#TeaserTuesday: Golden Eagle

In case you didn't see it on social media over the weekend, I finished Golden Eagle! I'm thrilled to be finished, but even more, I'm thrilled with the novel itself. I love the way this series allows me to keep exploring these characters as we go along, digging deeper on each chapter, exploring such a wide variety of themes. 

The book is set to release in late December - currently trying to get the KDP website to cooperate and let me order some proof copies. But for now, here's an extra-big teaser: chapter 26.

26

Sasha dreamed of the clearing.

A carpet of snow, and the reaching fingers of bare trees, and ravens, high and silent in the white-gray sky. It was the forest north of Stalingrad, where Rasputin had died.

The starets was there now, a blackened, smoking ruin like a scar on the snow. Other bodies, too. Kolya, Ivan, Feliks. His wolves, the wind stirring their fur, lifting the scent of blood to his nose.

And there was Nikita, skin nearly white as the snow beneath him, a crumpled doll with a slick, red mouth.

Sasha walked toward him, and pulled up short when a voice said, “This is a dream, you know.”

He turned, and there was Val, as he’d appeared that day, all those years ago. Hair pulled back at the crown and spilling like a rustling banner over one shoulder; cloak of shining sable on his shoulders, over red velvet, and dyed-red breeches. Shining leather boots up to the calves in the snow. His eyes glowed, bright blue gems in the colorlessness of the unnatural twilight.

“Why are we here?” Sasha asked.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Val said, striding toward him through the snow, boots throwing off little clumps of it, “but you’re the one who picked the time and place, I’m afraid.”

“Oh.” He glanced across the grisly tableau again, feeling faintly sick. “Why would I want to come back here?”

“I’m not sure it’s a matter of want.” Val reached him, and took his arm gently in one hand, steered him over to a felled log. He dusted it off with one bare hand and then sat, inviting Sasha to sit beside him with an elegant gesture.

Sasha plopped down. Inelegantly.

“The mind is a funny thing,” Val said, looking out across the clearing with a neutral expression. “We forget so many little lovely things we’d like to remember, but our minds take us back, again and again to the worst moments of our lives. Mia calls that ‘trauma,’ and I suppose she’s right. It’s easy to forget joy, but we never truly leave our trauma behind.”

He turned to Sasha then, expression kind. “I imagine this was the worst day of your life. And it’s a memory to which I am tied for you. It’s only natural.”

Sasha swallowed, and glanced toward Nikita’s still form, his arms out-flung. If he squinted, he could imagine Nik had laid down to make a snow angel, and not that these were the last, frigid moments of his life as a human.

“He doesn’t trust me,” Val said, a statement of fact.

“He doesn’t have a trusting nature.”

“No. Neither does my brother. It’s shame they fought the one time they met; I suspect that, under different circumstances, they’d quite like one another. As much as either of them is able to like anyone or anything.”

Sasha huffed a quiet laugh.

“They’re both incredibly stubborn, for one,” Val continued. His voice grew more serious. “People use that word: stubborn. They think they understand it. Mules are stubborn, and babies stubbornly refuse to keep tidy. Spots on fine silk are stubborn, and so are illnesses that linger.

“Vlad, though…it takes a very remarkable kind of stubbornness to keep to causes the way he does. To hold onto the grudges he has. To resist the enemies that he did. It isn’t something that can be beaten out of him, though. You can’t break that kind of stubborn. My violent brother will die with a sword in his hand, and smile when he reaches Valhalla because at least he died defending that which he holds dear.”

“Valhalla.” A word from books; from legend. “That’s for dead heroes.”

“For dead warriors. For dead Viking warriors. I think Vlad’s the truest example of that.” He smiled when Sasha glanced at him, and it seemed self-conscious. “We’re half-Viking, him and me. On our mother’s side.”

“Really?”

“Where do you think I got this?” He raked a hand through his hair, and it rippled, molten gold, catching sunlight that wasn’t even there. “I don’t know what happened to Mother,” he said, some of his brightness dimming. “I’ve searched for her, some, but never found her.”

He shook his head and took a breath. “I’ve gotten off track. I think your Nikita is that kind of stubborn. Once he’s convinced of the right course of action, he can’t be swayed from it. He has few soft spots. The largest of those is you, obviously.”

Sasha felt heat suffuse his cheeks.

“Look at you blushing. It’s adorable.”

No, it was miraculous – that Nikita loved him back the way Sasha loved him. That they could take down the barriers between them and just be, now.

“When it comes to you,” Val continued, “he can hardly get out of his own way.”

Sasha nodded.

“I was surprised to find that you two are lovers, and that he hasn’t bound you,” Val said, a note of apology in his voice.

“He thinks he’s protecting me. He says he doesn’t want me to be a slave.”

“But it isn’t like that at all.”

“I’ve tried to tell him.”

“Of course.” A frown plucked at Val’s mouth, and his gaze flicked out across the landscape. “Not being a wolf, I can’t know this from personal experience. From what I gather, there’s a sense of responsibility on the part of the wolf; of wanting to please and be of use. Gods knows Fulk can be a regular mother hen sometimes.” He smiled to himself. Then looked back at Sasha. “But I observed my mother with her two beloved Familiars, and Vlad with his Cicero.”

