That didn’t surprise Nita. At all. “Who?”
“My . . .” He considered. “We were never married, but it feels like a disservice to call her my girlfriend. We were together almost forty years.”
Nita raised her eyebrow. “Also a vampire?”
Given how many vampires had ended up on Nita’s dissection table over the years, it really was a miracle none of their friends had come for vengeance before now.
“No. Human.”
Nita blinked. “Why would my mother bother killing a human?”
Andrej hesitated, and then said carefully, “She was a very important human.”
Nita raised her eyebrows, waiting. She could feel something here, something that tugged on her memory. She’d wondered if Andrej had been the monster in the story Nita’s mother told, but she hadn’t been sure. But in that story, the monster was the killer. Her grief had seemed genuine, but who could tell with Nita’s mother?
Andrej seemed just as angry and grief-stricken. Which could also be an act. But they couldn’t both have killed the same person. Though she supposed they could both blame each other for her death?
“How did she die?” Nita asked.
Andrej looked away. “Trickery and lies.”
Nita rolled her eyes. “That is the vaguest answer I’ve ever heard.”
Andrej glared at her.
Nita shrugged. “I mean, if you don’t answer, I’ll just kill you. Cooperation buys you time.”
His jaw tightened like he was imagining ripping her throat out, and she suppressed a shiver. She was in control here. She was the one with the power. She wouldn’t be afraid.
Andrej tilted his head up so the light bounced off his clear eyes, and he said, “It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
He sighed softly, his face still eerily still. “Fine. I first met my girlfriend in the 1960s. This was before INHUP, before anything even like that existed. She was a monster hunter for hire, and she was damn good at it.”
Nita nodded. This was fitting perfectly with her mother’s story. Nita would have to question which version was right when they started to diverge, but the things they had in common, she thought it was safe to take as truth.
“What was her name?” Nita asked.
“Nadya.” He sighed softly. “But I suppose you’d know her as Nadezhda Novikova. The founder of INHUP.”
Twenty-Five
INHUP’S FOUNDER.
Nita tried to wrap her head around it. Not just that INHUP’s founder had been having a thing with a vampire for forty years and no one knew—no, actually, it wasn’t possible no one knew. How could INHUP not know?—but also the idea that Nita’s mother could have possibly been friends with INHUP’s founder. Nita’s mother hated INHUP. She was constantly deriding them, always wary of them. She despised them. Nita could never imagine her working with them.
But a dark, frightened part of her whispered that the most violent hate is born from the tightest love. And betrayal.
She cleared her throat. “Wait. Wait a minute. Nadezhda Novikova isn’t dead. She’s still head of INHUP.”
“Technically, she is.” Andrej agreed. “But she’s been a figurehead for the past, oh, twenty years or so, hasn’t she?”
“Yes . . .” Nita agreed slowly, dragging out the s. “But that’s just because she’s getting old. She’s got to be in her . . . eighties? By now.”
“But have you seen her at all, in any event, in the past twenty years? Surely an eighty-year-old could cut a ribbon at a ceremony, or give an interview.”
“I haven’t looked into it,” Nita admitted. Unsurprisingly, the head of INHUP hadn’t been someone she was interested in. She’d never really researched her.
Nita tried to think of any pictures of Nadezhda Novikova she’d seen, but all of them were too old. She seemed young, in her thirties, in most of the pictures Nita could recall. But most articles used pictures of people in their prime, so that was no surprise.
“If Nadezhda Novikova was dead, the world would have mourned. We’d all know. There’d have been a huge public funeral,” she pointed out.
Andrej sighed. “Well, she’s not . . . dead dead. She’s brain-dead. Her body has been in a coma for the last two decades, and for legal reasons, no one can unhook her. So everyone is just keeping it all under wraps for now, and hoping she passes away naturally soon.”
“Surely people would know, though.”
“You don’t think INHUP can hide one person in a coma? Have you seen how extensive some of their research and medical facilities are?”
This Nita did know. She’d researched INHUP’s research facilities extensively, because she’d researched everywhere with good unnatural science programs. There were a lot of internships at INHUP for an unnatural researcher. Not that Nita would ever work there.
Well, maybe. If the right research project came along.
“I have. It’s possible,” Nita admitted. “But why would they cover it up in the first place?”
“Because they don’t want people to ask questions.” His voice was bitter.
“Like how she ended up in a coma?”
“That they can lie about. Even tell the truth about, or a version of it. No, the issue becomes when people want to visit her body. Then things get tricky.”
“How so?”
“Nadya looked very young for being in her sixties. I imagine by now, age has caught up a bit, but she’ll probably still look in her mid-forties when she hits a century.”
Nita thought for a moment, then realized. “You’d been feeding her your blood. To slow down her aging.”
“Every day for forty-odd years. That empty body will easily live to two hundred.”
Nita’s mind whirled through the implications. “It would be obvious she’d been drinking vampire blood. Very regularly. There’s nothing else that has that effect on humans.”
He nodded. “And how would that look to the rest of the world? The head of INHUP, addicted to vampire blood.”
“Was she addicted? I didn’t think it was addictive.”
