The morgue. Oh shit, he’d died. Hadn’t he? But then those people…the two cops, Lanny and Trina, and the other guy, with the pale hair. Sasha. Who could growl like a freaking dog.
They’d told him he was a vampire, and brought him here, to this apartment, and somehow, he’d managed to convince himself that he’d imagined the whole thing.
But here he was, and he could breathe.
He’d been born with asthma; had almost died when he was two, and then again at six. At twelve, the one and only time his mother had let him go away to a boys’ summer camp upstate, when a bee sting had triggered a panic attack, which had triggered the worst asthma attack of his life. According to his then-best friend Evan, he’d been dead a whole thirty seconds in the ambulance before the paramedics revived him. It was normal for him: the diminished lung capacity, taking hits off his inhaler, staying indoors when it was too cold, or too hot, or too smoggy.
But this was a completely foreign sensation: breathing deep and free and easy. He wasn’t dizzy, or shaky, or achy. Air moved through his open throat into lungs that worked like bellows, and it took him a long, stupid moment to recognize the euphoria in his blood for what it was: oxygen. For the first time in his life, he was getting enough oxygen.
A mirror sat positioned across from the bed and he looked up into it, reaching out of habit for his glasses on the nightstand. His hand froze. He didn’t need the glasses; he could see clearly. He stared at his reflection, his own familiar, narrow face made new by the lack of wire frames, and he saw color in his cheeks and lips. No longer waxy and china-white, his face glowed with the subtle pinkness of health.
He smiled, and then startled hard when he saw the fangs. Carefully, watching himself in the mirror, he probed the point of one canine with the tip of his tongue and watched as both fangs descended a fraction; he could feel it in his jaw, some new muscle that forced those new, wicked teeth longer, more dangerous. More useful. When he pulled his tongue back, and relaxed his mouth, they retracted again, so they were proportionate. They didn’t push at his lip like the fake fangs in movies. No, these were designed by nature, sophisticated predator camouflage.
“So that’s that,” he said aloud, and took a deep breath just for the joyous novelty of it. “Now what?”
~*~
Nikita didn’t drag Lanny out of the apartment, but it was a near thing. “Go with him. It’ll be fine,” Trina said with an encouraging smile she didn’t feel. Much to her shame, when they were gone, and she’d heard their footfalls go down the stairs, she was flooded with relief.
“Shit,” she muttered, sinking down onto the couch.
Sasha made a low sound in his throat that she found strangely comforting and came to sit in the overstuffed chair across from her. He didn’t sit like a human would, she noted with a touch of amusement, but pulled his legs up in the seat and flopped across the armrest like a dog getting comfy. He settled his chin on the back of his hand and looked at her with a blend of sympathy and lupine attentiveness.
“Why would Alexei do this?” she asked. There were so many other things she’d meant to ask, but Sasha’s presence had a way of inviting honesty. She didn’t want platitudes right now, only answers.
“Maybe he wanted to help.”
She sent him a look. “You really believe that?”
He made an apologetic face. “Not really, no. I mean – I think he knew he was helping, but I don’t think he did it out of the goodness of his heart. Sorry.”
“No.” She waved off the apology. “It’s what I figured. Got any magical Russian insight?”
“Maybe.” He shifted, curling up tighter in the chair. “Vampires – the ones I’ve met – are really territorial. They have families, sometimes, people who are close to them. But they don’t get along with each other all that well. Nik killed Alexei’s sire. So.” His nose scrunched up. “There is bad blood there.”
“In more ways that one,” she said with a halfhearted smile. “What are we going to do about him?”
“Alexei? I don’t know. Maybe we can reason with him.”
It was a lie and they both knew it.
Her phone pinged, and it was a text from her captain.
“Boss wants to see Lanny and me about the, quote, ‘missing goddamn body problem.’” She blew out a breath. “Feel like taking a walk?”
Sasha picked his head up, grinning. “Always.”
