Page 6 of Crimson Oath (The Firebird and the Wolf #2)

“He’s not a stranger to provocation,” Polina said. “But attacking humans under my aegis like this? He’s never gone quite that far. If he did?—”

“Easy.” Oleg put a hand on her shoulder. “Throwing around accusations will get us nowhere. My brother is the governor of a major region in our empire.”

“And the head of a criminal gang,” Mika said.

Oleg shrugged. “And yet there are many in our clan loyal to him.”

“He’s been running his mouth to anyone who will listen about how you dealt with Zara,” Polina spat out. “As if that crazy bitch didn’t have it coming. You were too patient with her.”

“Your sister is dead now; it doesn’t matter.”

“But it does.” Polina lifted her chin. “Because Ivan is using it against you. And your druzhina may know what goes on behind the scenes, but the average area leader?” She pointed at the door.

“Those men out there cleaning up the ashes? They think Ivan is great. They congratulated me for calling in a favor ” —she nearly spat out the word— “a favor to help that poor man’s family. ”

Mika muttered, “You didn’t disagree with them, did you?”

“Of course not!” Polina hissed. “How could I without looking ungrateful? I nodded and smiled and acted like it was the least I could do for our people.” She shook her head. “Ivan is a thug. They used to hate him.”

“Yes, but that’s when his men used to puff their chests and make problems along the border areas,” Mika said. “Ivan has stopped all that.”

“Because he’s the one that started it.”

Oleg had to smile. “My brother is the master of creating a problem and then showing up to solve it. He has always been this way. It’s strategic thinking for small minds.”

“That may be.” Polina kept her voice low. “But right now he’s telling a story that those vampires out there are hungry for. And all of them are listening.”

They were back on the plane before Mika finally blurted out what he’d clearly been holding in for hours. “The vampire you just killed was Poshani.”

“And this is why you have a job.” Oleg settled into his seat in the custom plane they’d flown to Minsk. “His accent was definitely Poshani.”

“Eastern Poshani to be precise.” Mika closed the metallic cage that enclosed Oleg’s personal compartment. “You need to call Radu. Or I could call Kezia if you’d rather.”

“Not all Poshani vampires work for Radu,” Oleg said quickly. “Or the clan. This could mean nothing. He could have been an outcast.”

“An outcast with four partners who were probably also Poshani?” Mika sat next to him. “Their people are everywhere in our territory.”

Cesar, Oleg’s air steward, came to check on them and offer a bottle of blood-wine, but Oleg declined with a wave of his hand and Cesar retreated back to the galley.

Moments later, Oleg felt the plane moving toward the runway.

“The Poshani are our allies. Our relationship has never been compromised,” Oleg said. “Other than some bitching from Ivan, their people have never caused us problems. They pay us handsomely for roaming access to our territory.”

“As they should,” Mika said.

As the plane’s engines built up speed, Oleg felt that same clench in his belly. The same dip and fearful thrill he’d experienced the first time he left the earth.

Machine-powered flight. It was a truly marvelous thing. Airplanes were one of the few things that still got his heart beating.

Human ingenuity had always interested Oleg. Unlike many of his kind, he was curious about the modern world. He had no nostalgia for the past. The past was dirty and violent and cruel.

And yet so many of his kind clung to their history as if it were a precious jewel. The Poshani were the perfect example.

Had their lives fundamentally changed in the past millennium?

They were a vampire clan like none other in the world. Uniquely coordinated between their human and vampire elements, many did live in cities and operate in the modern world, but the majority maintained the itinerant lifestyle of their ancestors.

They were traders, builders, fighters, artists, and more than anything, they were fiercely loyal.

Perhaps if Oleg’s history had been marked by that kind of loyalty, he might cling to it as well, but he was the son of Truvor the Red, a cruel warlord who’d seen himself as above humans and nearly all vampires.

“You should have a meeting with Radu.” Mika glanced out the window, but he was already opening a book. The vampire read voraciously. This night it appeared to be a volume of Spanish poetry.

Obviously Mika had not been sired by Truvor the Red.

Oleg’s sire detested learning about anything that wasn’t related to violence or greed.

