Page 121 of Red Rooster

28

Buffalo, New York

There were plenty of beds, but Nikita never sought one. The idea of sleep was laughable.

Dawn saw him on the back patio, sitting with his back to the dew-damp wood of the house, one leg pulled up and the other dangling over the rail. He’d lost count of the number of cigarettes he’d smoked, the butts dropped in an empty soda can, the smoke curling upward in lazy swirls against the indigo backdrop of the fading night sky.

“Smoking will kill you, you know,” Alexei said somewhere behind him, and Nikita’s fingers spasmed on the filter in his hand. “That’s what all the advertisements say. And the doctors. And people on the street.”

Rustle of fabric, click of a cheap lighter, quick inhale. The first drag. Audible relief in the exhale.

“You and I,” Alexei went on, wandering into view, coming to lean against the rail a few feet down from Nikita, arms dangling over it, “we come from a generation in which everyone smoked. All the time. Just to keep from going crazy.”

Nikita took the last drag from his own smoke and dropped it into the can. “We’re not from the same generation,” he reminded, and for once, the words weren’t laced with contempt or leashed fury. They were just words. He was starting to think that though he’d never like Alexei, never trust him, maybe never even respect him, it required too much energy to continue hating him. His hatred, he’d decided, would go toward the people who’d taken Sasha from him. The people who he was going to enjoy killing with his bare hands when the time came.

“That’s right,” Alexei said, the faint light of pre-dawn flashing off his teeth as he smiled. “I’m older than you.”

“Only in years. Not in any way that counts.”

Alexei chuckled. “You are very stubborn. It’s a pity you didn’t work for my father. Things might have gone differently for your sheer stubbornness alone.”

Nikita hummed a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement. He wasn’t so sure he would have been any better than a puppet in Nicholas’s time – same as he had been in Stalin’s.

“Did you sleep?” Alexei asked.

“What business is it of yours?”

“In general? It’s not. But given our mission, it’s important that you’re rested. That you’ve fed. That you don’t faint.”

Nikita growled at him, quietly.

Alexeitsked. “You don’t take care of yourself,bratishka.”

“I amnot your brother.”

“We are both vampires. Both Russians. Both Whites. Both united in a similar cause. One could argue that we are brethren,” Alexei said.

“No.”

“Very well. But I’m right about the rest, and you know it. You live like you already have one foot in the grave, Nikita. Like your own life doesn’t matter. Wearing yourself down until you have to eat, to feed, to sleep. Do you take pleasure in anything?”

Nikita freed another cigarette from his pack and lit it. “I was enjoying the quiet before you came out here.”

Another chuckle. The asshole. “Very well. I can take a hint.”

“Can you?”

“Yes. I’m much more amenable than you.” He raised his cigarette to his lips, took a drag, and started to withdraw.

“Why are you here?” Nikita asked, and Alexei froze, turned to him with raised brows and wide-eyed innocence.

“Lanny drove us here in his car.”

“You know what I mean.”

The tsarevich smoked a long moment, glancing out across the yard.

“Don’t look out there; there’s no answers there,” Nikita said. “Why are you coming along? Why are you helping?”