Lanny had obviously shown up straight from the gym, his leather jacket thrown over a sweat-stained muscle shirt and ratty old gray joggers.
Sasha had offered him a free drink, and he was now working on his third, scanning the pulsating crowd over his shoulder.
“Did I, uh, interrupt your workout?” Sasha asked. He was trying to be subtle and accommodating. But. Crushing anxiety and all that.
“Nah, I was done.” Lanny drained his glass and set it back on the bar, firing Sasha an expectant look over the top of it.
“I said one free drink.”
Lanny tipped his chin down, and his eyes got comically wide. Like he’d been practicing compelling in his bathroom mirror and thought making a face was somehow part of it.
“Don’t even try it,” Sasha huffed.
“I wasn’t gonna! Man, you’re wound tight tonight.”
Sasha gave him a look.
“Yeah, yeah.” Lanny pulled out his wallet and slid his card over, gaze drifting back to the dance floor. “Where’s your man?”
Sasha’s stomach did a little flip. Lanny talked about them like…well, he was still so freshly human. He dismissed the supernatural elements of immortal relationships, looking at it instead with human frankness. When he referenced Nikita and Sasha, he didn’t speak about them as vampire and Familiar; didn’t revere the ancient kinship of wolves and vamps born on the banks of the Tiber when the she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus. No, he acted like they were just friends…or something more. A teasing light glinting deep in his eyes, a suggestive edge to his smirk. It wasn’t mocking, not really, but it was something. And it made Sasha’s palms sweat.
As if he could sense Sasha’s sudden discomfort – and he could now, since his turning – Lanny shifted back toward the bar, smile smug. “Uh-huh.”
Sasha drew up to his full height, jutting his chin out stubbornly. “This is important. If you’re just going to make jokes about us, you might as well go back to the gym.”
“Home gym,” Lanny corrected. “And no, no, I know.” He let out a breath and sobered. Cocked his head and fixed Sasha with the kind of gaze that reminded Sasha that Lanny was a detective, after all. And a good one, according to Trina. “You didn’t see him after you got snatched. Dude was freaked out.” He lifted his brows for emphasis.
Sasha sighed. “I know.” Nik was still freaked out; Sasha could feel the guilt and fear buzzing under his skin when they touched.
“No,” Lanny said. “I don’t think you actually do.”
Sasha bristled. “What–”
“Nik hated being a Chekist, right?” Lanny pressed on. “That’s what Trina said. That he was just pretending, and he felt shitty about all the awful things he did, and he hated Stalin, and all that?”
Sasha snorted. “More or less.”
“Well, he didn’t seem like he hated it when he was shooting everything that moved and choking little kids to death and being a walking nightmare in general.”
A low buzzing started up in Sasha’s ears. “What?” he asked, voice faint and cracked.
“You were pretty out of it when we got you back, but you saw the jacket, right?” Lanny shook his head. “All his lecturing about drinking from humans, and then he did it himself. He initiated it. Because he needed to be strong enough to get you back. He compelled people, and killed people, and drank from people – to get you back. Dude, we went all the way to Buffalo and he met his whole entire family, and all he cared about was getting you back, even if he got himself killed in the process. However he’s acting now, whatever kind of upset you’re seeing? It’s not even close to how fucked up he was before.”
Sasha whimpered in the back of his throat before he could catch himself, then tried to cover it with a cough. “I…I know he feels…guilty…”
“Hey, look.” Lanny’s tone softened. “I’m not trying to make you feel bad. But I thought you ought to know that he was pretty bad off…seeing as how you guys are co-dependent soulmates or whatever.”
Co-dependent. Yes, they were that. But it felt one-sided lately.
Suddenly, all the fretting and the stilted conversations and the avoidance caught up with him. He felt his eyes burn and looked down at the bar top, blinking away the shameful evidence of emotion. He was a pack animal, and he hadn’t been able to act like one lately, his packmate holding him at arm’s length when he most needed to reestablish bonds and intimacy.