He made a habit of pitting his children against each other, and Oleg’s brother Ivan had picked up many of his habits even though he’d hated their sire as much as Oleg did.

He’d also inherited Truvor’s loathing for anything different or anything he couldn’t understand.

Like the Poshani.

The clan was enigmatic by design and often spread lies purposefully to mislead the immortal world. Radu of Bucharest was one of their leaders—the public face of the Poshani clan—but Oleg knew that Radu had two coregents, a brother and a sister, who held equal power.

“I can tell the pilot to make a detour to Bucharest,” Mika continued. “We could be there in a couple of hours and open the house. Cesar could call the butler before we land.”

Oleg picked up a magazine. “No need just now.” He opened it, but he couldn’t concentrate. His eye caught on an ad for a perfume. The image was of a blond woman walking through a field of lavender.

Mika noticed the ad. “Is she one of your ex-girlfriends?”

“No.”

What would Tatyana have looked like in the sun?

Oleg had the absurd thought that he could build a light-proof warehouse as large as the one they’d just left, plant it with lavender, and put enough lights in it that Tatyana could have her own lavender field to walk through like the ones near her family farm.

“Oleg?”

He looked up. “What?”

Mika narrowed his eyes. “You’re thinking about the woman again.”

“What did your people in Kutaisi find?”

Mika didn’t roll his eyes, but Oleg could tell he wanted to. “She’s been going to an internet café, bar-café kind of thing. The bartender remembered her coming in with a silver-haired man.”

“The wind vampire.” Oleg had to swallow the urge to snarl audibly. The vampire was a favorite of Arosh’s; more importantly, he was the immortal who had flown away with Tatyana in his arms.

“The two of them come in fairly regularly,” Mika continued.

“How regularly?” Had she taken this silver-haired immortal as a lover? Was she attached to him? Oleg felt his fangs aching in his jaw .

“They come in once a month. Same day of the month. Around the same time. She’s been going there for over six months.”

Six months meant that she’d mastered her bloodlust at a year or less. Good. That was good. She would have more freedom that way.

But the same place for six months? It wouldn’t only be Mika who noticed a pattern like that. “When is her next meeting time?”

“Yesterday.”

Oleg curled his lip at Mika. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She didn’t show.”

Damn.

But good. His visit to Tatyana’s mother must have spooked her.

“She won’t go back.”

“Not if she’s smart,” Mika said.

“She’s smart.” He wouldn’t be this fascinated with her unless she was intelligent. “I wonder if she knows we could track her down anywhere in Arosh’s or Alina’s territory and she’d still be perfectly safe.”

“Physically safe? Probably.” Mika turned back to his book. “I don’t think she’s physically afraid of you.”

Then why did she run away?

Oleg had been rethinking their last night together like a detective, analyzing every word. Every expression. Every movement she made before she fled his house and his protection.

You are mine, he’d whispered to her. I am patient. But you are mine. And when you are ready, you will give me your fangs.

He’d all but asked for her fangs in his neck, the ultimate intimacy between vampires.

And she had run.

Perhaps she had a fear of commitment. Considering her family history, that was not unexpected.

“Oleg, you have to stop.” Mika shook his head. “I feel a kind of… distant obligation to her too. Do you think I’ve forgotten what happened to her and Elene? But you have to leave her alone. Ivan is becoming a problem, and if you don’t deal with him?— ”

“Call Bucharest.” Oleg folded the magazine and snapped his fingers at Cesar in the galley. “I changed my mind about Radu. Get the house ready. It would be good to touch base with a terrin of the Eastern Poshani for a number of reasons, and we can ask him about this Poshani who hijacked our truck.”

Mika glanced at Cesar, but the human was still well out of earshot. “The Poshani vampire who is now very dead?”

Oleg switched to an old dialect of Estonian that Mika spoke. “The Poshani practice blood price. I’ll have to make some kind of financial settlement when we find the man’s immediate clan, but Radu will be reasonable considering the circumstances.”

“Fine.” Mika nodded. “It’s spring, you know. Radu and all the Poshani will be getting ready for the kamvasa.”

“Then we’d better catch him before he disappears into the wilderness for six months.” Oleg turned to Cesar. “Call the house in Bucharest. And tell the pilot to change our destination.”