~*~
Based on his apartment, Lanny Webb was not the sort of person who would have wanted to befriend Jamie.
The décor consisted of Ikea pieces and a few bachelor pad staples. All the latest electronics, but no art of any kind. Jamie spotted a few framed family photos on top of the bookshelf in the living room…a bookshelf filled with CDs and stacks of magazines, predominantly Men’s Health and Shooting Times. The spare bedroom had been set up as a home gym, and the fridge was a blend of takeout containers and protein shakes, bags of dried apricots and domestic beer.
A portrait emerged in Jamie’s mind of a gym rat turned cop with no hobbies or interests aside from working out and paging through the occasional magazine. On his cursory walk-through, he didn’t spot so much as one real book.
How boring.
How normal.
His own room, in all the apartments he’d ever lived in, had always been a menagerie of art and half-strung canvasses. Coffee table books and computer printouts, museum-bought prints of his favorite inspirations to keep him fueled. Christmas lights and paint-streaked jeans and stacks of library paperbacks. He’d always kept orchids in the windowsill, usually a beta fish in a glass bowl. He’d surrounded himself with color and chaos and all the things that made him feel artistic.
And yet he’d never had much of a personal life. No steady girlfriend. No late nights out at bars, uproarious stories to tell after the fact. His life was small, closely-held, and unremarkable.
Lanny Webb, by contrast, was the sort of man who started bar fights, fucked women in public restrooms, and inspired the envy and aspiration of the men around him. His apartment was dull, but his life was not.
He’d never been able to decide which was the more pathetic existence.
Jamie sat down on the black leather couch and wondered what the hell he was supposed to do now.
His stomach growled, but nothing in Lanny’s fridge sounded appealing. Since the bastard creep who’d bitten him – Chad, the others had said his name was – hadn’t robbed him of his money, only his life as he knew it, he still had about fifty bucks cash in his wallet and all his credit cards.
New York was a big city. What were the odds someone would recognize him? Besides, no one other than his roomie and a handful of classmates even knew him. And Trina hadn’t told him to stay inside, only to lay low.
A takeout menu was taped up by the microwave, but he dismissed the idea immediately. He wanted to go out, breathe in city air, see the day without his glasses for the very first time. He wouldn’t stay out long, just enough to grab a late breakfast and stretch his legs a little. He’d come right back after.
Nodding to himself, he went to shower.
~*~
Lanny had met Trina’s dad a year ago. He’d been down from Buffalo, where he and his brother owned a moderately successful furniture business, and he’d swung by the precinct to take Trina out to lunch. Plenty of silver in his dark hair, sun and laugh lines on his face, but still trim and healthy-looking, Steven Baskin had spoken with a flawless upstate accent, but maintained an air of other all the same. He had Trina’s vivid blue eyes – Nikita’s eyes, Lanny now knew – gunmetal in some lights, oceanic in others. Something about the Slavic tilt of his brows, in the crooked, secretive smile hinted at bitter winters and the indominable spirit of a people whose oppressors had never managed to crush them. Steve Baskin had been born in America, but he was Russian through-and-through, and Lanny had decided he wholeheartedly approved of it, that day they’d shaken hands in the detective bullpen and Steve had invited him to come grab meatball subs with them.
But if Nikita Baskin was the real Russian of the bunch…well, Lanny wanted to change his opinion on record. Trina’s family sucked.
“I’m not gonna fucking just attack somebody,” Lanny griped. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
Nikita just hummed and signaled the bartender for another round. Since they were the only ones at the long mahogany bar at the Lion’s Den, the man stepped right over and refilled their tumblers with vodka.
“Okay, two things,” Lanny said when the guy was gone. “One: I fucking hate vodka. Especially at ten a.m. And two: if you’re so worried I might go nuts and bite somebody, do you really think getting me drunk is the best strategy?”
“You won’t get drunk,” Nikita said, downing his own shot. “At least not for a while. And it takes the edge off.”
“I don’t have an edge.”