Ordinarily, he wouldn’t confide in Lanny – in anyone else – but he’d reached a breaking point. “I,” he started again, halting, and then the dam burst. “I’m so worried about him. I can’t get him to feed, and he doesn’t want to eat, and he doesn’t laugh anymore, and he pushes me away, and I just…” He gasped a few times and then pulled himself forcibly together, looked up at Lanny miserably through a screen of hair that had fallen over his face.
Lanny said, “You mean he actually laughs?”
“He laughs a lot.”
“I don’t believe that for a hot second.”
“Sometimes,” Sasha amended. “He laughs sometimes.” When it was just the two of them.
“Do you want me to talk to him?” Lanny asked.
“Please.” It hurt to say, but he was desperate.
And Lanny, thick as a slab of beef most of the time, seemed to know it. He offered a crooked little smile. “First time for everything, huh?” Because it was the first time in their seventy-seven years of cohabitation that Sasha didn’t know how to reach his best friend. “Sit tight. Where is he?”
“Table duty, up on the mezzanine.”
Lanny threw back the last of his fourth drink and slid off the stool, melted into the crowd.
By the time he was out of sight, someone had taken his place on the stool. A female someone.
She smelled of perfume, sweat, deodorant, and the sticky-sweetness of alcohol – not in an unpleasant way. She propped her elbow on the bar, slid the dregs of her pink cocktail toward Sasha, and smiled at him. One of her dress straps slipped a little down her shoulder. Her hair was black, black, black, her lips the pink, pink, pink of ripe grapefruit.
There was a part of Sasha that would always feel like the blushing boy Ivan had dragged into a prostitute’s home back in Moscow. But he’d had plenty of years fielding advances at this point; just because he’d never done anything about his interest in sex didn’t mean it wasn’t there, lurking warm and insistent beneath his skin.
“Hi,” she said, voice pitched soft enough that he wouldn’t have heard it above the crowd if he wasn’t a wolf.
“Refill?” He scooped her glass up as she nodded, but he hesitated. Just a second. Her eyes were fixed to him in that way that spoke of laters and hotel sheets and fingernails digging into skin.
“Thank you.” She made a point of brushing her fingers over his when he passed her a fresh glass.
He knew, in that moment of skin on skin contact, that if he asked for her number, she’d give it readily. And not because he’d compelled her – he couldn’t do that. But because his too-long pale hair and wasp waist did something for some women. “Boy toy,” one customer had called him before.
This customer bit her lip. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-one,” he said, because he couldn’t reasonably pretend to be much older than he looked. His ID said 21, anyway.
“Hmm,” she purred. “You busy later?”
The thing was…Sasha wasn’t made of stone. He wasn’t immune to the promise of sex, the heady idea of it, of being, the way he’d always craved, with another person, and not just his hand and a few vague fantasies.
He just didn’t want to have sex with her.
But…
His gaze dropped to the bar, to the section where, beneath, in a plastic bin, he collected cocktail napkins with women’s numbers. And he thought of Nikita – spike of pain in his chest, shortness of breath – and the way he hadn’t smiled in the weeks since they’d returned from Virginia.
“Maybe,” he hedged, and did his best to give
the woman a sultry look. Was that something women wanted from men? Sultry? Whatever. “You see, I have this very handsome friend…”
~*~
Nikita smelled him first; thus was the vampire’s curse. Fresh sweat, bourbon, and his own personal markers. Nikita tensed – he was leaned back against the wall, arms folded, already strung so tight that he hadn’t known it was possible to tense further. He managed, though, as Lanny slipped between two tables and walked up to him with a wide, overdone grin.
“Nik. Dude.” He extended a hand for a fist-bump.
Nikita pretended he didn’t know what that meant, tucking his hands a little deeper into his armpits.
Lanny studied him, a single moment of sharp focus that plainly said, You’re not fooling me, man. Nikita heard it in his head in Lanny’s obnoxious New York accent. Then Lanny glanced over at the hulking George, who stood to Nik’s left. George was a bouncer who, unlike Nik, actually looked the part: six-seven, neckless, bulging with muscles.
