“I haven’t discussed this in any detail with our wolf friends, yet,” he said, “but I should very much like to head north from here.”
Kolya’s heart thumped. Sometimes, stuck in the vacuum of his own missing memories, he thought he might not have come back…right. That there were larger pieces missing: emotions, and responses, and empathy. But here he was, feeling. Hoping.
“New York?” he guessed.
The prince lifted his brows and turned a surprised little smile on him. “Why, yes, how did you know?”
“You said I could see them again. Nik and Sasha.”
“And so you shall.” His smile slipped, and he turned his upper body around so he could brace his elbows on the table. Set his coffee cup down with a sigh. “Actually, that’s why I’m here. I felt the need to…warn you.”
More feeling. Ice in his belly, pins and needles in his lungs. “About what?” His voice had gained strength in the months since his rebirth, no longer a sound like barbed wire tangling over itself; but it creaked now; his throat ached.
“It’s alright,” Val soothed. “It’s only – well, I think that your friends might be doubtful. At first. That you really are you.”
“Oh.” The breath left his lungs in a rush; he deflated.
“Nikita is, if you can remember, doubtful by nature. And he is wildly protective of his little family. He’ll come around, I’m sure. But I wanted you to be prepared.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
Val tipped his head, smile searching now. “Are you alright?”
“What do you mean?”
Soft, sad. Kolya knew what those things looked like, even if he couldn’t put his hands on them and claim them as his own. “Nevermind.” Gentle. “You’ll figure that out along the way. You’re with us, now.” He laid his hand on the table, near to Kolya’s, but not touching. “You’re safe.”
Safe. A word that held no meaning – not now…and not even in his piecemeal memories.
61
SIRE
Jake was a practical man. Born of a practical family, a boy who’d played baseball, and gone to the homecoming dance every year with a pretty date on his arm. A stand-up, designated driver, mom friend kind of guy. Decent grades in all subjects, but excellent ones in history and politics. A guy who’d known right away that he wanted to enter the military, spurred by the same swell of indomitable post-9/11 patriotism that had propelled so many young people to their local recruitment offices. West Point to Iraq, to a German hospital bed. He wasn’t one for fanciful thoughts. He’d never enjoyed books about made up shit, no Lord of the Rings or Walking Dead or Star Wars.
He hadn’t been prepared for redheaded girls who threw fire out of their hands. Nor for vampires. A nerd could have found the proper mental drawers in which to file these impossibilities, but he’d had no such resources.
To keep from going crazy, he’d decided to think of vampires like this: as dangerous zoo animals. Like the lions and tigers that are never touched with bare hands; instead lured with meat, and clickers, transported in huge metal crates and forklifts, feral golden eyes watching through the round holes cut in the sides.
He suspected that was why Vlad chose not to make Talbot’s study his headquarters. It smelled of another animal, of a male, and Vlad wanted to press his scent into a room as of yet untouched, his own area, and no one else’s, one in in which he graciously allowed others to visit, but never to stay.
Jake felt very much like he was walking into a tiger’s lair as he crossed the threshold of Vlad’s designated study. It was a room at the front of the house, with a wall of mullioned windows. A former sitting room, the kind with dainty furniture and pale blue wallpaper, designed for ladies in frothy dresses with delicate teacups.
Vlad had found a desk somewhere, a heavy, dark, masculine one at war with the rest of the room’s décor. He sat behind it, hair loose down his shoulders, poring over a map that took up nearly all the surface space, anchored at two ends with matching green lamps.
He afforded Jake only the barest of glances when he entered, a flat thing shot from beneath his brows, without lifting his head.
A small orange cat, the one the baroness had given to Prince Val, sat beside one of the lamps. It twitched its tail once, then stood, leapt down soundlessly, and disappeared somewhere near Vlad’s feet.
Jake approached the desk with a kind of hesitance he hadn’t even known in war. Cleared his throat. “You wanted to see me?”
