Page 192 of Red Rooster

Jake let out a high, thin scream, and Val tossed him away. He landed half-over a chair that then toppled, and lay still.

“Oh,” Red gasped, clutching at Rooster’s sleeve.

A man with glasses fumbled across his desk, a horror-struck, desperate attempt to defend himself while being too panicked to go about it properly. Rooster recognized that emotion. Reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there, wanting to flee, your knees too weak to hold you up.

Val leaned over the desk and clapped both his hands over the man’s, pinning them to the wood. “All my love to the family,” he said, and turned back to the door.

“Oh, him you don’t kill?” Rooster asked.

Val hesitated in the doorway, and though he feigned bored, Rooster saw a little tic in his jaw. “His daughter doesn’t deserve that.” Then he shouldered past them.

Rooster spared Jake a glance; he had no idea if he was dead, or just unconscious. At the moment, he didn’t care.

~*~

Nikita caught another vampire’s scent behind him just in time to duck the knife that knocked the hat from his head and buried itself in the paneling of the library wall.

“Shit,” Lanny muttered, whirling, shotgun at the ready.

Alexei yelped, and tripped, and dragged himself up hastily.

Nikita spun as he stood, gun leveled on the creature in the library doorway.

He was Nikita’s height, but broader through the shoulders. His face, the harsh angles of it, its stony utter lack of expression, pinged something way back in Nikita’s memory. The widow’s peak, the tied back long hair. This was not a young vampire, oh no. No laboratory creation. This was the real deal.

And he carried asword.

“Who are you?” Nikita asked him in Russian.

He answered in Romanian, an old dialect. “The Son of the Dragon.”

Dracula.

“Did he just say–” Lanny started, and Nikita waved him to silence.

His heartbeat throbbed under his skin, a painful pressure that felt like it would punch through him like he was only made of tissue paper. Under the strong blood-spice of Dracula – ofVlad– was a hint of a transferred scent: the pine needle musk that Nikita’s sheets smelled like back home.

The house was pandemonium beyond this room, filled with the thump of running feet, shouts, confused questions, the crackle and squawk of radios. But here, in this book-lined room, Nikita could think of nothing but that familiar scent. Just a trace. Fresh. Alive.

“Vlad Dracula,” he said with formality. “I think you’ve met my wolf.”

Vlad slid into English, too. Accented, but perfect, like an expat who’d been speaking it half his life, and not just a few weeks. “I have met Sasha, yes. But he’s not bound to a master, that I can tell. Not yet.”

Nikita flashed his fangs with a low, warning growl.

“You’re the one in the file. TheChekist.” He pronounced the word like it amused him. “Nikita Baskin.” He tipped his head to the side, weighing. “You are a young one.”

This was a game. No, it was adance. Nikita felt the weight of Kolya’s knives sheathed at his back and wished suddenly, desperately for this old friend.Kolya was the dancer, he thought with choked-back panic.Not me. With everyone else in this horrid castle, he could rely on brute force, on terror, his powers, the still-impressive black coat that had frightened Soviets, and frightened a whole new generation of peasants today. But here now, with the Wallachian prince of legend, intimidation wasn’t an option. There was only winning…and winning might mean death.

He fought to keep his voice neutral. It came out tight. “Where is Sasha?”

“He is safe,” Vlad said mildly. He didn’t move, but the sword caught the light somehow, a persistent glimmer. “You should not worry.”

“There are other wolves,” he said, thinking of the ferals they’d never been able to find back in New York. Of the wolves that Val had told them resided here…And where were they? The baron and his American baroness? Hiding? Choosing not to take sides? Assholes. “You can use them. For your tests.” To be your slaves, he didn’t say. “You have no need of Sasha. He isn’t a good war dog anyway. He wouldn’t be useful.”

But he remembered Sasha’s chin smeared with blood, the appalled excitement in his eyes, glinting bright as the sun-warmed snow. That was the beautiful thing about Sasha: he was all youth, and spark, and heart, and curiosity. He killed like he did everything else: passionately.

If he was doing it for someone he loved.