(sound of heartbeat)
It slammed against him like the memory of drowning.
Not his own—his chest lay still, the old, familiar non-motion that had defined his existence for so long. No, this heartbeat came from *above*. From *outside*. Thudding fast, too fast, like a frightened bird against glass.
A scent followed, riding the thin ribbon of cold air that seeped into the stone: warm and layered. Sweat, wool, something sweet—fruit on the edge of going bad in a bowl on a windowsill. Under all that, the sharp, metallic tang that filled every one of his selves.
Blood.
The thought came hazy at first, as if surfacing through tar. *Blood.* The word itself felt ancient in his mouth, older than the slogans, older than the languages he’d learned to pass among mortals.
He did not move.
He could not.
It had been so long since movement mattered.
For a while—for what felt like a long while—he had dreamed in fragments, at the edge of nothing. Sometimes he had been a boy, chasing a dog through snow higher than his knees. Sometimes he had been a man, kneeling in mud, hands buried in a stranger’s chest, not sure if he was trying to save a life or take it. Sometimes he had been that new thing in between, waking on a stone bench with blood between his teeth and the certainty that if he did not drink again soon, he would die in a way that mattered.
Between those flashes, there had been a vast, grey nothing.
He had sunk into that nothing and expected to stay there, because that was what he had asked for. Sleep until fire burned itself out. Wake when the world was no longer trying so hard to kill him.
Now, something had pulled him up.
The first sensation had been pressure behind his eyes, hot and prickling, as if someone had lit a candle directly against his skull. Then weight returned to his limbs, the awareness of his own body, the way his fingers lay curled against wool and stone.
Breath—again, not his—washed over his face, warm and quick.
The void cracked.
He dragged in his first actual breath in a century.
It felt like inhaling knives.
Cold air scraped down a throat that had not been used in far too long, tore through lungs that had forgotten what expansion felt like. His chest spasmed, surprised by the motion, old reflexes stumbling into new reality. He coughed once, a harsh, broken sound.
Light stabbed at his eyelids. He squeezed them shut against the assault, then, slowly, forced them open.
The world resolved into one shape.
A face leaned over the edge of his stone cradle, hovering in the cold air. Not Elizaveta’s. Not Lev’s. Not their maker’s.
A stranger.
Her skin was a rich, deep brown, with a faint sheen of sweat across the upper lip. A scarf wrapped around her hair in a messy knot, tendrils escaping. Her eyes were wide, dark, and *alive* in a way that hurt to look at directly.
His mind, still thick with the draught’s residue, tried to sort the details into categories that made sense. Her clothes—trousers, on a woman. Monochrome. Strange cut. No corset. A jacket of some synthetic material that whispered when she moved. Gloves that were not leather.
Her smell, much closer now, overwhelmed his attempt at visual cataloguing.
He sucked in another breath, less ragged. The air carried the scent straight to the oldest part of him.
Blood. Hot, pumping, right there, a thin layer of skin away.
The hunger erupted.
It was not subtle. It did not ask permission from all the careful habits he had built over decades: patience, choice, restraint. It roared up from somewhere below his spine, an animal that had been caged and lulled and starved and told to sleep and now found the door open.
His gums ached. His jaw tightened. He felt the old, instinctive sharpening just under the surface of his mouth, the lengthening of teeth that had no business changing shape anymore.
“*Elizaveta?*” The name tore out of him without consent, half hope, half accusation.
The woman jerked back slightly, her eyes snapping even wider, if that were possible. Her heartbeat stuttered, jumped, rose. He could hear it now, distinct, like a drum in a distant room whose music he knew by heart.
“Um,” she said, in Russian. Not the Russian he had learned. The vowels were… flatter. Some consonants softened to ghosts. But he understood. Mostly. “No. Not… Elizaveta. I’m—”
He did not catch the name that followed. His attention snagged on the word *no* and on the absence in the air.
Because along with the flood of scents—dust, stone, old incense, cold iron, this woman’s sweat and soap and blood—there was a lack.
No hint of Elizaveta’s perfume, the old, subtle floral oil she had favored even as fashions changed. None of Lev’s cigar smoke and leather. None of their maker’s distinctive, impossibly old musk.
Silence, where those notes should have been.
He tried to sit up, because he had always been the kind of creature who responded to lack with action.
His muscles did not agree at first. They twitched, heavy. Nerves fired in odd staccato bursts. He felt as if he’d been lying in one position for a very, very long time—which, of course, he had.
He planted his palms against the sides of the hollow and pushed.
