Innocent Blood(25)

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.