Page 14 of Red Rooster

Oh. Thesmells. So many of them, and so intense. He shut his eyes like that could somehow block them up, brought his hands to his tender head. He could smell the bowl of apples sitting on the kitchen counter, the bits of tuna clinging to a paper plate in the garbage that she’d fed to the neighbor’s cat.

He leaned forward and dropped his head between his knees, and that was when another scent hit him, the most overwhelming of all. Trina. Alive and vibrant in a way he’d never understood before. He could hear her heart beating. And faint, beneath her skin, he smelled her blood, and something inside him clenched.

Slowly, he opened his eyes and lifted his head. There she stood, leaning against the opposite wall, Nikita and Sasha flanking her. He’d smelled them too, he realized, but their scents had kicked off very different sensations. Whereas Trina stirred something like longing…and hunger…Nikita left him bristling. And he had the strange urge to pat Sasha on top of the head.

“Try it,” Nikita hissed through his teeth, “and I’ll take your arm off.”

He’d been staring at Sasha, and dragged his gaze away, over to the vampire – theothervampire. Shit. “What?” His own voice held the low rumblings of a growl.

Nikita lifted his lip and flashed his fangs. “You may be a vamp now, but he’s not your wolf. Don’t look at him like that.”

“I’m not.” But he had been. Something instinctual in him knew that wolves were meant to serve and help vampires. Combine that with his human history of fighting, and he wanted to challenge Nikita, throw down right here and battle it out for supremacy the old-fashioned way.

He realized his mouth was open, that he was panting, fangs showing.

Nikita lowered his head, eyes hooded and aggressive. “You’d lose,” he said, dark and certain. “Sit down, boy, before you get hurt.”

Was he standing? When had that happened?

“Lanny,” Trina said, and stepped forward. Tried to, anyway; Nikita grabbed her arm and held her in place. She sighed, but didn’t shake him off. “Lanny,” she started again, “sit back down, okay? Take a deep breath.”

He sat.

He didn’t take a deep breath, because the sensory overload was making him both sick and hungrier.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Trina said. She was giving him the sort of bland-but-guarded look that she used on suspects during interrogation: not picking sides, but listening; concerned, but not actually caring. He didn’t like having that look directed at him…but he did like watching her pulse beat in the soft skin just under her jaw, that little hollow in her throat where her flesh was thin enough he imagined he could see the faint blue trails of veins. Imagined he could smell the blood, hot and salty and–

“Lanny,” she snapped, brow furrowing. “We know Alexei turned you. Buthow?”

He shook himself – mentally and physically – and tried to focus.

Nikita gave him a sharp glare that said he knew exactly what Lanny had been thinking.

“I left,” he started, frowning. The memories were fractured, sharp at the edges and painful to grab hold of. “I left you guys’ place, and I was walking back…and I felt great. I mean, like I was twenty again. And then all of a sudden Alexei was there. Right in front of me. He said…he said he could help me. If I wanted.” He could feel his frown deepen, digging grooves in his forehead. “And I just…shit, I just walked up to him. And he bit me.”

“He enchanted you,” Nikita said grimly. “Rasputin was a master at that, and he was Alexei’s sire.”

Trina’s face paled. “You mean – Lanny, you didn’taskhim to turn you?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t need him to. Not after I had the–” He mimed knocking back a drink. “So no.”

Sasha gave a small, unsettledruff. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

Nikita wore the weary, but unsurprised expression of someone who’d long since given up on the small moments of decency in the world. “I shouldn’t have left him alive.”

Trina turned toward him sharply. “You can’t kill him.”

“He can’t control himself. Of course I can.”

“Yeah, but he’s not just some random vampire. He’s a Romanov.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“Um, guys?” Lanny said. “What’s gonna happen to me?”

All three of them looked at him, then, all worried to an extent.