The door opened to two scents: one vampire, one human. Not Nik, and not Vlad, a stranger, but…
Someone knelt down in front of him on the floor. Blue eyes, and tangled waist-length blond hair. Smell of human blood, and rags for clothes; pommel of a sword protruding over his shoulder.
He wasn’t polished and gleaming, dressed in velvets and high-gloss boots, and Sasha could actually smell him now, for the first time. But there was no mistaking…
“Val?” he asked, and to his great shame, tears filled his eyes.
The prince who’d first visited Sasha when he was eight, who’d told him how to kill Rasputin, and save Nikita, smiled at him now, so tenderly. He reached to touch Sasha’s face, cupped his cheek, swept his thumb across it. The warmth and solidity of him was a shock. “Hello, sweetheart.”
“Are you – are you really here?” As if the touch wasn’t enough proof.
“Yes, I really am. Let’s get those awful things off, shall we?” He produced a key. “Your Nikita’s here, and he’s mad as a wet cat.”
“Nikita’s here?”
The first cuff came undone with a little click. “Yes, can’t you hear all the shooting?”
*
Val knelt down in front of a pale-haired boy, face melting into sweetness, and they talked about…something, as Val undid his cuffs.
Rooster didn’t really see any of that. His eyes went straight to Red, who sat crouched against the wall, wrists cuffed together. She looked toward the door, and in the second before she recognized him, the sheer terror on her face made him want to stomp back out into the main lab, drag lab coats out from under tables, and put bullets in them.
He watched her see him, really see him, and she scrambled to her feet and ran to him. She couldn’t put her arms around him, but that didn’t matter. He caught her and tucked her into his chest, enfolded her into his own arms, big enough for both of them.
He didn’t say anything, because he couldn’t. He pressed his face down into her red hair and felt the warmth of her breath in the hollow of his throat, listened to the way it hitched and caught.
“You came,” she whispered. “You came.”
“Yeah,” he choked out.
When he lifted his head, he saw that Val had got the boy up on his feet, though he was wobbly. Val had an arm looped around his waist. The boy’s hair was glued to his forehead with sweat, and the dark circles beneath his eyes stood out prominently against too-pale skin. He looked sick.
Val studied him with clear concern. “Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t look it. Where’s Talbot?”
“Prob – probably in his office,” he boy said, and his teeth were chattering.
Val growled – actually growled, like an animal. After the blood-drinking, it still managed to surprise Rooster, that catlike sound.
“Here.” He steered the shaking boy toward Rooster and Red. “Make sure he doesn’t fall down. I want a word before we leave.”
“What the hell?” But all he could do was catch the boy by the shoulder and pull he and Red along with him as Val charged out of the room and toward a door marked with the name Dr. Edmund Talbot on a gold placard.
“Watch him,” Rooster said, entrusting the sickly kid to Red, who laid a comforting, if insubstantial hand on his shoulder, and scanned the lab around them. It was eerily quiet. Everyone had either fled, or was hiding. How there weren’t more guards coming at them, Rooster had no idea. His hand tightened on his gun.
A sound brought his attention back to the door: Val kicking it in. There was a splintering crack, as if a brace had been broken, and the door flew inward to reveal Jake standing just inside, gun at the ready.
A gunshot.
Val shuddered as the bullet hit home.
Rooster lunged forward, bringing his gun up.
But Val, somehow, though Rooster could see the gory exit wound in his back, didn’t fall. Instead, he laughed. “Lovely try, Major,” he said.
Jake tried to move, to get off another shot, but Val was impossibly fast. He batted the gun away with one hand, and gripped Jake’s jaw with the other.
“But you missed the important part.” Val’s hand tightened, knuckles going white, and there was a crack of bone breaking.
Jake let out a high, thin scream, and Val tossed him away. He landed half-over a chair that then toppled, and lay still.
“Oh,” Red gasped, clutching at Rooster’s sleeve.
A man with glasses fumbled across his desk, a horror-struck, desperate attempt to defend himself while being too panicked to go about it properly. Rooster recognized that emotion. Reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there, wanting to flee, your knees too weak to hold you up.
Val leaned over the desk and clapped both his hands over the man’s, pinning them to the wood. “All my love to the family,” he said, and turned back to the door.
“Oh, him you don’t kill?” Rooster asked.
Val hesitated in the doorway, and though he feigned bored, Rooster saw a little tic in his jaw. “His daughter doesn’t deserve that.” Then he shouldered past them.
Rooster spared Jake a glance; he had no idea if he was dead, or just unconscious. At the moment, he didn’t care.
*
Nikita caught another vampire’s scent behind him just in time to duck the knife that knocked the hat from his head and buried itself in the paneling of the library wall.
“Shit,” Lanny muttered, whirling, shotgun at the ready.
Alexei yelped, and tripped, and dragged himself up hastily.
Nikita spun as he stood, gun leveled on the creature in the library doorway.
He was Nikita’s height, but broader through the shoulders. His face, the harsh angles of it, its stony utter lack of expression, pinged something way back in Nikita’s memory. The widow’s peak, the tied back long hair. This was not a young vampire, oh no. No laboratory creation. This was the real deal.
And he carried a sword.
“Who are you?” Nikita asked him in Russian.
He answered in Romanian, an old dialect. “The Son of the Dragon.”
Dracula.
“Did he just say–” Lanny started, and Nikita waved him to silence.
His heartbeat throbbed under his skin, a painful pressure that felt like it would punch through him like he was only made of tissue paper. Under the strong blood-spice of Dracula – of Vlad – was a hint of a transferred scent: the pine needle musk that Nikita’s sheets smelled like back home.
The house was pandemonium beyond this room, filled with the thump of running feet, shouts, confused questions, the crackle and squawk of radios. But here, in this book-lined room, Nikita could think of nothing but that familiar scent. Just a trace. Fresh. Alive.
“Vlad Dracula,” he said with formality. “I think you’ve met my wolf.”
Vlad slid into English, too. Accented, but perfect, like an expat who’d been speaking it half his life, and not just a few weeks. “I have met Sasha, yes. But he’s not bound to a master, that I can tell. Not yet.”
Nikita flashed his fangs with a low, warning growl.
“You’re the one in the file. The Chekist.” He pronounced the word like it amused him. “Nikita Baskin.” He tipped his head to the side, weighing. “You are a young one.”
This was a game. No, it was a dance. Nikita felt the weight of Kolya’s knives sheathed at his back and wished suddenly, desperately for this old friend. Kolya was the dancer, he thought with choked-back panic. Not me. With everyone else in this horrid castle, he could rely on brute force, on terror, his powers, the still-impressive black coat that had frightened Soviets, and frightened a whole new generation of peasants today. But here now, with the Wallachian prince of legend, intimidation wasn’t an option. There was only winning…and winning might mean death.
He fought to keep his voice neutral. It came out tight. “Where is Sasha?”