“Cicero?” Sasha asked, momentarily startled.

“A nickname. Not the actual orator, dear. He was Father’s Familiar for centuries, and after Father’s death, when Vlad went home to Wallachia, he asked to be made Vlad’s. He was most devoted – and not slavishly. It was genuine love.” His smile turned inward, and bitter. “A love that drove him to imprison me. When he pressed hot irons to my skin, and glowered down at me with hatred, I could still see the love he held for my brother. I could smell it.”

Sasha fought off a hard shudder.

“Vlad doesn’t know that last bit,” he said, with a wink. “So let’s keep that our little secret, yes? Cicero, if he still lives, doesn’t deserve Vlad’s censure for torturing me. Any wolf would have done it.

“Wolves, you see.” He took a deep, unsteady breath and pressed on. “Are not quite like vampires. I imagine your Nikita knows this in theory, but he hasn’t come to truly understand it. Werewolves aren’t so different – instinctually, you understand, you know I mean no insult, darling – than purely four-legged wolves. You crave having a pack, a hierarchy. Your loyalty is genuine, born of love, and never faked. There’s no artifice to a wolf, and it’s the most beautiful thing about them.”

He reached to finger a piece of Sasha’s hair, smiling warmly at him. “The blue eyes don’t hurt.”

Sasha felt himself blushing again.

Val let his hand fall to Sasha’s shoulder, and squeezed. “It probably isn’t right. Humans certainly wouldn’t think it was. But we are not humans, my darling. And when a vampire is a loving and devoted pack leader, there is nothing wicked about the binding of a wolf. The binding has been in existence since my father and his twin washed up on the reedy banks of the Tiber. It was a wolf who nursed them; a werewolf and her pack. Perhaps binding is truly wrong; perhaps we’ll find a way, eventually, to eliminate the need for it. But so long as vampires can force themselves on Familiars, a bound wolf is a safe wolf.”

Sasha’s eyes stung. He blinked, and leaned into the hand pressed to his shoulder. “Nikita won’t do it.”

“Because he loves you,” Val said, “and because he doesn’t trust himself. He’s never really shed the coat and badge, has he?”

Sasha shook his head.

Val sighed, and put an arm around his shoulders, pulled him in so they were snuggled side-by-side. His sable tickled Sasha’s cheek. “I’ll have a talk with him.”

Sasha jerked reflexively. “I don’t think that’ll do much good.”

“Hmm. We’ll see. I’m very persuasive when I want to be.”

A comfortable quiet fell around them. Sasha realized the bodies had all gone, and that pristine snow stretched before them. A bird called – not a raven, but a songbird, a happy little trill.

“Come have brunch with us,” Val suggested.

Sasha felt a swell of glad anticipation at the idea. One that dimmed. “I don’t think Nik will.” He knew he wouldn’t.

“So leave him at home. He’s too cranky anyway,” Val said lightly, as if that was something Sasha could do.

Which…he could, couldn’t he? It wasn’t as if Nikita would do anything to actually stop him. He would scowl, and say he didn’t like it, and pout, and be even crankier – but he wouldn’t compel him. Wouldn’t bar the door or try to dominate him in any way. The only thing that would prevent him would be his own guilt; his own driving urge to make Nikita smile and keep him from worrying.

And how often, he wondered, had he stayed at home, or hung back, or stood on the sidelines because that was what Nikita wanted? And because the thing he wanted most of all was for Nikita to be happy?

He sighed.

“What are you thinking?” Val asked.

He shifted a little on the log. “I’m thinking I want to come.”

“So do,” Val said, as if it was that easy.

And, really, it was.

They sat in easy silence after that, until the dream slowly faded, a snowfall that blotted out everything, white, white, white, and then his eyes were fluttering open and it was just after dawn, silvery light filtering through the blinds on the bedroom window.

They’d slept beside one another last night, both of them tense and unhappy. They’d started out back-to-back. Was this what couples did? Was this like sitcom characters going to bed angry? But he hadn’t felt angry so much as tired; quietly devastated.

They’d turned toward each other in their sleep. When Sasha opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was Nik’s face mashed into the pillow, his dark hair wild from tossing around in the night. There was a groove between his brows – tense even in sleep – and Sasha knew the urge to reach out and smooth that line away with his thumb.

He tucked his hands beneath the pillow instead.

The light had shifted when Nikita finally took a deep breath and stirred. He made a face as his eyes cracked open, a little grimace that Sasha found terribly cute. He blinked a few times, stretched, and then settled, eyes open and clear on Sasha’s face, the gray-blue of faded denim in the early light.

They regarded one another for long moments, not tense, exactly, but Sasha could feel the weight of things thought and not voiced. He put a hand on the mattress between them, and Nikita covered it with his own.

Whatever’s wrong, that touch said, we’ll get past it.

It eased the tightness in his chest. “Val came to visit me in my dream,” he said, softly, barely making any sound.

Nikita swallowed. “I thought he might.”

“I’m going to go have brunch with them.”

“I thought that, too,” Nikita whispered, and squeezed his hand.