Authors: A.J. Aalto
It wasn't a request. His eyes were deep beyond dark chocolate, true black, as if some funky drug had permanently dilated his pupils. This tamped the final piece of the puzzle into place; if he'd ever been human, then I would have suspected he'd suffered from gigantism before being made a revenant, but this was no man. He never had been. There probably wasn't a human being in his family woodpile for generations.
“What, no ‘honored DaySitter’ or ‘hail and well met’?” I joked.
Silent, he blinked; I could have sworn his eyelashes created a breeze.
“Okay then.” I shrugged. “Viktor Moldovan Domitrovich, you are welcome in my home.”
The massive revenant half-breed moved forward across the threshold, encroaching like an invading glacier, slow and sweeping, dwarfing me in the hall. I had no choice but to shuffle backward as he overran my space. It was my first in-the-flesh ogre encounter; the scientist in me was dizzy with anticipation, expectation, and plain,
honest fear. The knowledge that this guy could easily rip my arm off and clobber me to death with it while neatly sipping a martini in his free hand, pinky lifted, was frankly a little exciting. I suspected he was considering it, too, as he sized me up with predatory eyes. Ogres don't have a wide emotional range, and I felt nothing empathically from his direction. His inspection of me was similar to the cold gaze of a crocodile, eyes just above water and everything else submerged, watching something just big enough to put up a fight. He was wondering if I had teeth; I was wondering if the gun in my drawer would even give him pause. Probably best not to count on it.
I also couldn't help but wonder, who the hell would make a Chukotka ogre into a revenant? Seemed like overkill, but brilliant for this position. Except for being indigenous to the harsh cold of the so-called Zone of Absolute Discomfort in the extreme north of Russia, and far less comfortable in this temperate climate, he'd make the perfect bodyguard. Chukotka ogres, unlike their Magadan counterparts, had a life-long pecking order inherent in their pack structure; once this guy knew who the boss was, as long as it was another male, he'd never question or challenge it. The only problem there was: I had indoor plumbing, and he was unlikely to take a female seriously.
Staying sideways in the hallway so as not to knock the pictures off the wall, he lifted his face to the air. There must have been two inches between his skull and the ceiling. I put him at just under nine feet tall.
“Many revenants.” The big chin came down and a massive eyebrow, like a black cat's arching back, questioned me.
“Ah, yes,” I told him. “There are two revenants at rest. The organization sent you to watch them for me today, while I'm unavoidably busy elsewhere. Correct?”
He gave one solemn nod, sizing me up again with those crocodile eyes. “The other?”
“No, just the two revenants. Right? Just two?” Could he smell Gregori Nazaire's ashes? Viktor didn't answer, he just watched me, his primeval inspection giving me the willies.
“So, how did you get here so fast?” I asked, giving him a thorough once-over. So much leather covering so much body. Sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat, glistened there, making me speculate about
the physiology of an undead ogre; Harry didn't perspire. My brain refused to accurately chronicle his size until he took another step toward me, and his arms, in the act of hanging up his bag, nearly swept me aside. I ducked his limbs easily, since he was at least three feet taller than me; we were practically eyeball-to-bellybutton.
“In the middle of the day …?” I prodded.
“I translocate.” He waved this off as though it were nothing. Since it was a talent I didn't know revenants had, didn't even know was possible, I had to place one hand on the wall to keep from toppling over in surprise. “Dematerialize in St. Petersburg. Rematerialize here. You show me resting place, now.”
I hurried to do so. Viktor barely fit down the stairs, and the way they creaked under his weight made me think we were going to collapse in a heap of treads and risers any second. Seeing him looming over Harry's bed, examining the latch on the casket where Wes lay, running big hands along the walls, checking for the unknown, sniffing the air with his eyes closed as though tasting their very souls, it all made me acutely uncomfortable. I'd once visited friends who had an unpronounceable breed of dog; all I knew was that the thing was huge, it was smart, and if it didn't like me, there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it; Viktor was like that, turned up to about sixteen on a scale of one to ten, and I didn't think he'd be charmed by a bacon and peanut-butter sandwich.
