out of the booth. “My break’s over.”

  Sasha sent him a sad look, but only nodded, and didn’t try to stop him.

  ~*~

  It was quiet a long moment after Nikita was gone – as quiet as it could be in a nightclub.

  “I, uh…” Alexei said. “I don’t want to be tsar, if that’s what he’s thinking.”

  Sasha shook his head. “It was hard for him to realize the thing he was fighting for could never happen. It’s not about you, and it’s not even really about Rasputin. He’s a righteous man without a cause, and that can be dangerous.” He offered a smile.

  Alexei said, “Oh.” He rubbed at his jaw.

  “Alexei, we need to find Chad before he turns someone else. Will you help us?”

  The young vampire stared down into his vodka glass, utterly defeated. “Yes, I will help you.”

  ~*~

  Nikita stood outside on the sidewalk, hands jammed in his pockets, cigarette on his lip, glaring at everyone who walked past.

  “You’ll scare all the customers away,” Sasha said as he approached.

  Nikita snorted a plume of smoke.

  They were mostly alone, no one in line, pedestrian traffic slow, so Sasha moved to stand beside him, mirroring his pose, following his line of sight across the street toward the dive bar that emitted a tumble of laughter and music every time the door opened.

  “It’s not his fault, you know,” Sasha said.

  Nikita reached to take the cigarette between his fingers. “Yeah.”

  “He was a victim, too.”

  Nikita made an unhappy noise. “You sound like a shrink.”

  Sasha grinned. “I do watch a lot of Law & Order reruns.”

  Nikita sucked down the rest of the cig in one long drag, then dropped it to the sidewalk and ground it under his boot.

  “Don’t litter.”

  Nikita ignored him. “Why now?” he asked, turning to him with eyes that blazed against the dark backdrop of the benighted street. “He crawled out of that grave in 1918. Why are we just finding him now? In New York? Connected to murders that Trina’s investigating?”

  Sasha sighed. “I think–”

  “Don’t say Val, damn it.”

  “Alright, I won’t. I don’t think it’s got shit to do with him. He’s been around my whole life. It’s his brother.”

  “What about him?”

  “Someone woke him up.” And that someone must have been a wolf. Sasha shivered a little inside every time he thought about meeting more of his own kind; he couldn’t tell if it was excitement or dread that stirred in his belly. “And it’s like…it’s like the whole immortal world woke up, too.” He made a motion with his hand that mimicked an explosion, or maybe lights turning on. “Can’t you feel it?”

  The way Nikita rubbed the back of his neck was answer enough. Surprisingly, he added, “Kind of.”

  A car rolled by, slow, full of young people that craned their necks to look at the unremarkable façade of the club, the neon letters the only sign that anything worthwhile lay inside. They moved on without stopping; Sasha could tell they weren’t dressed right to get in anyway.

  Nikita surprised him again. “Are you lonely?” It was just a whisper; anyone without Sasha’s hearing would have missed it.

  “Lonely? No. I have you.” He knocked their shoulders together.

  “You know what I mean.” Nikita wouldn’t look at him, then, staring vacantly across the street.

  And after all this time, Sasha did know, just like he knew that Nikita wouldn’t be able to put it into words. He was a well-spoken man, but emotions always got stuck in his throat like chicken bones.

  “I’m curious to meet other wolves. And vampires, too. I’m mostly a dog these days, it is in my nature,” he said with a grin, then grew serious. “But I’m not lonely. You’re my favorite person in the world.”

  Nikita snorted, but it sounded choked. So did his voice when he said, “Not a person.”

  “My person,” Sasha insisted. “My brother. I’m not lonely, and you won’t ever have to be. I promise you that.”

  Nikita’s smile was wistful, but he leaned in so their shoulders were touching again.

  “I think something big might be about to happen,” Sasha confessed.

  “Me too.”

  “But we’ll be together for it. Whatever it is.”

  “Yes.”

  Sasha’s phone rang.