“It’s not.” His head jerked slightly, as though he’d gone to make a hand motion before realizing he was paralyzed. “But people are addicted to power and looking young, which makes it more addictive than cocaine to certain personality types. And the media would spin it that way.”
They would. Nita could see the headlines now. INHUP Founder Addicted to Monster Blood. What Has She Been Sacrificing to Get Her Fix?
“So they’ve kept it under wraps.” Nita’s eyes narrowed. She still wasn’t quite sure she believed him. “But how did she end up in a coma in the first place, then?”
Andrej was quiet a long moment. “Your mother is how.”
Nita raised her eyebrows, thinking of her mother using the same hateful, disgusted voice when talking about how Andrej had killed her friend. “Do tell.”
“When I first met Nadya, she’d been hired to kill me, but somehow things worked out differently.”
“I’ll say.”
“She was riding off her fame from killing Bessanov,” he continued, undeterred. “She was getting calls from all over the world asking for her help. But she couldn’t be everywhere, so she was giving the jobs to other hunters she knew, including your mother, and taking the trickiest, most dangerous ones for herself. She loved her risks.”
“And you were a tricky, dangerous job?”
His eyes fixed on hers, eerie and clear. “Yes.”
Nita’s body stiffened in terror, and in that moment, she absolutely believed he was exactly as dangerous as he sounded.
“But, as I said. Things went differently. When she suggested forming INHUP to gather and train people, to centralize everything, I agreed to help. When we realized some of the corruption among the hunters, she decided to start making rules—which eventually became laws—about hunting unnaturals. There’s a big difference between someone who’s trying to get rid of a serial-killing unicorn and someone who wants to try eati
ng a ningyo because they think they’ll gain immortality.”
His eyes assessed Nita, cold and cruel. “But the more rules she put in, the more fame her organization got, the angrier certain elements became. Elements like your mother. They joined to kill things, and they didn’t like being told there were things they couldn’t kill.”
Nita leaned forward, fascinated despite herself. “And?”
“And things came to a head eventually. Twenty years ago. Your mother decided I had too much influence over Nadya. She couldn’t get rid of Nadya, she was the face of INHUP. But she could get rid of me.”
He closed his eyes. “I want to say I escaped, or that I won the fight, but the truth was I lost, and I’m only alive because your mother was interrupted before she could behead me. The people who interrupted her were under the impression I was human, and I was buried.”
He licked his lips. “It took me a while to get out. I was badly hurt, and weak, and climbing out of a coffin buried six feet underground is hard even when you aren’t starving and nearly dead. By the time I got out . . .”
“What happened?”
“Your mother—she went by Monica then, I don’t know if it was her real name. I don’t think so.” He swallowed. “Monica had confronted Nadya. I guess she thought if I was gone, she’d be able to regain her influence over Nadya. But Nadya knew what she’d done and was furious. They fought, and your mother was banished from INHUP.” His smile was bitter. “Officially banished, anyway. She had too much sympathy among the ranks for it to work, really.”
His voice went soft. “So when she snuck back into the building later, no one stopped her. And she found Nadya and murdered her.”
The grief on his face was so familiar, so much like her own heart-wrenching pain from her father’s death that it stole her breath. She could see the pain in his eyes, and the scars in her own chest throbbed in response. She understood this pain, and she knew, without ever asking, that he’d truly loved Nadya.
Her mother had claimed Andrej killed Nadya. Andrej claimed her mother did it. Both of them looked like they’d genuinely cared about this woman. So what was the truth?
“Why?” she asked. “Why kill Nadya?”
“I’m not in her head. I don’t know.” He met her eyes. “But if I had to guess, it was because she’s a fucked-up control freak who’d rather murder her best friend than let said friend make her own life choices.”
A chill went all the way down Nita’s spine, and she took a step back, heartbeat loud in her ears.
She suddenly saw just how stark the parallels between her own life and Nadya’s were. Her mother had killed Nadya’s boyfriend to regain control of her friend. It hadn’t worked, and she’d committed the ultimate act of control—taking Nadya’s life.
And now, decades later, her mother was doing it again. She was coming after Kovit. And when Kovit was dead, and Nita still refused to return to her mother, would her mother kill Nita too?
That, more than anything, made Nita believe Andrej’s side of the story. Because he couldn’t possibly know about what was happening with her mother and Kovit, and the parallels were too strong to be a coincidence.
Andrej continued, oblivious to Nita’s slowly mounting horror. “Afterward, your mother had her pet lawyer propose a bill.”
“Her pet lawyer?” Nita asked, clinging to the distraction, something else to focus her mind on while her subconscious worked through the truths she was faced with.
The “pet lawyer” had to be her father, a legal consultant and her mother’s partner in the black market industry. A person Andrej had only minutes before denied knowing the existence of, never mind the murder of.
Liar.
“Yes. He made the first proposal for the Dangerous Unnaturals List. It claimed if even I could kill Nadya after we were together for forty years, no vampire could live without murder. The council was full of old hunters already angry at Nadya for curtailing their murder sprees, and they passed the bill. The DUL was born with vampires at the very top.” His voice was bitter. “Followed closely by every other creature your mother used to enjoy killing and thought she could make money selling.”