Stone rasped under his palms.
Beside him, or above him—it was hard to tell, perspective still skewed—the woman made a sound that was almost comically small, a swallowed squeak. Her boots scraped against stone as she scrambled back another few centimeters.
“Careful,” she said. “You’ve—uh. You’ve been… lying down… for a while. You might be… dizzy.”
Her Russian was good but not native. There was a rhythm under it, a different music, probably the one she had learned first. He wanted, bizarrely, to know what that music sounded like when she wasn’t trying to wrap it in his.
He managed to get one elbow under him, levering his torso up a little. His vision swam, black creeping in from the edges. He blinked hard, gritted his teeth, and pushed again.
His body remembered, slowly, what upright felt like.
The hunger surged with the change in angle. The smell of her—*her*—swept over him in all its maddening, textured clarity.
He heard the soft rasp of fabric as she took another involuntary step back.
“Who are you?” he rasped.
The words sounded wrong in his mouth. Old syntax. Old vowels. He heard the difference as soon as he spoke, the way his consonants sat too hard in his mouth.
She understood anyway. Her brow furrowed—a quick, neat line between her eyes.
“My name is Mira,” she said. She enunciated carefully, as if talking to someone who might not follow. “Mira… Okonkwo.” She hesitated over the last name, then added, almost apologetically, “I’m… not from here.”
He tasted the name. *Mira*. A little like *mir*—peace, or world, depending on which language you meant. A bitter private joke, perhaps.
He grasped for context. “What… year is it?”
She blinked. The question seemed to throw her more than his mere moving had, which was interesting.
“Twenty twenty-six,” she said slowly. “Two thousand twenty-six. October.”
For a second, the words were unfamiliar noise. Then the arithmetic slammed home.
He had gone into the stone in 1923.
He had told himself—Elizaveta had told him—it might be a few years. Ten. Perhaps twenty, if the factions took a long time to kill each other. Enough time for dust to settle. For people to forget names.
He had not prepared for—
“*Sto tri goda,*” he whispered. One hundred and three years.
The number hung in the air between them, absurd and heavy.
Mira wet her lower lip. He tracked the motion with his gaze before he could stop himself. The thin skin there looked particularly fragile.
“You were… asleep,” she said, choosing words with care. “A very long time.”
He forced his eyes away from her mouth and up to her eyes. They steadied him. There was fear there, yes—anyone with sense would be afraid in her place—but also something else. Appraisal. Curiosity.
He clung to that.
“Elizaveta,” he said again. The name felt like a rope. “Lev. My maker. Are they…?”
He couldn’t finish. He had been about to say alive, but the word meant so many things now.
Mira’s gaze flickered, telling him enough before she spoke.
“I don’t know those names,” she said. “I can… look. But… this house? Your family?” She hesitated. “I’ve been researching. For my work. There are records. Some. It’s… not good.”
His phantom heart sank, if such a thing could be said to move.
He had known, intellectually, that a century would change things. Revolutions ate. Wars ate. Regimes changed flags and anthems and currencies. Yet some stubborn, childish part of him had clung to the idea that if he went to sleep with his world arranged in a certain pattern, he might wake and find the pattern still faintly visible, like old writing under fresher ink.
“It was never good,” he said, harsher than he intended. He tried to sit further, to get his shoulders fully off the stone. The effort sent a wave of weakness through him that made his hands tremble.
Mira noticed. The small line between her eyebrows deepened.
“You need to… take it slow,” she said. “You’ve been… in there. For over a century. Your… muscles. Joints.” She flapped one hand, searching for anatomy words. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
He almost laughed. “I have… hurt myself… in worse ways.”
The Russian word for “hurt” he used was archaic. She caught the meaning, though. Her mouth did a quick, involuntary twitch that might, in another context, have grown into a smile.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I’d feel bad if you fell over and cracked like old plaster five minutes after I woke you up.”
“You woke me,” he said slowly.
The thought did something strange to his sense of orientation. He had gone into the stone assuming one of two possibilities. Either he would wake to Elizaveta’s face, smug and triumphant and so very alive, saying, *I told you we’d outlast them*, or he would not wake at all.
He had not considered the third option: waking to a stranger in a century that used numbers like 2026 without choking on them.
Mira shifted her weight, boots scuffing against stone. “I… didn’t mean to,” she said. “Or— I mean, I didn’t *know* you were there. I thought this was a storage chamber. The slab looked… suspicious. I thought maybe smuggling, or documents. Not…”
She gestured helplessly toward him.
“…you.”
