Nikita snorted.
For the first time, Philippe’s voice took on an edge of anger. “Did you ever meet them? Or were you a child who heard stories of them at your mother’s teat?”
“Keep going.”
“Fine. I loved the Romanovs. That was never a secret. I thought of them as my own family. I wanted to help them in any way I could.” He drained the last of his tea and leaned down to set the cup on the floor. “Let me explain.
“The problem with leadership is that not all men wear it the same way. On some it’s too tight, on others too loose. Nicky wore it cautiously. He was young, and not ready to lose his father. Because he was nervous he tried harder than most – but there was always doubt in the back of his mind. He always questioned himself. Not openly; a tsar can’t be seen doubting.
“He needed an heir, and he needed a trusted advisor who could help him with matters of state. Militsa knew of my experience, and introduced us.”
“Experience?” Kolya asked, skeptically.
“With psychic fluids and astral forces. Communicating with the dead through séance and meditation. Predictions, foresight – that sort of thing.”
Ivan coughed a single, hard laugh.
“Do you doubt me?” Philippe asked. “I can also do this.” He lifted a hand, palm held out flat – and a flame leapt to life from its center.
“Holy Jesus,” Ivan breathed.
Feliks fell off the sofa.
Pyotr crossed himself, murmuring prayers under his breath.
Nikita said, “How are you doing that?”
The flame was discreet, a twisting tongue of orange-and-yellow that danced in the air above Philippe’s hand. Sasha couldn’t look away – and he couldn’t see any oil, or a spark, a match, a flint. Nothing. Just skin…and fire.
He tapped at his temple, his grin sly. “I wanted the fire to exist, and I made it so.”
“Ivan,” Nikita said.
The big man closed the distance to the couch and swiped at the flame with one of his giant paw hands. “Shit!” he hissed, and snatched back. “It’s real!”
“Of course it’s real,” Philippe said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell your captain.”
Nikita said, “Your magic is what got the tsar killed.”
“No. The Bolsheviks killed him. The same Bolsheviks you pretend to serve until your moment for revenge comes.” He tipped his head to the side, imploring. “We want the same things, Captain Baskin. I promise you that. It’s time for the Whites to take their country back.”
“In the middle of the war?”
“While the iron is hot.” He closed his hand, and the flame disappeared with a quiet pop.
Slowly, with obvious reluctance, Nikita holstered his gun.
~*~
He rinsed out the teacups and filled them to the brim with vodka. Stuck three cigarettes in his mouth and lit them all at once. Sat down at the table beneath the glare of its overhead bare bulb and passed the drinks and smokes to Kolya and Monsieur Philippe, taking a hard drag and a sip of his own to bolster his nerves.
Outwardly – he’d caught a glimpse of his reflection in the fogged kitchen window pane – he looked the same, perhaps with a glint of wildness tucked into the corners of his eyes. But inwardly, he snapped and hissed like an unmoored electrical wire, shaking and tender just beneath his skin. His mother was too young to have been at Alexandra’s court during Philippe’s tenure with the royal family, but other ladies in waiting had seen the man and described him vividly. Armed with her description, and now having seen the fire trick with his own two eyes, Nikita had no doubt that the man sitting across from him was indeed the Monsieur Philippe of Tsar Nicholas’s doomed Asiatic dreams. The conjurer they’d called “Our Friend” – before they gave the title to a holy man from Siberia.
Feliks and Ivan had taken the boys to one of the bedrooms; Nikita could hear Pyotr reading aloud from one of his books, voice tight with nerves, but clear and sweet as ever. He kept his own voice low when he spoke, more from shame at its roughness than any real desire for privacy.
“My mother gave me this,” he said, pulling the bell from his pocket and setting it on the table. It gleamed faintly beneath the light.
Philippe smiled sadly at it, but made no move to touch it – a restraint that left Nikita relieved. He knew his attachment to the thing was a type of obsession, but it couldn’t be helped at this point.
