Red Rooster (Sons of Rome Book 2)

  SONS of ROME

  Book Two

  RED ROOSTER

  by

  Lauren Gilley

  HP Press

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, and events are purely fictional, or, in the instance of real historical figures, are used fictitiously. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without express written permission from the publisher. Plagiarism of this book, or portions of it, will result in legal action.

  RED ROOSTER

  ISBN – 13: 978-1986588737

  Copyright © 2018 by Lauren Gilley

  Cover Image “Pattern with farm rooster silhouette” copyright © Stock Illustration

  Cover Design copyright © 2018 by Lauren Gilley

  HP Press

  Hoofprintpress.blogspot.com

  Lauren Gilley

  The Sons of Rome Series:

  “The Stalker”

  White Wolf

  Red Rooster

  The Players We’ve Met So Far:

  Nikita Baskin: Former Chekist from the Soviet Union, and a secret White loyal to the late Tsar Nicholas. Vampire currently living in Manhattan.

  Aleksander (Sasha) Kashnikov: Former Siberian university student and son of a comfortable trapping family. Recruited (kidnapped) by the Cheka to serve as a secret supernatural weapon designed to defeat the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War. Werewolf currently living in Manhattan. Best friends/roommates with Nikita.

  Trina Baskin: NYPD Homicide Detective and Nikita’s great-granddaughter.

  Lanny Webb: NYPD Homicide Detective, and Trina’s partner. Newly-turned vampire.

  Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov: Former tsarevich of All the Russias. Thought dead. Vampire. Lanny’s sire.

  Jamie Anderson: Former art student at NYU. Newly-turned vampire.

  Prince Valerian: Former Wallachian prince, younger brother to Vlad Tepes. Vampire. Currently imprisoned, but able to communicate with others via astral projection.

  Prince Vlad: “The Impaler.” Former Wallachian prince, older brother to Val. Famous for turning back the Ottoman Empire and preserving the autonomy of Romania.

  Fulk le Strange: Baron Strange. Werewolf. Currently “employed” by the Ingraham Institute.

  Annabel le Strange: Baroness Strange. Wife to Fulk. Werewolf.

  Dr. Edwin Talbot: Head of the Ingraham Institute for Medical Technology. Currently researching ways to synthesize vampire blood into a cure for countless human diseases and injuries.

  RED ROOSTER

  1

  The Ingraham Institute

  Queens, NY

  Five Years Ago

  For a moment, clutching the address tight in his left hand – his bad hand, his bad side – staring up at the clean, white façade of the building, he had allowed himself a rare sense of hope.

  The ad he’d torn out of the paper with painstaking care, left hand shaking the whole time, had promised hope for wounded veterans, and that’s what he was, wasn’t he? He wasn’t the sort who put stock in hope, not anymore, but he’d been half-drunk and not thinking with his usual dire cynicism when the paper came tumbling down the sidewalk and snagged on the toe of his combat boot. He’d picked the paper up with the intent to throw it away, when a half-page ad caught his eye. Soothing blue font on the heading. Words had jumped out at him: new drug trial, looking for participants, $250 per person.

  Two-hundred-and-fifty bucks would buy a lot of cheap bourbon.

  But more tantalizing than that, even to his alcoholic mind, was the idea of a trial. A radical new treatment, it said, believed to be incredibly effective.

  He couldn’t see well, vision blurred from drinking, and not enough sleep.

  He made his way into the closest Starbucks, plugged his phone into a wall outlet, and turned a blind eye to the uncomfortable glances shot his way by the student crowd. He Googled the Ingraham Institute from the ad, and lost half an hour down the rabbit hole, scrolling through article after article praising the Institute’s breakthroughs in trauma research and medical advancement. The VA spoke about the place in glowing terms. Smiling photos of vets were posted next to quotes talking about changed lives, a return to normal thought processes, an increase in mobility and quality of life.