Nikita turned to him slowly, gaze hooded and unimpressed. “You’re all edge, my friend.”
“I’m not your friend.”
“On that we are agreed.” He made another little motion and the bartender returned. “Drink your vodka.”
Lanny did, if only so Nikita would shut up about it. It warmed him, like all good liquor, but this was his third shot and he didn’t feel the usual rush of lightheaded giddiness that normally accompanied drinking.
“So what? We’re just gonna do shots all day?” His phone vibrated inside his jacket pocket, reminding him that he had an unread text. “’Cause I’m supposed to go to work.”
“Not today you’re not.”
“Oh, fuck you.” Lanny started to push back from the bar–
And Nikita reached out too fast for comprehension and locked his hand around Lanny’s wrist.
Lanny was strong, but Nikita was something else entirely.
“One more shot,” the Russian said, calmly, “and then we go.”
Lanny started to protest and the hand tightened a fraction; he felt the bones in his forearm shift under the force of that grip, and he nodded. “Yeah. Alright.”
The bartender came to pour him another round.
~*~
“Where’s your partner?” Captain Abbot asked.
Trina managed to keep her expression casual when she said, “He’s sick.”
“Yeah. Bourbon’ll do that to you.”
“He has food poisoning, I think.”
“Sure.” The captain gave a dismissive head shake and opened the file that sat before him on his desk blotter. “As soon as he sobers up, he needs to get his ass in here. This disappearing body shit?” He lifted his head and glanced first at Trina, then at Dr. Harvey, who sat in the visitor chair beside her. “It’s a fucking PR nightmare.”
“Sir,” Trina said.
Harvey cleared her throat delicately. “Actually, sir, I’m not sure ‘bodies’ is the right way of putting it.” When he stared at her, she continued: “Both of them got up off the slab and walked out of the morgue. The corpses weren’t stolen – they weren’t even corpses.”
“But you pronounced them both dead at the scene.”
“I did,” she said with a sigh.
“And why did you do that?”
“No pulse, no respiration, no response to stimuli. Liver temps.”
Trina winced when she thought about the thermometer piercing flesh that wasn’t, in fact, dead.
“So explain to me how they got up and walked,” the captain said.
“We have it on camera, sir,” Trina chimed in, drawing his jowly glare. “We’re thinking that there must have been some sort of drug involved. Something that lowered their heartrates and their body temperatures and made them seem dead.”
He grunted. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Do you have any better theories?” she countered. Respectfully – she hoped.
His brows dropped low over his eyes and he exhaled in an unhappy rush. He didn’t reprimand her, though; swiveled his chair back toward the computer and sighed. “Fuck it. Whatever it is, we need it cleared up before the press conference.”
“Press conference?” Trina and Harvey asked at the same time. Trina glanced over and saw her own mounting panic reflected in the ME’s eyes.
“Yeah,” Captain Abbot said with another angry grunt. When he got worked up, the man sounded like a water buffalo. “The commissioner wants to ‘get in front of the panic.’ Whatever the fuck that means. Goddamn mayor’s gonna be there and everything.”
“The mayor?” Trina asked. “Really?”
“The asshole himself.”
Trina swapped another look with Harvey.
“Will you need us there?” Harvey asked.
“Nah.” The captain waved at them, his usual dismissal. “But figure this shit out, yeah?”
“Yes, sir,” they chorused, and escaped out into the bullpen.
Where Trina saw that a bright-haired visitor awaited her at her desk, spinning slow circles in her swivel chair, pale eyes tracking across the crowded, chaotic room.
Damn it. She’d told Sasha to wait outside.
“Trina,” Harvey started, voice tired, and then she caught sight of Sasha. “Hey, isn’t that the guy you and Webb brought to the morgue last night?”
“Yeah.”
“Right,” Harvey said, her calm deliberate. “And he is?”
“It’s a very long story.”
“Cliff’s Notes, then.”
