Vegas Run

by Rachel A Brune

  But now? Never. Not in a century and a half.

  Still, there I found myself, in the flesh, awake at four in the morning, and the only clothes I could find were a neatly folded small pile on the folding stand. Jeans, button down shirt, even shoes and a belt.

  Next to this mysteriously appearing wardrobe sat a laptop, a cell phone and charger, and several discarded articles of feminine clothing.

  No. Oh no.

  If I thought allowing Maria to let me into the room and come in after me looked bad, this took the impending odds of my demise into the outer stratosphere.

  Not only did I find myself human and butt naked, but Maria lay, stretched out beside me, in much the same condition. I froze.

  "Ti ne spish?" She spoke, sleepy, languid. She turned over on her side, propping herself up on one elbow.

  "Just woke up." My voice sounded unnaturally loud in the small room, although I could swear I wasn't speaking at louder than a conversational tone.

  Maria smiled, and my stupid body short-circuited most of the signals to my brain. The bed we shared wasn't that large, and the space between us dangerously small.

  She reached out to me, brushing the tips of her fingers over my stomach.

  Her touch sent the electric shock I needed racing through my nerves. I scrambled to the side and ended up gracefully falling on my ass out of bed, thumping my head on the wooden frame, and knocking myself dizzy.

  "Rick?" The concern in Maria's voice almost brought me to tears at the slapstick nature of my love life.

  "I'm fine." I willed the pounding in my head to fade away. "I'm fine. I'm just going to … get dressed. Maybe go find some coffee."

  Maybe go run it off. For half a second, I reached for the change. Before the second half of the second, I pulled back from it. The expected electric shock never came. Of course. I wasn't wearing the cuff anymore. And yet, the Pavlovian response remained. Shit.

  On the floor, I waited for Maria to go back to sleep so I could figure out what to do with my life. Instead, she looked over the side of the mattress, giving me a onceover. In that moment I felt sure she intended to say something sarcastic, but instead she just started chuckling.

  Shrugging, I decided if she saw me as an unthreatening joke, I might as well take advantage of the situation and get dressed without embarrassment.

  "I'm not laughing at you." Maria leaned back in the bed, pulling the sheet over her. "You've been spending too much time around Americans. You're all shy and everything."

  That actually did hurt my feelings. Also, was she an actual mind reader? Or was I once again that transparent? I gave up and pulled on the pants.

  "Where did you find clothes in the middle of the night in the Czech Republic?" I desperately needed to change the subject. My body, pissed that I wasn't taking Maria up on her invitation, kept letting me know it stood ready to go. Down, boy.

  "Oh please." She rolled her eyes. "It wasn't difficult enough to be impressed."

  "What would be difficult enough for me to be impressed?" I shrugged on the shirt, tugging the waist down low enough to hide some of the awkward situation going on in my pants. "Landmine? Suitcase nuke?"

  "Pff." She sat up, pulling her hair back as she did. "Please. Eastern Europe. I said, ‘difficult.'"

  "I see your point."

  "Rick. Come here." Maria held out her hand to me. Deep breaths. I took it, and she pulled me back down beside her. This time, with some clothes on and her under the sheet, I felt more comfortable. Still wouldn't want her father walking in on us like this. Or the other women. "You're strung up like a wire. What are you so nervous about? The mission?"

  "More like Dmitri," I admitted. "You know your father is in the other room?"

  "So?" She shrugged. "Of course. He needs sleep like anyone."

  "That's not what I meant."

  Maria regarded me for a few moments, searching my face. I wasn't sure what she was looking for. Or if she found it. "You and my father are a lot alike."

  "We are?" An unexpected comparison. I didn't know if I totally agreed.

  "You're both very old school." She snuggled against me, finding her way into the space under my arm until I gave up and put my arm around her. "My father trained me. He knows there would be nothing you could force me to do if I didn't want to. Quit worrying."

  "I'll try."

  She chuckled again softly. We lay together, and as the moments passed, it felt less strange. Almost comforting.