  Rooster finally set his phone down on the table, stared at the cardboard sleeve of his small black coffee, and asked himself some hard questions. Was he capable of getting better? Of thinking normally again? Was normal qualitative anyway? And, most importantly, did he deserve the chance to get better?

  That was something his therapist had told him, when he first got out. You deserve to get better, Corporal Palmer. Yeah. Sure. He hadn’t been a person to that quack, just another rank, name, and serial number. (That was what he told himself, in the moments when his guilt for turning away from her kind eyes and helpful smile stabbed him in the gut.)

  But there were kids with cancer languishing in hospital beds, mothers dying in childbirth, innocent teens T-boned by drunk drivers. Why, of all the wretches of the world, did he deserve to get better? Because he’d served his country? That’s what his therapist had said. Before he stopped showing up.

  He sat leaning against the steam-fogged window of a Starbucks, ignoring the whispers and glances of a group of kids in NYU sweatshirts at the next table, and he realized, for purely selfish reasons, that he did want to get better. Deserving it had nothing to do with it…he just wanted to be whole again.

  So he’d called the toll free number, and set up an appointment. And for a moment, on the sidewalk, a brisk afternoon in Queens, leaves tumbling in the gutters, he’d allowed himself to feel hope.

  He’d been one of five in the waiting room. All men. All clean cut and well-groomed, in clothes that fit well. One man with a prosthetic lower leg had his wife with him, and the two of them talked in low tones. Rooster had become uncomfortably aware of his own scruffiness. The way his boot soles were starting to peel off, the dirt crusted into the wrinkles of his jeans and jacket. He looked homeless, which wasn’t far from the truth.

  Then had come the examination. First a physical, to test his limitations. His body had been so badly damaged by the bomb, had been hacked and pieced back together by so many doctors, first in Germany and then in the US, that he no longer felt shame when he stripped naked and allowed someone to pass gloved hands down the pocked, scarred skin of his arm, and side, and leg.

  Then came the psych eval. That’s not what the bright-voiced doctor called it, but Rooster had endured enough to know that’s what it was. Question after question, designed to catch him off his game, tough ones that could shake loose his fragile framework of lies.

  When it was over, all hope had bled out of his system, and it was his old friend resolution who took up the hollow space in his chest.

  “Alright, Mr. Palmer,” the doctor said, straightening the paperwork in his lap and shooting Rooster a perfunctory smile. “You’ve given us a lot to consider today.”

  Rooster took a deep breath and let it out slow. “That means no, right?”

  The doctor, a soft-in-in-the-middle man with glasses and a premature bald spot, glanced up with obvious surprise, maybe even a little affront. “I beg your pardon?”

  The scar tissue on his left hand – mottled, and lumpy, and tight – made simple, everyday tasks obscenely difficult. Rooster fumbled with his shirt buttons and tried to keep his tone civil. He didn’t know why he was angry; he’d expected it to go this way, after all. Holding onto hope was about as useful as trying to catch soap bubbles.

  “You said you need to consider,” he said, flatly. “That means you won’t take me.”

  “Oh. Well. Um. Of course not,” the doctor sai
d, flustered. “We receive a wealth of applicants every day, and we consider each one carefully before we make our selection.”

  Which meant jack shit. Rooster snorted and managed to get the rest of his buttons secured. He wished he’d worn a pullover instead. He wished he gave enough of a damn to be polite, but he just didn’t, not anymore.

  The doctor adopted an annoyed expression. “As with any intensive medical procedure,” he continued, lifting his head to a lofty angle. “A prospective patient’s circumstances must be taken into consideration. Eligibility is key.”

  “Yeah,” Rooster said, sliding down off the paper-covered exam table with only minimal wincing. The pins in his left knee had preserved his ability to walk, the VA docs had told him, but when his foot hit the floor, bright sparks of pain moved down his entire leg. Hot as fire in his knee, bringing tears to his eyes that he quickly blinked away. “I bet.”

