“I don’t care what he has to say,” Alexei snapped. “It’s all lies.”
“Well, I want to hear,” Trina said. She gestured to Dante in invitation.
Alexei sat back down in a huff, bristling and agitated.
Dante flicked him a cautious glance, swallowing, chewing at his lip. He decided Trina was the less hostile audience, and directed his words to her. “My name truly is Basil Norrie.” His voice started tremulous, but gained stability as he slipped into the explanation. “And I’ve truly been living as a schmuck named Dante in the city for the last two decades. Reinventing myself, as it were,” he said with a grim, self-mocking smile. “I suppose I was always a bit hopeless and awkward, and I decided to make a go at being a – a seducer.” His cheeks turned pink.
Alexei scoffed. “You’re not even that good in bed.”
So that explained it. Nikita had suspected, but it was nice to have it confirmed; no wonder Alexei felt so personally affronted about the whole business.
Dante bit his lip again, dark lashes fanning low across his cheeks. Hurt. And over something so petty.
Trina cleared her throat. “Let’s assume all of that’s true. How did you end up working with Gustav?”
All the flustered color bled out of his face. His cheeks went bone white, and his lashes lifted, eyes wide, and pale, and gleaming. He wet his lips, and his hands tightened on his ankles, clinging tight. “I’m – I’m afraid I didn’t have much of a choice.”
“He threatened you?” Nikita asked.
When Dante’s gaze snapped toward him, Nikita wanted to recoil from the chilling, haunted look in his eyes. “Working with him was the only was to secure my freedom.”
“Freedom from what?” Alexei demanded. His tone was still biting, but his expression, Nikita glanced over and noticed, had shifted, doubt creeping in at the edges of his anger. He might want to play at tsar, but he was still young emotionally, still too-trusting, too freshly hurt by Dante to give up on him completely.
Dante must have seen that, too. He uncoiled a fraction, sitting upright. He hesitated. “It might be easier to show you than to tell you.”
Alexei bared his teeth.
Slowly, Dante put his feet down on the ground and sat forward, undeterred, expression softening. “It was also the truth when I told you I was a dream-walker.”
Nikita felt his brows shoot up; Sasha made a quiet sound beside him.
“Shit,” Lanny breathed.
“It’s how I found you for them,” Dante said. “It’s also how I know what Gustav’s true intentions were. I’m…” He held out one pale, slender hand. “I can show you, if you’ll let me. I don’t know if I can explain it in a way you’ll understand.”
“Because I’m stupid?” Alexei snarled.
“No.” Dante swallowed. “Because it’s difficult to talk about.” He sat there, hand outstretched, waiting.
Trina caught Nikita’s gaze and shrugged. “It’s not like he can do anything with all of us here.”
Nikita shrugged back. “Your call,” he told Alexei. “Lanny can punt him down the stairs if you want him gone.”
Lanny cracked his knuckles right on cue.
Dante’s hand trembled, but didn’t lower. “No more lies,” he said, like a promise. “I only want you to see.”
Alexei considered a long, long moment, fingers drumming on the tabletop. He flicked a sideways glance at the mage, shivered all over like a horse covered in flies, and finally jerked a nod. “Fine,” he said through clenched teeth, gaze on the table. “Show me. Show me the truth.”
“I will,” Dante said, rising, exhaling long and shaky with obvious relief. His long legs looked like they nearly buckled on the walk over, but then Nikita and Sasha slid over, and he settled on the bench across from Alexei. “May I see your hand, your grace?” he asked, with perfect reverence.
Alexei shoved one sleeve up and smacked his hand down on the tabletop, rolling his eyes in a very un-tsar-like manner.
Dante set his own delicately atop it, and closed his eyes.
Alexei stared sullenly off to the side a moment – and then his eyes popped wide – and then they glazed over.
~*~
Alexei felt a gentle probing at his mind; not the shove of will that came with compulsion. It was a light, tickling touch, like fingertips sliding along his forehead. It’s only me, Dante’s voice said. He had the sense of a door opening, of being waved inside. Invited in.
His vision faded to gray, and panic swelled – but then he was spinning dizzily on a field of black dotted with white pinpricks like stars.
