Page 99 of Red Rooster

Jesus.

She knew her face was red as she walked into the living room, and hoped no one noticed.

If Alexei’s little smile was anything to go by, he definitely noticed.

She cleared her throat. “Grams, Dad said he would ask you about candles?”

“Yes, I should have plenty.”

That was when Trina took a good look at the room and saw that it was already halfway set up for a séance. Her gramps’ favorite recliner sat off to the side, angled toward the TV, like always, but the rest of the furniture had been pushed back along the wall to make room for a low, round table draped in deep blue velvet at its center. Candles of all widths and heights rested in the center, some white and some black. Other items adorned its surface: a pack of tarot cards, a Ouija board, a wide china bowl with dark residue at the bottom.

“Grams,” Trina said, careful to keep accusation from her tone. “Have you been doing this…a lot more…recently?”

“What’s this?” She made a fluttering motion toward the table with one wrinkled, too-slim hand. “No, no. Don’t worry. It’s just your gramps’ back isn’t what it used to be and it got to be too hard to drag the table back and forth.” She bustled around the room – which amounted to quick, but shuffling steps that didn’t jostle her old bones; when she hurried, she always gave off the impression she was hovering over the floor, so slight were her movements – picking up the cards, and bowl, depositing them on a sideboard.

But Trina did worry. Her dad would have been happy to move furniture for them. And not a speck of dust clung to the velvet covering the table; it was used often. Trina could even smell the low burn of recently-snuffed candles.

“Where’s Gramps?” she asked.

Her grandmother paused, hand splayed flat on the Ouija board, expression careful. She didn’t look at Nikita, but Trina sensed she wanted to. “He’ll be back,” she said. “I’ll need him to sit with us for the ceremony; more minds, more willpower, I always say. But he–”

As if on cue, the back door opened and closed, footsteps came across the old inlaid bricks of the kitchen floor, and then Gramps appeared in the threshold, bearing handfuls of fragrant herbs.

Nikita whirled to face him, nostrils flaring as he scented the air.

Trina held her breath.

“Hello, dear,” Grams said, voice still careful. She hadn’t moved an inch. “The kids are here.”

“I can see that.” His accent was faint, worn smooth by an adult life lived in the States; Trina knew, though, that when he’d had too much to drink it came roaring back, thick as Nikita’s. “Hi, Trina,” he said, but his gaze was pinned to his father.

“Hi,” she echoed, faintly.

In general, no one ever held truly still.Stillusually included a shifting of weight, a shuffling of feet, some little facial twitch, a quick breath. But Nikita held still as something carved from stone. Still as a predator in a tree…or a prey animal poised for flight. The rapid flicker of his pulse in the side of his neck was the only sign that he was alive, and not a cardboard cutout.

The resemblance between father and son was strong, though the son was an aged echo; Kolya looked like the blurred-edged photograph, while Nikita, unnaturally, the sharp, current incarnation. And even if no one had told her that her great-grandfather was a vampire, Trina could have looked at him now and known that he wasn’t human, not the way he held himself, unmoving.

She thought she would have to say something to dispel the awful tension, but Kolya beat her to it.

“I have a picture of you,” he said, and Nikita moved, drawing up to his full height, head tilted back at an angle so he looked down his nose: a challenge. “Of all of you,” Kolya went on. “Taken in front of the tractor factory in Stalingrad…or what was left of it. The White Wolf and his unit of wraiths.” He smiled, faintly.

Nikita made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Idiots. They called him that because his pelt was white. And they had no idea we were actually Whites.”

Kolya swallowed. “I knew. Mother told me.”

They stared at one another.

Until Grams clapped her hands and said, “Kol, bring me those, please. We don’t have all day to stand around. Trina, dear, who did you say you were trying to contact on the other side?”

The room started moving again.

Trina said, “Um, well, he’s not on the other side exactly…”

~*~

The table comfortably seated all of them, though they were close, shoulders brushing. Gramps drew the blackout drapes over the windows and Grams lit the candles. The room felt transformed, then, sent spinning back through the decades. The light flickered, the shadows leapt, and the heavy scent of sage filled the air as Dottie crushed the fresh, and burned the dry. She’d shed her grandmother skin and was now nothing but the occultist, straight-backed and reserved, quietly confident.

“Now,” she said, turning to Trina beside her, “do you have a token?”