But it had, once. Freedom. It had been worth death, for her. He still felt sick every time he remembered plunging the knife into her heart. Forgive me, darling. But then her eyes had opened, and she’d known him right away, and she’d smiled with blood in her teeth. He’d turned her into a creature made to be owned, and she’d only ever thanked him for it. Rejoiced in the chance to be together forever.
If they were human, he might have been able to drive her away. Scream lies at her, tell her he hated her, that he didn’t want her anymore; and maybe she would believe it, and tearing his heart out, letting her walk away, would be worth it if it meant she was away from this nightmare. Safe and sound.
But they were wolves, and their love was a living thing that could be scented, and heard, and touched between them. Lying to each other was impossible.
“I wish I could make you leave,” he whispered, eyes burning.
“I know.” She shifted around carefully so she could put both her hands on his face. Wipe the wetness from beneath his eyes with equally wet thumbs.
She pressed her mouth to his, and it felt like he’d failed, even though he’d done that long ago, when he refused to let her die.
41
As far as plans went, this one seemed pretty shitty.
“Do you have a better one?” John – Little John – asked and sounded somehow kind in his mocking. He was a mountain of a man. Werewolf. Whatever. With a smile to match.
“No,” Rooster hated to admit, sighing.
“Alright, then. This’ll work. We do this sort of thing all the time.”
Rooster glanced over at Deshawn, who nodded.
John peeled off a strip of duct tape and said, “Hold it steady. Like that.” He taped the small little flip-phone to the inside of Rooster’s arm and then tugged the baggy sweatshirt sleeve down over it.
“Tuck,” John prompted, and when nothing happened, turned around with a sigh. “Tuck.”
The friar came awake with a snort. “Wha…? Oh, yes, right.”
John sighed.
Rooster silently berated the old man for ruining the Disneyfied idea he’d had of Friar Tuck for most of his life.
They stood in an armory roughly the size of the house Rooster grew up in, surrounded by enough weapons and tech to storm the beaches at Normandy. Their plan, though, was much simpler than that.
Tuck fumbled a pair of narrow reading glasses from his pocket and slipped them on his nose; they sat crooked; the lenses were smudged. “What am I doing now?”
Deshawn sighed.
John patiently said, “A glamour. For the phone.” He tapped the concealed cellphone taped to Rooster’s arm.
“Oh, yes! Just a moment.” He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. Wiggled the fingers of his right hand, afterward, and then passed his palm slowly down Rooster’s arm, not touching, just hovering.
Rooster felt goosebumps spring up in the wake of his non-touch, and suppressed a shudder.
They’d told him that Tuck was like Red. A mage, they called it. But Tuck, according to Rob, was much weaker. He had a rudimentary grasp of power, but nothing like the fire-wielding and wound-healing that Red could manipulate without thought.
But it wasn’t Tuck they were sending in to find Red. Nor any of the wolves.
Just Rooster. With a glamoured phone.
Knuckles rapped the doorjamb. “Ready?” Rob called.
Rooster took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
*
Nikita had bragged once, to a young vamp maneater just before he’d put him down, that he’d never fed from a human.
He couldn’t say that anymore.
Cut off from Val’s help, unable to contact him, it had taken nearly two days to pin down the exact location of Blackmere Manor in the deceptively deep forest outside of Richmond, but they’d finally found it. Even a half mile away, in a rental cabin, Nikita feel the hum of the place. Power – both electrical, and supernatural.
His breath came in stutters, but his hands were steady as he unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out the secondary garment bag within. He laid it out on the lumpy, quilt-covered bed, alone for the moment in the cabin’s one bedroom. Hesitated a moment.
Most would have chalked this bag – the way he’d kept it in the back of every closet of every apartment he’d lived in for the past seventy-five years – up to nostalgia. But it wasn’t that at all. It was fear. A fear that one day he’d stop kidding himself that he was somehow morally superior to all the other monsters. He didn’t kill anymore…except he had. Except he did. And he would kill today.
With a sound like a gasp lodged in his throat, he unzipped the bag. As it gapped down the middle, revealing what lay inside, the last of his nerves bled out, replaced by a calm so unshakable it felt almost like bliss.
Yes. This was him. The real him.
“Hello, old friend.”
*
It was unremarkable from the street. A beat-up galvanized mailbox with flaking numbers, and a dirt track that led off the road and plunged down through the trees. It was a long driveway. Rooster walked down it for a half hour, until sweat had gathered along his skin, under his hoodie. Fall was approaching – he could see it in the first brown edges of the leaves that crowded overhead, shading his path – but mid-afternoon temperatures remained warm. Muggy. He swatted a mosquito away from his face as he followed a sharp curve. On the right, a hill reared up, faced with granite, shaded by clumps of thin tress. On the left, a ravine opened, deep and jagged as a knife wound, the slope plunging down into a stream.
Not for the first time, he decided this plan was stupid. His only means of communicating with the others – his team – was with the phone taped to his arm, and he wasn’t supposed to touch it until he was out of other options. They needed a man on the inside, a human man, one the Institute people would be forced to apprehend.
“What if things go south?” he’d asked back at Lionheart.
Rob had sent him a smile that he probably thought was reassuring. “We’ll get you out, don’t worry. One way or another.”
But Rooster had the feeling the “other” included him being dead, and that wasn’t something he wanted to happen before he made sure Red was safe and free.
After that.
Well, it didn’t much matter.
The elevation around him leveled, and after the next bend, he passed through a set of heavy wrought-iron gates with cameras poised on its stone pillars.
He took a deep breath, and kept walking.
Then, there was the house.
Lionheart’s fa?ade was impressive and battle-ready, but nothing like the palatial, opulent stone face of Blackmere Manor. Two sweeping wings that he could see, sun glinting off thousands of mullioned windows and the shape of a conservatory, far off to the left, so far it might be in another zip code. From the gargoyles on the pitched roofline to the iron-banded double front doors, every exquisitely-wrought detail had been designed to terrify and impress.
But the most terrifying aspect of all was the group of helmeted, armed men in tac gear flooding down the front steps and running at him, shouting for him to put his hands up and get down on his knees.
Rooster curled his hand around the butt of a gun that wasn’t there and knew a crushing, momentary panic. This would never work. This plan was shit.
But then they were circling him and all he could do was press his hands to the back of his skull and sink slowly to his knees in the dirt.
*
Trina turned all the walkies on and tuned them to the same channel. Lined them up on the table in front of her and let out another breath that was doing nothing to regulate her pounding heart.
Behind her, Jamie paced. Alexei sipped vodka straight from the bottle, passing it every now and then to Lanny who took a slug and passed it back.
Trina lined up the walkies again. Again. Fiddled with the straps on her Kevlar.
“Nik,” she called toward the closed bedroom door. “You ready?”
She heard the latch click, and the tread of boots, and turned…
And felt her mouth drop open in shock.
Expressionless, Nikita stepped into the room in black skinnies and t-shirt…under an ankle-length black leather coat. Boots. Gaiters. Fingerless gloves. And perched on his head: the black fur cap with the hammer and sickle. She’d seen him like this before, in the vision Val had shown her.
Gone was Nikita the grungy millennial, and in his place was Captain Nikita Baskin, Chekist.
“For real?” Lanny asked.
Nikita didn’t react. He gazed steadily at Trina. “Ready.”
42