Page 88 of Red Rooster

“Mom,” Trina said, holding up a hand. “Please don’t freak out.”

Her mother brought a hand up to her throat…but only swallowed a few times, nodding, eyes pinned to Nikita who stood frozen like a deer about to bolt. Finally, she nodded. Blew out a deep breath. “Okay. So. I guess the stories were true.”

“What?” Trina said, and felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “What stories?”

Her mother’s eyes flicked to her briefly, then back. “Your grandpa knows them better than me, obviously. But.” She took a deep breath and managed a shaky smile. “Hi, Nikita.”

Nikita swallowed, throat bobbing, but said nothing.

“Do vampires eat breakfast? ‘Cause we’re making a literal ton of food.”

“I dunno about him, but this one does,” Lanny said, and smiled wide enough to show his fangs.

Mom blinked at him, then sighed, expression becoming resigned. “Young lady.” Her gaze came back to Trina. “You’ve got alotof explaining to do.”

~*~

He shouldn’t have come here. That thought pounded inside Nikita’s head like a heartbeat as he sat at a long, handmade plank table in Steve and Rachel Baskin’s kitchen, an awful, cold numbness overtaking him like frost creeping across a statue. After Sasha was taken, every conscious thought had been dedicated to worrying about the horrifying possibilities that lay there. Sasha wounded; Sasha held captive; Sasha tortured. Food tasted like ash; breath felt like the scrape of knives in his lungs; all he’d cared about was finding him, freeing him, getting him back and looking over him with his own eyes and hands to make sure he was whole. And then ripping the throats out of the bastards who’d taken him. He’d been compromised by his worry, and that was why he’d let Trina talk them into coming here.

Which he now knew was a horrible mistake.

“So let me get this straight,” Steve Baskin said, turning away from the counter to set a heaping plate of bacon on the table in front of them. “You,” he said, speaking to his daughter, “managed to find your great-grandad, and Alexei Romanov,andget Lanny turned into a vampire all in one go. Right?”

Trina glared up at him. “And you knew he existed” – she gestured toward Nikita – “and just decided to never mention it?”

Steve propped his hands on his hips. “We didn’tknow. Nobody did. It was just stories my grandmother used to tell.”

“Why didn’t I ever hear any of them?” Trina asked hotly. She vibrated with anger.

Her mother came to the table, a plate of bagels in her hand. “Well, honey, they weren’tnicestories. Monsters, and the war, and all that blood.” She made an elegant face of distaste. “They weren’t the sorts of things I wanted to tell my little girl.”

“Unbelievable,” Trina muttered.

“Lanny,” Steve said, brows knitting in concern. “How did this – are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah.” Lanny shrugged, and Nikita could tell his bravado was entirely fake – in the part of his brain that was managing to catalogue all of this and read emotions. “I’m cool. I mean, I wasn’t. This guy” – he jerked a thumb at Alexei beside him – “didn’t even ask, or anything. I was pissed. But. Yeah, so I had cancer…? Was kinda dying. I guess it all worked out.” He shrugged again, inelegant caveman that he was.

Steve opened and closed his mouth a few times, traded a helpless look with his wife. “Alright…”

In the awkward pause that followed, Nikita’s brain latched onto one small, important detail. The only thing capable of breaking through his fog.

“Wait,” he said, voice coming out rusty, and all eyes turned toward him. It was the first word he’d spoken since they arrived. “You said…your grandmother.”

Steve turned to him, expression full of so much unselfish, freely given sympathy that Nikita had to turn his head away, pulse flaring hot in his throat, stomach churning. “Yeah,” Steve – hisgrandson– said quietly. “Katya.”

Nikita stared at a knothole in the wood of the table and forced his lungs to work. Inhale. Exhale. “Is she…?” He couldn’t bring himself to say it.

“No, I’m sorry.” The room had gone silent, no sound save the gentle tone of Steve’s voice. “She passed last year.”

Last year. And all the time up until then she’d been here, in Buffalo, a car trip away. If Trina had found him a year ago, if he’d thought to look…

He couldn’t breathe.

“Nik,” Trina said, sad and soft, but he was already moving, shoving up from the table and stalking back through the house to the door.

Last year. Another chance to torture him.

~*~