Lazlo waved a hand carelessly. “She told me I could call her that.”
Of course she did.
Underground explosions came in a series of low-pitched booms as the ground started collapsing in from the ruined plant. In the distance, the sky filled with billowing dust clouds lit by the blue security lights of the crumpling perimeter fence.
“Can you imagine?” Lazlo’s hands framed the glowing destruction. “A royal wedding in the Kievan Rus. There has not been one for centuries.”
“No, and there’s a reason for that.” The last royal wedding had been between him and Luana, and Lazlo was correct. It had been a spectacle.
“Weddings bring people together!” Lazlo said. “They give everyone something to celebrate. And if you do it during the winter, that gives you an excuse for a chaugan match or two.”
Oleg frowned a little bit. “We haven’t played chaugan with all the brothers in a long time.”
“Decades maybe?” Lazlo blew the dust from his nose. “Also, you give very good wedding gifts. I still have that gold drinking goblet.”
“You’re welcome.”
“It lost one of the onyx stones though. I should get it repaired.” Lazlo turned and crossed his arms over his barrel chest, staring at the growing destruction he’d wrought from underground. “This is fun, but do you think we should just kill Ivan? We probably should. It would be quicker.”
“I’m not going to kill another brother,” Oleg said. “I’ll take care of Ivan, but he does not need to die.”Probably.
“You could hire someone.” Lazlo smirked. “It’s not like you haven’t done that before.”
“Assassinate the bastard so he becomes a folk hero among his own men?” Oleg turned and started walking away. “Fuck no. We don’t need another monster being idealized by the young ones. Ivan’s already created his little cult of Truvor in Moscow. We don’t need to add to it.”
Still, Lazlo did have one good point.
Weddingsdidgive people a reason to come together.
Hmm.
Early 1700s
Oleg sat in a Siberian tavern,watching the stinking humans carouse around him. The vampires he was meeting had set the location, so perhaps they enjoyed chaos.
Oleg did not.
He felt the pull of fire in his blood, and the urge to rise, grab the flames from the old hearth, and push them over the dirty human tavern was nearly overwhelming.
This anger lived in him, and it was growing. Every night he was forced to watch the fights. Every night he watched more of his brothers die uselessly.
They were garbage to his sire, humans and immortals captured at his whim, then tossed into rings at night or let loose in a forest for the amusement of the hunt.
Rage burned at the back of his throat as surely as fire itched under his fingertips.
He had belonged to Truvor the Red for over seven hundred years. Seven hundred years of pain and misery and rage. Oleg felt as if his entire body were covered in the blood of innocents.
“Angry.” She slid onto the bench across from him. “You are very angry, Varangian.”
No one had called him that in years. Most of the world had forgotten the northern people he came from. The language he had been born speaking had morphed into different tongues so that the only ones who remembered the words in his dreams were a few of his brothers.
And Truvor the Red.
The assassin was as he remembered her. A tiny, grey-eyed Khazar from the Eastern Steppes, her fangs curling perpetually in her mouth.
Unlike Oleg and most immortals, this one did nothing to hide what she was.
She belonged to the wind; he knew that. She belonged to a warlord sire, had been the commander of his troops for centuries. That much they had in common.
