“Eric, tell me how you are doing these days,” Appius Livius said. He sounded genuinely interested. His hand went over to Alexei, and I saw he was stroking the boy’s back, as if Alexei were a puppy. But I couldn’t deny there was affection in the gesture.

“I’m very well. Area Five is prosperous. I was the only Louisiana sheriff to survive the takeover by Felipe de Castro.” Eric managed to sound matter-of-fact.

“How did that come about?”

Eric gave the older vampire a rundown on the political situation with Victor Madden. When he thought Appius Livius was up to speed on the Felipe de Castro/Victor Madden situation, Eric asked him, “How did you come to be on hand for the rescue of this young man?” Eric smiled at Alexei.

This would be a story worth listening to, now that I’d heard Alexei’s horrifying tale about “salting” his grave. While Alexei Romanov sat by his side in remote silence, Appius told Eric about tracking down the Russian royal family in 1918.

“Though I had expected something of the sort, I had to move much faster than I had anticipated,” Appius said. He finished his bottled blood. “The decision to execute them was made so swiftly, conducted at such speed. No one wanted the men to have time to think twice about it. For many of the soldiers, it was a terrible thing they were doing.”

“Why did you want to save the Romanovs?” Eric asked, as if Alexei weren’t there.

And Appius Livius laughed. He gave great laugh. “I hated the fucking Bolsheviks,” he said. “And I had a tie to the boy. Rasputin had been giving him my blood for years. I happened to be in Russia already; you remember the St. Petersburg Massacre?”

Eric nodded. “I do indeed. I had not seen you in many years, and only caught a glimpse of you then.” Eric had talked about the St. Petersburg Massacre before. A vampire named Gregory had had madness visited on him by a vengeful maenad, and it had taken twenty vampires to pin him down and then disguise the results.

“After that night, when so many of us worked together to tidy up the scene after Gregory was subdued, I developed a fondness for the Russian vampires—and the Russian people, too.” He tacked the Russian people on with a gracious nod toward me and Jason, as representatives of the human race. “The fucking Bolsheviks killed so many of us. I was grieved. The deaths of Fedor and Velislava were particularly hard. They were both great vampires, and hundreds of years old.”

“I knew them,” Eric said.