Obsidian Empire (The Firebird and the Wolf #3)

Chapter 1

Oleg

He walked behind them in the darkness, creeping through the edge of a forest near the border of Latvia. The warehouse was unimportant. The cargo was unimpressive. The men guarding it? Incidental.

They would take it anyway.

Oleg cloaked his power and covered his face; it wouldn’t serve his purpose for the men and vampires inside the warehouse to recognize his scent or his elemental power. He was there to observe.

“Wind vampires landing in moments.” The woman who whispered to the scattered group of immortals hiding in the trees was a child of his clan, a daughter of one of his daughters.

Normally a vampire with her pedigree wouldn’t bother herself with a raid like this, but it gave Oleg pleasure to see the calculation on her face.

Raiding was a family tradition, after all.

“Three minutes.”

Oleg heard shuffling from the human soldiers with them, but a single look from Polina’s daughter Yeva froze them in their tracks.

Unlike some of his brothers, his children did not entertain idiots in their ranks.

Oleg had survived as a mortal by raiding and trading among river towns from Novgorod to the Black Sea, journeying though the waterways of Eastern Europe with his brothers until one fateful night when the men of his clan were captured by the immortal children of Truvor the Red.

Yeva looked up, her hand lifted, ready to signal the others.

Truvor was a powerful earth vampire who’d systematically plucked the strongest men from mortal clans, then culled those who could not survive harsh life as servants to immortal masters. He considered humans lesser beings than vampires and treated them like livestock.

Yeva’s fingers dropped, and the company scattered from the shadow of the woods, over the chain-link fence and barbed wire, and into the yard that surrounded the warehouse.

One guard went down, and the scent of blood touched the night air. It would be only seconds before the vampires in the warehouse realized something was wrong.

A single shot was the only indication that the operation had been detected by those inside. A door swung open, and gold light flooded the yard, immediately followed by three dark shadows that shot from the darkness. Then the door slammed shut and there was scattered shooting until there wasn’t.

More blood.

Then silence.

Oleg, having watched the swift and efficient incursion by Yeva’s soldiers, strode across the yard, kicking away a gun that a fallen soldier was reaching for. Then Oleg kicked the man’s head and he lay still again.

The human’s heart was still beating; he would be fine.

Unlike Truvor, Oleg wasn’t a monster unless it was necessary.

After he’d been captured, all Oleg had wanted was to survive. All he remembered from his human years was the hunger for revenge and the sick sound of Truvor’s laughter.

His cruel sire had enjoyed how Oleg defied the odds and even how he refused to bend the knee. The earth vampire had thrown his toughest humans into battle against Oleg, and Oleg had killed them one by one. Eventually he learned how vampires fought, and he could sometimes kill them too.

Earth vampires lost their step if you caught them on snow.

Wind vampires were useless fighting on the ground.

Water vampires were the toughest because water was everywhere, and the most skilled could even freeze a human in their tracks.

But Oleg never gave up.

As he walked toward the warehouse, he kept his hood up and secured the scarf that covered his face in the cold night air. The forest was cloaked in fog, and the damp air was redolent with pine and cedar. There was a metallic hint in the air, and the mist carried the acrid scent of gunpowder.

“You there.” One of Yeva’s men walked out and waved a hand at him in a come-along gesture. “You wanted to see, yeah? Come on then.”

Oleg half suspected that Truvor had turned him simply to regain control, because once a vampire sired a child, that child would always be at least a little bit in thrall to their maker.

But though Truvor had given Oleg blood saturated in the soil of the Kievan Rus, the vampire who was born came to immortal life as a creature of fire.

From the moment of Oleg’s immortal birth, Truvor’s laughter had died.

Eventually Truvor died too.

As Oleg stepped over the threshold of the warehouse, the scent of his brother’s blood filled the air.

Truvor’s blood. Ivan’s blood.

It was all the same; his brother’s children carried the stench of their sire.

“Here they are.” Yeva spoke through the black mask that covered half her face. “Only seven left.”

Oleg saw the bodies on the ground, a few with heads detached from their bodies. Those would be the vampires.

Others were human, and a few were still moving. The seven left standing had their hands zip-tied behind them and were lined up along a chain-link partition near a small office.

The scent of vodka lingered in the air, and broken glasses and bottles littered the concrete floor. The men had been enjoying a drink before Yeva’s people invaded their celebration.

“Should we kill them?” Yeva asked.

“Not right now.” Oleg kept his voice low as his boots crunched over shattered glass.

