“Hurry, you whoresons,” the man with the lantern barked in guttural Russian.
Another man walked down the length of the truck, smoking a cigarette, a heavy woodsman’s saw propped over one shoulder.
“I know this forest,” Alexei repeated, faintly.
It was the place where his family had been robbed, dismembered, burned, and buried.
It was the place where he’d awakened.
Dante touched his shoulder. “We can go–”
“No. I want to see.”
A wave of dizziness hit him; the ground seemed to tilt, and his vision blurred.
When it cleared, he stood right beside the pit. The sky was darker. A fire burned a few paces away, its smoke a noxious gray against the fast-approaching night. One of the Bolsheviks fed it with dripping lumps that were not logs.
Alexei turned his head and saw himself, young, gangly, deathly-pale, laid out on a tarp. His jacket had been stripped, and his shoes, his belt, his pockets turned out. His lips were blue, his face shadowed.
One of the men knelt down beside him, saw in-hand, measured a moment, and then rested the jagged teeth of the saw on Alexei’s thigh. Drew his arm back, applied pressure–
The lantern light caught the wet glimmer of fresh blood welling up around the saw teeth.
The man paused a moment, wondering. Alexei’s eyes snapped open; his chest lifted on a gasp that was nearly a scream.
The man did scream.
Alexei – his current, adult self – stood by, unseen, and watched the boy he’d been sit up, eyes wild, and reach out with stark white hands for the man who’d meant to cut him into pieces. Grab his throat, and drag him in close. Bite his neck with new fangs, instinct driving every cell in his body to latch on, to feed, to kill, to survive.
The man’s scream choked off into a wet gurgle. Young Alexei held him tight with both arms, close as a lover, and twisted, rolled; they both went toppling into the open pit.
The other henchmen came running over, lanterns swinging.
“What was that?”
“Is someone there?”
“Where’s Sergei?”
“Wolves,” one said in a panicked voice. “Must be. There’s wolves out there!”
“Sergei! Answer me!”
Slowly, as a unit, they crept up to the edge of the pit, lanterns held high, squinting out into the darkness beyond it.
They didn’t look down. Didn’t see the dead-looking hands that reached up over the edge, knuckles smeared with blood and dirt. Didn’t see the boy that crawled up, using exposed roots and rocks for handholds, fingers digging in like claws.
“Lex,” Dante said, low, urging.
Alexei stood rooted. Watched himself scuttle up out of the pit like something not at all human, and grab one of the Bolsheviks by the ankle.
The man looked down, and screamed. Tried to turn and flee. Young Alexei pounced, and tackled him to the ground. The man screamed as his throat was torn out, the hot copper stench of fresh blood filling the clearing.
Chaos erupted among the others. Shouts, curses, wild prayers – Soviets, it turned out, were atheist until they came face-to-face with a demon, and then they screamed for their Lord and Savior.
One pulled a pistol, and cracked off a shot.
Young Alexei’s shoulder kicked up a spray of blood; the bleeding was too much, too quick, crimson spreading across the back of his dirty white shirt.
But he was feeding now, too, draining the man he’d tackled dry, gulp after gulp.
“Lex,” Dante tried again.
But Alexei kept watching. For Olga, he thought, as his younger self grabbed a man by the jacket lapels and reeled him in close, savaged his throat. For Tatiana. One tried to climb into the lorry and start it, and he dragged him out, screaming, firing his gun wildly into the air. He snapped his neck and fed at his leisure, as the body went limp. For Marie. One tried to grapple with him, and Alexei shoved him down, gouged his eyes; he screamed so loudly it made the veins in his throat bulge, and Alexei sunk his fangs. For Anastasia.
The last he had to chase, his shoulder still bleeding, running fleet and bare-footed over the frozen ground, following the rustle of leaves, and the exhausted panting of the man’s breath. He took him down like a wolf takes a deer. Drank, and drank, until, finally, his own wound started to knit closed.
For Papa.
For Mama.
He stood, bloody, dirty, heaving for breath, skin blue with cold – blood steaming on his mouth, and down his neck, his chest.
“God,” Dante murmured beside him.