  Outside in the hall, a door opened, then closed. Footsteps headed down the corridor to the communal water closet. Calix. I wondered if she could sense Maria and I, curled up with each other.

  And then I heard nothing, falling into a sleep deeper than any slumber I'd had in years. I dreamed of falling snow and running wolves, and a jade-eyed woman who ran by my side.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  A werewolf, a vampire, two magicians, and a badass walk into a café.

  Of course, to get to this café, we had to cross two borders and hop a train. Like I said, border crossings had gotten iffy in the past year or so. The guards peered at us with suspicion, deserved on our part since our papers were mostly created out of thin air and some hand waving from Dmitri and Maria.

  Karen had informed us we would be flying out of Frankfurt, back to Las Vegas. MONIKER had taken care of the reservations, as long as we could make it to the airport without attracting undue attention.

  I'm the part of the team that does the growling and the sneaking and the fighting, which is why I was glad the other members of the team were good at the forging paperwork stuff. Even with a few suspicious border guards, we were soon safely on our way, comfortably ensconced aboard a train to Frankfurt, enjoying quite a late breakfast spread in the dining car.

  They had wurst, thick German pretzels, yogurt, more wurst, Käse, mineral water…

  "Rick." Karen's voice brought be back to reality.

  "Mmf?" I spared her the sight of my mouth filled with sausage and cheese.

  "Just checking to make sure you're still with us."

  I nodded. Of course. But seriously, German breakfast is a wonderful thing, and it had been a really long time since I'd had one.

  "We managed to get most of the server cloned before everything went to hell," Calix continued. I hadn't realized she'd been explaining why they'd been late escaping the Black Mountain facility. "That info dump should keep the MONIKER data monkeys going for a few months."

  Dmitri nodded. He sipped a cup of strong, black coffee.

  "We have some friends who will also be interested in what I was able to glean from working with them," Maria added.

  "Friends?" My mouth was still full, but I could still enunciate. Mostly.

  "We work with … others," Dmitri said. "Not so formal. But useful."

  "Now that we've retrieved your daughter, I take it we're not so useful?" Calix, her plate piled impressively high, joined me in eating our way through the menu. I wouldn't have guessed.

  Dmitri shrugged. Maria sipped her own coffee. Unlike her father, she preferred just a dollop of cream. Every time I looked over at her, I couldn't stop staring.

  "Where are you heading after we get off in Frankfurt?"

  Karen's question startled me, and I almost choked on the pretzel in my mouth. It hadn't occurred to me that Dmitri and Maria would leave us after the rescue. Although, as I thought about it, that course of action made the most sense. After all, why should I even head back to MONIKER?

  "That's a very good question, Doctor Willet." Dmitri set down his coffee cup and folded his hands on the table, leaning forward. "One that requires, perhaps, some explanation."

  "It would be welcome, yes," Karen answered.

  "My daughter, Maria, and I–you may have realized are in possession of skills that are, shall we say, unusual for these times?"

  "That's one way of putting it." Calix snorted.

  Maria and Dmitri exchanged glances.

  "This will be faster if we continue without interruption." If
I'd ever doubted Dmitri as a German professor, the stern disapproval he managed to pack into that short sentence resolved any lingering reservations.

  Karen nodded, and Calix simply chewed and shut up. I hadn't even been tempted to talk. Not when the menu included German sausage. Four different kinds. And did I mention the cheese?

  "My family is old," Dmitri began. "Older even than yours, Herr Wolf."

  That didn't surprise me. Dmitri hadn't aged since 1943.

  "Like your family, we have kept our secrets, hidden our talents." He sipped some more coffee. "Unlike your family, we have spent lifetimes standing in the shadows of the powerful, the elite."

  "How old?" Calix couldn't help but ask.

  "I am the eldest of my family line," Dmitri answered, "and I first entered into the service as counselor and advisor to Peter the Great."

  Karen stopped chewing. I had expected him to say something along those lines, but it still unnerved me to hear him say it out loud.

  "Our family has spent generations in service to the Tsar and, later, the people of Russia," Maria added.

