7. Leo
Leo
The gold rush, for fuck’s sake.
He’d been held prisoner by Ermengarde’s lot since the goddamn gold rush.
Not just “before I was born,” but like, over a hundred years before I was born.
I wasn’t perfect with American history by any means, but didn’t they call the people who’d gone looking for gold “miner forty-niners”?
And I didn’t think they meant nineteen-forty-nine.
And then he’d escaped from them and was running aimlessly through the forest.
Starving, probably. I couldn’t imagine the witches I’d seen in the pack square, with their shiny new black cars and fancy clothes, offering up their necks to feed a vampire they were holding prisoner.
How had they even fed him? Bags stolen from the local blood bank?
Small animals trapped in the woods? No, they wouldn’t be interested in trapping animals and handling them for someone else.
Was there some kind of fae delivery service for blood?
I had kind of a bad feeling the answer wouldn’t be good, but I also didn’t want to ask.
He seemed . . . well, I’d been around enough traumatized people in my life to recognize that something wasn’t right with him.
He wasn’t stoic and silent like Viktor when he’d come home, but there was something familiar about the hunted look on his face.
Well, before he’d covered his face with my coat, which was its own kind of thing, wasn’t it?
Sure, yeah, he was hiding from the sun.
But also, he was just hiding.
He had pulled the coat off his face at some point, though, and .
. . well, his cheeks were hollow and his skin was a strange shade of taupe, like maybe his natural shade was brown, but there was a gray undertone.
I didn’t think that was natural to vampires, since that would make it pretty hard for them to blend in with humans and hunt them.
Even wrong as it all was, he was a beautiful man. Sharp features, longish chocolate-brown hair that fell in loose waves around his face, and deep dark eyes that . . . were clearly waiting on me for something.
What had he said? Oh, the witches. I sighed at that.
“They worked with our previous alpha. He was”—I looked around, like I needed to make sure no one from the pack was nearby, like they wouldn’t have rushed in to see what was going on if they’d been here—“he was selling the others to them. For sex. And maybe other stuff, since they took Avery and never brought him back.”
He flinched at that. He tried to hide it, but in the years since Viktor had come home, I’d become an expert in seeing the tiny expressions that gave away how someone was feeling. Most of the time it was the only way I had any idea what was happening in my own twin’s head.
I watched Altair transform in that moment, though.
He shoved his emotions down and straightened his spine, preparing to deal with me.
I’d seen Viktor do it a thousand times in the years since his return, and instinctively, I knew that whatever Altair said next would be a pastiche of the truth and lies, put together in the way he thought would elicit the response he wanted.
With Viktor, what he usually wanted was for me to leave him alone and stop asking hard questions.
With this man? Well, he was a stranger, hungry and desperate, who’d been held prisoner for over a hundred years. No doubt whatever he said would be designed to get me to help him.
I could have stopped him right there and told him not to bother with the lies, because it didn’t matter what he said, I’d already made my decision, and I was going to help. But some part of me was curious about what he would say.
What was that old saying?
Curiosity killed the cat, and satisfaction brought it back.
That was me, the smug cat who wanted to know everything.
“My sire was . . . like you. Russian. He killed me, and then kept me around for years, because . . . he said he gave me this life, so he owned it.” His eyes went distant as he said that, and it would have been impossible to ignore the very real pain in his eyes as he spoke.
Sure, maybe it was designed to make me sympathize with him, but .
. . well, I did that anyway. “I don’t know what you know about vampires—”
He broke off and stared at me, so I gave him a half-hearted shrug.
I wasn’t going to tell him that I hadn’t even been sure vampires were real until I’d seen him writhing and screaming in the dappled sunlight.
Nope. Again, I’d learned from Viktor that ignorance should be kept to myself, lest someone take advantage of it.
He sighed, glancing away, and took a moment to decide how to continue. “A vampire’s sire can give them orders, and we . . . we can’t deny them. He could tell me to stab myself, and I would do it.”
It was good. Oh, not that bit of horror about being someone’s slave, but him telling me. It cost him only pride, because it wasn’t like I was a vampire sire, to be able to take advantage of it, and also, it made me sympathize even more.
In fact, it made me sympathize more than he could know, since I’d lived most of my life in packs where we’d been forced to do the alpha’s bidding without question, and both of those alphas had been awful people.
The first Aleks’s grandfather, a sharp-edged man who had no soft emotions but lots of hard rules, and the second his uncle, who had been a selfish bastard who’d only ever thought of himself.
Still odd, how Aleks hadn’t turned out anything like either of them.
I tried to thank Mama for that every day. She was the angel who had made all of our lives livable, both under those horrible alphas, and by raising one who was better than any other. I had also spent most of my life trying to be more like her, because clearly, she was the best person ever born.
There couldn’t be a better role model.
I reached out and picked up the crushed basket, not looking at Altair as I tried to coax it back into shape. “I’m sorry. We had a terrible alpha who used to tell us to do bad things.”
“You said . . . The one who dealt with the witches, yes?”
“Yeah.” I glanced up at Altair, and his eyes . . . well, they were was intense. I didn’t know a damned thing about vampires, but in that moment, I’d have believed it if someone told me their eyes had hypnotic powers. Or maybe it was just that he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
He reminded me a little of a fae I’d met once in Russia, features so sharp and fine that they seemed like they should be a painting instead of attached to a human face. Ethereal. Not an angel like Mama, though. Maybe one of those devils human religion liked so much.
He swallowed hard and nodded to me, then glanced away. I wondered if that meant the next thing he said would be a lie. “I escaped him, barely. Ran to the new world, because vampires then didn’t like to cross the ocean. Months on a ship are dangerous.”
Ahh, not a lie so much as a . . . what was the word?
Skip? Ignoring things that happened. Glossing over them.
Maybe they were so traumatic he didn’t want to think about them, or maybe he’d done bad things and didn’t want to tell me.
Couldn’t really blame him either way. It wasn’t like I was telling him about killing Barry as we sat there in the woods, only just having met and still taking the measure of each other.
I nodded at that, because frankly, I couldn’t imagine it. The notion of sunlight being dangerous was impossible to take in properly. It was like if water were made of acid, or breathing air was toxic. Sunlight wasn’t something I’d ever considered avoiding. It was everywhere.
“I came west because people were going west,” he added with a little shrug, then winced. He glanced up at the sky, which was blocked off where he was, but given the deep orange light on the forest floor, and the slant the light was starting to take, it was clear that the sun would be gone soon.
I probably should have been nervous about it. Soon, I would be alone in the woods with a predator who was no longer held back by the danger that had stopped him before.
But I couldn’t be scared.
He was so miserable, so sad, as he sat there staring down at his legs.
His legs, which were flaking with dead skin that had been burned in the ten or so seconds he’d spent in full daylight.
He wasn’t scary at all. He was half-starved and miserable, and he’d spent almost two hundred years in captivity.
“So, um,” I said, pausing to try to find the least awkward way to say the very unintelligent thing I was about to say. “You’re probably pretty hungry, if you tried to attack a werewolf who’s a lot bigger than you.”
He just sat there and blinked at me, clearly not sure how to answer that.
I couldn’t blame him, since well . . . how was he supposed to respond to that?
It was obvious that he was hungry, but also, I imagined that admitting that one wanted to eat the person they were sitting with wasn’t exactly great manners.
“I’m not trying to—it’s just, I thought—I’m a werewolf, you know?
” I had to keep from groaning at myself at that.
Gee, did he know I was a werewolf? No freaking kidding.
“I’m just, I’m trying to say, uh, I could maybe spare a little.
If you . . . if you’re hungry, and you’re, like, willing to try to not kill me. ”