“I remember the day I gave it to Alix,” Philippe said, his smile flickering, wanting to become a grimace. “Nicky didn’t want to dismiss me, but he had to. After the pregnancy–”
“There was no pregnancy,” Kolya said, a simple statement of fact. “The doctor said there wasn’t a child.”
“Ah, yes, but there was. A boy child. I felt it.”
“How?” Kolya pressed.
Philippe turned an amused look to him. “I can conjure fire from thin air, and you want to know how? I know these things. Just as I know you are the oldest son of seven, Kolya Ivanovich Dyomin, and that your youngest sister has bad lungs, that the money you make from the state you use to buy the medicine she needs from a doctor who meets you out behind the hospital on his smoke break.”
Kolya’s face went carefully blank, lips pressed to a thin, white line. He flicked a glance to Nikita, and through the stoic mask of disinterest, Nikita could read his friend’s sudden fear.
Philippe turned to Nikita, next, and he clenched his hand tight around his mug, knowing what would come. “Just like I know what happened at that last village, when you were looking for artifacts, when your friend Dmitri–”
“That’s enough,” Nikita said, throat tight. “We get it. You have…”
“Abilities?”
“Magiya.”
“Yes, that.” The old man took a thoughtful puff on his cigarette. He looked so ordinary: old, and soft, and tired. Completely unremarkable. But he’d made fire. “Your mother was at Alix’s court?”
“You already know that, don’t you?”
Philippe smiled sadly again. “I would like to hear you tell it, Captain. I can know things, yes, but hearing it from a man’s mouth helps me understand it better.”
Nikita sucked down his cigarette all in one go, stubbed it on the tabletop and lit another, pausing to gulp vodka in the breath between. His throat burned, and that was better than the closing-up sensation.
“Yes, she was one of her ladies. Only a girl herself. She was terrified at the end. One of the palace guards – Viktor – helped her escape the night the family fled. He had false documents for her. She changed her name, married a peasant, and disappeared.” He wished he’d brought the bottle with him, hand closing around his empty cup. Kolya saw and got up to fetch it. “It was stupid of her to raise me White. Always a risk. Who can trust a child to hold his tongue?”
“But you did,” Philippe said.
“I did.” Kolya topped up his mug and he nodded his thanks, took a grateful sip. “She knew it was wrong, but she took the bell from the tsarina. She wanted me to have it. To remember what the magic men had done to ruin the Romanovs.” She’d raised him, ironically enough, to believe fiercely in the occult…and to hate it with every fiber of his being. She could have told him it was all silly parlor tricks – but she hadn’t.
Philippe didn’t appear to take insult. “You’re referring of course to Rasputin.”
“Both of you.”
“I’m afraid we’re not the same sort of animal. I am a mage, yes. But Grigory Yefemyvich was a holy man. A stannik.”
“Whatever you are, you made them look foolish.”
“Dear boy, we didn’t make anyone do anything. People fear the things they cannot understand. They didn’t understand me, and they certainly didn’t understand Rasputin. They didn’t even understand what Nicholas was trying to accomplish.”
“Which was?” Kolya said.
“Expand the empire all the way to the east. Russia could have been so much more. It could have been everything.” He sighed and
tapped ash from his cigarette. “But that’s over now.”
Nikita swirled the contents of his mug. Vodka always had a way of making him light-headed right away, but the more he drank the more settled he became. It always felt like his soul was tethered just outside his skin, hovering at the very limit of his body. Drinking pulled him back in, grounded him deep in the heavy bones of his shoulders and hips, caged him up like he ought to be.
He took three long swallows and reached for the bottle again. Kolya watched him with that assessing, fatherly gaze he’d adopted since Dima’s death. Did he eat enough? Is this too much? How very un-Russian of him.
“Let’s say I believe you,” he said.
Philippe chuckled. “I know you do.”
“Yeah. Let’s say that. What are you trying to do here? What do you want with the boy?”
