3. Nikolai
NIKOLAI
A ll three of us stared at the figure sprawled on the scorched earth, unconscious.
“Is it dead?” Caspian asked.
“Not it,” I corrected him. “A boy.”
It might not be accurate to call him a boy, but anyone younger than us heirs qualified, and we’d all lived long enough that most of the world looked like children now.
“If he’s dead, he’s it.” Caspian shrugged. “A corpse. And he looks dead to me.”
If the boy wasn’t dead, he was close enough.
His lips were cracked, peeling, dried to bleeding.
Dark bruises hollowed the spaces under his eyes, like someone had used him for practice.
Grime and dirt layered his face, and beneath it, four blue lines were painted down each cheek—war paint or tribal markings; I couldn’t tell.
The pigment had faded and smudged, as if he’d worn it for days.
His cropped hair was deepest midnight blue shot through with gold strands. Strange, but not unheard of .
When technology collapsed, latent energy had flooded back into the human world with punishing force. It reactivated dormant magic in the old bloodlines, giving rise to the twelve Zodiac Houses that now dominated the earth. But it also sought new hosts. Created a generation of anomalies.
Humans with abilities that didn’t fit.
People who shouldn’t exist.
But did anyway.
This half-dead boy could be one of them.
Despite his cropped hair, his lashes were ridiculously long and thick. They cast shadows that deepened the hollows under his closed eyes.
He wore something between a shirt and a rug, rough-woven and filthy. Miner’s garb, from the look of it. Blood covered him in layers, dried brown, fresh red, and the acrid green of monster ichor. His own. Someone else’s. Something else’s.
I caught myself sniffing.
Immediately disgusted.
But the damage was done. The boy was filthy, half-dead, but his blood sang to me like a siren’s call.
I’d fed before we headed out, a full meal from a willing donor at the fortress. I always made sure to feed before missions—avoid temptation, avoid complications. Yet his blood called to me anyway, made my mouth water and my fangs ache with a want I hadn’t felt in decades.
I held my breath and switched to breathing through my mouth. And then his scent coated my tongue like honey laced with sunlight .
What the fuck?
I narrowed my eyes.
Aelindor and Caspian studied him as well, their expressions unreadable. For several long seconds, none of us spoke. Each ran through our own thoughts and theories.
“Feel his pulse,” I told Caspian. “See if he’s alive, wolf.”
“Why don’t you do it?” he countered automatically. He started to crouch down, but as the words left his mouth, he straightened again.
“Children.” Aelindor shook his head with the long-suffering patience of someone who’d dealt with our rivalry for too many years. He crouched by the boy and pressed two long fingers to the side of his neck, just below the jaw. “He’s alive. Pulse is weak.”
“He smells.” Caspian wrinkled his nose.
“I feel his magic,” Aelindor said. His voice took on that distant, focused quality he got when sensing power. “Strong, but stuttering. As if it just learned to talk, raw and untrained.”
He pulled a waterskin from his travel bag, uncorked it, and tipped a few careful drops through the boy’s cracked lips.
The boy didn’t stir. Didn’t swallow. The water sat on his lips a moment before slowly disappearing into the cracks.
“How old?” I asked.
“Hard to say with humans.” Aelindor tilted his head. “Seventeen to twenty-two. He hasn’t finished his growth spurt yet. Impossible to tell if he’s immortal or will be. The magic in his blood hasn’t triggered a transformation.”
Caspian frowned, the kind that said this bothered him more than he wanted to admit. “I can’t scent his species. It’s all muddled. Human, but not quite.”
“If I took a bite, I could probably tell you what’s in his blood.”
“No,” Aelindor said sharply.
Caspian shot me a disgusted look, which would’ve been more effective if he weren’t a predator himself.
“Not for my benefit,” I growled, genuinely offended. “For information.”
“We’re taking him with us.” Aelindor’s tone allowed no argument. “We’ll learn more about him at the fortress. We have people for this.”
I nodded. We’d process this later at home base where we had resources, healers, and truth-seers.
Caspian stared down at the unconscious boy. “So this is what dragged us out of our warm beds?” He gestured at the crumpled figure. “He can’t be the one. Lost heir of two prestigious Zodiac Houses?” A pause. “He looks like a servant, or a miner.”
“I didn’t know you were such a snob, Caspian.”
“I’m not a snob. I’m a realist,” the shifter said exasperatedly, like I was missing something obvious. “Look at him.”
“I am looking at him.” I paused. “There isn’t much to look at.”
“All right.”
Aelindor cut us off before our bullshit could escalate. He turned from the boy and scanned the Scorched Wastes with the wariness of someone who’d survived too many ambushes. We’d put our weapons away, but none of us dropped our guard.
Hostile territory. Dangerous times. The monsters would be stirring soon.
“Between you two,” he said, “who’s going to carry him?”
“Let the wolf do it,” I offered immediately.
“You carry him, bloodsucker.” Instant counter.
I arched a brow. “I’m a bloodsucker as you pointed out. Before we make it a mile, I’d most likely bite him. You want that on your conscience?”
Caspian’s lip curled. “You’d really bite someone unconscious? Someone who can’t consent?”
