Standing next to him, Geoffrey must have fully felt the weight of the task at hand.
“You take the left side of the room and I’ll take the right?” Hugo quipped.
That elicited a soft smile out of Geoffrey. “Are you sure you remember how to read Russian?”
“If I get confused, I’ll ask for your help.”
Geoffrey elbowed him in the ribs. “I might as well read to you then. You’ll be asking for my help all night.”
Two pairs of footsteps sounded down the stairs behind them and Hugo quickly moved into the room to make way for the two vampires who were ready to join them.
“You have my sincerest thanks and apologies, gospoda.”
Hugo turned with a startled look to behold the once rabid and vicious vampire, standing upright with his chest out and sensible like any other man. If it weren’t for his ratty garments, Hugo would have never guessed he had behaved with anything other than dignity and poise.
“Not at all… I think?” Geoffrey replied with a questioning tone as he looked from his brother to the former ravenous vampire. Without any prompting from Michael, he extended his hand in greeting. “Geoffrey Swenson.”
The guard smiled, his white teeth slightly red with residual blood. “Anton Wiatrowski.” He heartily shook Geoffrey’s hand. “Thank you, truly. I can’t remember the last time I was so contented.”
At a loss for anything better to say, Geoffrey simply turned to his brother. “This is my brother, Hugo. You’ll have to excuse his manners.”
Hugo waved him off, not willing to play nice. “Charmed, I’m sure.”
Anton looked to him and his smile faltered a little. “I’ll try not to hold your offer to kill me against you.”
Michael quickly stepped in. “Anton, I assume you’re familiar with this place?”
The guard nodded and looked down to his clothes as if he didn’t realize how tattered they really were. A look of embarrassment passed over his face before he replied. “Indeed. I’ve read everything in here, at least twice. Sometimes, it’s the only way to distract myself. The tsar assigned me to guard this place from outsiders. I should kill you, but after the kindness you’ve shown me…” He gave a pointed glance to Hugo. “I suppose I can assist you.”
Thankful they wouldn’t be reading through mountains of scrolls, Hugo stopped and waited for them to get to the point.
Michael explained their search for the White Wolf and had to retranslate his request a few different ways before Anton finally understood exactly what they were looking for. The White Wolf of Peace wasn’t just any wawkalak or bodark.
“It’s a wolf that is said to embody the spirit of an ancient royal that was canonized as a deity that brought peace to the community.”
It took a moment for Anton to search his memory, but then he moved through the piles of loose-leaf manuscripts and scrolls to stand before a tall bookcase. “I believe there’s a book here that mentions it. Only, I can’t recall which one.”
Geoffrey and Hugo fell in beside Anton and slipped out stacks upon stacks of the volumes, some bound in leather and others held together by leather cords with no formal binding. He might have hoped too soon for a quick solution.
Hugo chose to sit on the floor, away from the others as they brought their selections to the table and began skimming through the ancient pages.
“Why are you looking for this wolf?” Anton asked after they had worked through more pleasant, casual conversation that Hugo wasn’t paying attention to. Once more, Geoffrey was opening himself up to a stranger. For being the older brother of the two, Hugo did not think him the wisest.
Michael was the first to respond. “When was the last time you left this palace?”
Anton didn’t have an answer. “It seems like an interminable amount of time.”
“The world is not a friendly place,” Michael continued. “Wars, hatred, senseless feuds, murder, strife, and all manner of oppression have stolen the hearts of man. This Spirit of Peace may be our only chance to restore balance.”
Hugo rolled his eyes and he was glad his brother didn’t see or he might have been on the receiving end of another scolding. What Michael said wasn’t untrue. The world had long been rocked by violence and anger. They had only recently heard of the legend and though they might have easily been lumped with the countless other werewolves who were untrusting of vampires, they knew it was not the way to live. The dissention, greed, and general despicable conduct of the three races of the world were enough to make the most holy man lose faith in the goodness of the Almighty.
It wasn’t just man destroying man. It was werewolf turning against werewolf over territories and rumors. Alphas battled one another for control over space. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about with the vampires looking to eliminate their kind, they didn’t need the threat from within. Perhaps that was the true reason Hugo and Geoffrey never longed for a home with a pack. Too much bickering, too much rivalry and discord. It wasn’t worth it.
If they could find the White Wolf of Peace, perhaps they could reason with it to ease the strain, just enough so the world could breathe easy again. Evidently, Michael was just as displeased with the way their races lived. Why else would he wish to help them rather than kill them?
Hugo shook his head and hoped the vampire’s mind-altering powers weren’t starting to have an effect upon him.
Chapter Three
The last time Geoffrey’s head pounded this hard, he was a young man suffering from a common, human ailment that should have been unfamiliar to him now. That was over two hundred years ago and as a werewolf, Geoffrey shouldn’t have gotten headaches. Bent over the manuscript resting on the table, his eyes straining in the dark, he had lost track of how many pages he had read.
The four of them had sat and paced across this underground library for what seemed like days. Geoffrey could feel his stomach growl in protest to the amount of time he had gone without a meal and he knew that if his brother was awake, he would have been feeling the effects of the hunger as well. Hugo leaned against a bookcase a few hours ago and had nodded off after his efforts proved fruitless as well.