I sidestepped closer to Harry's prone form, pale and still like an alabaster carving behind the white sheers. Harry's latent energy dominated the entire room, including the corner he'd given up to my brother; even as he rested, it seemed Harry's enormous presence and dormant power was only a heartbeat away. There was a complete absence of Wes in the room, so prevalent was Harry's resting aura. Fine tendrils of sandy hair swept Harry's forehead. His sleeping area smelled faintly of his fresh, lemony 4711 cologne and an ashtray full of cigarette butts. But Viktor filled the area with something new, something lively and musk-like, something that belonged covered in furs, crouched deep in a cave. Gnawing on a hunk of mammoth, maybe.
What exactly would I do if this guy turned on us? Die, probably. The thought startled an audible giggle from me, and I turned it into a cough. He was a revenant, and I knew better than most people how
to kill those, but I wasn't in the habit of keeping rowan wood stakes in Harry's chamber, and I sure as hell wouldn't make it all the way up the stairs to my bedroom closet to fetch one.
Viktor finally nodded, satisfied. “What is Bonding problem?”
This posed a quandary. I couldn't tell a complete stranger that Harry refused to have sex with me on the grounds that he didn't trust me not to abuse the power our intimacy would grant. On the other hand, attempting to lie to a revenant, any revenant, was plain stupid; they could smell my sweat, hear the sudden, guilty acceleration of my pulse and feel the fluctuation in my body temperature, all the human physiological signs of lying.
Thinking fast: not my strong suit. “Well, see, he's not
well.
I wouldn't call him
well
. He's tired, and has a terribly low sex drive. That's his age, right? We don't have nearly as much sex as I'd like. He doesn't seem too worried about it. I guess it's injuring me more than him. It's killing me, that's the truth. Heh heh.”
Viktor did not share my amusement.
“And he can't feel love. I know, revenants are denied love as a price of immortality, but I think it's injuring our Bond, technically. If he were able to love me, he'd wanna sleep with me more often, right? But, not a problem you could fix. Unless you can make me loveable. Er, you can tell that I'm not lying, right?”
The black eyes studied me from under quirked brows, without blinking, for nearly a minute. “No.”
“No, it's not his age? No, you can't make me loveable? Or no, you can't tell that I'm lying?”
Viktor didn't look like he gave a hoot about any of it. Maybe he'd only asked to be polite. “Where is television?”
I let out the breath I hadn't realized I was holding, and led him up into the living room, slightly embarrassed but otherwise relieved. I showed him the remote and how to use it. He turned it to the Food Network and sat. I heard my couch groan and the frame gave a threatening crack. His tongue lashed out and swiped his bottom lip as Gordon Ramsey started dropping f-bombs on a battlefield kitchen full of students hacking up chickens.
“Are you hungry, Viktor?”
His big hand dropped the remote in his lap in what I took to be surprise; his terribly intense black eyes impaled me from across the room. “This is offer?” he clarified thickly.
“I didn't mean … no, not
me
. I have blood.
In bags!
Not in my body. I mean, I do have blood in my body, of course, but I have bagged blood. For you. From Shield. If you drink blood. Do you? Drink?” I swallowed hard. “Blood? You must. I could warm some before I go?”
“I take cold.” He waved me off to fetch it, and I was happy to go. Those eyes had gained a hungry sheen I didn't like one bit.
C
HAPTER
11
NEVER MIND THE SILVER LINING
; every cloud brings a shit-storm, and today was no exception. If I had paused long enough to listen to the late summer storm lumbering in on the air, I would have worn what Harry calls my slicker: a long white raincoat with big black snaps, gingham collar, and a rubber hood with a drawstring. I also might have considered waiting an hour or so for our new cars to be delivered, or called a cab, instead of cramming the spare helmet on and borrowing Harry's Kawasaki. To be fair, the sky gave reasonable warning, I just hadn't paid attention. Not that it stopped me from cussing Mother Nature out long and loud when the clouds tore open twenty minutes into my ride, making visibility a bitch.
By the time I cruised down into Ten Springs to stop at Claire's Early Bird for a coffee to go, I was so truly and completely drenched that I felt like I'd peed my pants. Maybe I had. I was not used to driving the motorcycle, and wasn't used to its heavy, animalistic power. Harry always made handling it look easy. Of course, Harry made everything look effortless.