I’m here, Dante said, inside his head. I’m right here.
Then he could see…
An alley. Grimy red brick illuminated by a flickering pair of sconces on either side of a door. There was a poster, an ad for a band playing next Tuesday at a place called The Dungeon – next Tuesday in 2015.
He heard sounds, and finally placed them: the slap of shoes on pavement, the uneven sawing of breath. Someone was running. A tall, rangy figure barreled around the corner, careened off the wall with a stumble and a curse, and pressed on, pursued by dogs – no, by wolves. A half-dozen of them, shaggy, hulking things, snarling. The light caught the glimmer of saliva, the gleam of ivory teeth.
The running figure passed the sconces, and their yellow light slid across his sharp-featured face: Dante. Gaze hectic, pulse leaping visibly in his throat, wild and exhausted.
The alley was a dead end. Dante leapt when he reached it, scrabbling at the brick with fingers and nails, a low, awful, scared-cat whine caught in the back of his throat. The wolves reached him–
A new scene: a cell. A concrete floor with a drain in the center, white cinderblock walls, and a door of fat silver bars. A stick-thin figure in white scrubs, dark hair buzzed close to his scalp, huddled by the back wall, wrists circled with heavy silver cuffs that trailed silver chains across the floor, and up the wall to silver loops mounted with screws with quarter-size heads. Alexei knew it was Dante, even before he lifted his head in response to the sounds of footsteps out in the hall, but the sight of his face still sent an awful start through him.
He was always lean, but he looked nearly skeletal, now, nothing but fevered blue eyes and cheekbones, the skin of his cheeks sunken and pallid under fluorescent lights. The lack of hair, and the deep bruised circles beneath his eyes gave him all the liveliness of a skull. Poorly healing wounds marred his arms, and Alexei realized they were bite marks, the deep puncture wounds of wolf teeth.
Keys rattled at the door, and the bars slid back to reveal two men dressed all in black, and a third, holding a clipboard, in dress slacks and a long, white lab coat. A scientist.
An Ingraham Institute scientist, Alexei realized with another start.
“Good morning, Mr. Norrie, how are we feeling?” the man asked, clicking his pen, like he wasn’t speaking to an injured, underfed vampire currently chained to the wall like a Fifteenth Century prisoner of war.
Dante blinked at the man, and didn’t answer.
The doctor looked to one of the guards beside him, and nodded. The guard stepped forward, and in his hands he held what looked like a travel coffee mug with a straw sticking out of the top; steam curled from the straw, and even if he couldn’t smell it, Alexei knew instinctively that it was blood.
Dante’s head strained upward on a neck that looked fragile as a flower stem. His nostrils flared.
The guard knelt down on one knee, doing an admirable job of hiding his fear; Alexei caught the glint of it in his eyes, though, and felt the savage urge to lean down and sink his fangs in the man’s neck; to pin him down and drain him dry. Dante was barely strong enough to hold himself upright, and was chained besides, and this hale and hearty mortal skirted around him like he was the one in danger. He offered the mug, the straw steadied between two gloved fingers.
Dante stared at it a long moment, breathing quick and hard through his nose, scenting the air. Finally, hesitantly, he leaned forward and pu
t his lips on the straw. The blood was thick, slow and dark as it filled the straw. Dante took one small sip, swallowed, and then his eyes fluttered shut and he drank in earnest, greedy gulps until he had to sit back, gasping, trying not to choke, a stray drop running down his chin, jewel-bright against the papery hue of his skin.
The guard stood, and Dante creaked out a soft, broken, “Wait…”
But he moved back to the door to stand alongside the doctor.
“Let’s try again,” the doctor said. “Good morning, Mr. Norrie.”
Dante panted a moment, and then his gaze dropped. “Good morning,” he croaked.
The doctor smiled. “Now, was that so hard?”
The vision shifted with a blur of gray mist, and Dante was laid out on a table, fastened to rails at both wrists, and both ankles, naked save a white towel draped over his hips in the barest suggestion of modesty. He pressed his head back against the table, neck corded and straining, teeth bared, as doctors on both sides pressed plungers on the syringes plugged into both IV bags that snaked tubes down to the vulnerable, visible blue veins in the crooks of his elbows.