When they first dove into the challenge of searching through the texts, Michael and Anton talked more than read. They hunkered down to their task only when Geoffrey mentioned that they were running out of time before any of the guards might discover the lock on the heavily guarded library door was torn off.
He rubbed at his red-rimmed eyes and let out a tired sigh. Anton sat across the table from him while Michael had been quietly wandering around the room with a volume between his hands. He was glad that both of the vampires were as veracious readers as werewolves, otherwise this task might have taken much longer.
“How many more books?” Geoffrey asked to his companion.
Anton lifted his head and regarded the bookshelf. “Perhaps only another dozen or so.”
That was both good and bad. Good, in the sense that they were narrowing down the possible options for which book held the secret of the White Wolf. Bad, in that if they still couldn’t find it in the last books from that bookcase, the four of them would have to move on to the rest of the library. Though Anton’s memory seemed reliable, it was still likely that he was mistaken where he last saw the manuscript they were searching for. Geoffrey was determined to take a break before it came to that. He needed to eat something, and unlike the vampires, he didn’t have such a convenient source.
Michael’s footsteps slowed and then stopped completely. Geoffrey turned and regarded the older vampire, and saw the excited look in his dark eyes. With a snap of his fingers and a wide grin, he looked up to his friends. “I’ve got it!”
Hugo jolted awake, his wolf eyes nearly glowing in the darkness. Geoffrey quickly stood and met Michael in the open space in the middle of the library, Anton hot on his heels.
“You’ve found it?”
“I believe so,” Michael said as he angled the open book for them to read. “It talks about an ancient S
pirit of Peace that takes the form of a wolf and travels in the east.”
Geoffrey’s eyes skimmed over the passage and nodded with a smile. “Yes, this might be it.”
Anton craned his neck between their shoulders to verify. “Yes! It is. I remember this.” Then, he dodged around to take a peek at the title on the cover.
Hugo wiped the sleep from his eyes and hurried toward them. “Please say it’s not far from here?”
Michael shook his head. “Afraid not. It says it’s been commonly sighted in the far east, but not in the orient. Yet, it doesn’t give an exact location.”
“So, we’ll have to search the entire country,” Hugo groaned. “This told us nothing we didn’t already know.”
“Not necessarily,” Geoffrey interrupted. “We can narrow our search down to one half of the country, the half we’re currently not in, and then ask around if they have seen the White Wolf.”
Michael pointed to the text. “It doesn’t say the wolf is white. It actually doesn’t signify a color at all.”
“I’m sure peasants would recognize a wolf as unique as that, though,” Anton added.
Geoffrey pinched the top of the page near the fold and gently ripped the parchment from the book. The younger vampire who must have prized these volumes let out a horrified sound as if the werewolf had just desecrated something holy. “We will need to refer to this,” he consoled him.
With precision, he folded the paper and made his way toward the exit. Hugo followed close behind, probably just as eager to leave the library and dusty tomes. Geoffrey heard Michael snap the book shut and have a quick conversation with Anton before they trailed behind up the stairs.
“I can help you get out of the palace safely,” Anton told them.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Hugo called over his shoulder as they took the stairs three at a time, ascending back to the mortal world.
The closer they came to the surface, the more Geoffrey began to realize that something wasn’t quite right. Heavy footsteps sounded above their heads, men shouting in Russian as they went.
“He’s coming with us,” Michael announced.
While Hugo was inclined to turn and argue, Geoffrey grabbed his brother’s lapel and hurried him forward up the steps in an attempt to silence him. What was one more to their party going to hurt? They couldn’t simply leave him there to suffer from further starvation at the hands of the tsar, the boyars, and his council. He was put down in the library to guard it against intruders, and those intruders were the only source of nourishment he received. He couldn’t allow Anton to remain a prisoner like that.
Geoffrey would be lying if he said that Anton’s feeding had absolutely no affect upon him. At first, it was a means to an end. Michael wasn’t going to let them dispense with him in the way Hugo wished, but they also needed his assistance. Even before he mentioned that he had read the entirety of the library, Geoffrey somehow knew that Anton could prove useful.
However, the more the vampire fed on him, the more attached he became. He had invested his blood into the young man and however much he despised the idea, Geoffrey felt obligated to help him however else that he could.
“What’s happening?” Geoffrey asked, purposefully changing the subject to draw their attention to the activity within the Kremlin.
As they neared the door that led into the hallway, he could just catch bits and pieces of the frantic and panicked conversations. Anton pushed his way forward and listened, the torchlight from the corridor falling across his pale face.
“A mob has surrounded the palace,” he said in a whisper, lest someone running by hear him. It was clear that in the growing hysteria, no one cared to notice that the door to the secret library had been broken into.
Hugo squeezed past the vampire and peeked out into the hall. “I don’t see any sunlight. It should be safe to leave.”
“Were we down here all day?” Geoffrey questioned.
“It appears so,” Michael replied. “Anton, lead the way and I’ll do my best to distract the guards we pass. Hopefully, they will be too preoccupied to notice us.”