He studied her for a beat, letting his lungs drag in and out in slow, unnecessary breaths. The hunger coursed along his bones, impatient. It did not care how many years had passed or who this woman was. It cared that she was close, that she was warm, that there was so much blood moving inside her it made the air vibrate.
He had spent decades training that hunger, giving it rules. Only those who agreed. Only those who would not be missed. Only as much as needed, never so much that they did not wake.
He had not had to enforce those rules in a very long time.
Now, they felt brittle.
“I need…” His voice cracked. He swallowed. “Water.”
Mira blinked, as if the request had startled her. Then the practical part of her brain clearly snapped back online.
“Right,” she said. “Water. Yes. That’s… step one.”
She backed away from the slab, moving more quickly now that she had a task. At the threshold of the small chamber she paused, glanced over her shoulder.
“Don’t… try to climb out yet,” she said. “If you fall, I can’t drag you up alone. I’m… not that strong.”
He almost smiled at the idea of this slim, intense stranger gamely trying to haul his dead weight up onto the crypt floor.
“I will… wait,” he said.
It wasn’t entirely voluntary. His limbs simply refused to cooperate with any more ambitious plan.
Mira nodded, once, briskly. “Good.”
Then she vanished around the archway, her footsteps receding quickly down the crypt corridor. Her scent lingered, maddening.
Aleksandr lay back, staring up at the low stone ceiling, and tried to breathe through the hunger.
The draught had dulled more than his awareness of time, it seemed. It had also wrapped his oldest instincts in a thick layer of cotton. Now, as it wore off, those instincts were returning all at once.
He remembered the first nights after his making. The confusion. The way every sound had been too loud, every smell a physical thing. The way the sight of any exposed skin—wrist, throat—had made his jaw ache.
This was worse.
Decades of self-control did not eliminate hunger. They just taught it tricks. Operant conditioning, Lev had called it once, laughing, too pleased that his years in European universities had given him jargon to describe what they already knew in their bones.
“Sit, heel, don’t kill,” Lev had said, tapping Aleksandr’s forehead. “Our very own well-trained beast.”
The beast inside Aleksandr had listened then, begrudgingly. It had learned to wait. To take blood from those who offered it as a gift, a bargain, a shared pleasure. To see humans as more than cattle.
Now, it raged.
He was aware, distantly, that this was not entirely about physical need. A century with no blood, no movement, no sound—it was a kind of starvation beyond simple thirst. Now that the dam had cracked, everything wanted to flood in at once.
He closed his eyes, forcing himself to think.
Twenty twenty-six. One hundred and three years. The words felt… not real. He tested them against the anchor points in his memory.
1923: the year he had gone into the crypt. Lenin still alive. The civil war grinding on, a messy, bloody echo of the world war that had killed his human life. Men in leather coats and peaked caps, drunk on power. His family names scraped off doors. Portraits burned. Property seized.
Had the Bolsheviks won? Had they lost? Were there still red banners hanging in the streets overhead, now faded to pink?
“Of course they lost,” he muttered. “Everyone loses eventually.”
His voice sounded a little stronger. The act of speaking tethered him to the present, kept him from drifting too far into memory.
He thought of all the things that could have happened in a hundred years.
Another war. Or several. New regimes. Old regimes returning with new names. Borders drawn and redrawn. The city changing shape around the hill. Perhaps the estate itself had been swallowed by apartment blocks, by factories, by whatever this new century thought of as progress.
He thought of Elizaveta’s promise.
*When you wake, this will be over. We will be somewhere stupid and beautiful and very far from here…*
He was very clearly *not* somewhere stupid and beautiful and far from here. He was under his family crypt. His last clear memory before sleep was the sound of men forcing the outer door.
Had they found Elizaveta? Had she escaped? Had she kept her word? Had she tried and failed? Had she died?
The idea of her truly gone—scattered ash, unbound by blood—made something in him flinch away. Vampires did not simply… fail to wake. They either chose the sun or it chose them. Or someone made that choice for them with fire and stakes and as much screaming as they could extract.
He did not know which fate was worse for her. He had not been there. He had chosen not to be there.
Guilt, old and thick, rose like bile.
He swallowed it.
Mira’s footsteps echoed in the corridor again, lighter this time, hurrying. He opened his eyes as she appeared in the archway, flashlight beam cutting a clean path through the dim.
She carried a plastic bottle.