“This guy,” Lanny said to him, grinning, jerking a thumb toward Nikita. “Total sourpuss, you know?”
George grunted something noncommittal.
“So, hey, this place is jumping,” Lanny continued, looking up at George–
Looking at him, Nikita suddenly noticed with a start. His dark eyes blown wide, all pupil. The subtle shift of his voice, the dropping into a lower, velvety register, moved across Nikita’s skin unpleasantly, like the buzzing of insects.
“Maybe you should go keep an eye on the dance floor, huh?”
George blinked, and then, slowly, pushed off the wall and shifted away through the crowd, head-and-shoulders above the patrons.
Lanny turned around and slumped back against the wall in the place George had vacated, breathing out a gusty sigh. “Shit. That’s hard. I think I pulled something in my brain.”
Nikita was too disturbed by the realization that Lanny had been practicing to take the obvious joke bait. “You’re getting stronger.” It didn’t leave his mouth as a compliment.
Lanny shrugged with his face and his shoulders. “Alexei’s been showing me some things. Said it might come in useful.” He turned to Nikita, smile wry. “Never know when you might have to storm a castle, you know?”
“Why are you here?” Nikita asked.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have no social skills?”
Nikita turned his head away, faced forward. Beside him, Lanny smelled of Trina, sweat, bourbon…and Sasha. He’d been to the bar first.
Lanny chuckled. “I can smell you getting aggressive. Down, boy. I’m not moving into your territory. I don’t swing that way.”
Nikita growled. A low, threatening, leave-it-alone growl.
But Lanny was an asshole. So.
“If you know what I mean,” Lanny added.
“Everyone always knows what you mean,” Nikita said through his teeth. “Idiot.”
Lanny rolled his eyes, overhead blue neon catching electric in the whites. “Okay, ordinarily, I would humor your raging asshole tendencies. I actually think they’re hilarious. And you tried to fight fucking Dracula with a pocket knife – mad props for that. But this is serious.” He made a face. “Apparently, you’re acting like even more of a raging asshole than usual at home, and seeing Sasha cry is like – well, it’s like looking at a kicked puppy. For real. So whatever’s going on with you, you need to get over it and start being nice to your boy. The world isn’t ready for a crying Sasha.”
The breath left Nikita’s lungs like he’d been punched; it was a familiar feeling at this point. He hadn’t been able to breathe properly in weeks.
Lanny softened, head tipping back against the wall. “What’s going on with you? I don’t care if you hate all of us – you probably do. But what are you doing to the kid?”
Nikita gritted his teeth and glanced away, afraid his face would reveal too much. Even after a hundred years of schooling his features, Sasha-related distress had the ability to strip him bare.
“I have a theory.”
Shut up, Nikita wanted to tell him – meant to tell him – but he couldn’t unlock his jaw and form the words aloud.
“I think, somehow, for some reason, you didn’t realize that the only thing in your whole miserable existence that meant anything was Sasha. And that freaks you out. Because you love him. And you’re thinking, ‘Maybe if I push him away, he can find someone else to get attached to.’ And you think that will make him safer, or better off somehow, or…I dunno. Whatever. I’m not selfless like that, so I’m just spitballing here.
“But I think you know that can’t work out. He’d be miserable, you’d be miserable.”
If Nikita clenched his jaw any tighter, he thought it might crack. Dima had always called him a martyr. He’d said it fondly, usually followed it up with a light smack to the back of his head. And Nikita knew that he was.
Lanny wasn’t wrong, but Nikita wanted to punch him in the face anyway. Maybe because he was right.
“When I first met you guys,” Lanny said, “I thought you were…” He wisely trailed off when Nikita growled. But then: “Are you in denial or something? Or do you really not know that you–”
Before Lanny could finish, and before Nikita could then follow through on the face-punching, the sea of bodies in front of them parted and a woman stepped through. Curves, and a tight dress, and flawless makeup, and a smile that had probably turned the head of every man on her way through the club.