Nita stared at him, mouth open. This couldn’t be true. Her mother couldn’t be responsible for the Dangerous Unnaturals List. It simply wasn’t possible.
Except it was definitely something her mother would do.
Nita kept her tone mild. “It sounds like you had quite a grudge against all the people involved.”
“Oh, I do. I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to kill them all. Those wretched INHUP hunters. Her wretched pet lawyer. And especially your mother.”
And there it was. Everything made clear and in the open.
In all probability, her father’s killer was in front of her. The signs pointed to it, even if he hadn’t confessed it outright. She should feel vicious, want to carve his heart out. She should press him on his slip-up, bully a confession out of him.
But all her mind could do was keep going back to her mother, and that terrible story about Nadya and how her mother had destroyed so many lives in order to keep control of her friend.
“Is my mother still part of INHUP?” Nita asked.
“Yes. She’s one of the few original board members still alive.” His lips curled. “But so many of the board members are younger now. They grew up with INHUP, they aren’t hunters by nature. They’re changing the organization, and she doesn’t like it. She’s losing control, and there’s nothing that enrages her more.”
Nita’s brain clunked sluggishly along. Here, here was the source of INHUP’s corruption, the broken wheel that had started everything. Here were her answers.
“There’s warrants out for my mother’s arrest,” she pointed out, trying desperately to poke holes in his words, to prove them lies.
“Indeed. Warrants for a thirty-year-old woman named Helen. Or a forty-five-year-old woman named Valerie.” His hair caught the light and gleamed like diamonds. “But the board doesn’t know what she is. No one knows that thirty-year-old Helen and eighty-seven-year-old Monica are the same woman.”
Nita wanted to protest, to ask how they couldn’t know, but she didn’t. Because it would be easy. If her mother really was that old, really could heal age . . . Well, Nita had seen her stack of fake passports. She knew how many identities her mother had. Why couldn’t one of them be INHUP’s board member?
She swallowed suddenly, a terrible thought occurring to her.
“How much would my mother have access to in INHUP?” Nita’s breathing became fast and hard. “Could she have expedited a name being put on the Dangerous Unnaturals List?”
“Of course.”
A sick feeling welled up in her chest, as more and more pieces clicked together.
“Could she have gotten someone to install bug software on a refugee’s phone?” Nita asked, the words heavy on her tongue.
“I don’t see why not.”
Nita’s hands were shaking, and she couldn’t seem to stop them. Had Nita’s mother been the one to sell her location on the black market when she was in Toronto?
Nita tried to think back to when her information had gone up. She’d rejected her mother. She’d left the restaurant. And then, right after, her phone’s GPS location had been posted online.
Almost like a response to Nita running away.
She’d thought it had to do with leaving INHUP—that was the safe time for the corrupt INHUP agent who’d bugged her phone to sell her information. But she’d left her mother at the same time. And her mother had tried to use the danger of Nita’s location being revealed to force Nita to come back. To weasel her way in, to make Nita flee to her for protection. To put Nita back in her control.
And her mother had guessed Kovit’s existence so easily—if she’d bugged Nita’s phone, she’d know Nita was meeting someone.
The thought made ugly, sludgy emotions rise up in her chest. She remembered how proud her mother had said she was when Nita fended off the black market.
Was all that a lie too? A trick to get Nita to come home again?
Nita tried to talk herself out of it—she’d suspected her mother of terrible things before, and she’d been wrong. Her mother hadn’t sold her on the black market, Fabricio had. But the idea had wormed its way into her mind, and no matter how she tried to talk herself away from the thought, it only burrowed deeper.
And the story about Nadya was just too close to what Nita was living.
People never really change. They repeat the same patterns over and over in their lives. And this was not a pattern Nita could risk ignoring.
Nita took a shaky breath as things became clear. She’d been fighting the black market. She’d been fighting INHUP. But the truth was, they were actually the same enemy. She’d only been fighting one person this whole time.
Her mother.
Fury burned in Nita’s stomach, anger searing her soul as everything that had happened started piling up, her mother’s list of crimes growing longer and longer. All of this to force Nita back, to return to her mother’s control.
Fuck her. Nita was going to live her own goddam life.
Nita raised her eyes as she came to a decision, her gaze hard and cool as she looked at Zebra-stripes, supposed victim of her mother and weaver of tragic love stories. He might not be evil. He might even be a better person than her or Kovit. She might even be able to use him more if she kept him alive, his quest for justice might be useful to her plans.
He might even be innocent. She didn’t think so—she was reasonably sure that, in this at least, INHUP hadn’t lied to her. Zebra-stripes was probably her father’s killer.
And if he wasn’t, so what?
If Nita released him, he’d just kill her. Keeping him alive and a prisoner was a liability, and she didn’t think she’d get any more useful information out of him.
More and more, Nita was realizing she didn’t give a fuck about what was right or justified. She cared about herself and the people important to her. And him being alive put her and them in danger.
“Thank you for the information.” Nita’s voice was calm, perfectly calm, despite the emotions that ran rampant through her soul. “That’s all I needed.”
When Villains Rise Page 17