Alphas for the Holidays

by Mandy M. Roth

  “Today you will be visited by three spirits. Listen to them, Kirill. Hear what they have to say. They may be your last chance.”

  Kirill retrieved a few vials from the drawer of his dresser, holy water, acidic dragon saliva, and a few others. He brought them to the bed and tucked them underneath his pillow alongside the weapons already nestled there. Rasputin’s words haunted him as he drew the curtains closed around his bed, providing a second shield against the daylight. He lay down in his clothes, not bothering to undress since Irina wouldn’t be coming to bed before he died.

  Staring up at the ceiling, Kirill half-heartedly ran through the spirits he’d encountered in the past. What spirits would be visiting him? Would they speak, or would they show him images? Would they project themselves into the blackness that swallowed him when he died, or would they wake him, bring him out of his daily death?

  Too many questions and not enough answers. For one shining moment, Kirill was thankful he didn’t sleep as humans did. Surely with all he’d heard tonight, sleep would have been impossible. He closed his eyes and ran through his list of spirits one more time before he died.

  Chapter 3

  The scent of werewolf woke him. That unmistakable musk that made one feel as though an animal was lying on his face, overlaid with the sharp scent of shredded leaves. Kirill met the land of the living with a bone-jarring, senses-searing awareness, eyes flying open, upper body jolting off the bed.

  His fingers tightened over the blade that he’d drawn automatically as he sat up. His curtains remained unmoving, still surrounding his bed, still cloaking him in darkness. But there was no mistaking the earthy aroma of wolf, the familiar warm power of a shapeshifter oozing over his body.

  “Etienne?”

  As if saying the prince of Saguenay’s name had summoned him, the werewolf’s familiar golden eyes suddenly appeared, glowing like fireflies in the dark forest. Kirill blinked, his keen night vision showing him Etienne’s form in faint, shadowed outlines. He hadn’t felt the bed move, hadn’t seen the curtains part. How had Etienne gotten so far into the castle—so far into Kirill’s private chambers? He tightened his grip on his blade.

  “Etienne, what are you doing here?” Kirill kept the emotion out of his voice, even as his mind worked furiously to figure out why he was awake, what time it must be. Irina was absent, she still had not come to bed. Surely she would have come to greet him if it was nightfall? He felt inside himself, finding that lethargic weight that fell upon him when the sun began to rise in the sky, the almost sickening heat he could feel no matter how cold the air was. It was most certainly daytime.

  “I’ve never liked you.” Etienne shifted on the bed, the furs tugging beneath Kirill’s body. “I know you better now, know you’re not as evil as I once thought you were. But you’re still a corpse. My senses revolt in your presence, screaming at me that you don’t belong. You’re dead.”

  “You aren’t Etienne.” Kirill eased his body closer to the headboard, sliding his hand beneath his pillow. He slowly groped for the vial of holy water.

  “Why do you doubt your senses?”

  ‘Etienne’s’ voice was amused. The Saguenayan prince Kirill knew as Etienne was never amused. It confirmed his suspicion, solidified his deduction that the werewolf prince would never have violated his sanctuary in this way. Kirill loosened the stopper of the vial, careful not to spill it on his skin.

  “It takes so little to affect the senses,” Kirill said calmly, his gaze still locked on the glowing eyes in front of him. “Only a fool allows his senses to tell him what his mind knows cannot be true.”

  “Typical vampire,” Etienne mocked. “Too smart for his own senses.” The golden eyes sharpened, something foreign sliding behind the glowing orbs. “Be that as it may, it might behoove you, vampire prince, to accept what your senses are telling you and probe no further. There are other, less pleasant forms the Spirit of Koliada Past may take. You may well be grateful to me for choosing a form that would be comforting for you. Especially since it took such effort on my part to find a creature on this earth that doesn’t hate you and would be seen as unthreatening.”

  “Spirit of Koliada Past?” Kirill ignored the spirit’s barb, the open vial held carefully in his grip. “Then you are the spirit Rasputin spoke of?”