Alexei’s younger self turned, head whipping around, eyes glimmering in the dark. Almost as if he saw them.
But then it was another tilt, blur, and they stood in the deep, white snow of a small yard behind a house, its fence too tall to climb, its boards too tightly-overlapped to see through.
Siberia, still, the house where they’d lived in exile, just before the massacre. He and his sisters played, laughing despite the pall of depression he remembered even now, shivering in their coats; nothing they owned was warm enough to keep out the Siberian chill.
Papa stood watching, laughing – though his eyes were sad. Young Alexei whirled and tossed a snowball at him, and Nicholas ducked only a little; he let it hit him. “A marksman,” he declared, the fondness in his gaze tinged with melancholy.
A glance up revealed Mama’s face in the window; she felt too poorly, again, to be outside. She watched them with exquisite sadness.
“The world thought they were monsters,” Alexei murmured. “And maybe they were. But they were my parents, and they loved us.”
“I know,” Dante murmured back.
The next dizzy moment came, and then Alexei stood in the corner of a room, one richly appointed with thick, elegant drapes, ornate scrollwork on the wall paneling. The palace at Tsarskoe Selo. His nursery room; the rocking horse with the real horsehair mane and tail; his collection of toy soldiers, his favorite blocks, stowed neatly on the shelves to the side. He hadn’t played with them in days; had lay quietly in bed, while Monsieur Gilliard read aloud to him, and while Mama bathed his fevered forehead, and prayed over him, and whispered words of love and comfort into his ear, barely registered through the haze of illness.
His younger self rested now in his narrow bed, head propped up beneath a stack of snowy pillows, his skin nearly as pale as the linens, circles dark as bruises beneath his eyes.
A man sat on a stool beside his bed. Dark-haired, bearded, dressed in a long, dirty black kaftan, his head bent so that his face rested against Alexei’s wrist.
“Grisha,” the current him said, aloud, unheard by the specters of the past.
He remembered this hematoma; a terrible swelling in his lower leg.
Beside him, Dante shuddered; a palpable sensation, though he remained silent.
Rasputin lifted his head, licking his lips. He’d left a small puncture at Alexei’s wrist, amid the visible veins there. He hadn’t taken much, no. That would come later.
They were alone, though Rasputin checked with a glance over his shoulder. Then he scored his own wrist with his fangs and pressed it to Young Alexei’s slack mouth. “Drink, little one. It will help.” He brought his other hand up to cup the back of Young Alexei’s head and lift him up, encourage him. The lips closed over the wound, feeble at first, barely conscious. But a few swallows gave him strength, and then he latched on, drinking steadily.
Rasputin left his wrist there, in Young Alexei’s shaking grasp, and with his other hand flipped back the bedclothes, exposing the terrible, blue-and-purple swelling above the boy’s ankle. He bent his head, and bit, and carefully drained the hemorrhage away.
“The press about him,” Alexei murmured to Dante. “Everyone said he was a heretic; a devil-worshiper. He was only a vampire. And he saved my life – one drop at a time.”
Then, softer: “He was always kind to me. I never thought he was monstrous…but when Nikita told me what he’d done…”
He’d tried so hard to deny it: to them, yes, but to himself, too.
He turned to Dante, still in that awful suit, with the tied-back hair. “Why? Why would he try to kill them all?”
“I think,” Dante said carefully, “that, like Gustav, he wanted a place at the right hand of the devil, and it didn’t matter who he killed to achieve that.”
“Could he be that terrible? That worth it? Romulus?”
“He must be,” Dante said, helplessly. “No one does anything like this without a reason.”
“Why did he turn me?”
Dante didn’t answer, head tilting, gaze saying, You know.
“Everyone wants an army,” Alexei murmured. “God, everyone.”
The scene shifted, again. His parents in one of the palace’s pretty sitting rooms, having tea with Rasputin.
“God is a part of everything,” Rasputin was saying, in that voice Alexei remembered so well, even now. Low, and rough; uncultured, but honest. “It is only through accepting Him in our hearts that we find ourselves the beneficiaries of His grace.”