Her eyes moved between the two of them a moment, then settled on Nikita.
She smelled like perfume, fruity cocktails, and, faintly, Sasha.
Black dread filled Nikita’s stomach before she said, “Hi, are you Nikita?”
Nikita didn’t move, so Lanny answered for him: “Yeah, he is.”
Her smile widened a fraction. “I was just talking to your friend at the bar. Sasha.”
Oh shit, oh shit.
“He says you guys might be interested in hanging out later.”
Oh…wait.
You guys. Sasha was always gently steering women Nikita’s way when he was in a bad mood, assuming – sometimes very correctly – that Nikita needed to blow off some steam.
But maybe tonight he wanted to do that together.
Maybe…
“Sure,” Nikita said, surprising himself, and Lanny, too, if the elbow in the ribs was anything to go by. “We get off at two.”
2
Lanny left the club feeling like he hadn’t accomplished what he’d set out to, but he’d tried, and that was what counted, right?
Trina would give him The Look, he knew. Ask him why he hadn’t tried a little harder, expressed himself a little more clearly. “We talked about this, Lanny,” she’d sigh.
As if thoughts of her had summoned her telepathically, his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket and answered it with a cheery, “Hey, babe.”
“How badly did you fuck it up?” she asked.
“Hey, excuse you. Why do you assume the worst?”
She didn’t answer; he could envision her face.
“Look, it’s not my fault your gramps is having a big bisexual crisis or something.”
A couple passing the other way on the sidewalk gave him a sharp look.
Trina sighed. “Ugh, you’re terrible.”
“What part of that statement wasn’t true? And I tried, okay? He’s a stubborn asshole.”
She sighed again, softer this time. “Yeah, I know. Where are you now, have you left yet?”
“Walking back now.”
“Meet me at the hospital instead. Harvey has something she wants to show us.”
Alarms chimed in the back of his mind. “Oh shit, what?”
“She said it was our kind of thing, so I’m thinking…monsters.”
~*~
It took a lot to impress Trina, especially these days, but Christine Harvey managed with flying colors. She’d taken the knowledge that Trina’s great-grandfather was not only still alive, but young-looking, and
a vampire, in stride like a champ. Had even helped them by looking at Sasha after his imprisonment, testing his blood for drugs to the best of her ability. She’d just rolled with it, the knowledge that immortals existed, and that they could present a problem in New York.
“So,” she said now, peeling back the sheet that covered the face of her latest DB. “Something tore his throat out.”
That Trina could see, going by the gory wound in the poor man’s neck, clotted with dry, blackened blood.
“And gutted him, too,” Harvey added.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was a bear attack.”
“Yikes,” Lanny said with a wince.
Harvey sent him a look. “Yeah. Yikes.”
“Hey.” He held up both hands, which just served to highlight his grungy old workout gear. “I never gutted anybody, okay? I’m all about that pig’s blood life.”
Trina sighed. “We got a name?”
The case had come in to Simms and Bukowski, but Harvey had called them when she got the body on her table. She didn’t even bother to consult the chart, now. “Walter Rendell. Forty-eight. He’s a contractor who was overseeing the new Adamant building – it’s an accounting firm. They had a new-build going in, and he was pulling double shifts, according to his colleagues. Was at the site last night, after everyone else. They found him this morning, torn to pieces.”
Trina looked down at the wound in his throat and her stomach quailed. She remembered a manor house in Virginia, Sasha unconscious, and wolf-shaped. “Any chance the wounds were made with a human weapon of some sort?”
“This is punctures and tears. No clean edges, like from a knife. Not of any kind I’ve seen, at least.”
“Still…” Trina said, holding back a wince. “There’s lots of things that could…do that.” She gestured, and looked away.
Harvey covered the vic’s face again. “Could it?” she asked, dryly.
“I’d like to believe that.”
“It was a wolf,” Lanny said. He frowned, expression more serious than normal. “I can smell it.”
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