Chapter 11
CHAPTER 11
A lexei
I am running through the streets of Rostayvik, moonlight in my eyes and pure fury in my heart. The scent of vampire draws me through the cold blue streets, cast in cobalt by my animal vision. The vampire scent is red to my gaze; I see it stretching out ahead of me, smoky wisps leading me to my prey.
I had been warned that this day would come. I wish I had listened more closely, heeded the warnings, understood that once an alpha has a mate, he becomes a target.
We are at war.
The pack is on the hunt, day and night.
I intend to kill vampires until I find my mate.
The trail thickens ahead, swirling around a door. They had to pause there in order to enter, and in doing so they left what amounts to a big red smeared dot in the world.
I stop in the midst of their trail, and I leave my animal form. I came prepared, strapped with a very particular weapon. I catch it in my hand as it falls from where it was strapped around my neck. It is a gun, of sorts, a modified harpoon-style weapon complete with an ash stake.
The door is not locked. Vampires don’t worry about anybody getting into their homes. They are not used to being hunted… yet.
I stride into the vampire den. Even to my human form, the place stinks of them. I am naked, which functions as an effective distraction as I step into the lounge and find a vampire sitting in an armchair. It stands up as I enter, a motion that happens so quickly it would terrify any normal mortal.
It hasn’t noticed my weapon. It is too busy looking at my naked form. Vampires of all genders are lustful creatures. They cannot help themselves. Human flesh in all its forms is attractive to these things. So it stares at me as if I am a lamb delivering itself for the slaughter.
“Well, hello. Look at you,” the vampire purrs. “A naked David walking right into my lair. My dear, you are carved like Michelangelo…”
“Do you know where Anya is?”
I ask the question, because it has been impressed on me that if I do not ask, I am risking losing potential intel on the location of my mate. The truth is I am leaving the interrogations to my pack mates. They are more measured than I am. I loathe these creatures so deeply that I am unable to be in their presence without wanting to kill them.
“Anya?”
It has no idea. Good.
I lift the gun and fire. The stake arcs across the room in the flash of an eye, striking the creature in the chest. The effect is instantaneous. The vampire drops, incapacitated. It lies on the floor, eyes staring up at me with a mixture of shock and something I am sure it has not experienced in a long time: fear.
To kill a vampire, you must stake it through the heart and remove the head. The back of my weapon contains a relatively sharp knife. Not too sharp. Not so sharp the dead thing does not suffer. These creatures are responsible for me feeling the greatest pain I have ever experienced in my life. I do not merely want to kill them. I want to hurt them. My worst and cruelest instincts have been activated by losing Anya. I will find her, and every day I do not find her, they will suffer violently.
One moment I am being condescended to by a beast who wants to feed on me, the next a pile of ash is forming on the floor where it was standing. It is almost anticlimactic.
“Anya!” I shout her name, though I already know she is not here. I would be able to scent her if she was. Her name burns through me. I feel the intensity of the loss all over again.
I wish I had never met that vampire. I wish I had never heard the word vampire. I will erase their kind from the planet for what they have done to me and the one I love.
There is a brief tussle at the door as the pack stragglers finally catch up. They are not quite as fast. They are able to follow my lead, but not keep up with my pace.
“You found a vampire?”
The question comes just as I am restraining myself from pissing on its ashes.
“Yes,” I say. “I did.”
“Any intel about Anya we can action?”
“No.”
“Alexei?”
A new, deeper, but familiar voice interjects.
I turn to see my brother, Vlad. Vlad has been in St. Petersburg for several years now. He is thirteen months younger than I am, and brilliant in many respects. He left the pack several years ago in order to pursue economic opportunities. He is the last person I expected to see here. I didn’t know he was even aware of what is going on.
I notice that he is dressed in a tailored suit. An expensive watch of some kind flashes on his wrist. His hair is cut in the way rich, soft men’s hair is cut. He looks like he stepped out of a magazine. All this means that he has not taken his wolf form. He did not come to hunt. He must have come by vehicle. What the hell is he doing here?
“What are you doing here?”
He walks up to me and wraps me in an embrace. My bare skin meets the fine exterior of his suit. This is the hug of my brother. Blood of my blood. There has been very little to soothe me since Anya was taken, but his presence helps a little.
I have always been the older brother. I will always be the older brother, but Vlad has a certain serious nature that I appreciate in this moment. He will be a strong and forceful ally.
“I heard what happened, and I’m here to help,” he says. “Is that a harpoon?”
“It’s a vampoon,” I say. “Want to see how it works?”
