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“Allo?”

“Nikolai Zelenko?”

“Yes.”

“This is Autumn Darling… Aleksi’s servant. I’m at the airport.”

“Oh, hi. Your plane’s early, I’m at the Starbucks still,” a sweet tenor replied with accented but otherwise perfect English. “I thought I had another forty minutes.”

“No… I’m here,” I nervously sighed into the phone and looked around.

“I hope this doesn’t take points off,” he laughed nervously
…it was an oddly familiar laugh.

“It won’t, I’ve a feeling it’s going to be pass fail.”

“Well, I’ll try hard not to disappoint,” he chuckled nervously and I froze—I knew that laugh. That was Aleksi’s laugh. And then I saw him as he rounded the corner and my heart stopped in my chest. With the phone pressed to his ear and the Starbucks cup in hand he looked so normal, so utterly completely normal, and so much like Aleksi I actually panicked. The mouth was different but everything else, minus coloring
, was exactly the same. And I knew that mouth, that adorable, playful kittenish mouth—that was Colette’s mouth. What was Colette’s mouth, doing on Aleksi’s face?
Oh you know the answer to that.
The coloring was slightly different but I could chalk that up to the fact that he was living still. He was slightly darker than Aleksi, or rather his skin tone seemed more alive. It was a healthy slight tan as opposed to the other’s delicate, vampiric pallor. His hair was somewhere between light brown and dark blonde, almost that dishwater blonde shade that I could envision as Aleksi’s before his hundred year partial moratorium on sunlight.

The only real difference that couldn’t be explained away were the eyes. Aleksi and Colette had eyes that were surreal in color. They were electric blue, shockingly vibrantly blue. Nikolai’s eyes were so pale blue they almost lacked color. The same color Colette told me her child’s eyes had been. But she said he died.
No, she didn’t. You assumed, and you know what happens when you assume things.
Colette’s words from six months ago flooded my mind as I watched him approach me.
You look frightened, smile…

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Hamlet 3.1.125-30; Modern translation: I am arrogant, vengeful, ambitious, with more ill will in me than I can fit into my thoughts, and more than I have time to carry it out in. Why should people like me be crawling around between earth and heaven? Every one of us is a criminal. Don’t believe any of us.