The material itself, the look of it, jarred him more than the electricity had. It was so obviously… *contemporary.* A strange, translucent thing with a crinkled label and a screw-top lid. The text on the label—bright colors, simplified fonts he did not recognize—shouted in a register his eyes instinctively labeled as advertisement even before he could parse the words.
She unscrewed the cap with practiced ease and knelt at the edge of the opening, leaning over him cautiously.
“I’m going to… help you sit up a little,” she said. “Okay?”
He nodded. The effort cost him less than before. He drew his knees up a fraction, braced his heels against the lower end of the hollow, and pushed as she hooked one arm under his shoulders.
The contact was a shock.
He had not been *touched* in… he didn’t know how long. The memory of hands on his skin had faded with everything else. Now, Mira’s arm, firm through the layers of her jacket, pressed against his back. Her gloved fingers hooked over his upper arm. Heat bled through the cloth.
He gritted his teeth and let her help him, his pride a small, ridiculous thing compared to the sheer physical challenge of getting upright.
They managed an approximation of sitting. His back thudded against the stone wall of the hollow. His head swam; the ceiling seemed to tilt. Her face hovered uncomfortably close, breath warm on his cheek.
“Okay,” she said again, quieter. “Here.”
She held the bottle to his lips, tilting it carefully.
The smell of the water—chlorinated, faintly chemical, utterly foreign to his memory of well water and melted snow—hit him a second before the cool liquid touched his mouth.
He opened his lips, let it in.
It tasted… strange. Thin. Like the memory of water translated through a different language. But his throat convulsed gratefully, swallowing. The sensation of liquid sliding down, splashing into an emptiness that had not known moisture in a century, was almost obscene.
He drank greedily, ignoring her little warning sound, until she pulled the bottle back.
“Not too much,” she chided gently. “You might— I don’t even know if you can throw up, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
He frowned slightly at the unfamiliar term. “Throw… up?”
She made a quick, flailing gesture with her free hand, then seemed to regret the line of conversation. “Never mind. Slow.”
He nodded, licking a droplet from his lower lip. The simple act made her eyes flicker to his mouth. He saw the movement, catalogued it automatically.
The water took the worst, sharpest edge off the dryness in his throat. It did nothing for the deeper thirst.
His fangs—no point in lying to himself—itched, pressing subtly against his gums. He clenched his jaw against the impulse to let them slide free. In his weakened state, he doubted he could overpower even a human woman—but hunger made creativity vicious.
“Thank you,” he said roughly.
She exhaled a breath she might not have realized she’d been holding. “You’re… welcome.”
“You should not be here,” he added.
Something flashed across her face then—irritation, quickly masked. “You’re not the first man to tell me that,” she said. “It hasn’t worked out for any of them.”
“I am not… *a* man,” he said. It came out more defensively than he intended.
Her gaze sharpened. “What are you?”
He hesitated.
Once, that question would have been laughable. The people who had known him in the years after his turning had not needed to ask. They had either been his kin in the blood and known immediately, or they had been prey and never had the opportunity to form the question.
Now, staring at Mira’s determined face, the faint smudge of dust along her jaw where she must have brushed against some wall, he realized information might be his only currency.
“I was born… human,” he said, carefully. “I died… in the war. I woke… something else.”
She studied him, lips parted.
“You’re saying you’re…” She groped for a word. Her mouth shaped it reluctantly. “…vampire?”
The modern pronunciation sat oddly in the air. In his youth, they had used other words: *upyr*, *nosferatu*, terms more whispered than spoken.
He inclined his head.
Mira huffed out a nervous laugh that sounded more like self-defense than amusement. “You know, I came down here today to look for old land deeds and maybe some letters. Not… folklore.”
“Folklore?” he repeated, unfamiliar with the word in Russian. It had the tang of other languages around it. German, perhaps. English. He filed it away.
“Stories,” she clarified. “Scary ones. People like to tell them about this house.”
“Do they?” he asked. His voice had steadied. Each word made the century between then and now feel more substantial, like a weight settling on his limbs.
She nodded. “It’s… a thing. Old noble family. Dark rumors. People disappearing. The usual. The Morozovs were… not popular.”
He huffed a humorless sound. “We were not… intended to be.”
She tilted her head. “You’re a Morozov?”
“Aleksandr.” He paused, fumbled briefly with the new orthography that had clearly taken over in his absence. “Morozov. Yes.”
Her eyes widened—not just with surprise, but with the slight, electric recognition of someone hearing a name they had seen on paper now attached to a person of flesh.
“I’ve… read about you,” she said slowly. “Not you specifically. Your… family. The estate. Cases. Confiscations. Trials.” She chewed her lower lip. “They said you were all gone. Killed. Or… dispersed.”