  The golden eyes bobbed in the darkness as if the creature nodded. “I am.”

  Kirill opened his mouth but Etienne’s voice cut him off.

  “Do not plague me with questions. Trying to figure out my origin, my weaknesses, would be a waste of time for us both. You will have to accept my word that I am not here to harm you. The day does not last forever and I have much to show you.”

  “Will you be taking me somewhere then?” Kirill asked cautiously, furiously trying to decide how far to let this spirit go. Rasputin had told him to listen, he’d said nothing of traveling with the spirit. There was a fine line between heeding his old mentor’s advice and being unspeakably foolish. Blindly following an insulting ghost fell firmly in the latter category.

  “I would not want you to burn.” The ghost’s voice was slow, patronizing. “And in any case, your mind can travel faster than your flesh. So look around you, Prince of Dacia, and tell me what you see.”

  Kirill glanced to the side and went deathly still. He wasn’t in bed, not in his room. He blinked, hands flying out to feel the bed underneath him. It was all gone. The curtains had vanished, and a new scene had sprung up around him so that he now stood in another room in his castle. The library.

  Books surrounded him on all sides, bookcases covering the walls, tome upon tome bearing down on him, reminding him of lessons that had been drilled into his head so long ago. The scent of old parchment and worn leather filled his senses. Each spine brought a new memory, a new piece of knowledge that he’d hoarded. Information was power, and he’d wanted it all.

  “Young master, that is not the text you were assigned.”

  Rasputin’s voice sliced through the air, cracking like a whip. Kirill whirled around to find a child sitting at a small desk set up by the library window. Sunlight shone through the glass, and Kirill tensed. There was no burning though, no searing pain. The sunlight was as fake as the child. The child that was remarkably familiar…

  “It’s me.” The words passed his lips in a hushed whisper, shock and intrigue threatening to steal his voice entirely. The child at the desk shared his white-blond hair, the locks pulled back into a severe ponytail that fell past his shoulders. His skin was pale, though not as much as it was now. Of course, he’d been alive back then.

  “I’ve finished that text.” Young Kirill did not take his eyes from the book in front of him, gaze still sliding across the page. “And the one after that. If you cannot keep up, then perhaps the king and queen should assign me a new tutor?”

  Rasputin snatched a book from the shelf beside him and brought it down with a resounding slam on Kirill’s desk. Young Kirill raised his eyes from the page he’d been reading to look at his tutor.

  “You read the history book I gave you on Dacia, young master.” Rasputin’s voice was eerily calm, almost musical. “But what book did you progress to after that?”

  “The next Dacian historical text,” Kirill answered, his tone bored. “Why?”

  “The text you should have read after the first Dacian historical text is the first Saguenayan historical text.”

  A furrow appeared between Young Kirill’s brows. “Why?”

  “Because, young master,” Rasputin answered, black beady eyes shining. “Knowing your enemy is the first step in defeating them.” He leaned forward, putting his face closer to Kirill’s. “Or do you intend to rule over only part of the world?”

  A slow smile spread across Young Kirill’s face. He closed the book he’d been reading and opened the one Rasputin had dropped on his desk. The bearded advisor turned away, leaving the young prince to his studies.

  “Bred from a young age to dream of world domination,” Etienne muttered. “Is
it any wonder you’re such an ass?”

  A scathing retort leapt to the tip of Kirill’s tongue, but it vanished at the sight of the ghost standing beside him. He would have sworn it was really Etienne. He dressed in the same rough trousers the werewolf prince wore more often than not, the same tailored shirt clinging to his broad chest. Polished boots too heavy for most noblemen graced his feet, ideal for all the trekking the werewolf did through the woods. The scent, the energy…it all matched Etienne. It took a great deal of power to mimic a living being so precisely. He shook off the shiver trying to rattle his spine.

  What manner of being has Rasputin set on me?

  “You were always alone for these lessons with Rasputin.” Etienne leaned against a bookshelf, shifting his wide shoulders as if scratching his back on the shelves. “Other lessons were shared with some of the other noble children—but never these.”

