Sasha’s growl cut off and he looked dismayed. “You got out of the car.”
“And both of you should get in it, right now, before this ends up on YouTube.” When they stared at her, she clapped her hands together once, sharply. “Right now.”
Which was how she ended up with Russian royalty in the backseat of her unmarked cruiser.
4
This was a bad idea.
“This is a bad idea,” Nikita said, because he wanted it on record that Trina’s plan wasn’t likely to go the way she wanted it to.
She nodded. “Maybe so, but it’s the best I got, and I want everything out in the open. No secrets, no more rooftop chases in the dark. New York isn’t gonna lie down and keep quiet while we sort our shit out. Lanny and I need to go back to work and handle the real criminals in this city.”
She squared up her shoulders and sent him a brave smile that, for a moment, reminded him of her great-grandmother’s heartbreaking play at confidence.
Nikita reached, quick but soft, and cupped her cheek in one hand. Her eyes widened, startled. He pulled back. “Alright. Let’s do it then.”
She stared at him a moment, confused, searching his face, then nodded again and turned. “Sasha!” she called.
They stood on the hot, cracked pavement of a rundown self-storage complex, surrounded by roll-top doors and concrete walls stained by years of polluted rain. Trina’s car sat at a slant in one corner; Sasha opened its rear door and reached inside, dragging out an unresisting Alexei by the shirt collar. Doubtless Rasputin’s spawn could get away if he wanted, but was choosing to play along for the moment.
Nikita saw him there with Sasha, close enough to hurt him, and a growl bubbled to life in his chest.
“Okay, you can’t get all territorial,” Trina said. “I need somebody to be the other adult in this situation.”
He let his growl swell – a deep, dark jaguar pulse of sound – and then nodded and pulled it back. Took a deep breath, the stink of a rival in his nose.
Sasha sent him one of his pack looks as he marched Alexei up to them, meant to be concerned and comforting and loving.
“Lanny,” Nikita called.
He’d left his charges around the corner, and they walked around it now, Lanny and Jamie, both full of blood and, hopefully, in good control of themselves.
Nikita grabbed hold of Trina’s elbow, ready to tug her away, and beckoned to Sasha with a flick of his fingers. His wolf came, coming close on his opposite side, rubbing their shoulders together and whining softly.
“Shh,” Nikita murmured, leaning into the pressure of his shoulder.
Then Lanny caught sight of his sire.
His eyes flashed. A growl exploded out of him, half a roar, and when he opened his mouth, Nikita saw that his fangs had extended.
“Hello, Lanny,” Alexei said.
Lanny attacked, fingers curled into claws.
Nikita put an arm around his great-granddaughter and his wolf each, and towed them neatly to the side.
“Shit,” Trina said.
“It’s okay,” Nikita said, but didn’t know if he believed that. He hoped it would be, but in any event, he had hold of the only two people in this scenario he cared about. So.
Alexei seemed to have been taken by surprised, but recovered quickly. He was the older, stronger, more experienced of the two; he knew his own strength and speed and weaknesses.
But Lanny was a cop used to handling high, drunk, and volatile suspects. And he’d been a boxer before that; one on his way to televised matches, if Trina was correct.
Alexei braced his feet on the tarmac and caught Lanny’s headlong rush with both hands clamped around the other man’s wrists. Lanny roared again, muscled through, and laid Alexei out flat on his back. He hit hard, head landing on the pavement with a crack. And then Lanny straddled him and started throwing punches.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Sasha said, and made a little involuntary move toward the brawl.
Nikita held him fast, hand pressed tight to his sternum, and gave a quiet warning growl. No.
Sasha huffed in annoyance, but subsided.
The meaty sounds of fists meeting a face echoed off the storage lockers around them. Something crunched.
“He’s going to kill him,” Trina breathed.
“Not that way he isn’t.”
She turned to glare at him. “My plan was for us to talk all of this through. What was your plan: let them fight to the death?”
“Should we be…um, helping somebody?” Jamie asked.
Nikita sighed and turned loose of his charges. “Fine. All of you stay here.” He gave them an admonishing wag of his finger for emphasis.
Sasha grumbled under his breath.
Trina said, “Fucking do something already.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Neither combatant noticed him as he approached, and why would they? Lanny kept hitting, and hitting, his knuckles shiny red with blood, spraying droplets of it across the pavement. Alexei had both hands fisted in the front of Lanny’s shirt, but was otherwise incapable of resisting the attack, his face a lumpy, bloody, pulpy mess. It was hard to look at, and Nikita had looked at his share of awful things in his century of life.
He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled. The sound went off in the enclosed space like the whistle of a steam engine, loud enough that he knew Sasha had to have flinched behind him.
Lanny grunted and paused, bloody fist hovering in midair, twisting around to search out the source of the noise. He panted, breathing through his open mouth, fangs showing, pupils wide and black: the bloodlust had hit him, more potent than any paltry human drug.
“Get up,” Nikita ordered.
Lanny regarded him a moment with flat shark’s eyes, unseeing. He stood slowly, movements deliberate, but tense. Ready to pounce. He stared flatly at Nikita a moment, then snarled and attacked.
Lanny might have been a cop and a boxer who’d carried his strength and ferocity with him into immortality.
But Nikita was Cheka. It wasn’t a contest, really.
He side-stepped at the last moment, darted out his hand, and caught Lanny by the throat. He squeezed just hard enough to cut off his air and draw little pearls of blood with his nails, but not hard enough to snap vertebrae or pierce the jugular.
“Stop,” he said. “That’s enough.”
Lanny struggled a moment, coughing and sputtering, and then he returned to himself, blinking, his pupils receding to a normal diameter.
“You back?” Nikita asked.
Lanny kept coughing, but managed to nod.
“Don’t do that again,” Nikita said, and opened his hand.
Lanny dropped to his feet, and then his knees gave and he went down on all fours, coughing wetly and dragging big gulps of air through his bruised throat.
A pained groan drew Nikita’s attention and he glanced over to see Alexei sitting up, slow and unsteady, cradling his ruined face in both hands. He would heal, of course he would, but it would take ungodly long unless he fed.
With a sigh, Nikita brought his own wrist to his mouth and made a surgical-precise cut with one fang. “Here,” he said tersely, closing the gap between them and offering his hand to the former tsarevich. “If you can even work your mouth.”
Through the bloody wreck of his face, Alexei’s eyes shone bright and hurt.
“Drink,” Nikita said. “I don’t have all afternoon.”
Alexei took his hand in his own, leaving smears of blood, his touch eliciting unpleasant shivers – and memories of snow, and smoke, and the cawing ravens of Moscow. Nikita almost jerked away when Alexei’s mouth closed over the oozing wound on his wrist. Then came the pull and the draw, his blood going to nourish another. A completely foreign sensation. He’d never, Nikita realized with a little shock, allowed anyone to feed from him. He’d never been close with another vampire and had never had a reason to. In his life, he’d only ever taken.