Vlad hummed a sound of agreement and motioned to the chair across from his desk – powder blue with curved white legs. “I’m going over your modern maps.”
Jake sat down slow, like the chair might bite him. It creaked. “I’m guessing they look a lot different from the maps you had in your day,” he said, carefully. Because if Vlad was a tiger, then he was one who’d swatted at his keepers, and broken his latch.
Last night, Jake had dreamed of Vlad’s sword cutting through that guard’s neck. The wet thock sound of it, like a woodsman’s axe notching a tree. The twin thumps of the body and the head hitting the floor separately. Blood everywhere. The awful stink of the dead man’s bowels voiding.
Jake had seen lots of death in war, before the war eventually took his sight. But for reasons he couldn’t understand, that death shook him to the core. The cage had come open; the tiger was loose.
The tiger was staring at him over a map of eastern Europe.
Jake swallowed with difficulty. “Do you need help with any of the new names for things?”
Vlad gave him an unreadable look, then dropped his gaze back to the map. He pressed his index finger to a city. “This is where I was born.” He slid it over. “And this is where the palace was. Where Val and I grew up.” His voice was still commanding and implacable, but softer, gruffer. “Here, Bucharest. I built this city from scratch.”
Jake swallowed again and scooted to the edge of his chair, forearms resting on the desk so he could peer down at the map, some of the buzzing anxiety in his belly calming. “It’s a major metropolis now. Modern. But some of the old buildings are still there.”
Vlad looked up, sharply. “You’ve been there?”
“I looked at pictures when Talbot told me about you. I’ve never seen it in person.”
A nod, and his gaze swept downward again. “There are some immortals who know that I buried my uncle. I had my wolves spread false rumors about the location, however. It is true that I rode to Damascus. I was seen riding east from there…and also west. The deserts of Egypt? The deserts of Arabia?” He tapped his fingertip. “That was a ruse. He’s in Bucharest.”
“He…he is?”
“If he hasn’t been found, then yes, he is.”
“But…” Images from the video Talbot had shown him flashed behind his eyes, shaky, visceral, repulsive. Undeniable. “The footage. The mountain village. Christ, that was in Pakistan! How…?”
“There’s no way to know how many humans Romulus managed to turn before I put him in the ground. It could be dozens, or hundreds. Everyone he turns is eventually corrupted by whatever dark disease lies in his blood – and anyone they turn doubly so. They’re little more than raving monsters.”
“Zombies,” Jake said, flatly, overwhelmed. “They’re like – fuck, they’re like zombies.”
“Zombies?”
Jake made a vague gesture. “The undead. They eat people. There are movies about them.”
“Movies.” Vlad tasted the word.
“For entertainment. You had the theater back then, right?”
That earned him an unimpressed look.
“There’s movies about zombies. And…about vampires.”
His brows lifted. “I was under the impression that mortals at large are still ignorant as to our existence.”
“They are. The movies are just pretend.”
Vlad cocked his head, thinking it over, then finally shrugged and looked back at the map. “In any event, the first order of business is retrieving Romulus and killing him. If we
can.”
“There’s a chance we can’t?”
“I made only a weak attempt before,” Vlad said, grim. “He’s the son of a god, you know. He doesn’t die as easily as the rest of us.”
Faintly: “Right.” He thought he might pass out. “What if – what if Romulus isn’t there?”
“He will be. And then we will find and eradicate any of his spawn.”
“Yes, your grace.” The title came to him easily, to his surprise. He was used to calling someone “sir” or “ma’am.” Vlad was unlike any CO he’d ever had in his military career, but he found himself responding to the presence of him as such all the same. He’d reached the limits of belief and just wanted, selfishly, to fall in line at this point.
Vlad eased back in his chair; a lazy, panther-like movement undercut with an energy just shy of a threat. Eyelids at half-mast, he should have looked relaxed, sleepy – but he didn’t. He was terrifying. “There’s no royalty here in your country. Does it pain you to call be by a royal honorific?”