“Injecting now,” one of the doctors said, and a tech with a clipboard scribbled notes. “This is test IC, human papilloma virus…”
Another flash, and Dante was on his stomach, shirtless, wearing an electrode helmet, while a doctor with latex gloves on his hands carved long, bloody lines down his back with a scalpel, and while Dante screamed around some sort of gag, the sound muffled.
Though Alexei was only a floating voyeur, he felt a rolling sickness in his belly, the urge to heave, and the vision flashed again.
Time had passed, he could tell. Dante had regained a little weight, a little color, and his hair curled out from his head in dark, unwashed ringlets like corkscrews. (That was why he was so ruthless with the pomade, Alexei thought faintly; if left undressed, his hair tended toward riotous curls.) He wore a white t-shirt, rather than a scrub top and a soft blue pants; rubber flip-flops on his formerly bare feet.
Gustav stood in front of him.
“As you can see,” Gustav said, gesturing, “talking with me has already bought you greater comforts.”
A pair of flip-flops. Pants that weren’t white. Those were Gustav’s provided comforts.
“If you cooperate.” He pitched forward at the waist, pushing his face into Dante’s personal space; Dante swallowed and inched backward on his cot. “You might even see the outside world again.”
“But I have cooperated,” Dante said, voice soft and broken. “I have. I’ve been so good, for all their tests.” Even softer: “I only screamed a little.”
Alexei’s nausea spiked again. He felt a low, insistent tugging in his chest, a plucking of heartstrings. God. God.
“They’re done with all their tests, Basil,” Gustav said, and laid a hand on Dante’s head. There was nothing comforting about it; the touch of someone reluctantly petting a stray dog. “No more pokes and prods. Now, we need you to do some sleuthing for us.”
Dante’s brows drew together. “S-sleuthing?”
“Yes.” Gustav smiled. “It’s time you put that magical brain to work.”
“But,” Dante said, drawing his legs up, wrapping his thin arms around his knees – just like he had on the chair in Colette’s living room. His eyes were red-rimmed as they had been just moments ago, in real time; big, and terrified, and full of doubt. “But I don’t–”
“Do it,” Gustav said, “or the testing will continue.”
The faint color in Dante’s cheeks bled away, leaving him nearly as white as the shirt he wore. He looked…
He looked like Alexei had felt, all those decades ago, when the Chekists had barked at them to stay where they were, and then lifted their guns. When he’d realized that they were all about to die: a fear that couldn’t be borne, one the stripped away all reason and self-preservation.
In that moment, it didn’t matter that Dante had betrayed him, that Alexei hated him; he wanted to lift him up and carry him away from this moment, shield him bodily, and hiss a warning to Gustav. The things they’d done to him…those few glimpses…
The black field of stars again, a dizzy spin, and Alexei was back at Colette’s table, breathing raggedly through his mouth as if he’d just sprinted a long way, nauseated and off-balance and furious, and hurting. When he blinked his gaze clear, he was staring at his own hand, curled into a tight fist, Dante’s resting over the back of it, trembling faintly. Alexei had no idea which one of them was shaking – maybe both.
He lifted his head, and sought Dante’s gaze, hoping to catch a flicker of doubt, of guilt, some trace of a lie.
But Dante gazed at him steadily, his expression as raw and cracked-open as Alexei had ever seen it. Eyes red and wet, mouth twitching in a shaky semblance of a smile that was affectionate, and sad, and embarrassed. He looked nothing like the Dante he’d first met at Nameless, sharp and smirking and looking for a good time. That Dante he could have handled, could have turned away.
But not this one.
He had to wet his lips before he could speak. “How long did they keep you?”
“Until about six months ago.”
Almost four years, then. Four years of testing, of torture; of being injected with human diseases and flayed alive in the name of science.
Alexei swallowed.
“I’m so sorry, Lex. Your grace.” Dante’s breathing hitched. “It was my only way out, and I took it.”