He thought of the burned coffins in the upper crypt. Of the way Elizaveta had spoken of their parents’ remains: “They burned them.” Not with grief, exactly. With… respect for a gesture made by enemies who sometimes understood symbolism better than their friends.
“We are… very hard to kill,” he said.
“Clearly,” she murmured. Then, after a beat, “Are there… others? Like you?”
“Once,” he said. The word felt brittle. “We… had a nest. A… *family.*” He groped for a modern word that would approximate what they had been to each other. “We were… six. With our maker. And… others, scattered in the city.” He paused. “You said you have… read things. About us. Tell me.”
She hesitated. Her gaze flicked toward the crypt entrance, as if measuring how quickly she could get him up and moving if this conversation went poorly. Then she seemed to decide that if she was already talking to a possibly mythological creature in a secret tomb, full disclosure hardly made things worse.
“Most of the official records end in the twenties,” she said. “Nationalization orders. Asset lists. There’s a mention of a… ‘special operation’ at the cemetery. No details. After that, nothing, until the nineties.”
“The nineties,” he echoed, testing the number. “Nineteen… ninety.”
“After the Soviet Union…” She paused. “How much do you know about what happened after you went to sleep?”
“Very little,” he admitted. “We had… guesses. But no newspaper… from the future.” The concept made his lips twitch briefly.
She huffed another of those quick almost-laughs. “Okay. Summarizing a century of political and social upheaval in under a minute. No pressure.”
“Take two,” he said dryly.
She flashed him a quick look that might have been appreciation. “Twenty-three: you go to sleep. Lenin dies in twenty-four. Stalin happens after him. He is— How do I even explain Stalin? He is like… if you took every worst instinct in a man—paranoia, cruelty, fear of weakness—and gave it an army. The purges, the gulags. Millions die. Then the war— the *second* world war. The Nazis come. Half the country burns. They push them back. Victory. More repression. More control. Then Stalin dies. Things… thaw. A little. Bureaucrats fight. Leadership shuffles. People drink. There are poetry readings. Dissidents. In the eighties, there’s ‘perestroika’—reforms. Openness. Things loosen. The cracks show. In ‘ninety-one, the Soviet Union collapses. Everything… breaks.”
He listened, the words washing over him in a dizzying cascade of misery and brief, sharp electrons of hope. Lenin dead was expected. Another bold, ruthless man stepping into the vacuum was inevitable. But the scale… she spoke of millions like they were a unit of measurement, not an unimaginable number of individual pulses gone silent.
“And then?” he prompted when she paused for breath.
“Chaos,” she said simply. “The ‘wild nineties.’ Oligarchs—men with no names before, suddenly rich from selling off what used to belong to all. Crime. Violence. Everyone hustling. The city—this city—was… not kind.”
He thought of 1905. Of men in leather coats. Of bombs tossed under carriages. “We had… practice,” he said.
She nodded, grim. “Old habits. New reasons. Somewhere in that mess— in the early nineties— there’s a file. Very thin. It mentions ‘closure of the Morozov case.’ It doesn’t say exactly what happened, but it implies that… whatever was left here, whoever was left here… was… removed.”
He heard what she did not want to say.
“Destroyed,” he translated.
“I don’t know,” she hedged. “The language is… bureaucratic. Vague on purpose. It could mean… that. Or it could mean they… negotiated. Left. Died in some other way. But whoever wrote the report believed… there were no more Morozovs here.”
“And yet,” he said, voice flat, “here I am.”
“Yeah,” she said softly. “Here you are.”
Silence settled for a beat, heavy with everything not said.
He let his head fall back against the stone with a dull thud and stared up at the ceiling. Hairline cracks traced delicate spiderwebs across the stone, like a map of all the roads the world had taken while he lay below.
“You should have left me,” he said, more to the stone than to her. “If all of them are… gone… there is no one left to wake me. I asked to be sealed, not… accidentally excavated by the curious.”
“Rude,” she said, surprising him. There was a thread of heat in her voice now, small but distinct. “I find a mystery stone in a hidden room in a family crypt under a collapsing estate and I’m supposed to *not* investigate? Do you know how hard it is to get funding for my work? This is the closest I’ve come to a proper adventure in years.”
He turned his head to look at her. Despite the fear and the dust, her eyes were bright. There was outrage there, yes, but also—God help them both—amusement.
“You think this is an… adventure?” he asked.
