Innocent Blood by James Rollins, Rebecca Cantrell

cheek, leaving a hot trail across his frozen skin.
    He wiped it away with the back of his glove, growing angry, frustrated, wanting to scream at the endless expanse—not for help, but for release, to see his mother and father again.
    Two months ago, someone had drugged him, and he woke up here, on this giant icebreaker in the middle of a frozen ocean. The ship was newly painted, mostly black, the cabins stacked on top like red LEGO bricks. So far he had counted roughly a hundred crewmembers aboard, memorizing faces, learning the ship’s routine.
    For now, escape was impossible—but knowledge was power.
    It was one of the reasons he spent so much time in the ship’s library, sifting through the few books in English, trying to learn as much as he could.
    Any other inquiries fell on deaf ears. The crew spoke Russian, and none of them would talk to him. Only two people aboard the icebreaker ever spoke to him—and they terrified him, though he did his best to hide it.
    As if summoned by his thoughts, Alyosha joined him at the rail. He carried two rapiers and passed one over. The Russian boy looked the same age as Tommy, but that face was a lie. Alyosha was lots older, decades older. Proving his inhumanity, Alyosha wore a pair of gray flannel pants and a perfectly pressed white shirt, open at the collar, exposing his pale throat to the frigid wind that raked across this empty corner of the icy deck. A real person would freeze to death in that outfit.
    Tommy accepted the rapier, knowing that if he touched Alyosha’s bare hand, he would find it as cold as the ice crusting the ship’s rail.
    Alyosha was an undying creature called a strigoi .
    Immortal, like Tommy, but also very different from himself.
    Shortly after Tommy’s kidnapping, Alyosha had pressed Tommy’s hand to his cold chest, revealing the creature’s lack of a heartbeat. He had shown Tommy his fangs, how his canine teeth could push into and out of his gums at will. But the biggest difference between them was that Alyosha fed on human blood.
    Tommy was nothing like him.
    He still ate regular food, still had a heartbeat, still had his same teeth.
    So what am I?
    It seemed even his captor—Alyosha’s master—didn’t know. Or at least, never shared this knowledge.
    Alyosha clouted him on the head with the hilt of his rapier to gain his attention. “You must attend to what I am saying. We must practice.”
    Tommy followed him out onto the makeshift fencing strip on the ship’s deck and took his position.
    “No!” his competitor scolded. “Widen your stance! And keep the rapier up to cover yourself.”
    Alyosha, apparently bored on the giant ship, was teaching him the manners of a Russian nobleman. Besides these fencing lessons, the boy taught him a lot of terms for horses, horse tack, and cavalry formations.
    Tommy understood the other’s obsession. He had been told Alyosha’s real name: Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov. In the library, he had found a text on Russian history, discovered more about this “boy.” A hundred years ago he had been the son of Czar Nicholas II, a royal prince of the Russian Empire. As a kid, Alyosha had suffered from hemophilia, and according to the book, only one person could relieve him of his painful bouts of internal bleeding, the same man who would eventually become his master, turning the prince into a monster.
    He pictured Alyosha’s master, with his thick beard and dark face, hidden elsewhere aboard the ship, like a black spider in a web. He was known in the early 1900s as the Mad Monk of Russia, but his real name was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin. The history texts detailed how the monk had made friends with the Romanovs, becoming an invaluable counselor to the czar. But other sections hinted at Rasputin’s sexual weirdness and political intrigues, which eventually led to an assassination attempt by a group of nobles.
    The monk had been poisoned, shot in the head, beaten with a club, and dumped in a frozen river—only to