Page 189 of Red Rooster

~*~

It was a suicide mission. Or it would have been, for someone else. Someone who wasn’t a former Soviet attack dog too hell-bent on killing everyone in his path to worry about jeopardizing his comrades. He’d never been any good at keep his friends alive before, why start now?

Nikita mowed through guards in the manor’s soaring foyer. A group of lab technicians in white coats cried out and threw themselves down onto the expensive rug, hands flying to cover their heads.

“Where is Aleksander Kashnikov?” Nikita demanded, shouted really, his accent thicker than it had been in years. When no one answered, he fired a shot straight overhead, and heard crystal shatter. A few thick pieces rained down on the floor around them, and the lab coats screeched collectively. “Where is he?”

“You’re fucking insane,” Lanny muttered, and Nikita was dimly aware that he was clearing the rest of the foyer, checking for threats. “I love it.”

Nikita lowered his Smith & Wesson, so its barrel was trained on the huddled techs as he stalked toward them, wooden bootheels kissing the floor with a sound like gunshots. He was reminded, ridiculously, of walking across the Kremlin’s high-gloss floors.

“Are you deaf?” He reached them, and toed a cowering woman’s hand away from her face. She made an animal sound of terror and looked up at him through a sheen of tears. “Where is my wolf, bitch?”

“So angry,” Alexei mused at his side, but made no move to stop him.

“D-d-downstairs,” the woman stuttered.

Then that was where he would go.

He didn’t realize he was in the process of stepping over the woman until a restraining hand landed on his arm.

“Whoa,” Lanny said when Nikita snarled at him. “I get it: you’ve got a one-track mind tuned to Sasha. But maybe we should figure out how to get downstairs first, yeah?”

Nikita snarled again, because this was going too slow.

“Yeah,” Lanny sighed. “Come on.”

~*~

Jamie wasn’t ready to shoot people. Even if he could work the gun – which he knew he could thanks to practice with Trina’s dad – and even if the threat was very prevalent – which it was at the moment – killing wasn’t something Jamie could stomach.

“You killed last night,” Nikita had told him levelly, and he’d been overcome by a wave of nausea.

It hadn’tfeltlike killing. That night – “come here, little one” – with the weight of a comforting hand at his nape, and the heat of a living body at his chest, the wonderful, thrilling bloom of fresh blood in his mouth, he’d felt so veryalive. How could death beget that kind of wild self-aware life?

In his sated, post-blood ecstasy, it had been so easy to overlook the two dropped bodies. The way Nikita and Lanny had hefted them over a fence and into a tangle of roadside kudzu.

But he had killed.

And he didn’t think he could do it in good conscious, unless his blood lust was up.

So for now, the plan was to blend in. To find Sasha.

They’d bought a cheap blazer on the way down, and as soon as they were past the door, he ducked into a dining room with a table as long as a football field and shrugged into it. Put a pair of useless glasses on his nose and a fake ID badge hanging out of his pocket. A disguise that would have never worked under normal circumstances, but right now, with Nikita and Lanny creating a violent distraction, Jamie might be able to slip in unnoticed.

He took a deep breath, started forward, and caught his reflection in a gilt-framed mirror.

Just weeks before, he’d been worried about final exams and portfolios. Now? He was a party to murder, and rescue, and had fed off a man’s blood. Had taken his life.

He shivered all over, and walked deeper into the house.

~*~

There were two doors that led to the cell, one made of bars, and one that looked like something used to secure a bank vault, or the hold of a Navy ship. Beyond that was a spiral stone staircase, straight out of a castle, and the only way was up.

Val went first. They encountered more guards on the ascent, but Rooster never had to fire off a shot. Val broke one’s neck and sent him tumbling down the stairs past Rooster. Another he looked like he might bite, and Rooster hustled him past with a terse, “Not time.” Val sighed and slammed the man’s head against the stone wall.

At the top, they emerged into a long, low-ceilinged stone room that Rooster recognized by smell: the place of dust and mildew. He saw boxes arranged on several long rows of metal shelves; boxes stacked in corners; boxes gone damp and sagging apart, spilling books like rice from a sack. Boxes that looked charred at the edges.