Alexandra shifted forward in her chair, tea forgotten, listening raptly.
Alexei searched her face, aching with nostalgia – for signs of compulsion. It had been impossible to know, then, as a mortal boy, but Rasputin had passed his strong gift for compulsion down to every vampire he’d sired. Surely he’d used the power on their family; surely that was why they’d all fallen under his spell, and granted him unprecedented access to their inner sanctum; why they’d trusted him over highly-trained and valued advisors. It had to be a trick, all of it: an immortal’s powerful sway over humans.
But Alexei looked closely at his parents’ faces, now, stepping in close, unseen, really scrutinizing – and he didn’t find what he’d hoped. Didn’t see the blown-pupil, glazed-over, slack-jawed compliance of the compelled. No: Mama was bright-eyed, eager, present. As was Father, though toned down, as was his way.
Not compelled. Merely…infatuated.
The knowledge that his parents had gone along of their own free will was the sort of thing that had the potential to destroy him.
He wanted to scream.
Instead, he swallowed hard and said, “They wanted to believe in a miracle, and he offered one.”
“He was very convincing,” Dante said, not sounding convinced at all.
“To them, he was.” Alexei couldn’t bite back his bitterness. “And…to me. Though I was only a child.”
Dante waited a beat, as, in the vision, Rasputin took Alexandra’s hand between both of his. “It’s not your fault, you know,” he said, finally, tone gentle. “You were a child, and you had no control over–” He cut off when Alexei whirled to face him.
“It was my illness that created the vulnerability; it was for my sake that they entertained him.”
“You didn’t choose to be sick.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that I was.”
“That was – Lex, that’s the result of nobility interbreeding. A lack of understanding of genetics,” Dante said, frowning, getting a bit huffy. “It isn’t your fault.”
“Small consolation, when he ruined us.”
Dante didn’t argue that point; there were dozens of long-held, deep-seated political issues that had led to that moment they’d witnessed only minutes ago, in the dark forest, but Rasputin had been an overwhelming part of the final descent to disaster. There was no consoling that knowledge away.
The dizziness returned.
His parents, younger now, Mama’s face without the lines and weight of long years of stress, sat at a round, cloth-covered table, a glass ball on a stand at its center. Opposite them, a small, stocky man with a tidy salt-and-pepper beard.
Alexei thought he knew the man, but Dante explained, confirming: “Monsieur Philippe.”
As they watched, Philippe reached into his pocket and withdrew something that he placed into Alexandra’s waiting hand: a bell, small, brass, and tarnished.
“That’s Val’s,” Alexei said, because he knew that now. Not merely a token from a sorcerer, but a token from a legendary vampire: from one of the two immortal sons born of Remus of Rome.
He shivered.
“She gave it to one of her maids at the time of the Revolution,” Dante explained. “For safekeeping; she must have thought she’d get it back, or maybe she knew she never would, but didn’t want the Bolsheviks to have it. She believed it to be enchanted; to have real magic. Which it does, of a sort. And the maid she gave it to was Nikita Baskin’s mother.”
Alexei knew that, also, but it seemed more important, now. Having met Val, seeing the transaction as it had truly happened. It felt…prophetic.
He turned his back on the scene, sinuses burning with tightly-checked tears. “I thought you were going to show me my lineage, but we’ve just been peeking in on my parents.”
Dante blinked. “Quite right.”
The world tilted again.
A cascade of images followed, one after the next, too quick to be distinct, like the faces of playing cards just glimpsed as they were shuffled by expert hands. Alexei wondered if this was one of the glitches Dante had mentioned; if the history was sliding too fast through his hands. He glimpsed his grandfather – the one for whom he was named, another Alexei; as implacable, stern, and robust as Father had been placid, accommodating, and retiring.
It was only a glimpse, though, and then the past kept moving, a film reel on fast forward, until it paused, a moment.
A tall man sat astride a handsome, dun stallion, his saddle green velvet, his uniform that of a lower-ranking officer. Not a general, but merely a captain.
“Peter,” Dante explained. “At war with the Swedes.”