“What else is it?” she retorted. “If you’re a story, I’m going to tell it. If you’re… real…” Her gaze flicked once to his teeth, as if checking whether they had grown any longer in the last thirty seconds. “…then that’s a different kind of problem. But either way, I wasn’t about to pretend I hadn’t seen you.”
“You could have… called the authorities,” he pointed out.
She grimaced. “Do you trust… ‘authorities’ in this country? In any country?”
He thought of leather coats. Of files stamped with words like ENEMY and UNRELIABLE and TO BE REMOVED. Of men in suits now, perhaps, with the same instincts, just different fonts on their letterheads.
“No,” he said.
“Me neither,” she said. “So. Congratulations. For better or worse, you’re my problem now.”
The absurdity of the sentence, delivered in a crypt to someone who had gone to sleep under a different flag, lodged in his chest like a splinter of laughter.
He did not quite smile. But the weight on his ribs eased a fraction.
The hunger, unfortunately, did not.
It bit at him again, sharper now that the initial daze had passed. His fingers twitched against the stone, wanting to curl into fists, to grab, to *hold.* He could *hear* her pulse now the way a starving man hears a locked pantry being opened in the next room.
“You should go,” he said abruptly.
Her brows rose. “Excuse me?”
“You should leave,” he insisted. “Go back up. Close the stone. Fill it with rocks, if you must. Forget you saw me.”
Her mouth fell open. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am very rarely anything else,” he said. “You do not know me. You do not know what I am capable of. Your pulse is… very loud.”
She stared at him for a beat. Then, to his faint astonishment, she laughed.
It wasn’t hysterical, though it had an edge. It was genuine, quick, almost incredulous.
“You think I don’t know danger?” she said. “You think I haven’t seen what families like yours did to people like me, even without fangs? You think I walked into this house without weighing every risk?”
He blinked. The bracing honesty of that hit him more than any accusation would have.
“My family—” he began.
“Were nobles,” she said. “Landowners. You had… serfs. Later, workers. Either way, people who didn’t own the roof over their heads. I’ve read the records. The petitions. The complaints. The quiet, desperate requests for mercy that never got answered because the Morozovs were too busy holding masquerades and arguing about which French poet hated the tsar the most.”
He flinched at the sharpness in her tone. Not because it was entirely fair—things were always more complex than pamphlets made them—but because it was not entirely unfair either.
“We fed,” he said, stung, “on those who could afford to lose a little. We had rules. We—”
She made a small, cutting gesture. “I’m not here to litigate your class politics. My point is, danger is relative. I grew up in a country where corrupt men stole billions while babies died in underfunded hospitals. I work in a system where a developer can erase a whole neighborhood’s history with one signature and a bribe. You? You’re… one more dangerous man. But you’re also… one I’ve actually *seen.* That makes you easier to manage.”
He stared at her.
“You think you can… manage me,” he said slowly.
Her gaze held his. “I think I can decide for myself who I help, and how.”
The word *help* snagged in his mind. It was not one he had expected to hear down here. From her.
“Why help me?” he asked. “You owe me… nothing.”
“That’s not how this works,” she said, shrugging one shoulder. “You were put in a hole for a hundred years because someone—maybe you, maybe someone else—decided history was too dangerous. You woke up in the middle of my fight. I’m… not going to leave you down here like trash because it complicates my case file.”
She glanced toward the corridor again, the beam of her flashlight thinning as the battery tired. “Also, purely selfishly, if the wrong people find out there was a secret chamber under this house and I *didn’t* investigate what was in it, I’ll never forgive myself. So.”
He searched her face. Looking for… what? Lies? Fear? The subtle glassiness of someone glamoured?
Her will stood like iron.
He exhaled slowly. The air fogged briefly, then cleared.
“Even if I… could hurt you?” he said softly. The warning in his tone was not entirely for her. It was also for himself.
She swallowed. Her throat moved, an elegant line.
“Can you?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“Yes,” he said eventually. Truth mattered in some things. “If I chose to. Not… now.” He flexed his fingers. They shook slightly. “But later. When I am… stronger.”
“Then I’ll decide later how close to stand,” she said. “For now…” She reached down, pressing the cool plastic bottle into his hand. His fingers closed around it reflexively. “…you’re thirsty. And I need you to tell me everything you remember about how this place works, who knew about you, and who might come looking.”
“Telling you may put you in more danger,” he said.
She gave him a flat look. “I walked into ‘more danger’ the moment I opened the gate to this property. At least now I know who else is on the board.”
Board. Game. The metaphors had shifted while he slept.
