They swung open the cage door, cattle prods at full power, humming with electricity. The man lazily lifted his hands in surrender. "Now, now." He said softly. His voice was like velvet. "No need. I'll do as you please." The man in the cage said, his...
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No matter how long he stared up at the silvery canopy, Dimetreaus could not put the pieces of his mind back together. He couldn't put the pieces of the puzzle of this place into a picture that fit. He didn't understand.
It had been four days since Theo had died, her body left to grow cold on the cement floor of the cellar. Four days since he'd tried to kill the beast that bit her. 'Lycan' he had learned to call it. Four days since Samuel had admitted to being the one who chose Theo for the task. Four days since Dime had struck him out of anger.
What reservations he had about safety were gone now. No one could be trusted, and it meant there was no point to skepticism. Everything would work out, or it wouldn't. So Dime sat up out of his bed in the Morozov home, and walked down the hall.
The mahogany door was open, like Vsevolod had been waiting all this time for Dime to seek him out. Like he knew that he would. Like there was never a world where he didn't.
The white haired man stood behind his desk, inspecting his fathers medals. He turned around when Dime sat in the plush chair before him. They stared for a long moment, some level of understanding shared between them. Some level of respect.
"I can't make sense of it," Dime said in a voice hoarse from disuse.
Vsevolod only tilted his head. Waiting. Listening.
So Dime launched into it. The bones that belonged to a woman, and the gunshot wound in her skull. The negative gunshot residue tests from all the human residents that looking back were wasted time because he had known deep down that it was never one of them. Mitroshka's fur in the Campbell home, and the claims of Clara Campbell's father. The scars on Samuels frail body. All of it. Every last piece that he couldn't make fit.
Vsevolod sat in silence, listening to it all with a distantly contemplative look. When he was done, the man didn't respond. For a moment, Dimetreaus thought he wouldn't at all and that he'd be left with this unsolved puzzle for the rest of his life.
Then, "horror is the way of man."
Dime's brows furrowed, but he kept his silence.
"Horror is a human trade. My family merely adopted it to get what we are owed. Our old lands, our old titles, our old wealth. Revenge on those fools that tried to take it from us and have reveled in it for these past ten years. Rodion, Inessa, their rotten idea of a family and all those who believe them."
"What do you mean?"
Vsevolod's eyes rose to his, fixing him with a look he didn't understand. It made Dime afraid, but he couldn't find it in himself to move. He had to know.
"It was my father's idea, to blend the old ways with the hell of the humans. After we'd been banished, we came here, but it didn't mean we gave up the war. For him, it never ended, and it meant that it was always going to be passed to me. To us. We needed bodies. Soldiers," Vsevolod began, his fingernail picking at a chip in the surface of his desk that Dime had never noticed before.