  "And you are all …" Karen trailed off, searching for the word.

  "Sorcerers. Yes." Dmitri dropped the word as blandly and casually as he dabbed his napkin at his mouth.

  "How … how is that … how the hell are supernatural creatures running around Europe and nobody ever noticed?" Karen demanded.

  And now I choked on my food because Dmitri and Maria both burst out laughing. Okay, perhaps more of a subdued, academic chuckle, but still not the reaction I expected.

  "We've had our fair share of unwanted publicity," Maria offered. Her mouth twisted up at the corner. "Maria Rasputina was my first cousin, twice removed." She stopped and looked up into space for a second. "Or my second cousin, once removed. Or my great aunt. I can never keep up with the genealogical categories." Her gaze returned to us.

  Calix opened her mouth, then visibly halted herself and waited until it became apparent Maria and Dmitri were giving us time to react. "You're claiming that Grigori Rasputin–he was one of you? One of these advisors?"

  Dmitri nodded. He brushed at the front of his sweater vest, almost in a gesture of embarrassment. "He was, perhaps, the wrong choice to shepherd the Romanovs into the new century."

  "That's one way of putting it." I had been there for some of the shepherding that the old regimes had attempted. It hadn't been pretty.

  "My father led the group of nobles who assassinated him, which allowed us to reassert ourselves into the highest echelons of the revolution, and then the party," Maria continued.

  "Is sorcery a talent or a skill?" Karen hunched forward, her arms crossed and resting on the table. Tension radiated off of her, although her fingers tapping a frenetic pattern against her elbow were the only outward sign she made.

  "If you're asking whether we are born or made," Maria answered, "the answer is yes."

  Which one was it? I opened my mouth to interrupt anyway, just as the train slowed, the brakes squealing just a bit, as we passed over an intersection. Outside the train, a line of cars waited patiently in the sunlight for us to pass. Bright, normal life. I felt like I'd been chasing it since I left my own family, and it remained ever outside a thick window of glass while circumstances kept me motoring on by.

  "War is coming," Dmitri said into the silence. "It's been creeping up on us again, and the only way we can prepare for it is to make our alliances and consolidate our strengths."

  I'd heard all this before, over a century ago.

  "There are few others our family is willing to ally with," Maria continued. "Our strength cannot be the only one to hang an alliance upon."

  Calix stayed silent. I wondered what she thought about all this, if there were things she hadn't told any of us about her family.

  "Are you going to tell us your big reveal, or just sit there and finish your coffee?" Karen took the words out of my mouth, which again I'd filled with food.

  "My young friend, the organization you work with was, for a brief few decades, a worthy adversary, and could have been a worthwhile ally," Dmitri said. "But it has wasted its time on unworthy goals."

  "Unchecked, Black Mountain would roll over MONIKER and leave nothing standing," Maria added. "Perhaps the information you have shared will prolong that day, but it will not prevent it."

  "That's why you dragged us into this mission." Karen's face betrayed her suspicions, her disgust at being used. "A pretext. You didn't need us to rescue your daughter; you wanted to get the data to MONIKER without it looking like it came from you."

  "Yes." No more, no less of an answer than I expected.

  "Why drag Rick into it?"

  "We decided the time was right to make our approach once we heard whispers that another wolf had achieved the Überwechsel." This time, Maria answered.

  I stopped chewing.

  "You are the first wolf in centuries to call that Change to you," Dmitri continued where his daughter left off.

  "That was Pushkin's drugs." At the thought, I clenched my hand tighter around the knife, willing my claws to sink back.

  "You were not the first wolf they'd had on their table," Maria informed me. "Just the first to survive and call the Overchange."

  Just like that, I lost my appetite.

  "Strength." Dmitri nodded. "An ally with strength." He picked up his napkin, dabbed at a nonexistent piece of food on his chin. "An ally who owed a debt."

  "And the rest of us?" Calix looked me in the eye, then glanced back to Dmitri. "Are we part of your alliance?"