  44

  EAT YOUR HEART OUT

  Should have known, Trina thought with an inward snarl of frustration. If they hadn’t been exhausted and caught up in their own personal bullshit drama – Lanny dying wasn’t bullshit, she corrected, not really – one of them would have been sharp enough to think that, at some point, Chad Edwards would go running to his girlfriend. And give her the scare of her life.

  The door to her apartment had been torn off its hinges and lay broken in two pieces on the floor of the front hall. A starburst of cracks in the sheetrock of the entryway marked a place where a fist or a head slammed into the wall. A shattered plate lay in the divide between kitchen and living room.

  Chad’s girlfriend, Christa, sat on a couch that had been shredded at one end, stuffing and foam spilled out onto the rug. A paramedic dabbed at a nasty cut on her face and someone had draped a shock blanket across her shoulders. Her gaze was vacant, fixed in the middle distance. She didn’t blink, or twitch, or react to the sting of alcohol on her wound.

  A middle-aged man, presumably the neighbor who’d called in the disturbance and then rushed to the rescue, sat on a stool at the kitchen island, a second paramedic bandaging his right arm. He looked dazed and spooked, but more together than Christa. His boyfriend hadn’t come back from the dead, after all.

  “I’ll take him, you take her?” Lanny asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Trina went to Christa and knelt on the rug in front of her, setting a tentative hand on the girl’s knee. Christa didn’t react.

  Trina made brief eye contact with the paramedic, who shook her head, eyes wide. The woman’s voice was calm, though, when she said, “We’re gonna take her in. Make it quick.”

  “Yeah. Christa? Can you hear me? I’m Detective Baskin. We spoke a few nights ago.”

  No reaction.

  Trina heard Lanny asking the witness/good Samaritan questions behind her at the island. “Christa,” she said, “can you tell me what happened tonight?”

  No reaction.

  Trina shared another glance with the paramedic, who shrugged. Then she turned to glance at her partner over her shoulder. “Maybe we should–”

  There was an almighty clatter on the fire escape.

  Trina’s heart jumped up her throat. “He’s still here!”

  “On it,” Lanny said, and charged toward the window.

  “Lanny, don’t–”

  But he was already throwing open the sash and clambering out onto the fire escape.

  “Shit,” Trina said, and followed him.

  It was the deep, black dark of just before dawn, and the fire escape seemed an illusion made of shadow – that was her initial, terrifying thought as she swung her legs over the windowsill. I’ll fall, she thought, but then her boots touched the metal with a clatter, and she started down the ladder after her partner, who was, judging by his curses, losing ground on their perp. Vampires were faster than humans, after all.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Lanny chanted, one level below her, and she ran to catch up, one hand skimming the rail, the other clamped to the butt of
her gun. At some point after seeing the impossible security footage of Edwards walking out of the morgue, she’d decided she’d shoot him, if given the chance. She hadn’t trusted him when she thought he was dead, and certainly didn’t now that he’d killed a boy.

  Thoughts of Jamie Anderson’s face – peaceful and childlike in death – made her sick, so she pushed them away, and kept running.

  “Goddamn it all to hell,” Lanny said, and she heard the slap of sneaker soles on pavement: Chad had reached the alley; they’d never catch him now.

  Above her, Trina heard a soft woof sound, like a flag caught in a sudden breeze. Then she felt a breeze, down the side of her face, whipping her hair, and a dark blur fell past her through the open air.

  “What?” She paused and glanced over the railing just in time to see the blur land on its feet, lightly, graceful as a gymnast, in Chad Edwards’s path. The alley’s security light caught hold of shaggy, platinum hair, and she knew it was Sasha.

  “Holy shit,” Lanny breathed.

  The kid had just leapt off the top of a four-story building and landed on his feet like it was nothing. Yeah. Holy shit.

  Trina pelted the rest of the way down and landed beside Lanny on the ground, drawing her gun. “Freeze, Chad! Hands in the air where I can see ‘em!” she called, and realized she didn’t want to approach him. Damn it, she was scared, and she hated herself for it.

