Holy hell.
A light breeze eddied through the alleyway, carrying with it the stench of vampires gone Rogue. And there was spilled blood too. Human blood. A damned lot of it, mixed with the vile odor of bleeding Rogues.
Nikolai froze with his hand still on his fly, shocked stupid in one blinding instant.
"Jesus Christ."
What the fuck was going on?
He yanked the woman's skirt back down and swept his tongue over her neck wound, sealing up his bite.
"I said, don't st - "
Niko didn't give her a chance to finish the thought. With a glance of his palm over her brow, he scrubbed her mind of the entire thing. "Get out of here," he told her.
He was already jogging up the alley by the time she shook out of her daze and started moving. He followed his nose to a dilapidated building not far from where he'd been. The stench emanated from inside, a couple floors off the street.
Nikolai climbed the lightless stairwell to the second floor. His eyes were practically watering from the overwhelming stink of death that rolled out from under a closed door. His hand on the gun holstered at his hip, Niko approached the place. There was no sound on the other side of the battered, graffiti-tagged door. Only death, human and Breed. Niko turned the loose knob and braced himself for what he would find.
It had been a massacre.
An apparent junkie lay in a supine sprawl amid discarded syringes and other trash that littered the blood-soaked floor and a fouled mattress. The body was so ruined it was hardly recognizable as human, let alone a distinguishable gender. The other two bodies were savaged as well, but definitely Breed - without question, both of them Rogues judging by the size and stench of them alone.
Nikolai could guess what might have happened here: a lethal struggle over prey. This fight was fresh, maybe only minutes old. And the two dead suckheads wouldn't have been able to shred each other so thoroughly before one or the other went down. There had been at least one more Rogue involved in this scuffle.
If Niko was lucky, the victor might still be in the area, licking his wounds. He hoped so, because he 'd love to give the diseased bastard a taste of his 9mm's custom rounds. Nothing said "Have a nice day" like a Rogue's corrupted blood system going into allergic meltdown from a dose of poisonous titanium.
Nikolai went to the boarded-up window and tossed the crudely nailed panels aside. If he was looking for action, he'd just found it in spades. Below, on the street, stood an enormous Rogue. He was bloodied and battered, looking like ten kinds of hell. But holy shit...he wasn't alone.
Alexei Yakut was with him.
Incredibly, Lex and the Rogue walked toward a waiting sedan and got in.
"What the fuck are you up to?" Niko murmured under his breath as the car roared up the street.
He was about to leap out the open window and follow on foot when a shrill scream sounded behind him. A woman had wandered into the carnage and now gaped at him in terror, an accusing, shaky finger pointed in his direction. She screamed again, loud enough to wake every crackhead and dealer in the neighborhood.
Nikolai eyed the witness and the bloody evidence of a struggle that looked anything but human.
"Damn it," he growled, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Lex's car disappear around the corner. "It's all right," he told the shrieking banshee as he left the window and approached her. "You didn't see a thing."
He wiped her memory and shoved her out of the room. Then he took out a titanium blade and stuck it into the remains of one of the dead Rogues.
As the body began to sizzle and dissolve, Niko set about cleaning up the rest of the mess that Lex and his unlikely associate had left behind.
Chapter Twelve
Renata stood at the counter of the lodge's galley kitchen, a knife gripped loosely in her hand. "What kind of jelly do you want tonight - grape or strawberry?"
"Grape," Mira replied. "No, wait - I want strawberry this time."
She was perched on the edge of the wood countertop next to Renata, her legs swinging idly. Dressed in a purple T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and scuffed sneakers, Mira might have seemed like any other normal suburban little girl waiting on her dinner. But normal little girls weren't made to eat the same thing, practically day in and day out. Normal little girls had families to love and care for them. They lived in nice houses on pretty, tree-lined streets, with bright kitchens and stocked pantries and mothers who knew how to cook endless wonderful meals.
At least, that's what Renata imagined when she thought of the ideal picture of normal. She didn't know from any kind of personal experience. As a child of the streets before Yakut found her and brought her to the lodge, Mira didn't know what normal was either. But it was that wholesome, normal kind of life that Renata wished for the child, as futile a wish as it seemed, standing in Sergei Yakut's dingy kitchen, next to a beat-up range that probably wouldn't work even if it did have a gas line running to it. Since Renata and Mira were the only ones at the lodge who ate food, Yakut had left it up to Renata to see that she and the child were regularly fed. Renata didn't particularly care what she had for sustenance - food was food, a necessity of function, nothing more - but she hated not being able to treat Mira to something nice once in a while.
"Someday you and I are going to go out and have ourselves a real dinner, one with five entirely different courses. Plus dessert," she added, slathering the strawberry jam over the slice of white bread. "Maybe we'll have two desserts apiece." Mira smiled under the short black veil that fell to the tip of her little nose. "Do you think they'll be chocolate desserts?" "Definitely chocolate. Here you go," she said, handing the plate to her. "PB&J, heavy on the J, and no crusts."
Renata leaned back against the counter as Mira bit into the sandwich and ate like it was as delicious as any five-course meal she could imagine. "Don't forget to drink your apple juice."