“I know.” Alexei turned his hand over, and when Dante started to draw back, thinking he was being shaken off, Alexei laced their fingers together, and squeezed tight.
Dante squeezed back.
~*~
“I’m not the sort of dream-walker that His Grace Prince Valerian is,” Dante said a few minutes later. He sat on Alexei’s other side at the table, breathing in the fragrant steam from a mug of tea, visibly more relaxed now, though his face was still drawn with lines of tension. Occasionally, he’d rake a hand through his hair, mussing it further, so it curled softly on his shoulders. “I’m not that strong. Most of the time, when I go visiting, I fail to take a visible shape.”
“So no one sees you,” Nikita said, unnerved by the idea. Doubtless Val could hide himself too, if he chose, but was too vain – (lonely, Nik knew, truthfully) – to keep to shadows and dark patches. He always announced himself with great fanfare, and a toss of his golden hair.
“Not generally, no. And I can share my past with others” – he tipped his head toward Alexei – “but I’ve never been able to link the consciousnesses of two other people, the way Valerian did for you and Trina.”
“You told him about that?” Nikita asked Alexei.
The tsarevich – Nikita wasn’t going to call him tsar, not even in his own head – nodded primly, unapologetic. “I don’t believe in keeping secrets anymore, not between us.”
Nikita snorted.
Again, Alexei didn’t take the bait. “If we’re going to be pack…”
“And you think he counts as pack?”
“I wouldn’t presume–” Dante began, gaze dropping.
But Alexei said, “He does.” To Dante: “Continue, please.”
Dante glanced between them, and took a small sip of tea, uncertain. “There are advantages to being more or less invisible, though.”
“Yeah, ya think?” Lanny said, and was ignored.
“I was able to look in on Gustav. And, when I touched him, I was able to slip into his thoughts.”
“You read minds?” Trina asked, alarmed.
“I can read lies,” he said. “It requires a physical touch, and a considerable mental effort on my part, but I can divine someone’s true intentions. Suffice to say, I’ve been acquainted with Gustav long enough to understand his true motives.”
“Which are?” Nikita prompted. Perspective shift or no, he only had so much patience.
Dante took a breath. “The Institute is in the business of research. They’re trying to distill a miracle cu
re for every kind of human disease. Yes? Probably, more likely, they’re trying to figure out how to become immortal without requiring blood. And how to fight and contain us, how to kill us. They do believe in the war – the threat of Romulus is very real to them.
“But Gustav…Gustav isn’t thinking about defeating Romulus for the benefit of the world, but of himself. He was a true believer when he served the Kaiser – in truth, I think he was more ambitious than Wilhelm. His head is full of dreams of grandeur a la Alexander the Great and Mehmet the Conqueror.”
“Jesus, why does everybody want to take over the fucking world?” Lanny muttered.
Dante looked right at Nikita. “Gustav is after power. He’s playing the long game, and he’s going to remove any player from the board who stands in opposition.”
“I thought he wanted revenge against my family,” Alexei said.
“He does, darling. Revenge…and then the world.”
~*~
A small, second-floor balcony on the rear of the townhouse, just off the kitchen, offered a view of the small, tidy backyards lined up to either side of Colette’s place, and the alley beyond, the rows of trash cans and recycling bins. A canvas awning shielded it from the rain, fat drops pattering overhead and dripping off the edge; a breeze stirred two sets of windchimes, one tubular and clear-sounding, the other made of spoons, its tinkling discordant, but charming.
Lanny stood with his back to the rail, rainfall silhouetting him in silver, smoking a cigarette. “You’ve got that look on your face like you’ve decided something,” he observed.
Trina pulled her feet up into the papasan chair and curled her legs beneath her, settling deeper into the cushion. It smelled faintly of lavender, and something darker, sage, maybe. She felt guilty for taking up space in Colette’s house – for bringing more problems to her heavily-warded door. But she felt safe here, too; hidden from anyone or anything hunting for them.
“Yeah?” She sighed. “You’re not wrong.”
“You believe Dante?”
“Do I believe the same place that kept Val locked up in a basement took Dante prisoner? Yeah. What about you?”
Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) Page 49
