“Nice fire.”
A low snarl was all he could manage.
“Knyaz.” The moment he reached the door, a wide-eyed soldier fell to his knees and bowed his head. “Knyaz.”
The murmur followed Oleg as he walked through the warehouse.
“Knyaz.”
“My lord.”
“Tsar Oleg.”
“Kral Oleg.”
“Velikii Knyaz.”
Bowed heads and men on their knees surrounded Oleg as he walked through Ivan’s soldiers. The charred bodies of theKazakhs were mostly outside the factory, but a few headless corpses lay bleeding on the concrete among pallets of what were definitely not chemicals, and two humans were huddled in a corner, bleeding from wounds and watching Oleg with abject terror.
Ivan was standing over one open crate, lifting a white bag of what smelled like heroine in the air. “I knew they were shortchanging me! Moving volume like this, they should have been paying me twice as much.”
Twice as much money.
Oleg had no regrets about killing the clan of vampires who were smuggling drugs into Moscow, but the fact that Ivan was celebrating this and clearly intended to take the drugs for himself to distribute made Oleg’s shoulders start to smoke again.
“Give me the word,” Ludmila whispered, “and it is done.”
Oleg’s face was impassive as he called to his brother. “Ivan, get your people out.”
Ivan frowned. “Why?”
“I’m going to burn all this.” He gestured to the humans still alive. “Leave them. Let them go back to their clan and tell them that no one steals from the Kievan Rus.”
“But…” Ivan wanted to protest. In fact, he nearly started toward Oleg, but then he looked around, saw his men on their knees, surrounding their knyaz. “Good. Excellent. A warning to the entire immortal world.”
The tall vampire Ivan had called Yury nodded sharply. “A wise statement, my Lord Oleg.” He whistled, pointed toward the door, and the kneeling men started to move. Then he walked over to the corner and took control of the two shaking humans. He grabbed them and pointed them toward the door with the tip of his sword.
“Out, all of you!” Oleg shouted, his eyes flashing at Ivan, then at the few lingering vampires who looked tempted by the drug-laden crates. “It’s all going to burn.”
He stood alonein a field of black, his hand sticky with dried blood as he clutched his axe in one hand and held a ball of blue fire in the other.
He turned in the ward of Truvor’s largest kremlin, the massive wooden fort his sire had constructed at the junction of two rivers where his immortal sons struck out, gathering riches and wealth from the Black Sea to the Baltic to offer as tribute to their sire.
Oleg lifted his legs as he turned, the blood-soaked mud sucking at his feet and pulling him down into the rotting gore of seven nights of brutal fighting.
“Send the next!” he roared to the vampires watching from the towers.
He had spent a week killing his challengers, burning and slashing and gutting the vampires who wanted to take Truvor’s place, then hiding in the forest during daylight, terrified that one of his sire’s thralls might take their own revenge.
The blood of Oleg’s brothers whispered from the ground, cursing him and shaming him for spilling it. Their screams and their laughter echoed in his mind.
Dozens were dead at his hand, and every death was a cut to his own body. Ash, blood, and earth mixed with the cold grey water falling from the sky.
“Send the next!” he roared again.
Lazlo—his oldest brother—emerged from behind the high wooden keep and took three steps forward with his axe raised.
Oleg’s chest felt like it would break open, but he gripped his weapon even harder.