He weighed, in the space of a breath, the options.
He could demand she leave. He could try to climb out of the stone, fail, and look ridiculous. He could lie, tell her nothing, hope she lost interest and went back to her papers.
Or he could accept the reality stamped on the moment: he was newly woken, weak, starving, disoriented. This woman was his only link to the surface, to information, to whatever the world had become. Pushing her away out of some misfired instinct for chivalry or self-flagellation would not make him noble. It would make him a fool.
“I will… tell you,” he said. “But not here. Not… now. I cannot… think clearly… with your pulse so loud and your scent…” He trailed off, jaw tight.
She blushed.
It was subtle, but on her dark skin he could see the faint warming along her cheeks, the slight dilation of her pupils.
“I’m… not wearing perfume,” she said defensively.
“It is not… perfume,” he said hoarsely.
Her eyes tracked him for a beat, then slid away. “Right. Blood. Got it.”
She pushed to her feet in a quick, decisive motion, dusting her hands on her thighs.
“Okay,” she said, brisk again. “Step one: get you out of the hole. Step two: get you somewhere… safer. Step three: feed you something that is not me. Step four: information dump.”
He stared at her, vaguely scandalized by the idea that climbing out of his century-long tomb had been reduced to a list.
“You are very… organized,” he said.
“Someone has to be,” she muttered. “Can you stand if I help you?”
He looked down at his legs.
They looked like his legs. Solid. Real. Clad in the same trousers he’d worn in 1923—wool, hand-tailored, now dusty but intact. His boots were on his feet, laces neatly tied. Elizaveta had seen to that. Her idea of a joke, probably: sending him into the earth dressed for a dinner party.
He flexed his toes. They obeyed, clumsily.
“I can… try,” he said.
She extended a hand, fingers splayed, palm up.
It was an absurd gesture. Courteous, almost. As if they were in a ballroom and she was inviting him to dance, not to haul himself out of his own grave.
He hesitated only a second before wrapping his fingers around hers.
Her hand was small, but her grip was strong. Calluses roughened her palm—pen calluses, perhaps, and a new one at the base of her fingers that might come from… tools. Bolt cutters. His people had had their own calluses once, before servants softened everything.
He braced his other hand against the edge of the hollow and pushed.
Muscles groaned. Stone scraped under his boots as he planted one foot, then the other, on the narrow ledge inside the cavity and straightened. His head cleared the level of the crypt floor. His stomach lurched with the change in height.
Mira stepped back to give him room, still holding his hand until the last moment. Then she let go, hovering close but not touching, ready to grab if he stumbled.
He swung one leg over the edge, then the other.
For a horrible second, his knee buckled. The world tilted. He saw the crypt from an angle—slabs, shadows, the iron gate a dark mouth—and thought, *I am going to fall and break my spine and this will be the stupidest end to an immortal existence anyone has ever written about.*
Mira’s hand hit his chest, flat and firm, stopping his forward momentum.
He froze, balanced on the edge between dignity and disaster, her palm over his ribs.
“Breathe,” she ordered.
He did, mostly out of surprise.
In. Out.
He could feel the fine tremor in her fingers where she pressed against him. She was afraid. Of course she was. But she did not step back.
Slowly, his center of gravity adjusted. His knees unlocked. He straightened fully, boots planted on the crypt floor.
He was taller than her by a head and a little. She had to tilt her chin up to meet his eyes now. Up close, he saw flecks of amber in her dark irises, like sunlight caught in deep water.
“See?” she said. “Not plaster at all.”
He let out a breath that might have been a laugh if he’d had more practice.
“Not yet,” he said.
She withdrew her hand, fingers trailing over the front of his coat. The contact, brief as it was, burned.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
He tested his weight gingerly from one leg to the other. The familiar mechanics returned slowly, like an orchestra tuning up. There was weakness, yes, but no real pain. The draught had not betrayed him. Flesh remembered.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good.” She retrieved her backpack from where she’d left it by the wall, slinging it onto one shoulder. “Then we need to decide where to take you.”
He frowned. “Up. Out.”
She made a noncommittal noise. “Eventually. But not… outside-outside. Not yet. It’s… bright.”
He glanced toward the iron gate at the end of the corridor. Faint, diluted daylight seeped through the cracks around the main crypt door up the stairs. Even that was enough to make his eyes ache.
“Ah,” he said. The memory of sunlight on skin flared, painful and delicious. He hadn’t indulged in that particular sensation since before his making. It would not be safe now. “Day?”