  Lanny stalked forward, gun trained, but she heard the faint note of fear in his voice, too, and felt better for it. “Hands up, asshole!” he barked.

  Trina went with him, the two of them a united front as they approached Chad from behind.

  He didn’t put his hands up, frozen with his arms down by his sides, weight shifted onto one foot. Ready to bolt. There was just enough light for Trina to see that the muscles in his back, his arms, hell, his whole body, clenched and twitched, like a spooked horse about to take off. He was squared off from Sasha, who had his head down, filling the alley with a low, threatening growl. That sound made the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand up; nothing on two legs should have been capable of making a sound like that.

  “Chad,” she said as they approached, trying for calm and reasonable. “There’s only one good way out of this, and that’s by cooperating with us. I know you didn’t mean to hurt Christa.” She didn’t believe that, but certain scenarios called for stretched truths in the line of duty. “And you probably didn’t mean to hurt Jamie Anderson either.”

  Chad flinched and Sasha’s growl went deeper, louder, a vicious snarl. “Don’t move,” he snapped.

  “I know what you are,” Trina said, voice getting even softer. “I know what happened to you must have been terrifying, and that you’re feeling all these crazy things. We can work with you, help you find a really great lawyer, but you have to cooperate so no one else gets hurt, okay? I know you don’t want that.”

  Slowly, his head turned a fraction, so she could just make out his profile, bright white in the glare of the security bulb. “I meant to,” he said.

  Something in her mind faltered. “What?”

  “You said I didn’t mean to hurt them, but I did, didn’t I? I wanted to bite them, turn them, and I knew that would hurt.”

  “Okay…”

  “I had to try it first. That’s why I followed that guy – Jamie, you said? – to see if I could make it work. Then I was gonna turn Christa, so we could be together.”

  Shit.

  Lanny said, “Shit.”

  Trina’s heart was pounding, but she managed to keep talking, steady and curious, not freaked out and furious. “Why Jamie?”

  Chad shrugged. “He was all alone. Figured nobody would miss him.”

  Sasha snarled.

  Lanny said, “Wow, what a piece of shit you are. Hands up, let’s go. Behind your head where I can see ‘em.”

  Chad sighed, shoulders dropping, and lifted both hands –

  He whirled.

  Sasha was on top of him before Lanny or Trina could blink – or pull the trigger. They watched, stunned mute, as Sasha tackled the vampire to the ground and bit him hard in the back of the neck, white hands like talons in the meat of his shoulders.

  Chad screamed, half-pain and half-anger, and tried to twist out from under Sasha. But Sasha was stronger, doubling down. Chad’s shirt ripped where Sasha’s fingertips were dug in; shiny pearls of blood rolled down the side of his neck.

  “Shit, is he gonna kill him?” Lanny asked.

  “I have no idea.” And a part of her wondered if that would be such a bad thing, a thought she immediately struck as unethical, and possibly evil. But. She’d thought it.

  Sasha gave one last violent snarl and then stood upright, dragging Chad with him. He disengaged his teeth from the back of his neck and spat on the pavement. Licked the blood off his lips and teeth and spat again. “Don’t fucking move this time.” His accent came out thick and guttural amidst his growl.

  Chad look dazed, eyes sweeping the alley back and forth, glazed and unfocused.

  “How about putting your hands up for real this time, huh?” Lanny said, motioning to him with the barrel of his gun. “Nice and high, behind your head.”

  Chad complied this time, hastened by a little shove from Sasha.

  Trina took out her cuffs. “Um. Are these gonna work on him?” she asked Sasha.

  The wolf sighed and shook his head. “Probably not.” Then he glanced up, over the top of her head, grin tugging at one corner of his bloody mouth. “But don’t worry, we won’t need them.”

  She heard a faint rustling behind her, and twisted around just in time to see Nikita land ballerina-light, like Sasha had, his hair still settling as he started toward them.

  “You guys make a habit of jumping off buildings?” she asked.

