Wildblood

Chapter 40

40

They dumped Zverev in the storage closet next to the office. Kai goaded Connor the entire way, quipping at him for skipping leg day. While Kai preferred more organic methods of staying in shape to the tedium of weightlifting, Connor was a zealous subscriber to the bench press.

“Sorry I’m not…a goddamn…werewolf…” Connor panted once they’d dropped off their cargo, a vein still popping in his rouged neck.

“I’m not a werewolf,” Kai deadpanned. “Don’t blame my genes for your aversion to deadlifts.”

“Hey! I do squats!”

“I know a five-foot-six white-haired murder queen who could squat three of you.”

Connor shoved the cable wire back into the kitchen nook with the rest of his tools. They’d restrained Zverev’s arms and legs, though Connor was displeased with Kai for foisting a bad crime plot on his precious establishment. “What now?”

“I asked Carol to take Caelan home.” Kai splashed water on his face in the employee bathroom. The faucet squeaked off, and he ripped free a piece of paper towel to pat his face dry. It came away bloody. “Now that we’ve got that asshole tied up, we can chat.”

“In the damn storage closet?” Connor balked.

Kai rolled his eyes. “Close up for the day. We’ll want the place to ourselves.”

Swearing to the saints, Connor did as he was told, stomping off to flip the sign in the window. Then, they dragged Zverev into the office and locked the door. He looked pretty messed up, the side of his face that’d met Kai’s elbow swelling under a mural of dark purple. Not that Kai looked too hot either. His jaw felt like pulverized meat, but he’d nabbed a bag of frozen peas from the walk-in freezer to nurse his wounds. The cold stung, but it wasn’t as bad as the ache in his teeth and the tenderness under his eye. He’d glimpsed a blotch of red around his iris in the mirror—a nasty hemorrhage from the punch he’d stopped with his face. His ribs would need more than frozen vegetables, but Connor wasn’t in the business of peddling codeine.

The office was a bland affair—small, cramped, and in desperate need of some color. The room reminded Kai of two closets stitched together. A modest desk, a decade-old laptop, a cork board covered in flyers, and a few shelves stuffed with records, accounting folders, and packs of unopened napkins. Kai leaned against an olive-green filing cabinet near the door, his battered body half-obscured in shadow. The dim glow of the overhead light barely reached him. Connor lurked by the adjacent wall, ready to pounce if needed, though he glanced nervously between the two men. He knew about Kai’s unique abilities, that he was something between human and fable. More than likely, he’d surmised that Zverev was another such monster.

“What were you doing at the park?” Kai asked when the behemoth stirred. He tossed the peas atop the filing cabinet, his skin prickling from the chill.

Still rousing from his nap, Zverev weakly tested his restraints. He was slumped against the wall, chin lolling across his chest. His eyes fluttered open, then rose to meet Kai’s. Bruised lips skinned back to reveal teeth caked in red. “Look at you. Only a heartbeat from collapsing.”

Kai ignored the jibe. Sure, he felt a little ragged after their dumpster duel, but he wasn’t fucked up enough to black out like a college freshman during frosh week. “Answer the question.”

“I knew what I was looking for,” Vanya slurred, rolling his neck with a grimace.

“Don’t get cryptic with me,” Kai warned, “or I’ll slam Connor’s favorite kettlebell into the side of your skull.”

Zverev choked out a laugh—a painful sound. “You truly are an animal. No regard for the rules of engagement, for dignity or pride. Only survival.”

Kai stepped out of the murk, his eyes a scarlet portent as he bore into the man opposite from him. “You said I’d always lose when it matters, but you don’t get to decide what matters, cous .” He bent over to pick up Connor’s kettlebell—thirty pounds of pure steel. Adjusting his grip, he gave it a cursory swing as he ambled a few paces closer. “I won’t ask again. What were you doing in Boston Common?”

Connor made himself a wallflower, though he watched Kai’s every move. He was no rookie to the underworld, but Kai was towing a delicate line. The Confessional was neutral ground; turf wars and vendettas were strictly forbidden, but Zverev violated the pact when he attacked Kai in the pub’s alleyway. Dragging Zverev’s unconscious ass into the bar was a faux pas, but letting him go without answers would’ve been worse than breaking etiquette. It would’ve been stupid. And Kai wasn’t about to risk Caelan’s life to stand on ceremony.

Zverev sighed, averting his gaze. “Pyotr told me the forgery was someone who looked like his adoptive daughter, Alina. That’s who I was looking for. Alina disappeared from school today, so Pyotr had me track her down. He knew I’d find her faster than his best men.” He turned back to Kai with a bloodied smile. “I’m sure you understand why.”