I could have gone home. No one would be the wiser. I stood at the counter, willing my bare wet knees to stop shaking, heart slamming energetically, causing enough activity in my chest that my lungs forgot what they were supposed to be doing and I had to talk them through it; this is particularly tricky when one isn't breathing. I told myself that scaring my pants off counted as a healthy dose of cardio. Watching Claire doctor my coffee, I figured that terror had burned enough calories that I could afford to order a cherry Danish, too; if I was gonna die by road rash, I could at least go to the grave with sweet
stuff stuck in my molars, assuming they didn't end up embedded in a 4x4’s grill or a guard rail.
My brain wheedled and bribed me to retreat to the cabin, where I could send Mount Viktor home, dry off, and spend a rainy afternoon napping on the couch, or eating brownies and reading some Stephen King short stories as the atmospheric dirge howled around the cabin. It was tempting; avoidance is still my strongest suit.
Then I pictured the faceless Irish OSRA defector charming everyone at the PCU with his lyrical elocution and his magically delicious Lucky Charms, wearing my lab coat and sitting behind my desk, typing on my computer and writing on my grease board. Using my microscope? Feeding my zombie beetles? Intolerable! Made me want to bounce his head off the Blarney Stone. Violent overreaction was also one of my strong suits. No wonder I suck at poker.
I yanked several paper napkins out of the holder on the counter, dried my bare arms and legs, wiped mud off the back of my calves, then tossed the napkins in Claire's garbage can. She inspected me with a flat stare and said nothing. If I didn't already know exactly how much she charged for coffee and a Danish, I'd have had to lean over and read the register tape; Claire was the delightfully non-communicative sort. I handed her a five, told her to keep the change, and heard something I never thought I'd hear.
“Y'all ain't goin’ out in that mess again?” Claire asked.
As if on cue, the sky split; a detonation that rolled over the café, reverberating the plate glass windows, and ending with a moment of ominous silence during which we watched the front window breathlessly. A second crack brought a deluge so ostentatiously intense, it looked like some kind of Vegas casino's penthouse decoration.
I sighed. “I've got to. There's an ogre in my house and some ass-monkey is trying to wheedle my beetles.”
Beneath her frizzy bangs, Claire's eyes narrowed; I thought she felt my pain. I waited for her to tell me to either give up or to go get ’em.
Instead, she pulled a garbage bag out from under the counter and punched a hole in the bottom and slapped it into my hands. I looked at the impromptu rain smock with a grimace; it was the first act of social grace between Claire and I, and I figured if I refused, it might be the last.
“Right.” I pointed hard at the door. “Perseverance. I like the way you think.”
Slipping the bag up, I tugged my head through the hole. Once I put the black motorcycle helmet back on, I looked like the embarrassing sibling Daft Punk never talked about.
Batten
cannot
see me like this
. I saluted to Claire as I left. Kind of. It was probably hard to tell, because both my arms were shrouded inside the bag.
She had already turned around to make a fresh pot of coffee. Probably to serve the ambulance drivers who were going to have to scrape me out from beneath a Winnebago, I'm sure.
* * *
The FBI's Preternatural Crimes Unit had been relocated from the J. Edgar Hoover building in Quantico, Virginia to its new home Boulder in January. I could only imagine some of the protestations made over the timing. I didn't even like bringing in groceries when it was chilly; the thought of moving an entire office in the middle of winter made me break out in gales of disbelieving laughter. It now resided in an underutilized substation in an industrial crescent. I pulled into the rear lot, sparsely inhabited by tell-tale black SUVs and utility vans, and parked next to Agent de Cabrera's chained-up mountain bike — a serious, hardcore machine that made me think he didn't
do
cars. Yanking off the Hefty bag, I shoved it in the garbage can outside the building.
According to what Chapel had told me, the new PCU building was a giant step up from the bunker they'd been relegated to in the Hoover building at Quantico. In the new PCU branch, they had their own armory, a fully equipped lab and, down in the basement, a gym, locker room, and shooting range. Batten had threatened to teach me how to handle my Beretta Cougar properly. Probably I wanted him to handle some other things. Probably we both had a death wish.
I accepted the fact that the junior agent who stopped me at the front desk because I wasn't wearing my little clip-on ID tag almost certainly wasn't a ginormous putz; while he was calling up to see if
Chapel was available, I tried not to make impatient noises. So this junior agent didn't recognize me, so what? Last time he'd seen me, I'd been a giant squirrel.