The next scene was of Peter, again, standing in a muddy street, looking proudly over a patch of land that didn’t look like it should have inspired anything like pride. The buildings were of rough-hewn logs, the architecture that of Old Muscovy; they looked temporary, unremarkable, and along a wide, obviously freshly-cleared street, construction was underway of tall, two-story houses with many windows, European in their look; the builders toiled away in the mud, struggling to build on what had originally been a marsh, slowly being filled in with humanity.
It took a moment of staring for Alexei to recognize the city he’d lived nearest as a boy. This was the humble, doubtful beginning of St. Petersburg, the naval power dream of its founder.
“Oh,” he said, some of the tension in his gut melting away. Here, finally, was a vision that didn’t put his heart in his throat. “The Nevsky Prospekt.”
“Yes,” Dante said. “He was strange, violent, overly passionate, and outright dangerous to those who served under him – but there’s no denying Peter was a visionary.”
“The enemy of traditionalists – and anyone who lay in the path of his expansion. Why are you showing me this?”
Dante turned so they faced one another fully, frowning.
“To show–”
“Me that I come from a long line of eccentric, violent empire builders? Yes, I’m painfully aware of the fact. Papa was the least ambitious of all, and yet he’s the one who paid the price for previous generations’ ambitions.”
The frown deepened. “You disapprove of your ancestors, then. I wasn’t aware.”
“I don’t…” He struggled for the words. He’d never been able to make proper sense of his feelings on the matter, indecisive and childish to the last. At moments, he felt savage pride for the Romanovs, for the things they’d accomplished, for the way they’d risen.
But he’d spent long enough in America, absorbing all manner of media, from social to structured classroom lessons, and it was harder and harder, after he’d felt great rushes of nostalgia for the empire’s faded glory, to justify imperialism itself.
His mother had always clung tightly to the autocracy, always urging Nicholas to be harsher, to stand his ground, to reject any Russian attempts at a more representative government. The Russian people needed and wanted
an autocrat, she believed wholeheartedly.
And Russians had slaughtered their last autocrat.
How did he live with that? With knowing that Nicholas, that the Romanov dynasty, had not been the voice of the common people…but with remembering the man as Papa; as a loving, doting father, doing his best?
He realized he’d closed his eyes, and opened them. “There’s no place for me in this world. That’s the big, terrible secret of being immortal, isn’t it? You can never outrun the time that birthed you. You can never fit. That’s why we’re still secret, after all these centuries of existence: because relevancy is a uniquely human condition, isn’t it? It’s not possible for us.”
“Lex,” Dante said, tone disturbed. “I wasn’t – wasn’t expecting this.”
“My wholehearted mental breakdown? It had to happen sometime. I suppose it’s happening now.”
“You’re not – here, hold on.” Dante took his hand, and the scene was different, again.
A balcony at the head of a red-brick staircase, the low clouds, and Italianate lines of Moscow, the Kremlin. A woman stood there, her eyes glittering with unshed tears, white-rimmed with fright, but her chin lifted bravely. She held the hands of two boys, one on either side. One of them, Alexei could tell with a glance, was Peter as a boy, which would make the other his half-brother Ivan. Below, armored musketeers, stray beams of sunlight glittering on their uplifted pikes.
The Streltsy.
Voice trembling, the woman – Peter’s mother, Natalya – called down, “Here is the Lord Tsar Peter Alexievich. And here is the Lord Tsar Ivan Alexievich.”
“This is when the Streltsy revolted,” Alexei said, recalling it from stuffy lessons, days spent lying in his sickbed, Gilliard reading to him, while through the open window, the voices of his playing sisters floated up to him. “I thought, as a boy, that the Red Staircase must be named for the carnage that happened that day.”
“It wasn’t,” Dante said, faintly.
They didn’t stay long – but long enough to see Natalya flee into the safety of the palace, and for them to see the moment when anger, frustration, and miscalculation boiled over; when the Streltsy rushed up the staircase, took hold of their commander, and pitched him over the edge of the balcony – onto the pikes waiting below. He fell amongst the sharp points like an overripe melon, spouting blood from every terrible wound.
Golden Eagle (Sons of Rome Book 4) Page 58