  The doctor exhaled through his nose and fixed Rooster with the sort of look every doctor and therapist had fixed him with over the past year. “Corporal Palmer, it’s very important that–”

  “Thanks, doc. I’ll see myself out.”

  The doctor didn’t protest.

  Rooster didn’t expect him to.

  He limped back through the mazelike hallways, following the laminated signs that steered patients back to the waiting room.

  If he’d cared about aesthetics, he would have said it was a beautiful building, in the way that a medical facility can be eye-catching. The walls had been painted a warm taupe, the terrazzo floors looking more like those of an upscale hotel lobby. Rather than harsh overhead tubes, glowing wall sconces provided the light. The air held a subtle floral smell. The effect was miles from the glaringly-bright, bleach-scented hospitals he’d cycled through after he was blown up.

  Not just a place of healing, but a well-funded one. A place not intended for the likes of him, with his unwashed hair and grungy jacket.

  In the waiting room, a new group of hopefuls occupied the chairs. All of them still with buzzed hair and immaculate dress. Several guys had spouses. An athletically-built woman in head-to-toe Nike sat upright, right arm cradled in her lap in a way Rooster knew too well – it was the same way he held his own bad arm in public, holding it close, guarding it.

  She glanced up as he walked past, eyes flashing dark and guarded. Stay away from me, her expression said.

  That was fine; he figured his own face said something similar.

  He was in the air lock when the alarm sounded.

  As it did every time something like this happened, his brain split in two. A clean, metaphorical cleaving that left him of two minds.

  Part of him – the half that had been pierced and pitted by shrapnel, burned and beat up, fractured and pinned back together again – wanted to curl and cower. But the other part of him, the dutiful Marine, the well-trained military killer, picked up the limp, frightened half of his psyche and kicked into action.

  He turned back to the lobby, was in the process of tugging open the door when a uniformed security guard loomed on the other side of the glass, waving him away.

  Rooster opened the door anyway, and the alarm was louder then. Not an air raid siren, not the fire alarm wailing he remembered from drills at school, but something softer and politer. An unobtrusive sort of siren, meant to catch your attention, but not to send you into a panic.

  The guard, face set in a scowl, held up a flat palm. “You can’t come back in here, sir. Please make your way out of the building.”

  Behind him, two other guards were herding the waiting patients up out of their chairs and toward the door. The door that Rooster was blocking.

  “Sir,” the guard said, firmly.

  “What’s going on?” Rooster asked. He felt a hard tug in his gut, that sense of responsibility he couldn’t shake off or drink away. There was no such thing as an ex-Marine, and all his training and instinct was kicking in now. Something was wrong, therefore he needed to act.

  But the guard was having none of it. “Sir,” he said, edging forward, openly hostile now. “You need to leave. Now.”

  The other potentials were closing in, peering at him curiously…and suspiciously. They were all vets, they would assume a man blocking the door was up to no good.

  The alarm continued to ring, on and on. Something wrong, something amiss. A fire? A gas leak?

  Not his business, really.

  Rooster nodded and turned away.

  The hopefuls followed him out onto the sidewalk, murmuring questions to one another, wondering aloud what might be happening. Evening was fast approaching, bringing a cold breeze with it, fat gray clouds piling up on the horizon.

  Rooster zipped his jacket with stiff fingers, shoved his hands – one smooth, one ruined – into his pockets and walked to the bus station.

  ~*~

  He’d just brought his third glass of bourbon to his lips when he heard the front door open and then shut above him. He was in that good space, where the buzz was fresh, floating but not flying, deliciously warm, his pain fuzzed at the edges so he felt almost human. His muscles, the ones that hadn’t been shredded and harvested to try to repair his broken body, had relaxed, and he was melting slowly down into his secondhand sofa.

