Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind him, a slow approach, and there came a quiet clearing of a throat. Jamie.
Nikita stood with one hand braced on the trunk of a dogwood tree, staring unseeing at the dew-drenched field, clenching his teeth, shaking, choking, hating, aching. He would have turned around and roared at Jamie. Sent him running. But he didn’t have the strength to do so.
Sasha would have cupped a gentle hand around the back of his neck. Told him he needed to feed. Told him nothing was his fault, that he’d done his best.
But Sasha wasn’t here.
Behind him, Jamie took a breath, preparing to speak, and there was nothing he could say that Nikita wanted to hear.
But he said, “I was madly in love with my roommate.”
Nikita stilled, for just a moment.
Jamie sighed. “It was pretty pathetic. We met at school. Our first day. And she was just…” He exhaled in a way that spoke more eloquently than words could. “And I was the nothing-special friend. And her boyfriend was…well, he’s a lot like Lanny, actually.” His voice grew sour. “He doesn’t have an artistic bone in his body. Or, if he did, it got crowded out a long time ago by protein powder and muscles.”
It wasn’t funny, but Nikita snorted. “Pathetic.”
“I know.” Jamie moved up to stand beside him, on the other side of the narrow tree trunk. “The sad part is, now I’m strong, and I can breathe, and I don’t need glasses…and she thinks I’m dead, or that I’m a zombie she ran into in our favorite coffeeshop and…well.” Another sigh. “It doesn’t matter now.”
Nikita glanced over at him, suspicious…but found no trace of manipulation in Jamie’s features. Only wistfulness; the pain of a lost chance.
You don’t know anything, Nikita thought, and almost told him. A schoolboy crush was nothing like his own loss. If Jamie Anderson thought he’d been through something terrible, immortality wasn’t going to serve him well.
But he was too tired to voice those things.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie said after a long spell of quiet. “I know that doesn’t mean anything, coming from me, but I am.”
Nikita nodded, swallowed with trouble. “Thanks.”
Footsteps again. Loud and graceless, human.
“Hey, Nik.”
Nikita turned and found Steve Baskin standing behind him, within arm’s reach, close enough to kill him. If he’d wanted to. So he wasn’t afraid, then. Maybe he shouldn’t have been – what child feared his own grandparent?
“Nik,” Nikita said. “That’s awfully familiar.”
Steve had his eyes, just like Trina did. His smile was half-hopeful, half-rueful. “Sorry. I just feel like I already know you.”
“You don’t.”
Jamie looked between them, and then silently walked back to the house.
“If it helps,” Steve started.
“It probably won’t.”
“She had a good life. Lots of family. Nice place to live.” He looked so…so sad, and understanding. Nikita wanted to vomit. “She always missed you – she kept your memory alive – but I think she was content. Happy, even. She loved her kids, and–”
“Kids?” His breathing hitched.
Steve, if possible, grew even more sorry-looking, eyebrows crimping, frown one of consolation. “Yes. She had three – including my dad.”
Nikita tried to swallow, but his throat was too dry. “She found someone else, then.”
“Nik – Nikita…she married Pyotr.”
Blankness.
For one blessed second, he thought nothing about that.
Then it was, Huh, well, okay.
Then, That makes sense.
Then it was…painful.
He dragged in a breath and pushed something like a smile across his lips. “Well. Good for little Pyotr.”
“I’m sorry–”
“I got his brother killed, you know. Did they tell you that? My best friend since childhood, Dmitri, and my lack of leadership got him stabbed to death by a fucking farmer in some fucking backwater village. I took Dima from him, so I guess it’s only fair he took my woman.”
Steve’s features settled into something harder, angrier. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Don’t tell me what it was like,” Nikita snapped. “I’m glad they had each other. They deserved every happiness, both of them.”
Steve took a breath. “I know it stings, though.”
“You don’t know anything. They should have never mentioned my name. I should have been the monster story that woke the children up with nightmares in the middle of the night. How dare they tell you who I was. What I was.”
The morning spun around him and he made himself take another breath, clutching at the bark of the dogwood tree for balance.
Steve gave him a flat look that Nikita had seen countless times in the mirror. “You need to get over yourself.”
“I–”
“Every family has its dark secret. Ours is you. And Sasha.” He looked sorry again. “Trina said they took him. Those Institute people.”
Nikita slashed a hand through the air, trying to silence him. He just…couldn’t anymore.
But Steve was a Baskin, after all, and he was good at pushing. “Grams would be glad that you two stayed together all this time. It’s good that you have someone.”
“Shut up!” Nikita roared – really roared, the snarling big cat sound punching out of his lungs, echoing off the front of the house. He kept growling, low and constant, the taste of blood filling his mouth as his fangs nicked his tongue. “I don’t have him,” he said viciously, “I lost him, and it should have been me. Why didn’t they take me instead? Why is it never me?”
Steve stared at him, gaze assessing, terrifyingly penetrating. “But it was you,” he said, softly. “Once. Sasha had your back then. And you have his now. Right?”
Nikita swallowed his growl and wiped a hand down his face.
“Trina says you guys need to have a séance,” Steve continued. “So let’s walk up to the other house and see if Mom’s got enough candles. Yeah?”
Slowly, Nikita lowered his hand, marveling. He’d just yelled at this man. Was his century-old grandfather, back from the dead, or from legend, or wherever. And Steve was inviting him in, accepting him, like…
Like he was family.
Nikita swallowed. “Your father…”
Steve smiled. “Kolya.”
Oh. Oh, didn’t that hurt.
“I think he’d really like to meet you, if you’re up for it.”
He didn’t think he was; would probably never be. But he nodded.
“Come on,” Steve said, gently, and he went.
20
Farley, Wyoming
She woke up slowly, like she always did after an energy transference. Rooster called it “healing,” what she did, but that wasn’t how it felt. For her, it had always been like taking a deep breath, gathering her power, feeling it move through her veins like blood, like something brighter and stronger than blood, and pushing it through her skin and into someone else’s. She didn’t know the medical mechanics of it, how Rooster’s body was able to absorb and metabolize her energy like that. She could only be grateful for the process.
She opened her eyes to a room striped with dawn shadows, Rooster’s arm heavy around her waist, his breath regular and reassuring against the top of her head.
She craved this: the closeness. The touch of skin, the warmth of shared body heat. Knowing that he was whole, and safe, and near enough for her to ease, to heal, to soothe if she needed to. She’d never had this – intimacy – before she fled the Institute and found Rooster. There had been the other LCs, the redheaded children who looked so like her, testing their budding powers on mannequins in gun ranges, but they’d each been assigned a bunk and told to stay there. They’d never touched; the only hands that had ever touched her body belonged to the doctors and nurses and techs. Touches used to manipulate her limbs, and draw samples, and administer drugs that made her see double, and throw up, and lie shivering in her bunk for hours.