His self-righteousness might have stung more and amused me less if it weren’t coming from a shifter.
“When have my kind ever needed consent outside our territory?” I rolled my eyes. “We’d all starve waiting for permission. Besides, the boy might smell like shit to you, but his blood is sweet. Too sweet.” I gave him a shrug. “I’m being honest about my limitations.”
Aelindor gave me a pondering look, as if checking whether my fangs had descended yet. They hadn’t. But it was close.
He wasn’t volunteering to carry the boy himself.
That much was clear. The four of us were equal in name, but in unspoken terms, the Fae heir outranked us all.
He’d seen empires rise and fall, had lived longer than the rest of us combined.
Without him, there’d be no Covenant. We’d all be dead—executed like our parents, by the White Witch and her despicable coven .
“Will you carry the boy, Prince Caspian?” Aelindor asked. “You have the broadest shoulders among us.”
Caspian grinned. “I have the broadest shoulders everywhere I go.”
“Then put them to use for once.”
Caspian grunted. No one argued with Aelindor.
He patted the boy down, quick and efficient. Found a crude dagger strapped to a rope that served as a belt. The boy couldn’t even afford proper leather. He was in worse shape than a beggar.
Caspian grabbed the hilt, then jerked his hand back with a curse.
“What now?” I rolled my eyes. “It’s a simple task.”
“Fuck.” He stared at his palm. The skin where he’d touched the weapon had turned black.
“Don’t touch it bare-handed.” Aelindor dropped to one knee. From his pocket, he produced a silk handkerchief—monogrammed A, pristine—and wrapped it carefully around the hilt. He studied the dull blade, its surface dark as scorched bone.
“It’s not rune or spell infused,” he said. “No silver either.”
Shifters burned at silver’s touch. Fae withered against iron. Aelindor, too powerful for such weaknesses, was the exception.
“Then why did it hurt me?” Caspian flexed his blackened palm, displeased.
“You take everything personally,” I said.
“Then you hold that stupid homemade blade,” he challenged.
“Pass.” I crossed my arms .
“Yet it hums.” Aelindor turned the weapon slowly, handkerchief still shielding his grip. “Faintly.”
“I heard nothing,” Caspian admitted.
I shook my head.
“Interesting,” Aelindor murmured.
He wrapped the dagger carefully and tucked it into his bag. Then he turned and led the way back toward where we’d left the jeeps at the edge of the Scorched Wastes.
We’d traveled hundreds of miles from our base in old Colorado. Then another seven on foot into Utah, the White Witch’s territory. All before we found the half-dead boy.
Caspian swung him onto his shoulder in one fluid motion, like a hunter carrying his kill. It didn’t take long for the complaints to resurface.
“He really smells.”
Too bad for him. Shifters’ noses were legendary for their sensitivity, and he was the most powerful among his kind. Every scent, magnified tenfold.
“Take a long shower when we get back.” Aelindor’s rich, musical voice carried no trace of empathy.
He was logical like that. Apathetic. Feelings were complications he’d learned to shed centuries ago.
“He’s fucking heavy.” Caspian lagged behind, struggling to match the ground-eating stride Aelindor and I had settled into. The stride of those who didn’t tire.
“How?” I glanced back. “The boy’s skin and bone. He’s probably starved for weeks.”
I didn’t sound pitying. War hardened everyone. Sympathy was a luxury .
“He’s big, all right.” Caspian adjusted his grip. “I bet he’s got a couple of inches on me, and I’m already tall. It’s the bones that weigh the most. Dense. He’s built like a prizefighter.”
I was tired of his whining. How did all those women tolerate him?
“Just hurry up.” I scanned the sky. The haze was thinning. The sun would burn through soon. “This is the fringe of the feeders’ range. They hunt in the light.”
High noon. My weakest hour. I didn’t like putting myself in vulnerable situations. It went against every survival instinct I had.
Caspian lengthened his stride, boots thudding against the packed earth. Then, five steps in—a sharp curse. A dull thud.
I turned. “What now?”
Caspian had dropped the boy a few feet from a pile of human bones half-sunk in the dirt, their empty grins aimed at the sky.
“Why did you do that?” I snapped. “It’s not as if you’ve never seen a corpse.”
He just stared at the boy, his expression caught between shock and confusion, as if his charge had suddenly caught fire.
“Breasts,” he said.
I blinked. “What?”
“He has boobs. They kept bouncing against my back like two fucking soft balls.”
“For fuck’s sake. Some men develop breasts.” I kept my voice level, educational. “It’s a medical condition.”
“Since when did you become an expert on man boobs?” Caspian sneered, but uncertainty flickered behind his eyes. He glanced down at his own muscled chest, as if genuinely worried the condition might claim him in the near future.
“Happens to old men who let themselves go.” I sighed, exasperated. “If you insist on being difficult?—”
“The boy’s too skinny for big boobs.” The shifter dug in. “It’s disturbing. They’re too developed. I’ve slept with enough women to know.”
“Some men develop breast tissue, all right.” My patience was gone. “Are you done panicking?”
“A teenage boy should not have breasts like that,” Caspian insisted.
“Have you considered,” Aelindor said, not looking up from his scan of the horizon, “that the boy might not be a boy at all?”