Aizhana lowered herself gently to his side. She smiled and brushed a lock of hair out of his face. Even as a shadow, his features were elegant and refined. “What a beautiful boy you are,” she whispered.
His principles held him back, made him think it was wrong to murder for his own gain. But he shouldn’t have to be relegated to existence in a dream. Nikolai deserved more.
He could be tsar.
I have energy to spare, and no qualms about obtaining more. Aizhana watched her sleeping son. Sometimes, the young did not know what was best for them. But that was what mothers were for. Aizhana lifted her hand and placed it on the back of Nikolai’s neck. She was careful not to scratch him with her brittle nails.
He stirred but did not wake.
Good. Sleep, and soon you will feel stronger. Better. Aizhana closed her eyes, too.
But she did not rest. Instead, she felt the current of energy inside herself, some of it gray like the beetles and maggots she’d siphoned it from, and some of it black from the people she’d killed to obtain it, for she’d slaughtered them out of anger and vengeance. Her methods stained the energy with their darkness.
Just a little bit of my energy to sustain him, she thought. He won’t even notice. She smiled. I’m doing what a mother ought to do.
Then she sent a trickle of energy from her own body, through her fingertips, toward Nikolai. His shoulders tensed around his neck where she touched him. There was opposition, and Aizhana’s energy pooled at her fingers like a funnel that had been stopped.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right, my darling. It’s only a little, until you get more of your own.”
Nikolai’s shoulders remained taut for another moment, and then the tension released, as if the muscles, like the rest of him, were too fatigued to fight back.
The gray-black energy in her fingers burbled as Nikolai’s resistance disappeared, and it dribbled into him like a liquid parasite, pleased to find a new host.
“There is too much of Saint Petersburg and its rules about honor in you,” Aizhana said. “But this is good, for my energy will give you more of my spirit, my fight. You should be tsar, my son. Pasha sent you to your death and tried to take away all that mattered to you—your magic and the girl you love.”
Thinking of the wrongs heaped onto Nikolai roused her. She abandoned her plan to share only a little energy, and instead sent a surge of her black power into his veins.
“I’m giving you this energy so you can be strong, but also because I hope you will see that I am right, that you will exact revenge, just as I did with your father,” Aizhana said. “Take from Pasha what matters most. And make him suffer while you do it. That is the Karimov way.” She shot her appetite for vengeance into Nikolai, straight to his heart.
He took in a pained breath and reached in his sleep for the back of his neck. Aizhana jerked her hand away.
Nikolai rubbed his skin where her fingers had just been. Then he sighed—contentedly, Aizhana liked to think—and let his hand drop back to the grass.
She smiled her broken-toothed grin. It was gruesome, and yet laced with affection. The kind of twisted smile only a mother could give.
“You see, my son? I can tell you feel better already.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
That evening, Vika dreamed of being on Letniy Isle again, at Candlestick Point at the end of the Game. Nikolai stood before her, pacing. He twirled in his black-gloved hand the dagger that his mentor, Galina, had gifted him.
“I’ve never wanted anyone but you,” Nikolai said.
Vika felt herself tugged forward, closer to him, by the invisible string between them. And yet he continued to spin the dagger.
“Then what is the knife for?” she asked.
“To end the Game.” Nikolai tightened his hold on the handle. The sun reflected viciously off the blade.
“You love me, so you’re going to kill me?”
He smiled reluctantly, the corners of his mouth weighted with regret, then shrugged. “Yes.”
She tried to throw up a shield to protect herself. But the enchantment would not appear. She couldn’t even feel the magic in her fingertips. Another hitch in Bolshebnoie Duplo’s power?
Vika frowned. This was not how it had happened at the end of the actual Game.
But it didn’t matter, for this alternate version barreled along regardless of accuracy, and Nikolai strode up to her, embraced her, and slammed the dagger into her heart, hilt to her chest and blade protruding out through her back. She cried out and collapsed into his arms.
“I didn’t intend for it to turn out this way,” he whispered, even as she felt her life and her magic bleeding onto his coat, soaking into the wool, seeping into his skin.
Vika gasped. But not only from the physical pain. She also realized Nikolai was extracting the magic from her on purpose.
“Then why?” Vika managed.
Nikolai paused and looked at her. His eyes, though always black, were now bottomless, like a chasm too deep for the sunlight to penetrate. A moment later, he turned away and resumed taking her energy.
“Because this magic never belonged only to you,” he said.
“Nor to you.” She sagged farther into his arms. “It’s meant for us together.”
Nikolai frowned but nodded. Then he jerked the blade from her body and stabbed himself, too. “Us. Together.”
Vika gasped and startled awake.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nikolai groaned as he woke in the steppe dream. His neck was stiff, damn it, probably from falling asleep curled up on the hard-packed dirt. And it was dark now, with no moon in the black sky—the very limited sky, since he’d gotten rid of the majority of the dream. He groaned again.
But then he stretched his limbs, and they weren’t creaky like his neck was. Rather, they felt almost normal again.
Nikolai conjured a lantern so he could examine his body in the dark. He held his breath as the light flickered across his arm, and . . .
He let out all the air in a single puff, because he was still composed of shadow.
But nevertheless, something was different. It wasn’t warm, as his energy usually felt, but it was some kind of strength. Dark, like his shadow form, and a bit cold, like a trickle of ice water in his veins. How strange. He furrowed his brow. What was it?
And yet the feeling was not unwelcome. Nikolai climbed carefully to his feet, brushing off the bits of grass that clung to him. He pulled his shoulders back and rotated them several times. Shook out his hands. Twisted from side to side.
Yes, he was definitely stronger than he’d been a few hours before. Perhaps all he’d needed was sleep, and some time for his past magic—that which he’d repurposed from the dream—to reinvigorate him. But was it enough?
It had better be. He didn’t want to think about what it meant if it was not.
“Shh,” he said to the uncertainty trembling inside him. When it stilled, Nikolai tried to imagine waking, to stir himself from the dream. He yawned. He stretched. He shook his body in inelegant ways that would have embarrassed him had anyone else seen.