  “These lessons were private because they were meant to prepare me to rule,” Kirill said stiffly. “There was no reason for the other children to be here. They did not share my future.”

  “But there was one boy who was to share your future.” Etienne’s brown eyes shifted to gold, his voice dropping to a gravelly canine base. “Wasn’t there?”

  Kirill’s stomach dropped, a strange clammy feeling sliding over his skin. A memory long buried stirred beneath layers and layers of his past, fighting to be heard again. “No,” he whispered, trying and failing to inject some force into the word. “I do not wish to see that winter solstice.”

  His words fell on deaf ears. The scenery around them changed again, colors melting, swirling, and reforming. They were still in the castle, but this time they were in the grand ballroom. Music wafted through the air from the orchestra playing in the corner, and men and women dressed in their Koliada finery twirled around the dance floor. The stench of fear that usually permeated the air when the nobles were forced to attend a royal celebration post-coup was mitigated, a low hum instead of the dull roar it usually was. Koliada lifted spirits, and it seemed that not even a vampiric king and queen peering down with dead eyes and ghostly pale faces could completely dampen that spirit.

  None of the festivities mattered. Kirill remembered this winter solstice, remembered it even though part of him had tried so hard to forget it, to banish the memory forever. He was inexplicably pulled to the drawing room right off the main ballroom, driven to open the door and step into the relative silence, closing the door behind him as he had so many years ago. The ghost remained at his side, without ever seeming to move. His Etienne disguise was so perfect, Kirill could almost believe he would be there to offer comfort for what was coming. If indeed the real Etienne would have offered him comfort after seeing what was to transpire… Together, they followed the sound of angry voices that were beginning to grow in volume.

  “Traitor!”

  Kirill fought the urge to close his eyes, to block out the face he knew he was about to see. The sound of his own voice killed whatever hope he’d had that somehow this was not the Koliada memory he feared.

  “I am no traitor, Evgeni. I am the prince, and it is my responsibility to do what is best for my kingdom.”

  A young man stood dressed in a thick, heavily embossed tunic, gold all but smothering the deep green of the fabric the color of holly leaves. His black hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at his neck, leaving nothing to obstruct his dark, flashing eyes. His voice was tinged with desperation, the slightly hysterical note as plain to Kirill now as it had been all those years ago.

  “We had an accord! You agreed to support me if I moved against the Malenkovs.”

  Kirill steeled himself against the empty expression in his younger self’s eyes as his comrade seethed in front of him. He was older now than he’d been in the last memory, no longer the child under Rasputin’s tutelage, but a grown man. The deathly pallor of his skin was another reminder that the coup that had made his family into vampires had already passed. Rasputin was dead now.

  “We had nothing in writing,” Young Kirill said calmly. “And I’m afraid another offer has arisen that will be more beneficial to my people. I cannot sacrifice the greater good—”

  “Greater good.” Evgeni spit on the floor, the heat of his fury blistering, even through all these years. “You care nothing for anyone other than yourself.” He straightened his spine, though there was a tremble in his lean arms that betrayed him. “I am already committed to this war. The Malenkovs will not walk away now, they will not stop until my family has nothing left. If you will not stand behind me, I will lose everything.”

  “If I stand behind you, the alliance I’ve managed to attain will fail, and more than just your family will suffer.” Young Kirill strode toward the door. “I’m afraid you will have to bear the consequences of your own choices.”

  “Traitor!” Evgeni screamed.

  Kirill closed his eyes, struggling against the desire to cover his ears and block out this unfortunate piece of his past. Evgeni. He turned to the ghost and opened his eyes. “Take me away from this place.”

  “He was your best friend,” Etienne mused. “And you abandoned him all because she told you to. Because she promised to help you gain more power.”

