James Rollins - Innocent Blood

Tommy accepted the rapier, knowing that if he touched Alyosha’s bare hand, he would find it as cold as the ice crusting the ship’s rail.

Alyosha was an undying creature called a strigoi .

Immortal, like Tommy, but also very different from himself.

Shortly after Tommy’s kidnapping, Alyosha had pressed Tommy’s hand to his cold chest, revealing the creature’s lack of a heartbeat. He had shown Tommy his fangs, how his canine teeth could push into and out of his gums at will. But the biggest difference between them was that Alyosha fed on human blood.

Tommy was nothing like him.

He still ate regular food, still had a heartbeat, still had his same teeth.

So what am I?

It seemed even his captor — Alyosha’s master — didn’t know. Or at least, never shared this knowledge.

Alyosha clouted him on the head with the hilt of his rapier to gain his attention. “You must attend to what I am saying. We must practice.”

Tommy followed him out onto the makeshift fencing strip on the ship’s deck and took his position.

“No!” his competitor scolded. “Widen your stance! And keep the rapier up to cover yourself.”

Alyosha, apparently bored on the giant ship, was teaching him the manners of a Russian nobleman. Besides these fencing lessons, the boy taught him a lot of terms for horses, horse tack, and cavalry formations.

Tommy understood the other’s obsession. He had been told Alyosha’s real name: Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov. In the library, he had found a text on Russian history, discovered more about this “boy.” A hundred years ago he had been the son of Czar Nicholas II, a royal prince of the Russian Empire. As a kid, Alyosha had suffered from hemophilia, and according to the book, only one person could relieve him of his painful bouts of internal bleeding, the same man who would eventually become his master, turning the prince into a monster.

He pictured Alyosha’s master, with his thick beard and dark face, hidden elsewhere aboard the ship, like a black spider in a web. He was known in the early 1900s as the Mad Monk of Russia, but his real name was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. The history texts detailed how the monk had made friends with the Romanovs, becoming an invaluable counselor to the czar. But other sections hinted at Rasputin’s sexual weirdness and political intrigues, which eventually led to an assassination attempt by a group of nobles.

The monk had been poisoned, shot in the head, beaten with a club, and dumped in a frozen river — only to come back up sputtering, still alive. The books said he eventually drowned in that river, but Tommy knew the truth.

It wasn’t so easy to kill a monster.

Like the boy-prince, Rasputin was a strigoi .

Quick as a cobra strike, Alyosha lunged across the fencing strip, feinting right, then moving left, almost too fast to see. The tip of his rapier landed in the center of Tommy’s chest, the point poking through his parka and piercing his skin. These were not practice swords with blunted ends. Tommy knew Alyosha could have skewered his heart if he had wanted to.

Not that it would have killed Tommy.

It would have hurt, likely left him bedridden and weak for a day or two, but he would have healed, cursed as he was atop Masada with an immortal life.

Alyosha smiled and stepped back, sweeping his rapier with a triumphant wave. He was close to Tommy’s height, with wiry arms and legs. But he was far stronger and faster.

Tommy’s curse offered him no such advantages of strength and speed.

Still, he did his best to parry the next few attacks. They danced back and forth along the fencing strip. Tommy quickly grew exhausted, sapped by the cold.

As they paused for a breath, a loud crack drew Tommy’s attention past the starboard rail. The deck canted underfoot. The bow of the ship rose slightly, then crashed down onto thick plates of ice. Its giant engines ground the ship forward, continuing its slow passage through the Arctic sea.

He watched great sheets of ice shear away and scrape along the hull and wondered what would happen if he jumped.

Would I die?

Fear kept him from testing it. While he might not be able to die, he could suffer. He’d wait for a better chance.

Alyosha burst forward and slapped him across the cheek with his sword.

The sting reminded him that life was pain.

“Enough!” Alyosha demanded. “Keep alert, my friend!”

Friend …

Tommy wanted to scoff at such a label, but he kept silent. He knew in some ways this young prince was lonely, enjoying the companionship, even if forced, of another kid.

Still, Tommy wasn’t fooled.

Alyosha was no boy.

So he returned to a defensive stance at his end of the strip. That was his only option for now. He would bide his time, learn what he could, and keep himself fit.

Until he could escape.

The hunter had become the hunted.

Elizabeth sensed the pack trailing her across the dark narrow streets and alleys, growing ever larger in her wake. For now, they remained back, perhaps wanting strength in numbers. These were no human curs, no brigands or thieves seeking the soft target of a lone woman on these predawn streets. They were strigoi, like her.

Had she intruded upon their hunting grounds? Broken some rule of etiquette in her feeding? This age held many pitfalls for her.

She glanced to the east, sensing the winter sun was close to rising. Fear trickled through her. She wanted to return to her loft, to escape the burning day, but she dared not lead this pack to her home.

So, as the day threatened, she continued down a narrow street, her shoulder close to the cold stucco wall, ancient cobblestones uneven under the soles of her boots.

The hours before the dawn had grown to be her favorite in this modern city. At this early time, the growling automobiles fell mostly silent, their breath no longer fouling the air. She took care to study the men and women of the night, recognizing how, in many ways, little had changed from her century, easily spotting harlots, gamblers, and thieves.

She understood the night — and she had thought she owned it alone.

Until this morning.

In the corners of her eyes, shadowy wraiths shifted. They numbered more than a dozen, she knew, but how many more she could not say. Without heartbeats or breaths, she could not be confident until they were upon her.

Which would not be long.

The beasts circled, drawing their net ever tighter.

It seemed they believed that she had not marked them. She allowed them this belief. Deception might yet save her, as it had so often in the past. She drew them onward, toward her own choice of battleground.

Her destination was far. Fearing they might attack before she reached it, she quickened her steps, but only a little, for she did not want them to know that she had sensed their presence.

She needed an open area. Trapped in these narrow alleys, it was too easy for the pack to fall upon her, to overwhelm her.

At last, her boots drew her toward the Pantheon at the Piazza della Rotonda. The square was the closest patch of free ground. The gray light of the pearling sun lightened the shadows on the Pantheon’s rounded dome. The open eye of the oculum on top waited for the new day, blind in the dark.

Not like her. Not like them.

The Pantheon was once the home of many gods, but it was now a Catholic Church dedicated to only one . She avoided that sanctuary. The holy ground inside would weaken her — likewise those that hunted her — but after being reborn to this new strength, she refused to forsake it.