For the first time, the old man’s calm confidence wavered, something uncertain shining through. “In 1901, I conducted many séances with the tsar and tsarina. During most of them, I admit, I didn’t even try to contact anyone. I read Nicholas’s intentions and served as a mirror, if you will, reflecting back to him the things he was afraid to pursue without some encouragement.” He took a drag and the smoke left his lips in an uneven stream, stuttering as his breath hitched. “But there was one time. Only a few years ago…I made contact with another…entity. A powerful one. I was searching for someone to…someone like Sasha.”
The avoidance turned Nikita’s stomach sour.
“I asked for help from this entity, and it gave me a name. Aleksander Kashnikov. It took a long time to find him.”
“Probably because he was just a kid,” Kolya said, but there was an edge of something worried and frightened beneath his caustic tone.
Philippe ignored him and turned to Nikita, presenting him with his whole face, his earnest, searching eyes. “Captain Baskin, what are you prepared to do in order to reinstate the empire?”
It was probably the vodka – he was on his fourth mug, now – that made Nikita admit, “Anything.”
Philippe nodded, approving. “Then you need me. And I need this boy Sasha. And we are going to raise the dead, you and I.”
A shiver crawled down his back, shook through his arms and legs, filled up his empty, hungry heart with something wild and hopeful and crazy. Again, it was probably just the vodka.
“There’s only seven of us,” he reminded.
“Yes,” Philippe said, grinning now. “But there’s also magic.”
~*~
Sasha had only ever slept on a fur pallet in the woods on hunts. And in his own bed. And in between his parents, when he was little, when he had nightmares about clawed, fanged things crawling from under the bed.
Pyotr’s bed smelled like Pyotr, sweet and faintly stale with old sweat, the musk of skin when he turned over restlessly and pressed his face into a cool spot on the pillow. The radiator chugged with a manufactured heat that was nothing like the fires of home, and he was too hot, kicking the covers down and down again by increments.
Monsieur Philippe snored in the other bed, dead to the world, sleeping in a corpse pose with his hands folded over his breast.
Through the wall, Ivan’s snoring sounded like a bear snarling.
There was another sound, though, something soft and unobtrusive, but noticeable. Not something mindless, like a dripping faucet or the ping of the radiator. No, something alive.
Without realizing why, Sasha slipped out of bed and padded barefoot out into the hall, still in his heavy wool pants and nubby sweater.
Light from outside, ambient city light, still spilled through the window, fuzzy, grease-fire orange. Just bright enough for him to make out Ivan on his stacked mattresses, and Feliks on the sofa, a blanket draped over him, one arm flung up above his head. Both of them looked innocent as children in sleep.
The sound was coming from the kitchen. The window was open a crack, and Nikita stood with his elbows braced on the sill, staring through the smeared glass to the street below, smoking a cigarette with his shirtsleeves rolled up, his hair falling limp on his forehead.
“You should be sleeping,” he said when Sasha passed through the threshold, without turning to look at him. “We have an early day tomorrow.”
Sasha edged a step closer. He didn’t know what to think of these men, but he wasn’t afraid anymore. “Are you really a White?” he asked, voice just a whisper.
Nikita exhaled a stream of smoke toward the gap between the window and the sill. “Do you think I’d admit to being one if I wasn’t?”
“No.”
He nodded. “I really am.” He twisted to glance at Sasha over his shoulder. “Planning to turn me in?”
“No.” And he wasn’t, but he tasted the sharp tang of panic on his tongue when he swallowed. “What’s going to happen now?”
“Something magic, Monsieur Philippe says.”
“Will it work?”
“I don’t know.” In a smaller voice: “I think we have to try, even if it doesn’t.”
Sasha nodded. He understood. Russia wasn’t Russia anymore. Its people lived in squalor…and fear. Despair.
“Go back to bed,” Nikita said, gently, like he was talking to a child.
“Okay.”
“Sasha,” he said, just as Sasha was about to leave the room. His eyes glittered in the dimness. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry it was you.”
~*~
Nikita smoked two hand-rolled cigarettes by the window, leaning low so he could feel the bitter cold of the night air against his face, hoping it would chase away the lingering haze of the vodka. But his brain felt like mud, too heavy for his head. All his thoughts were toxic.