“Distract?” Anton asked, a confused frown forming between his brows. Clearly, he knew just as little as the werewolves did about the elder vampire’s extraordinary psychic abilities.
Hugo shoved Anton through the doorway. “No time to explain. Just get us out of here.”
The vampire, tattered uniform and all, paused in the middle of the empty hall to gain his bearings. The others waited, then followed him in the opposite direction they had originally come. Geoffrey half expected his impulsive brother to make a remark on the fact, but he seemed too busy listening to the shouts coming from outside the palace.
Geoffrey heard them too. The people were rioting over unfair taxes and something about salt. They wanted the heads of officials, but the tsar was not willing to listen to their demands. A riot would surely break out at any moment and he didn’t want to be around when it finally happened.
A few guards ran past them and Anton flinched, but just as before, Michael did a fair job of masking their movements through his bizarre, but oddly useful mind tricks. Anton didn’t them through the heart of the palace, through the grand golden chambers and decadent rooms. He led them down through the servants’ quarters and out the back passageways that Geoffrey was sure Michael wasn’t even aware of.
Within moments, they were outside the Kremlin, breathing in the fresh night air. The mob that clustered around the front of the palace wouldn’t see their escape through the streets of Moscow.
The party arrived back to the small encampment just outside of the city. Reitz stood to greet them, but when his eyes fell on Anton, he looked less than enthusiastic. Michael took the time to explain everything to his blood servant and introduce the new vampire, while Hugo pulled Geoffrey aside, well out of earshot.
“We have our information,” his younger brother whispered. “Let’s leave them. We don’t need their help anymore.”
Geoffrey glanced over his shoulder and sighed. He remembered the promise he had given to Hugo before they left for Moscow, but something didn’t settle right with the idea of leaving anymore. Not only because of their new addition, but because of everything Michael had said in the library.
Their goals and values were nearly identical. Past their obvious differences, Geoffrey found himself identifying with Michael’s frustrations about the world at war. The mob around the Kremlin was evidence enough that this world needed the Spirit of Peace, now more than ever. Five heads were better than two – though Geoffrey sometimes wondered if his brother’s mind could only be counted as a half. If Michael was the traveler he proclaimed himself to be, his assistance in navigating through the harsh eastern lands would prove invaluable.
Geoffrey looked to his brother and did not take pleasure in what he would say. “I think we need to travel with them for a bit longer, just until we feel like we’re close to finding the Spirit. Then, we’ll part ways.”
Hugo gave him a look as if he had grown three heads and sprouted a set of devilish wings. “I can’t believe you’re siding with them over us.”
“That’s not what I’m doing,” Geoffrey growled.
“You actually think staying with them will benefit us at all?”
His brother balled his hands into tight fists as his eyes glowed their wolfish gold. Geoffrey didn’t want this to end in a fight, but his wolf was ready for one if it came.
“I think it is pointless to leave them now,” Geoffrey replied, stepping closer so his brother wouldn’t mistake the light shiver of dominance he radiated. “If Michael could find us in an obscure village, he will find us in the forest. He would only follow, if he was truly set on all five of us seeking out the Spirit together.”
A muscle jumped in Hugo’s jaw and Geoffrey knew he had won his case. Hugo was eager to get away from the vampires, but fleeing wouldn’t do them any good at the present. It would only create a strained conflict between them.
“When can we leav
e them? I won’t travel all the way across Russia with that smell.”
“If you’re truly worried about the smell, we can stuff some cloth up your nose.”
Hugo sneered. “Cloth you’ve wiped your ass with? No, thank you.”
Geoffrey cracked a smile and playfully pushed his brother to make him stumble backward. The two chuckled and their eyes faded to their human color. “I promise, as soon as the time is right, we will part ways with Michael. Just, not right now.”
“Traveling with them will slow us down,” Hugo remarked as he glanced toward the campsite.
“The carriage will protect the vampires during the day, though I’m sure it will be slower than we are used to.”
Hugo pursed his lips in thought. “Perhaps I can run ahead and scout the path. You know, make sure it’s clear.”
“And let you out of my sight?” Geoffrey said. “Not a chance. If I have to tether you to my hip with chains, I won’t let you wander off. Who knows if I’ll see you again.”
For a moment, a hurt look flashed in his younger brother’s eyes. “I would never leave you,” he said softly. “Especially to them. Anton would bleed you dry, I’m sure of it.”
Geoffrey rolled his eyes and draped his arm around Hugo’s shoulders. “You needn’t protect me, brother. I can take care of myself.”
“Yes,” he spat sarcastically. “Just like you could get free from the pyre the other night.”
“I would have gotten free if I were given few more moments.”
They slowly traced their way back to the group. “What about the time that merchant nearly cut off your manhood for messing around with his wife?”
Geoffrey winced. “Well…”
“Or the time – “
“Okay,” he cut him off. “We need one another. I understand.”
Hugo laughed. “Ah, you need me, but I certainly don’t need you,” he said as he poked his brother in the chest.
“Weren’t you the one to admit that you were a piss-poor excuse for a rabbit hunter?” Geoffrey teased.
The Prophecy (A Legacy Series Novella) (The Legacy Series Book 4) Page 3