Yeva had told her men that Oleg was one of Mika Arakis’s informants from Riga, coming to survey the operation so close to Mika’s border. All of them, including Oleg, were wearing masks.

It didn’t serve Oleg’s current purposes for the humans or vampires guarding this warehouse to know who was holding them at gunpoint and knifepoint.

All he needed them to do was watch as, one after another, Yeva’s people drove loaded cargo trucks out of the warehouse and into the night, depriving Ivan and his sons of millions of euros as their precious electronics disappeared.

One of the humans lunged toward Yeva, but she lifted the butt of her rifle and knocked him on the temple. The human crumpled, and another of the men cried out.

The language wasn’t Russian.

Oleg walked over, his hands stuffed in his pockets, and stood before the man who had cried out. “Who are you?”

The man lifted his chin and spat out, “None of your damn business!” He spoke Russian, but the accent wasn’t local.

But Oleg recognized it.

He walked back to where Yeva was standing and watching the last truck roll out of the warehouse. “Where were these trucks coming from?”

The trucks might have been sitting in Ivan’s warehouse, being guarded by Ivan’s men, but Oleg had a feeling that the man he’d just spoken to wasn’t one of Ivan’s.

He had a feeling the man was a driver. A contractor.

Yeva looked at a clipboard one of her people had handed her. “They’re coming from…” She looked up at Oleg. “Poland.”

“Hmm.”

“Is there a prob—”

“We’ll talk later,” he murmured.

Shit.

“Are we finished?” he asked.

Yeva looked at the man to her right, and the vampire scanned the warehouse before he gave her a quick nod.

“Leave the men,” Oleg said, then walked out of the warehouse and into the frosty night. “Ivan’s people will find them sooner or later.”

“What was the problem?” Yeva’s voice was tinged with concern. “Knyaz, if I have done something wrong—”

“No, no.” Oleg walked over and kissed Yeva on the forehead. “Please, my dear, do not concern yourself. You and your people did well.”

He and Yeva were meeting with Polina and Mika at their office in Vilnius.

“Dear Yeva, I’m the one who chose the warehouse and the cargo,” Polina said. “If there is fault, it is mine.”

“There is no fault,” Oleg reassured them. “Not for either of you. The operation went very well, and now we have six truckloads of electronics we can sell for a very good profit.”

“No fault,” Mika said slowly. “But perhaps some… complication.”

Oleg put his hand on Yeva’s cheek and patted it gently. “I am proud of your efficiency and your professionalism. You moved quickly and did exactly as ordered.”

“Thank you.”

“The operation was a success.” He spoke to Polina. “How many vans did we take?”

“Five, totaling around forty million euros retail,” Polina said. “Wholesale, Ivan will have lost about eighteen million.”

“Excellent,” Oleg said. “And Ivan had already paid for them?”

“Yes, the suppliers have already been paid, so this should hit only his pocket.”

“Except for the trucks,” Mika said. “And the drivers.”

“None of the drivers were killed,” Yeva said. “A few injured, but none badly. They didn’t really challenge us.”

“And the trucks can be dealt with,” Oleg said. “So the only ones who will feel this are Ivan and his men.”

“And any human backers,” Polina said. “The phones were heading to a high-end electronics chain in Moscow.”

“Routed through shell corporations to skirt sanctions.”

“Good.” Oleg was more than happy to let human politics interfere with Ivan’s bottom line. “Has he reported the loss yet?”

“Not to me,” Mika said, “but that’s not a surprise.”

“He won’t say anything to me even if he suspects it was my people,” Polina said. “He’ll never admit losing that much cargo.”

Ivan was a governor in Oleg’s empire, and he and his criminal enterprise controlled a huge and wealthy territory. Still, it wasn’t unheard of for a governor in one region to poach from other territories even if they were all under Oleg’s umbrella.

It was a bit like wolves stealing from a shared kill. It was expected with an empire as extensive as Oleg’s. Good-natured even. His people might snap at each other, but they’d turn on any outsiders if the larger clan was threatened.

Or at least that was how it was supposed to work.

But for the past few years, Ivan had been a thorn in Oleg’s side. Stirring up dissension among his commanders, poaching contracts, and undermining deals when they didn’t benefit his territory.

It was becoming clear to Oleg that Ivan’s plans were tending in a distinctly unfriendly direction.

You should have killed him years ago.

Mika lifted an eyebrow as if reading Oleg’s mind. “You know what I am going to suggest.”

Polina glanced at Yeva. “You’ve done well. Give your people the bonus we discussed.”

Yeva nodded at her sire. “Yes, Knyazhna.”

“You may go.”