  Drinking helped with the anxiety, too. When he was buzzed, he stopped listening for footfalls, waiting for disaster. When he was buzzed, he didn’t worry about the rest of his life, the disaster it was becoming. Sure, he’d wake up sweating and nauseas at two a.m., heart pounding out of his chest, blood in his mouth because he’d bitten his tongue in the midst of a nightmare.

  But for now, he drank.

  Overhead, high heels rapped across the hardwood floors. From the foyer to the kitchen, followed by the hurried thumps of a child’s sneakers. Two voices – one young and high, one grown and patient – conversed. Slap of the fridge door. Scrape of a chair’s legs.

  He was sitting forward to pour his fourth drink when the door at the top of the basement steps opened and the high heels clicked down into his lair.

  Ashley stepped around the corner wearing what had become her patented you-can-do-better expression. She folded her arms and propped a shoulder against the wall, fixing him with a look. “Number three?” she asked, nodding toward the glass in his hand.

  “Four.”

  She nodded, because she’d expected to find him like this, but her jaw tightened, because she hated it. “How’d your appointment go?”

  He shrugged. “It was a waste. I didn’t make the cut.”

  She sighed deeply. It was the same sound that followed her six-year-old daughter’s worst transgressions: jumping off the back of the sofa, and playing with the makeup. Serious stuff. “Rooster,” she said, in that voice that made grown men – her husband among them – run for cover. “You’re fucking up.”

  He let his head flop back so he didn’t have to look at her anymore. “I know, I know.”

  “So do better,” she said, like it was simple as that.

  She knew it wasn’t, though, and so Rooster heard the note of sadness in her voice.

  He recalled something her husband, Deshawn, had said to him once, reaching up to tap the photo of Ashley he’d taped above his bed. “She’ll chew your ass out,” he’d said, his smile broad, “but it’s only ‘cause she loves you. When she stops fussing, that’s when it’s time to get scared – that’s when she’s decided she’s done with you.”

  She clearly hadn’t given up on Rooster yet, so that was something.

  She pushed off the wall and came into the central room of the basement, going to the coffee table and collecting empty glasses and greasy paper plates, consolidating everything so she could take it to the kitchenette in one trip.

  “Ash, you don’t,” he started, half-rising. His knee, and his back, and his neck grabbed, lightning flashes of pain that forced the air out of his lungs in a low hiss.

  “Sit your ass back down,” she said, her sigh fond and worried now. “Have you eaten anything? You can’t
drink like that on an empty stomach.”

  Slowly, sweat popping out on his temples as he fought the pain, he eased back down to the couch. “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, you look fine.” She carried the plates to the trash and dropped the glasses into the little shallow sink that he only used once he’d dirtied all his glasses and was forced to at least rinse them out before he filled them again. “I’m making spaghetti for Desiree. Come upstairs and have dinner with is.” It wasn’t a suggestion.

  “Ash–”

  “Twenty minutes,” she said, firmly, leaving no room for argument, and shot him her best drill sergeant glare on her way out.

  Rooster listened to the gunshot sounds of her high heels going back up the stairs and knew that, somehow in the next twenty minutes, he’d get himself upright and drag his carcass upstairs for spaghetti and Desiree’s exuberant eight-year-old brand of conversation. He might drink himself to sleep every night, take too many painkillers, and be a walking disaster in general, but there were some lines he wasn’t willing to cross, and displeasing Ashley Spencer was one of them.

  A year ago, Deshawn had been taking point when they infiltrated the house where they’d finally pinned down the al-Qaeda boss they’d been hunting for weeks. Rooster had heard the faint click echo off the stone walls. Had thought of the photos of Ashley and Desiree taped over his friend’s bed. And he’d grabbed Deshawn by his pack and dragged him back, thrown him around the corner, behind the wall. Had shielded him with his own body.

  Deshawn had walked away with minimal scrapes and bruises.

  Even now, Rooster could only remember the pain burning through his body like fire, the blurred view of faces crowding over him, shouts and curses. The thump of the rotors and the wind on his face as he was strapped down and loaded on the helo.