Monsieur Philippe in the flesh. Unquestionable proof of magic. It was too much to think about this late – maybe at all.
He flicked the butt out the window and then closed it. Walked on silent feet back to his bedroom.
He paused a moment in the doorway when he heard the unmistakable sound of someone breathing. For a heartbeat, half-drunk and too exhausted to think properly, he was convinced the past few weeks had been a bad dream. That when he flopped down onto his bed, Dmitri would grumble from the other one: “Stop being so loud.” That the springs would squeak as he rolled over and put his back to Nikita, and that the morning would bring his cheerful best friend shaking him awake by the shoulders and announcing that he’d slipped out early before dawn and that they had (relatively) fresh fish for breakfast.
But it was just a heartbeat, and then Nikita saw the way the moonlight fell on the body in the far bed, the way it was too small and slender, curled up tight into a ball. Heard the way the breaths were too light and shallow.
It was Pyotr, and not his best friend.
Nikita folded his clothes up neatly and set them on the military-issue foot locker at the end of his bed. Crawled between the sheets and stretched out on his back, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling.
Sleep came slowly.
~*~
The thing was, they were the good guys. Good guys only pretending to be bad. And the good guys weren’t supposed to die until the end.
Every time he thought about the village, about what had happened to Dmitri, he questioned their goodness just a little more.
Monsieur Philippe was right: it was time.
10
A SPECIAL SORT OF VOLUNTEER
“But my clothes are warmer than this,” Sasha protested. They were nicer, too, but he didn’t voice that. Homespun and not much to look at, but much more durable than the cheap factory-made shirt Feliks was trying to shove into his hands.
Feliks made an exasperated sound in his throat. “They make you look like–”
“I’m from Siberia?”
“Ugh.” Feliks grimaced and threw the shirt in his face – but Sasha saw the edges of a smile tweaking his mouth. “I liked it better when you were afraid of us. Nikita,” he said when his captain walked into the room, “tell this man he looks like my grandmother in that sweater.”
Nikita was dressed and immaculate, the cheap factory clothes looking tailor-made to fit. Who knew – maybe the Cheka were given custom uniforms. A row of water droplets stood out dark on his pressed collar where his slicked-back, bath-damp hair had dripped at the ends.
He paused in the process of buttoning his cuffs and regarded the two of them. “Let him wear his clothes,” he said, and Feliks groaned again. “They know he’s from Siberia; what’s there to hide? Might as well look authentic. Besides, his will be warmer.”
Sasha smiled.
“Here, though.” Nikita finished the last button and stepped in close to him, a movement that seemed both unexpected and potentially sinister. He smelled of harsh chemical soap. He reached with both hands – clammy and cold from bathing – and scraped his damp fingers back through Sasha’s hair, pushing it into some semblance of order. “Hmm,” he murmured, frowning to himself, fingertips dragging against Sasha’s scalp in a way that felt shockingly intimate. “We don’t have time to cut it. Shame.”
When he stepped back, surveying his work, Sasha reached to tuck a stubborn lock behind his ear. “I like it longer.” His voice came out small. “It keeps my head warm.”
Feliks snorted a laugh.
One corner of Nikita’s mouth twitched. “I suppose it does. Go brush your teeth. And make sure your hands are clean – get beneath the nails.”
Sasha nodded.
In the bathroom, Ivan stood in front of the mirror, shoulders spanning the distance between the wall and the tub – he wasn’t built for the indoors; he belonged, Sasha thought, in a logging camp somewhere, hauling felled trees by chains like a draft horse. His huge fingers were careful as he styled his hair, though, an open tin of pomade balanced on the edge of the sink.
He caught Sasha’s gaze in the mirror and winked. “This is American. Good stuff.” He wriggled his sticky fingers. “Want me to do yours?”
“No.” Sasha smoothed a palm across the crown of his head, feeling a residual dampness from Nikita’s hands. “Thank you.”
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