He schooled his features and nodded. “Yeah. Alright.” He jerked his chin toward the screen. “What’d you find?”
Nikita closed his eyes a moment, took a deep breath, nostrils flaring. “I don’t smell him.” Just a whisper. “He’s not here.”
Lanny hadn’t smelled him either, but hadn’t wanted to say anything. “What does the computer say?” he pressed.
Nikita lingered a moment, eyes shut, like he could will the horror away. Then he turned back to the screen. “Um.” It was the first time Lanny had heard him utter that syllable; it was rattling to hear. Fearless leaders didn’t show hesitation. “This is a schedule. A shipping one. Lots of dates here – including this afternoon. ‘Live specimen’ it says. I think…” He took a rattling breath. “I think they sent him to Virginia.”
“Okay. What’s the address?”
“It’s a post office box. It isn’t…there’s not…” He was hyperventilating.
“Hey.” Lanny rested a hand on his shoulder and felt the hardness of muscle clenched tight as bone. Nikita was strung so tight it was a wonder he didn’t crack apart like marble. “We’ll find him. You’ve got two cops and some serious freaky weirdos on your side.”
Nikita snorted.
“So we’ll find him. Save all that to the drive and then we’ll sniff around a little more – literally. If we can’t find anything, we’ll hook back up with Trina, have another meeting, and go from there.”
“Yeah. I…okay. Yeah.” The last just a murmur, quiet and scared.
That was when Lanny understood: this wasn’t about a job, or about preserving the life he’d had before. He was in this now. This world he hadn’t known existed. Hell, he was related to it. He’d been dying, and now he wasn’t; now he had an obligation to the family of the woman he loved.
“Alex and I are gonna go see what we can find,” he said, patting Nikita’s shoulder.
“Alex?” Alexei asked, scandalized. “Oh no. I don’t like that.”
“You turned me into a vampire; I’ll call you whatever I want.” He stepped back. “Meet us out in front in fifteen,” he told Nikita.
“Yeah.”
Lanny peeled away and headed out the door.
Alexei followed.
Funny, he thought: the prince had always been just that – a prince. He’d never led, and wasn’t about to start now, no matter how bratty and entitled.
Mona stood at the end of the hall, so Lanny turned the other way, toward an EXIT sign and a stairwell. “If you were hiding a werewolf hostage, where would you keep him?” Lanny asked.
Alexei said, “The basement, of course.”
*
A guard stood at the bottom of the stairs in front of the door to the basement.
“Watch,” Alexei said. “Learn.” He smiled and his voice turned sugary and soft. “Let us through,” he said, and the man in uniform tugged the door open and stood aside as they entered.
It was, Lanny had to admit, a handy skill.
And then all such thoughts were swept aside as he got a good look at the open expanse that stretched before them.
White walls, white floors, and table after table. Some that looked normal, more that looked like doctor’s office exam tables, elevated and covered in paper. Some with, he noticed with alarm, gynecological stirrups at the ends.
“What the fuck?” he said to himself.
A boy appeared in front of them, not there one minute, and right in their faces the next. Lanny almost hit him.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his voice flat, his hair bright red.
Alexei startled a moment, but recovered admirably. “Sure we are,” he said, smiling at the boy, leaning forward to put his hands on his knees so the two of them were on eye level. “What’s your name? Why don’t you show us around?”
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” the boy repeated, frowning.
“Um…” Lanny started.
Alexei’s smile turned brittle, teeth bared. “Show us around,” he commanded.
The boy tilted his head. “Who are you?”
“Fuck,” Lanny said. “We’re fucked.”
Alexei held up a staying hand. “Hello,” he said, trying again. “We’re looking for a friend of ours. Maybe you’ve seen him. His name is Sasha.”
The boy blinked at him. “Yes,” he said, toneless. Creepy as one of those fucking kids from The Shining. “He was a bad wolf.”
“Where is he?” Lanny demanded, half-elbowing Alexei out of the way.
The boy blinked some more. “Gone.”
*
Nikita clicked through files in a rush, scanning each only briefly before rejecting it or saving it to the flash drive. Most were useless. But words jumped out at him here and there: wolf, subject, volunteers. This wasn’t just about Sasha, in all likelihood: Trina would want as much information about the Institute’s operation as possible. She had that look on her face, that mulish set to her mouth that reminded him so much of Katya. This place had offended her, and she wanted to pick it apart.
But for him, it was entirely about Sasha.
His heart lurched and skipped, his pulse erratic and loud to his own ears. His palms and the soles of his feet itched with anxiety. Sweat slid in slow beads down his spine, gathered in the dip of his lower back. A panic attack, humans would have called it. That sounded about right.
Every time he blinked, he saw Sasha laid out on a table in a secret lab north of Stalingrad. Saw the delicate blue tracks of veins beneath his skin, the youthful knobbiness of elbows, the finger-wide gaps between ribs. And he saw Philippe’s knife driving into his heart. He replayed the sound, over and over, of the blade pushing through skin, and meat, and ribs, and finding home.
He used to think that being turned was the worst thing that had ever happened to Sasha; a stupid hope that had been dashed the moment he realized he was missing. There were worse things, much worse, and he imagined them all, breathing in short little gasps through his mouth, as he finally abandoned the computer and went to find the others.
He took the long way. Walked through every floor, from one end to the next, nostrils flared, searching… But really he’d known the moment he walked into the lobby that Sasha wasn’t here. He’d never been here. He clung to some sort of feverish hope, though, until he finally reached the basement, waved a security guard aside with a look, and found Lanny and Alexei standing in front of a red-headed little boy looking like a couple of cobras who’d been charmed by a mongoose.
“What are you idiots doing?”
Their gazes darted to him. Alexei seemed frightened. “I can’t – he won’t listen – there’s no–”
The boy turned his head slowly, his expression one of glazed indifference, reptilian and shiver-inducing.
And then Nikita caught the scent: scorched paper, singed hair. The scent of flame made flesh that all of his ilk shared.
Horror warred with fury. He snarled, and felt his lips peel back, his fangs dropping. “He’s a mage,” he growled.
Lanny blinked.
Alexei, though, took a hasty step back, hissing.
“Get out, both of you,” Nikita said, and for the first time in hours he felt a welcome sense of calm close over him. Being without Sasha – having any distance between them at all – made him want to claw at his own face. But this…this he could handle. This stirred up only one emotion: cold hatred.
For once, Alexei didn’t argue. He grabbed Lanny – “Hey, wait, what’s going–” – and dragged him back out through the door.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” the boy said, looking up at Nikita without fear, or anger, or any emotion at all.
“No.” Nikita lifted his hand, and settled it around the boy’s throat. “I’m not.”
*
Trina knew when they trooped in that that news was bad. If they’d found Sasha, they would have called her. Their long faces confirmed what she’d already thought: that Sasha was gone.
“No luck, huh?”
Alexei shook his head. “There was no sign of his scent there.”
Nikita threw the flash drive onto the table, expression hard to read as he stared at it. “I found a shipping address in Virginia. It’s a P.O. box.”
“Oh. Okay. Well, at least that’s a start.” She tried to inject a little hope into her voice.