They could only follow.
Trina kept in good shape, but Sasha was an unnatural kind of quick. He looked like he was only jogging, but no matter how fast she accelerated – dodging pedestrians with a muttered “excuse me” – he continued to pull away from her, nothing but a bobbing patch of bright hair.
Nikita kept pace with her, though. Steadied her arm when she tripped. Steered her around a newsstand with a few deft movements.
She was a cop, and not an optimistic one, so she knew what they were going to find. Still, it was a shock.
Sasha ducked into an alley. Trina skidded and nearly fell when she did the same, catching herself against the side of the building.
In the alley stood a dumpster.
And behind it, boots sticking out, lay Lanny.
*
It hurt when Alexei bit him. Sharp like a bee sting, like the needle teeth of his grandmother’s old Pomeranian who liked to nip ankles. But the pain seemed unimportant, distant, like a memory. It was something he couldn’t flinch away from.
The night around him tilted, a warm blur of light and dark, all its varied scents peeling back from the spicy cologne that filled his sinuses. The heat of the night paled beside the wet heat of Alexei’s mouth on his throat. The warmth of his body where their chests were pressed together. Hot touch of skin where Alexei’s palm cupped the back of his neck.
It should have disturbed him, this closeness with a stranger, being held by a man who was neither brother, nor friend. But Lanny knew only peace. A fuzzy, welcome sort of contentment. He felt a pull at his throat, and his eyes slipped shut, and the black velvet of the void welcomed him with open arms.
He slept. Dreamless and endless, as his cells broke apart and knitted back together in stronger, healthier shapes. Somewhere deep inside his body, a low hum started, like the purring of an expensive imported car. Blood coursed thick, and red, and glossy through his veins, bathing the tumors, eating them away like acid. The legends and the novels had gotten it wrong, over and over, every time: he did not die. No. He transformed. The vampire cells made room for what they needed, and dug deep. Made him their home. Altered his DNA.
He slept.
And when he woke, it happened slowly, and in stages. He became aware of the heaviness of his limbs, the pounding in his head. He felt a shakiness steal through him, like the jitters from too much coffee. Felt his lungs work, and his stomach clench, empty and hungry.
He lay on something soft and he twisted onto his side, blindly seeking the light that he could sense but not see. He opened his mouth and it tasted like he’d been sucking on car keys; traced his teeth with his tongue and got snagged on something sharp – on his fang. The copper heat of fresh blood bloomed on his tongue, filled his mouth, and two things happened.
His stomach growled, and something that hadn’t been there before in his throat answered. A jungle-cat roar that startled him fully awake.
The sound tapered off into “…holt shit!” as he bolted upright.
The light was too bright, and he squinted against it, just making out his surroundings. He was in Trina’s apartment, on her sofa. And the place…smelled. Not bad, but very much like her, and coffee, and the clean laundry in the bedroom, and his own sweat on the sheets, the musk of sex, soap and shampoo in the drains in the bathroom and…
Oh. The smells. So many of them, and so intense. He shut his eyes like that could somehow block them up, brought his hands to his tender head. He could smell the bowl of apples sitting on the kitchen counter, the bits of tuna clinging to a paper plate in the garbage that she’d fed to the neighbor’s cat.
He leaned forward and dropped his head between his knees, and that was when another scent hit him, the most overwhelming of all. Trina. Alive and vibrant in a way he’d never understood before. He could hear her heart beating. And faint, beneath her skin, he smelled her blood, and something inside him clenched.
Slowly, he opened his eyes and lifted his head. There she stood, leaning against the opposite wall, Nikita and Sasha flanking her. He’d smelled them too, he realized, but their scents had kicked off very different sensations. Whereas Trina stirred something like longing…and hunger…Nikita left him bristling. And he had the strange urge to pat Sasha on top of the head.
“Try it,” Nikita hissed through his teeth, “and I’ll take your arm off.”
He’d been staring at Sasha, and dragged his gaze away, over to the vampire – the other vampire. Shit. “What?” His own voice held the low rumblings of a growl.
Nikita lifted his lip and flashed his fangs. “You may be a vamp now, but he’s not your wolf. Don’t look at him like that.”
“I’m not.” But he had been. Something instinctual in him knew that wolves were meant to serve and help vampires. Combine that with his human history of fighting, and he wanted to challenge Nikita, throw down right here and battle it out for supremacy the old-fashioned way.
He realized his mouth was open, that he was panting, fangs showing.
Nikita lowered his head, eyes hooded and aggressive. “You’d lose,” he said, dark and certain. “Sit down, boy, before you get hurt.”
Was he standing? When had that happened?
“Lanny,” Trina said, and stepped forward. Tried to, anyway; Nikita grabbed her arm and held her in place. She sighed, but didn’t shake him off. “Lanny,” she started again, “sit back down, okay? Take a deep breath.”
He sat.
He didn’t take a deep breath, because the sensory overload was making him both sick and hungrier.
“What happened?” he asked.
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Trina said. She was giving him the sort of bland-but-guarded look that she used on suspects during interrogation: not picking sides, but listening; concerned, but not actually caring. He didn’t like having that look directed at him…but he did like watching her pulse beat in the soft skin just under her jaw, that little hollow in her throat where her flesh was thin enough he imagined he could see the faint blue trails of veins. Imagined he could smell the blood, hot and salty and–
“Lanny,” she snapped, brow furrowing. “We know Alexei turned you. But how?”
He shook himself – mentally and physically – and tried to focus.
Nikita gave him a sharp glare that said he knew exactly what Lanny had been thinking.
“I left,” he started, frowning. The memories were fractured, sharp at the edges and painful to grab hold of. “I left you guys’ place, and I was walking back…and I felt great. I mean, like I was twenty again. And then all of a sudden Alexei was there. Right in front of me. He said…he said he could help me. If I wanted.” He could feel his frown deepen, digging grooves in his forehead. “And I just…shit, I just walked up to him. And he bit me.”
“He enchanted you,” Nikita said grimly. “Rasputin was a master at that, and he was Alexei’s sire.”
Trina’s face paled. “You mean – Lanny, you didn’t ask him to turn you?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t need him to. Not after I had the–” He mimed knocking back a drink. “So no.”
Sasha gave a small, unsettled ruff. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
Nikita wore the weary, but unsurprised expression of someone who’d long since given up on the small moments of decency in the world. “I shouldn’t have left him alive.”
Trina turned toward him sharply. “You can’t kill him.”
“He can’t control himself. Of course I can.”
“Yeah, but he’s not just some random vampire. He’s a Romanov.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“Um, guys?” Lanny said. “What’s gonna happen to me?”
All three of them looked at him, then, all worried to an extent.
“We’ll figure something out,” Trina said at last, but she was a beat too slow, and her smile was a bit too forced.
*