“No. Sir.”
“Hmm. You are a soldier, used to bending to authority.”
“Yes, sir.”
Vlad picked up a letter opener shaped like – oh, no, that really was a knife. Long, slender, double-edged, meant for stabbing rather than slicing. He walked the hilt down his knuckles in a quietly dazzling, deft movement, twirling the blade at the end in a fast arc and beginning again. Hypnotic. It felt intentional. “But you are repulsed by me.” It wasn’t a question.
“I–” Jake faltered.
“I can see it in your face. I can smell it on you. No need to lie.”
It took a degree of effort not to squirm in his chair. As evenly as he could, he said, “You’re not human.”
Vlad waited.
“You drink blood. You cut off a man’s head without a second thought – and maybe he was expendable, to you, and maybe he was a jackass, but he didn’t deserve to die. And with Adela–” He bit off the rest; he’d already said too much.
“Ah.” Vlad caught the knife’s handle and it stilled, angled so the blade became a bar of reflected sunlight, its threat obscured. “This is about Adela, then.”
Jake grit his teeth.
“You care for her.”
“She’s a fellow soldier and a member of my team. She’s my subordinate. And you turned her without her consent.”
This, of course, neither bothered nor shamed the prince. He said, “I asked you, Major. I asked what she would want.”
“I know.”
“The question then becomes,” Vlad drawled, “which of us do you hate the most? Me for turning her, or yourself for allowing it?”
“It isn’t that simple.”
“Of course it is.” Maddeningly calm. Jake gripped the flimsy arms of his chair until the tendons stood out in the backs of his hands; until the wood creaked. “Everything is simple.”
Shaking, vibrating out of his skin with a fury so potent he couldn’t hope to understand it, Jake said, “You really are insane.”
Vlad said, “For most of my childhood, I was held hostage by my father’s enemy. A man whose son would go on to defile my little brother and keep him as a concubine. My father’s own people turned on him, killed him. My little brother nearly cleaved me in two six-hundred years ago, and then I returned the favor.
“These are things that happened. Because of selfishness – and because of protectiveness, also. Brutal things are always simple, Major Treadwell, even if your emotions are not. I saved Adela’s leg; I made her immortal and ungodly strong. Now: are you glad of that, or do you wish she’d lost her limb?”
Jake bit the inside of his cheek and tasted blood.
“Are the two of you lovers?”
Shut up! he wanted to scream. He couldn’t answer, afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth – and what Vlad might do in retaliation.
But the prince was calm. He set the knife down on the desk and linked his hands together over his flat stomach. He had large, long-fingered hands, rough with prominent calluses in places not caused by modern weapons. His lips tipped up the slightest fraction in the corners, and he looked almost amused.
“No need to answer, Major, I can tell that you aren’t. I would have smelled it if you were. I might think you wanted to be her lover, but that’s not quite the truth, is it? You just don’t want me to be.”
“If you’re mind-controlling her–”
“I can’t do that.”
The chair arms groaned.
“I possess no psychic abilities whatsoever,” Vlad explained. “Though it appears I’m stubborn enough to resist the compelling efforts of mages even as strong as our stupid Mr. Price. I have no way to compel Adela, though.”
Jake forced his fingers to uncurl from the wood; they were bloodless and aching from the pressure.
“I have done innumerable violent things in my life, and I’m not sorry for them. But I’ve never forced a woman against her will, and I have no plans to do so now. There are more important things at stake than sex,” he said, dismissive, and turned back to his map. “I have need of a second in command, and I thought that might be you, if you are capable and willing enough.” One last, lazy glance, only half-curious, but assessing.
Jake took a series of deep breaths, his heart pounding against his ribs so forcefully that it hurt. It hit him then, with an unreal sense that the floor was tipping out from beneath him, that he’d made a terrible error in judgement.
Tigers could kill, and tigers could escape. Tigers could creep up silent in the half-light of dusk and gut you open. But the thing he’d forgotten? Tigers were smart.
