Snow again. The crippling cold. And the blood. Always the blood.
She lay on her back, and the wet cold of the snow bled through her clothes, bit through her skin and found purchase in her bones. Too cold to shiver, too cold to hurt, too cold to scream. Above her the sky wheeled white and endless, sifting fat flakes, clawed by the hard black talons of leafless tree limbs.
She didn't want to die, but she thought she might.
A face appeared above hers, well-made, blue-eyed, pale hair blowing in the ceaseless wind. He didn't snarl at her this time. No, he crouched beside her, the careful touch of his hand achingly warm against her face. His fingers trembled. His breath left his mouth in a shaky rush, pluming like smoke.
"Nikita," he said, and she woke up.
It's always fun to see different authors' takes on vampires, vampirism, and immortality in general, but within the genre, there are certain hallmarks to which most everyone adheres. One of those is the idea that the main reason life is precious is because it isn't permanent; immortality, therefore, comes with its own unique burden. It's a burden that weighs heavily on Nikita, and is the reason (spoiler alert) he hates Alexei at first. Alexei turns others without thought, as flighty about imbuing forever to his victims as the child he was when he was first turned.
But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
In Chapter Three, we see more of Trina's problem, in the form of another nightmare, and we learn about Lanny's problem, when he shows up drunk on her doorstep to reveal that he's received a crushing diagnosis. Trina urges him to start treatment, which he doesn't want to do, but he's too addled to have that sort of conversation with - or for the confession he lays at her feet. Like I said in the last post: he's an ass. It's a good moment for the gentle reminder that I often disagree personally with the way one of my characters behaves, but it makes for good on-page drama.
Obviously, Lanny's health crisis is going to become important later. But the big twist of Chapter Three comes at the end, when Trina doesn't merely have another nightmare, but wakes up inside a stranger's body. This time, the blue-eyed boy of her nightmares isn't snarling and howling in the snow, but kneeling in front of her - of the person whose mind she's inhabiting - and pleading sweetly for someone named Nikita to "show her" something.
There's a throwaway line in this chapter that, this many years later, I've forgotten I originally included. Not when her family had long since fallen apart and she had no one left but him. In the early days of White Wolf, I had this idea of Trina's family being a little more eccentric and unstable than they prove in Red Rooster. I liked the idea that, knowing the family history, the Big Secret of Nikita, her parents were strongly against her becoming a cop. They didn't want her getting into a dangerous profession; cue young, academy-bound Trina pushing back, big blowups. Her grandparents are a little kooky, and host seances, and her uncle's a little "off." I liked the idea of her needing Lanny more than he needed her.
It's a case of the overall needs of the story adapting as a series progresses, and of an author having written millions of words and forgetting lines like this one. Oops!
But I'll choose to see it here as Trina feeling like she can't lean on her family, like she's fallen out of it. Looking ahead, I think that works well enough.
This chapter marks the end of the modern-day storyline for a while. In Chapter Four, we travel to Moscow, and we dig into the historical side of the novel in earnest. In Chapter Four, we meet our captain.
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