  “I know what I did.” Kirill pressed his lips together, squaring his shoulders and opening his eyes. “The coup was still fresh in people’s minds, their distrust of my kin, of the knowledge that the royal family now consisted of vampires, overwhelming them. It was only a matter of time until they got up the nerve to try again, to come at us with fire and holy water. I needed more influence, influence from creatures beyond humanity. I had no connection to that world yet.”

  “But Serafina did.”

  The mention of Irina’s stepmother fell over Kirill like a bucket of ice slivers, sharp and freezing. “Yes.”

  “Does Irina know that you betrayed your best friend to earn the loyalty of the woman who tried to kill her?”

  Kirill didn’t answer, the lump in his throat cutting off any words he might have spoken in his defense. Irina knew about his former alliance with her stepmother, had almost lost her life because of it. It had never seemed the right time to confess how far back his alliance with Serafina had gone. Indeed, he’d tried very hard to convince himself that it was not necessary to share that with Irina at all. Ever.

  “Friends were never important enough to you to make you pause your drive for power, your drive for more.” Etienne stalked around Kirill, a predator circling its prey. “Evgeni lost everything when the Malenkovs discovered he’d tried to take over their land. He followed the advice you gave him, used the strategy you yourself devised, to weaken their holdings, and just when he was ready to make his final move, you abandoned him. He was your only friend.”

  The scenery around them faded, darkness eating away at the walls of the drawing room. Kirill couldn’t help but glance at Evgeni, stare at his old friend until blackness swallowed everything and all that remained was Etienne’s golden eyes, hovering in the darkness beside him.

  “Irina would sacrifice any amount of power for a friend, her heart far more important to her than her power,” Etienne whispered. “She gave you her heart, believes she received yours in return. How long will it take her to realize you never had a heart to give her?”

  Chapter 4

  Kirill’s eyes flew open. The curtains tented above his bed played tricks on his mind, for a moment making it appear as though he were gazing into a swirling, bottomless void. He saw Evgeni’s face in that void, his eyes burning, his voice sharp and tinged with the unmistakable ring of panic. For a second, Kirill thought he felt his own heart beat, one, solitary thud. Or perhaps that was just another memory.

  Steel dagger, small vial of holy water, dragon’s saliva…

  Kirill ran his fingers over the weapons under his pillow. Each one was smooth, familiar, comforting. The memory of Evgeni, the reminder of the betrayal he hadn’t thought of in ages, settled against his skin like acid, burning, eating through his flesh. Kirill
remained still, staring unblinking up at the curtains, peering into that false, swirling void.

  “The past must remain untouched,” he whispered. “No one can turn back time.”

  Over and over he caressed his weapons, searching for the comfort their presence usually brought him. He weapons were security, protection. But not against ghosts.

  “Today you will be visited by three spirits. Listen to them, Kirill. Hear what they have to say. They may be your last chance.”

  This ghost had reached into the past with unerring accuracy and pulled forth perhaps the one true regret Kirill had. There had been many betrayals in his past, many times he’d used a loophole to escape from one bargain to enter into a more beneficial one. It was strategy, pure and simple. He made the decisions that would benefit him the most, and by benefitting him, benefit his people. But no betrayal had ever haunted him like that first one. Like Evgeni. Perhaps it was no coincidence that he hadn’t had a friend since.

  Kirill closed his eyes again, willing his body to die, to spill him back into the dreamless darkness. The undulating heat and sickness that writhed inside him, letting him know the sun was high in the sky, grew warmer. The spark of consciousness inside him flickered and began to fade as he died for the second time that day.

  It seemed he had scarcely had a moment’s peace when the rustle of feathers assaulted his ears like the mad flurry of a flock of crows. The bed dipped again, farther this time, Kirill’s entire body tilting with the sudden weight on the end of his mattress. Kirill opened his eyes, resigned to another visit and determined not to let this ghost best him as the last one had.

  “The Ghost of Koliada Present, I presume?” Kirill paused, considering. The first ghost had taken the form of Etienne. And now he heard rustling feathers and felt a great weight pressing down on the space before him. “You’ve taken the form of the angelic prince of Meropis,” Kirill guessed. “Interesting.”