So was Vlad.
This was no rabid beast foaming at the mouth for violence. Not something depraved who feasted on chaos. Vlad was colder and more calculating than any military man Jake had ever met. Vlad weighed the odds and acted on logic.
And sometimes, logic was the most monstrous motivation of all.
~*~
Adela checked her watch and was surprised to find that it had only been five minutes since she’d checked last. She’d covered nearly two miles in that time. Earbuds pumping music, she lifted her head and pressed on. Nikes digging into the loose pebbles and hard-packed dirt of the trail, arms swinging, lungs working with a strength and regularity that was almost mechanical. She jumped a branch, skipped over a set of hoofprints, and started up the next hill with a fresh burst of speed.
She’d always been athletic, but this was…this was something else entirely.
Dr. Talbot hadn’t wanted her to leave the mansion. Agent West had said “under no circumstance,” his face pinched and pale.
But Vlad had stepped in. “She goes where she wants.” And his word was law, now.
Agent West had been on the phone, hiding in corners, having hushed, furious conversations. She’d eavesdropped without any effort: calls to Washington, to the secretary of state, on hold with the president, requests to speak with the joint chiefs. There was a real possibility he might try to call in an airstrike on the manor just to get rid of Vlad.
But Adela knew this whole thing was bigger than ego or the lives of a few underlings. The US government had spent seventy-five years and uncountable millions trying to find Vlad Tepes; if he wanted to control a manor house, he could control a manor house.
She had no idea how the rest of it would shake out, only that she was now a part of it in a way she’d never expected, and there was no going back.
She flew the last distance, taking the wide stone steps two at a time. She was out of breath and tired when she reached the double front doors, but in a pleasant way. The familiar ache of lactic acid, the rush of too much oxygen in her lungs, the dizziness of dehydration, yes – but she wasn’t going to cramp, or faint, or need a nap. She could feel energy in a reserve now, dormant in her blood, ready to be tapped into with a sit-down and a snack and a bottle of water. Vlad had told her she was strong now, and she was.
She paused in the vestibule to take out her ear
buds and slip them in the pocket of her shorts. She looked down at her feet.
The surgeon who’d performed the transplant of the donor leg had done a magnificent job. The donor had been the same shoe size, and of a very similar build. She’d been Latina, and shared Adela’s slender calves and ankles. Still, it hadn’t been a perfect match; no such thing existed. The skin tone hadn’t been an exact match; then there had been the scar…
When she’d stood in her shower, and looked down at her feet on the stark white tile, the difference had always seemed glaring. The success of the surgery, the fact that her body had accepted the new limb, had been miraculous. She’d been grateful.
But now…now her legs looked the same. The scar was still there, but the leg was her own in a way she’d never thought possible.
She went through the inner doors into the soaring atrium as Jake walked across it toward the grand staircase, head down, brows pinched with unhappiness. Discontent rolled off of him, a detectible aura that was part smell, part vibration along her nerve endings.
He paused when he saw her, hand suspended above the bannister, and offered a bare smile. “Good run?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He turned away, but not before his smile turned brittle and fell away. A part of her wanted to reach out, ask him why he looked and smelled and felt this way. But they’d never been close; just coworkers and team members; their only bond was military service and their place in the drug trial.
He started up the stairs, calling over his shoulder: “Vlad wants to see you. He’s in his study.”
Her stomach flipped. “’Kay. Thanks.”
She looked down at herself again, her dusty sneakers and her orange tank top glued to her skin with sweat. She should shower first. But she knew that delaying the meeting would just make her jittery stomach worse. So she headed for his study.
Which she realized was a horrible, horrible idea the moment she rapped on the open doorframe and crossed the threshold.
His head lifted immediately, his nostrils flared, his gaze snapping up, a predatorial gleam in his dark eyes.
Dragon Slayer (Sons of Rome Book 3) Page 80
