Hello, Merry After Christmas, and welcome to what will doubtless be the first of several Golden Eagle debriefing posts - this one totally spoiler free.
If you follow me on Instagram, you'll have seen me mention a time or two that this book felt like its central theme was that of identity: who we think we are, who we've been told we are, and who we actually are - and how that actual identity is sometimes influenced and informed by the first two. Every character struggles with identity over the course of the novel - Trina's slow-creeping dread is understated, and something that we'll explore more in depth as the series continues - but the two who struggle the most are, arguably, Nikita and Alexei.
We've watched Nikita wrestle with his identity since White Wolf. He was born just before Tsar Nicholas was deposed in 1917, and his mother had worked for the royal family, so he grew up with his mother's stories - stories loyal to the Romanovs; the secret sentiments of White Russians. He joined the Cheka because he felt he had to, and his position among the secret police afforded him resources he'd never have had otherwise. He hated Stalin's government, even as he carried out its darkest orders. There's a part of him that will always be ashamed of that: it would have been braver, he thinks, to stand up to his superiors, rather than follow their orders, though he knows that would have meant immediate execution or imprisonment. Nikita's story is a timeless one: that of survival by ugly means, sustaining oneself on the dream that you'll one day make it right.
He never did make it right, though. That's the sad truth of those kinds of stories. And, given Nik's anxious nature, it's a truth that plagues him still. He's relieved he got out, that he's free of all that, but the guilt weighs heavier on him that it would on some. He feels like he doesn't deserve happiness and peace; that he doesn't deserve to have anything good to call his own - and what's a better example of "good" than Sasha? Nik's a bisexual man born in 1915, hardwired to repress his sexuality, and very much in love with his best friend. When Golden Eagle opens, we find him in a dark place - but one I can safely say he finds his way back from, with the help of Sasha and the rest of the pack. There's a moment in the book when he and Sasha talk about the coat. The black leather duster he wore as a Chekist, and which he still owns, and dons still when he feels more like a weapon than a person. "That coat scares people," Nik says. And Sasha replies: "So do you."
For Sasha, that's an important thing to point out: Nik hates what he did as a Chekist, but there was always the capacity for violence inside him. He's killed, and he'll kill again, and not simply because he's a vampire, or because he was a state-sanctioned killer. It's Sasha embracing all parts of him, even the dark ones; it's Sasha, once a hunter and a trapper, now a wolf with blood running down his chin, saying "I'm not this golden angel you think I am. We're both dark, and that's okay."
*insert diabolical laughter* Gray morality for the win.
And then we have Alexei. The heir to the Romanov dynasty. A very sick little boy who grew up in the lap of luxury while a nation revolted beyond the walls of the palace grounds. An inheritor of all the glitz and glamour of St. Petersburg...just as that Westernized way of life was dying in Russia. By all accounts, Alexei's parents were loving spouses and parents. They adored their children and doted on them - but to say that leadership mistakes were made in the running of the country would be a vast understatement.
Though the Alexei in my novels is a fictional character, at this point, I'm always trying to write from a perspective that feels the most likely, given the history of the real Alexei Romanov. It's a perspective that becomes, by necessity, layered, complex, and often contradictory. Because Alexei was a prince, yes, frolicking in gilded palaces, summering on yachts, tutored privately and paraded before the people of Russia as the heir to an empire. But he was also a hemophiliac who suffered terrible, near-fatal bouts of bleeding, one of which permanently crippled him. (At the end, when the family was murdered, Nicholas had to carry him down the stairs into the basement, because he was too ill to walk.) And as a vampire in my stories, he's someone who lived in exile for a time; who watched his family deposed, and who was shot by secret police in a cold, dank basement. The Alexei in my books is the victim of a massacre; someone who, as he reminds himself often, "crawled out of the pit." He's been living in America for decades now, and there's a realistic part of him who now knows that his family ruled poorly. that there are those who loathed the Romanovs. He's a jaded, cynical modern man - but he'll always be the prince, too.
In GE, he's trying to rectify the two sides of himself, and overcorrecting, definitely. The message of this series is not "empires are actually great and we should go back to that." Far from it. But in "growing up" finally, Alexei's going to have to lay firm claim on the adult he never got to be in Russia. His first step toward understanding, toward accepting what's happened to him, is to grab hold of his father's legacy, and, with genuine good intentions, strive to avoid his father's mistakes.
Being a part of a pack helps. He has a long road ahead of him, still.
In the next week or so, I want to touch on our other characters. The way Val is rethinking "running away." The way Mia is...well, that's a spoiler! And we have Kolya, our most obvious example of an identity crisis, as he struggles to remember who he is. Lots more to talk about!
In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying the novel. You can grab it for Kindle HERE, and it'll be up for Nook, Kobo, and paperback soon!
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