His brows lift in surprise. “Maybe…”
I lift the weapon and shoot the vampire that was coming through the door behind him straight through the heart. It collapses backward, and I leap on it, removing the head with no small amount of effort.
When I turn around, Vlad and the others are looking at me with expressions ranging from admiration to horror. I am the worst and the best version of myself at this moment.
“We need to get you out of here. This is not doing anything to get Anya back.”
“I disagree. This is teaching them that there is a cost to taking my mate. I will kill every vampire I encounter until I get her back. It is that simple.”
“Or one of them kills you, Alexei.” Vlad scowls at me, then his eyes slide to the others, lower ranked members, those who need our guidance. He stops himself from saying whatever harsh words he feels I need to hear, and instead puts a hand on my shoulder. “We will get her back.”
I know there are those who think I am losing it. The alpha is supposed to be a calm, steady, dominant influence. The alpha is not supposed to be in the streets murdering those who are even tangentially related to a loss.
That is what my father would say if he was here, I’m sure. He would tell me to be stoic, to hide my pain. He would probably tell me to forget about Anya entirely, the same way he told me to forget Lilly. My tendency is to become attached to those who need protection, and to those who rely on me. I believe it makes me a good alpha, though my father always saw it as weakness.
But I am not stoic.
And I am not the only one killing vampires.
I’m aware that some of the younger warriors are starting to get out of hand due to my influence. I’d call it a bloodbath, but there’s no blood. Just the dust of long-dead creatures being returned to the earth.
“We should go back to the castle and regroup,” Vlad says. “There is much to talk about, much strategy to be addressed.”
The remnants of sanity in my mind know that he is correct. Vengeance and the murdering of every vampire we can find is not the most strategic of responses, though it is the most satisfying.
I allow myself to be led out to the vehicle that Vlad came in.
“It’s good to see you, brother,” he says when we are safely ensconced. “I should have come back earlier.”
“You didn’t need to come back at all. But it is good to see you.”
Usually the oldest sibling is the most serious, but Vlad has always been a responsible, analytical sort. He’s not alpha material, but he is reliable.
The ride back to the castle is a long one. Hours. I fall asleep a few minutes in, exhausted from running long distances tracking in my wolf form. I do not wake up until morning is breaking and we are back at the castle.
Every time I wake up, I have to yet again remember that Anya is missing. It is one of many brutalities inflicted by the tyranny of memory.
“Get cleaned up,” Vlad says, nudging me out of the car. “We need to talk.”
“We can talk like this.”
“I’d rather you put your clothes on,” he says with a slight sniff. Vlad doesn’t like shifting, and he certainly does not like the animal aspect of being naked in the aftermath of a transformation. “And I’d rather you showered.”
I realize I don’t know when I last bathed. Days ago, certainly. I suppose I probably do stink to high heaven right now. Can’t say I care. But he’s going to keep bitching about it, so I decide to humor him.
I go and get showered, and I put some clothes on. A shirt and pants, socks and shoes. Enough to satisfy his need for civility.
When I emerge, he has a meal waiting for me. Borscht, a beet soup swimming in steak and vegetables. It smells delicious. It smells like home. This is the food we were raised on.
“Eat,” he says. “You’re looking gaunt.”
“You’re fussing, Vlad.”
“Someone has to,” he says disapprovingly. “I know you’re under some stress, but having your mate taken is just part of being an alpha. You can’t go to pieces every time someone strips away something precious to you. You know very well that life is about losing everything one piece at a time until there is nothing left.”
Our father used to give us pep talks like this.
“You expected to meet the love of your life and enjoy yourself? You spent too long in America.”
“I was in America for less than a week.”
“Too much time,” he says. “Remember who you are. Who we are. What our life is made to be. We are beasts in the cold. We are survivors of a curse. It is not a good thing to be able to turn wild, brother. It is something put upon us, something un-survivable, something that poisons our children if we have them…”
I eat my soup while Vlad gives a speech Tolstoy would be proud of. He reminds me of the arrogance and childishness of expecting to be happy in love. It should not make me feel any better, but somehow it does. There is a kind of joy and freedom in giving up hope.
“You have to get a grip, Alexei. You are creating the war we are trying to avoid.”
“They created the war by taking Anya.”
“Then you are being provoked into conflict. Don’t be stupid, Alexei. Use your brain. Is she weak?”
“No. She is not. She got into this trouble by consuming two vampire thralls.”
“If she is not weak, then she is probably taking care of herself. Trust your mate instead of mourning her.”