Page 26 of Red Rooster

“He’s going to kill him,” Trina breathed.

“Not that way he isn’t.”

She turned to glare at him. “My plan was for us to talk all of this through. What was your plan: let them fight to the death?”

“Should we be…um, helping somebody?” Jamie asked.

Nikita sighed and turned loose of his charges. “Fine. All of you stay here.” He gave them an admonishing wag of his finger for emphasis.

Sasha grumbled under his breath.

Trina said, “Fuckingdo somethingalready.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Neither combatant noticed him as he approached, and why would they? Lanny kept hitting, and hitting, his knuckles shiny red with blood, spraying droplets of it across the pavement. Alexei had both hands fisted in the front of Lanny’s shirt, but was otherwise incapable of resisting the attack, his face a lumpy, bloody, pulpy mess. It was hard to look at, and Nikita had looked at his share of awful things in his century of life.

He put his thumb and forefinger in his mouth and whistled. The sound went off in the enclosed space like the whistle of a steam engine, loud enough that he knew Sasha had to have flinched behind him.

Lanny grunted and paused, bloody fist hovering in midair, twisting around to search out the source of the noise. He panted, breathing through his open mouth, fangs showing, pupils wide and black: the bloodlust had hit him, more potent than any paltry human drug.

“Get up,” Nikita ordered.

Lanny regarded him a moment with flat shark’s eyes, unseeing. He stood slowly, movements deliberate, but tense. Ready to pounce. He stared flatly at Nikita a moment, then snarled and attacked.

Lanny might have been a cop and a boxer who’d carried his strength and ferocity with him into immortality.

But Nikita was Cheka. It wasn’t a contest, really.

He side-stepped at the last moment, darted out his hand, and caught Lanny by the throat. He squeezed just hard enough to cut off his air and draw little pearls of blood with his nails, but not hard enough to snap vertebrae or pierce the jugular.

“Stop,” he said. “That’s enough.”

Lanny struggled a moment, coughing and sputtering, and then he returned to himself, blinking, his pupils receding to a normal diameter.

“You back?” Nikita asked.

Lanny kept coughing, but managed to nod.

“Don’t do that again,” Nikita said, and opened his hand.

Lanny dropped to his feet, and then his knees gave and he went down on all fours, coughing wetly and dragging big gulps of air through his bruised throat.

A pained groan drew Nikita’s attention and he glanced over to see Alexei sitting up, slow and unsteady, cradling his ruined face in both hands. He would heal, of course he would, but it would take ungodly long unless he fed.

With a sigh, Nikita brought his own wrist to his mouth and made a surgical-precise cut with one fang. “Here,” he said tersely, closing the gap between them and offering his hand to the former tsarevich. “If you can even work your mouth.”

Through the bloody wreck of his face, Alexei’s eyes shone bright and hurt.

“Drink,” Nikita said. “I don’t have all afternoon.”

Alexei took his hand in his own, leaving smears of blood, his touch eliciting unpleasant shivers – and memories of snow, and smoke, and the cawing ravens of Moscow. Nikita almost jerked away when Alexei’s mouth closed over the oozing wound on his wrist. Then came the pull and the draw, his blood going to nourish another. A completely foreign sensation. He’d never, Nikita realized with a little shock, allowed anyone to feed from him. He’d never been close with another vampire and had never had a reason to. In his life, he’d only ever taken.

Unable to watch, he turned his face away and saw that Lanny was on his feet again, massaging at his throat with one bloody hand. His knuckles were split to the bone, but already starting to repair themselves.

Trina hovered an arm’s length away, expression guarded, arms folded across her chest. She was afraid of her lover now, and even if that was for the best, Nikita ached for her. And for Lanny, too – he knew what that felt like: to look into the eyes of the person you loved, and find only fear. But that’s what happened when you became a monster.

A familiar body crowded in against his back, and Sasha’s warm hand landed on his arm, just above the place where Alexei gripped him with white-knuckled desperation. An understated warning growl stirred in his chest; Nikita could feel it move through his back where they touched.