On his next spin, Sasha spotted Trina standing outside the captain’s door and smiled wide enough to show the too-sharp points of his canines. Beside her, Harvey jerked a little; just a quick movement that she immediately smoothed away. Whether she’d reacted to seeing his fangs, or was simply struck by the combination of almost-glowing blue eyes and his completely guileless face, Trina didn’t know. It was all rather shocking.
She said, “Let’s just say that he’s a very close friend of the family I’ve just met recently.”
“Right,” Harvey said flatly.
“On my Russian side.”
And when Harvey said, “Ah,” she sounded like that made at least a little sense. No one ever questioned anything that happened on Trina’s Russian side.
Trina took a shallow, bracing breath and walked toward her desk, not surprised, but dismayed, when Harvey stayed glued to her side.
When they reached him, Sasha turned his smile on the doctor and said, “Good morning, Doctor Harvey.”
Harvey blinked, face blanking over with surprise. “Oh. Um. Good morning.”
“Harvey, this is Sasha.”
“Yes, we met last night,” Sasha said, with all the brightness of the irrepressible little sunbeam he was.
His cheer was the reason Trina managed to keep her tone light when she said, “Sasha, I thought we talked about you waiting outside.”
“We did, yes,” he said, his attention coming back to her. “But Nik said I was supposed to stay with you.”
“And what Nik says trumps whatever I say?”
“I’m sorry, yes,” he said, and didn’t sound sorry in the least.
She sighed. “Fine. I could use your help anyway.”
He looked delighted by the prospect.
Harvey, caught between an admirable state of composure and a full-on freakout, said, “Trina, where is Lanny? Really?”
“It’s actually part of that whole long story.”
Harvey looked a little hurt, but nodded. “You know I’m gonna want a real explanation at some point, right?”
“Christine,” Trina started, and the doctor stopped her with a raised hand.
“A man walked out of my morgue. A dead guy got up off my table. I think I’m owed the truth.”
Trina opened her mouth…but then nodded. Harvey was right. If their roles had been reversed, she would have been demanding answers. “You’ll get one, I promise.” She gave Sasha a little wave and he sprang to his feet, hair bouncing. “Let’s just say the truth is a lot more X-Files than you probably think.”
Harvey’s eyes popped wide.
Trina gave her
an apologetic smile and headed for the door, Sasha trailing after her.
He caught up to her easily out on the sidewalk, falling into step alongside. “Are you going to tell her about Lanny?” he asked, curious rather than judgmental. She had a feeling Nikita would already be lecturing her.
“That wasn’t my original plan, no. But she’s one of the good ones. I don’t like lying to her.”
Sasha nodded sagely. “That’s what made Nikita such a terrible Chekist. The lying ate him up from the inside out.”
“Does it still?” She thought about a life spent more or less on the run, just the two of them keeping to themselves, forming no outside attachments, keeping their powers hidden away like contraband so as not to draw attention. In that scenario, the lying never really stopped – even if killing wasn’t in the job description anymore.
Sasha sent her a quick, sad smile. “That’s the problem, though. If you pretend to be something for long enough, it usually sticks.”
~*~
It was easier being indoors, Lanny realized as he and Nikita walked down the street. His senses were no less finely-tuned, but in a bar, or the apartment, he could sit still and catalogue the sights, the scents, the sounds; could ground himself and take the time to pick apart all the subtle differences and scent markers he’d never noticed before. When he was human.
(Thinking of himself as not human wasn’t going to start feeling normal anytime soon.)
But outside, moving, the hypersensitivity felt like an assault. He tried breathing through his mouth, but he could taste scents too. And a blaring, air raid siren part of his brain was telling him he was surrounded by threats…and by prey. His body wanted blood, and it was all around him.
Sweat gathered at his temples, under his arms, in the small of his back. He could hear his breath rasping in and out of his mouth and knew he had to look like a drunk or a psycho; he swore he could feel his eyes pinging side to side as he scanned the sidewalk, the street, the windows up above.
Red Rooster (Sons of Rome Book 2) Page 5