Kai tightened his hold on the kettlebell. Of course he knew why. Zverev was like him—heightened senses, inhuman healing, freakish speed and strength. “The people who kidnapped the forgery?—”

“Thought she was Alina. Or a twin separated at birth, raised in a different household.” He shrugged. “They were amateurs. Had no idea who they’d taken or that they were handing the girl over to her death.”

“You caught up to Pyotr’s kid and saw two of her in the field,” Kai realized.

Zverev cast Kai a weighty look. “I was surprised to find a whole storybook’s worth of creatures.”

Kai ignored the meaning woven into that stare, his attention shifting to Connor. He looked uncomfortable—a man pincered between two beasts. The barkeep gave a slight nod of reassurance. Permission to continue.

Exhaling through his nose, Kai wondered if Alina and Caelan were actually long-lost twins. It felt too simple. Too clean. Pyotr called her the forgery for a reason, and everything about Caelan screamed dreamscapes and ethereal devilry. Miya’s world—one that terrified him. Kai hated what he couldn’t grasp with his own hands. “Why does your boss want the forgery dead?”

Zverev snorted. “I have no damn clue. Clearly, the man thinks this look-alike is a threat to his daughter.”

“That makes no sense,” Kai growled. “Wouldn’t a look-alike be an asset? The perfect decoy?”

Silence. Then, from the wall, “She’s a fetch.”

Two pairs of otherworldly eyes swung to Connor. Kai frowned. “A what?”

“You said there were two of her, and Pyotr thinks this forgery ”—Connor emphasized the word—“is putting his daughter in danger. She’s a goddamn fetch—a doppelganger.”

Zverev scoffed, squirming against his bonds. He winced as the wire dug into his wrists. “Bullshit.”

Kai ignored his bellyaching. “If you see your double, it’s an omen of your death, yeah?”

Connor nodded. “That’s the folklore. They kill and replace you. The Irish call them fetches, but they’re pretty much like doppelgangers. Didn’t think Pyotr was the superstitious type, though.”

“He clearly believes in this asshole.” Kai gestured toward Zverev. “Why not a doppelganger or a fetch?”

Zverev laughed sharply. “Pyotr and I are from the same culture.” He tipped his chin up at Kai. “It’s your culture too, though you’ve lost your roots. Diaspora will do that.” His eyes slid to Connor. “We speak the same language—share an understanding of the world. Pyotr has grounds to believe in me, but a fetch ?”

“You said his kid’s adopted,” Kai interjected. “I take it she’s not Russian.”

Zverev hesitated. “No, she’s not. Alina’s name may be Slavic, but she’s all Celt. Pyotr had her tested.”

“Then you have no idea what she has access to, or what has access to her.” Kai ran a thumb over his scraped knuckles, something wild and desolate twisting in his middle. Everyone inherited an invisible blueprint from those who came before. A ghost that contoured the world to fit the shape of the past. “My childhood’s a blur, but there are…pieces. Things that stay with you like a reflex. I knew what a domovoy was—could explain it when I had to. You don’t lose culture. It just changes. Imprints differently.”

“What’re you saying?” Ivan Zverev asked.

“I’m saying that you have no clue what Alina brought with her when your shitty boss adopted her. Sure, he’s got his book of Baba Yagas, but maybe he realized his daughter brought her own grimoire into the family. One he didn’t recognize.” Kai launched himself into an anxious pace, prowling the office from wall to wall. Connor tracked his agitated strides as though he were a trundling grenade with its pin gone astray.

If Caelan was a fetch, then she wasn’t the one being haunted. She was the one doing the haunting. She was the specter who’d emerged from the dreamscape to prey on the living. Alina—Pyotr’s daughter—was the hunted.

The call Caelan kept referring to—it came from Alina.

Caelan’s garbled resistance made sense now. She didn’t want to kill her human counterpart, but the leshy was trying to force her. He amplified the nature in things, and the fetch’s was to seek out and destroy its human double. Being around the leshy only intensified the call and Caelan’s impulse to answer it.

Kai ceased his pacing, grinding his molars despite the pain shooting through his jaw. Caelan had never wanted to leave the dreamscape. She was pulled out, and yet, Alina was just a girl with an overprotective crime boss for a father. Neither of them wanted this.

Why, then, had Caelan been drawn from the dreamscape in the first place? The answer awaited in an otherworld that terrified Kai, and with a girl on a collision course with death.