  “Only when we have to.”

  “It’s fun,” Sasha said.

  When she looked back at Chad, she saw that he’d spotted Nikita, and that he was trying to shrink down into his shirt collar like a turtle hiding in its shell.

  “We’re taking him in,” Lanny told Nikita. “Douchebag already confessed to killing the Anderson kid.”

  “Hmm,” Nikita said, drawing up in front of a now-shivering Chad, face impassive. “And do what with him? Handcuffs won’t hold him. Neither will a cell – not in the long run. Too many chances to overpower guards and other prisoners.”

  “Yeah, well,” Lanny huffed. “That’s the system we got.”

  “Ineffective,” Nikita said, dismissively, all his attention on Chad. “Did you turn that boy?” he asked.

  “I…”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes,” Chad said. His teeth were chattering he was so scared. “But please, I didn’t…”

  “Mean to?”

  “No, well, I did, but–”

  “You’ll do it again.”

  Chad sighed, deflating a little further into Sasha’s grasp. “It isn’t a bad thing. That guy was sick, okay? I saw him use an inhaler. He was some geeky loner with no friends, and now he’s gonna be super strong. I made him better. This is – this is amazing! Who wouldn’t want to feel like this?” But his voice was not that of an enraptured holy man – it was that of a petulant child. Mean-spirited and entitled. “I did him a favor,” he repeated. “And he’s not even dead – he’s gonna wake up – so it’s not murder.”

  Nikita nodded. He shared a look with Sasha. Nodded again.

  Trina sucked in a breath. “Wait, no–”

  Nikita grabbed the boy’s head in both hands and snapped his neck with one clean jerk.

  Chad slumped forward, knees and ankles going soft, and Sasha held him upright.

  “What the fuck?” Lanny roared. “You can’t just – you just – what the fuck?”

  When Nikita turned to them, he looked exhausted. “You wouldn’t have been able to contain him, and he wouldn’t have changed. I did what had to be done.”

  “You broke his fucking neck,” Lanny seethed.

  Nikita turned hi
s gaze on Trina, quietly imploring.

  She waited for the revulsion to hit her. The hate. The fear.

  Instead, she felt…relief. Chad was no longer her problem, or anyone else’s.

  She nodded at Nikita, and he nodded back. Yes, she understood. This had to be done, even if it left a bad taste in the mouth. Even if she wound up with nightmares.

  She became aware that Lanny was talking to her.

  “…say something?”

  “What? Oh.” She turned to him. “I don’t.” Sighed. “What do you want me to say?”

  Lanny stared at her, disappointed, then threw up his hands and turned away, making a disgusted sound.

  She turned back to the others. “I’ll call this in. We can say he fell off the fire escape.”

  But Sasha made a face. “Actually…”

  “I’m not done,” Nikita said. “I need to make sure.”

  “Make sure…” And then her stomach rolled. “Oh my God.”

  He looked even more tired than before. “Say you lost him. Say…I don’t know. I’m sorry.” He ducked his head and slung Chad’s limp form across his shoulders, like a hunter hoisting up a deer. Chad’s hands flopped and Trina swallowed the urge to gag…even as her mind was already accepting it and making allowances. Her disgust was superficial and physical. Mentally, emotionally, she’d already forgiven her great-grandfather for the act.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Lanny turned around. “Okay? Are you serious?”

  “What do you want me to say? It’s already done.”

  He turned his back again, muttering curses under his breath.

  “The one he turned,” Nikita started.

  “I’ll go and check on him.”

  “Like hell,” Lanny said over his shoulder.

  “He wasn’t like this one,” Nikita said, tilting his head to indicate the body across his shoulders. “Was he?”

  “Not before he died, no. Not if Chad and the roommate are to be believed.”

  He nodded. “Alright. Be careful. Take Sasha with you.”

  “I don’t think–”

  “Take him with you.” And that was an order. If anyone besides her boss or her family had delivered it, she would have bowed up her back.