  "That is your decision to make," Maria answered. "We would never be so foolish as to invite Rick without the people he counts as friends."

  "Do I–we–get a choice in this?" I growled.

  Dmitri's eyebrow lifted. He shrugged. "There are always choices. But the time is approaching when those choices will become harder, and the consequences higher." He put his napkin down as the train slowed again, this time in preparation for stopping. "Even now, your own position remains unclear, even to you."

  He and Maria stood, swaying slightly as the car came to a halt. Over the loudspeaker, the announcement informed us we would be at the station for ten minutes to allow passengers to depart and embark.

  "If you have an answer for us, you know my home in Berlin," Dmitri said. He nodded to us and took his leave. Maria followed after, but not before handing Karen a small, leather bag. Karen didn't say anything or acknowledge it other than to nod her head and tuck it away in one of her many pockets.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  "Maria, wait." I'd followed her out of the car, now quite sure what I hoped for by going after her.

  I caught up with her halfway through the train car. At the door, Dmitri looked back at his daughter, saw me, and disembarked without further comment.

  "Rick." Maria stepped aside to let an older man pass us. "You've got your answer already?"

  "Yes." No, wait. "No." Crap. "I mean, I wanted to ask how long you'll be in Berlin."

  "Not very," she answered, ignoring my fumbling. "We want to follow up a rumor of a worldwalker operating out of New Orleans."

  "Worldwalker?" I wasn't familiar with the term.

  "First one in a couple of centuries." Maria shrugged. "My father thinks it will be worth the trip."

  "Recruiting for your supernatural alliance?"

  "Something like that." She looked straight at me, and once I again I lost my train of thought.

  The train whistle sounded, letting us know the moment was done. Maria bent over and brushed her lips on my cheek, an electric charge that jumped me back to myself. "If you wait too long, I will be in touch."

  I didn't bother to ask how she would find me. She would. Also, everyone else always seemed to. I waited until she got off the train safely, then returned to where Karen and Calix were polishing off the remains of the breakfast spread.

  With Dmitri and Maria's departure, the table seemed larger and the atmosphere more bleak. I'd never imagined I would see him lea
ve with anything but relief, but now I kind of wanted to follow him off the train.

  The only thing that kept me in my seat was the knowledge that once we got back to MONIKER, nothing would stand in my way. I didn't care if Dmitri and Maria had some elaborate scheme to achieve balance among supernatural agencies by keeping them and Black Mountain at each other's throats. I would burn the agency to the ground.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I thought we would fly out of Rhein-Main military base, but time and history have a way of conspiring to throw you off when you least expect it. While I'd been someplace else, the military had shut down the base that had been operating since the war. My last military flight had been out of the Rhein-Main airport, strapped to a medical gurney, snatched from Dmitri's Soviet hands by Gunnery Sergeant Victor Wieleski.

  This time, instead of the noisy metal and nylon webbing of a military cargo hop, we took off out of Nürnberg airport on an actual passenger plane, surrounded by a mix of German and American citizens. About half the Americans had the haircuts and bearing of troops heading home on some rotation. The other half had the wannabe haircuts, tacticool pants, and faux military gear of contractors and the military adjacent. From snatches of overheard conversation, I gleaned they were heading back to the States after attending some sort of arms conference in Nürnberg. Times really have changed.

  Even on a crowded plane full of noisy people, Dmitri's absence made it feel like something was missing. I hadn't exactly gotten used to him being around. But I definitely noticed it now that he wasn't.

  And Maria. I missed her, too. I kept replaying the moment in the room together, wondering why I hadn't taken advantage of her offer. She'd caught me, embarrassed and unaware, but hadn't pressed or laughed. She'd said she would call me, and maybe she would. And yes, I realize that makes me sound like a founding member of the Lonely Hearts Club for Torch-Bearing Werewolves. Piss off.

  Calix had fallen asleep the minute the plane took off. Karen, sitting between us, stared straight ahead, breathing evenly, barely blinking. For about three hours. She had fallen asleep with her eyes open, and by the way, that's every bit as unnerving as it sounds.