“Afternoon,” she said. “Cloudy, but not enough. We’ll have to wait. Maybe the servant corridors. There are rooms without windows.”
“Wait for… night,” he murmured.
“Yeah.” She hesitated. “Is that… really a thing?”
“Yes,” he said simply. The stories had not lied about that, at least. “We burn.”
She inhaled, the sound catching faintly on the exhale. “Okay. Night it is. Then we sneak you out while everyone’s asleep and hope no one with a thermal camera is watching.”
He blinked. “Thermal…?”
“Later,” she said quickly. “There’s… a lot.”
He believed her.
He took one cautious step toward the crypt entrance. Then another. His balance improved with each, the old, predatory grace slotting back into place as if it had only been left on a chair for a few minutes, not a century.
Mira watched him walk with an expression that was part scientific observation, part wary appreciation. Her gaze flicked over his shoulders, his hands, his legs, as if assessing threat, capacity, damage.
“You look…” She searched for a word.
“Old?” he suggested.
She huffed. “No. You look like you were poured into that coat at a tailor’s shop in 1920 and forgot to leave. People now don’t… move like you.”
He wasn’t entirely sure if that was a compliment or a warning.
“At least I am still… fashionable,” he said dryly.
She snorted. “That’s debatable.”
He almost smiled. The hunger snarled in him at the extra motion, as if resentful of any amusement that did not involve tearing flesh.
As they reached the iron gate, he paused, laying his hand flat against the cool metal. His fingertips brushed old filigree, the stylized M. There was the faintest residue of something under his skin—old protective charms, laid by craftsmen who had not known exactly what they were guarding against.
He turned back once, letting his gaze linger on the slab he’d just left. It sat askew, stone scraped, the hollow gaping like a pulled tooth.
That had been his world for a century.
“I will… not be going back in,” he said quietly, more to himself than to her.
Mira followed his gaze, then nodded once. “Good,” she said. “Because I’m not pulling you out twice.”
He met her eyes.
“You should tell me,” he said. “Who else has… interest in this place. You mentioned… a call. A man who knew your name.”
She grimaced. “You heard that?”
“I may have been… sleeping,” he said. “But my hearing still works.”
She squinted at him. “I got a call this morning,” she admitted. “From a man who refused to give a real name. He knew about my organization. Knew I’ve been… making noise about this estate. He told me to be careful. In his way.”
“Threat,” he translated.
“Wrapped in concern, like a bad gift,” she said.
He tilted his head. “Developers?”
“Maybe.” Her expression darkened. “Maybe not. There are rumors about why the Morozov estate was never completely demolished, even in the worst years. Some people think there’s… money. Hidden. A lot of it.”
He exhaled slowly.
Of course there were.
Elizaveta’s voice echoed in his mind. *I can make arrangements. Guard the estate from afar. Stash what we can of the fortune before they seize it all.*
He had gone into the stone trusting her to handle those particulars. Money had mattered less to him then than getting out alive.
“Are there… other vampires,” he asked, testing the modern word, “in this city now?”
She hesitated.
“I don’t… know,” she said. “But if there are, this is the kind of place they’d watch.”
The idea hadn’t occurred to him. He had been so wrapped in memories of his own nest that the possibility of others—created later, living through the decades he’d missed, building their own rules—had not fully formed.
“If you woke,” she added, “and if you’re… the last Morozov anyone knows about who might have information about where your family’s… assets went…”
“Then I am,” he finished for her, “a target.”
She gave him a grim little nod. “Yeah.”
“And you,” he said, “by association, have just painted a mark on your own back.”
She lifted her chin. “It was already there. I just made it bigger.”
His mouth twisted.
“Stubborn,” he said.
“Occupational hazard,” she replied.
He looked at her for a long moment, in the dim of the crypt, with the knowledge of a century pressing at the back of his eyes and a hunger older than that gnawing at his bones.
“Very well,” he said. “Let us go upstairs, Dr. Mira Okonkwo, and you can… lecture me on your century while we try not to die again.”
She blinked at the use of her title.
“How did you—”
“You speak like someone who has argued with stubborn men for money,” he said. “And you used the word… ‘archives’ like a lover. You have a doctorate.”
She rolled her eyes. “Flattery will not get you special treatment.”
“I thought nothing would,” he murmured.
He stepped through the iron gate. She fell into place slightly ahead of him, beam of the flashlight sweeping the corridor, her outline sharp and small in the fragile light.
His hunger paced at the end of its chain.
He followed her into the darkness of a world he no longer knew.
***