Dead in the Family

crossed the boy’s face. “At times, all of those,” he said succinctly. “But truthfully, I haven’t been well myself. That’s why we’re here.”
    Jason began to look angry. He likes kids, always has. Even though Alexei could have killed Jason in a second, Jason thought of Alexei as a child. My brother was building up a big mad, actually thinking of charging into the living room to confront Appius Livius Ocella.
    “Listen, Alexei, you don’t have to stay with that dude if you don’t want to,” Jason said. “You can stay with me or Sookie, if Eric won’t put you up. Nobody’s gonna make you stay with someone you don’t want to be with.” Bless Jason’s heart, he sure didn’t know what he was talking about.
    Alexei smiled, a faint smile that was simply heart-piercing. “Really, he is not so bad. He is a good man, I believe, but from a time you can’t imagine. I think you are used to knowing vampires who are trying to . . . mainstream. Master, he is not trying to do this. He is much happier in the shadows. And I must stay with him. Please don’t trouble yourselves, but I thank you for your concern. I’m feeling better already now that I’m with my brother. I don’t feel as if I’ll suddenly do something . . . regrettable.”
    Jason and I looked at each other. That was enough to make us both worried.
    Alexei was looking around the kitchen as if he seldom saw one. I figured that was probably true.
    I took the warm bottles out of the microwave and shook them. I put some napkins on the tray with the bottles. Jason got himself a Coke from the refrigerator.
    I didn’t know what to think about Alexei. He apologized for Ocella like the Roman was his grumpy grandpa, but it was apparent that he was in Ocella’s sway. Of course he was; he was Ocella’s child in a very real sense.
    It was an awfully strange situation, having a figure out of history sitting in your living room. I thought of the horrors he’d experienced, both before and after his death. I thought of his childhood as the tsarevitch, and I knew that despite his hemophilia, that childhood must have contained some glorious moments. I didn’t know whether the boy often longed for the love, devotion, and luxury that had surrounded him from birth until the rebellion, or (considering he’d been executed along with his whole immediate family) whether it was possible he saw being a vampire as an improvement over being buried in a pit in the woods in Russia.
    Though with the hemophilia, his life expectancy in those days would have been pretty damn short anyway.
    Jason added ice to his glass and looked in the cookie jar. I didn’t keep cookies anymore, because if I did, I’d eat ’em. He closed the jar sadly. Alexei was watching everything Jason did as if he were observing an animal he’d never seen before.
    He noticed me looking at him. “Two men took care of me, two sailors,” he said, as though he could read the questions in my mind. “They carried me around when the pain was bad. After the world turned upside down, one of them abused me when he had the chance. But the other died, simply because he was still kind to me. Your brother reminds me a little of that one.”
    “Sorry about your family,” I said awkwardly, since I felt compelled to say something.
    He shrugged. “I was glad when they found them and gave the burial,” he said. But when I saw his eyes, I knew that his words were a thin layer of ice over a pit of pain.
    “Who was that in your coffin?” I asked. Was I being tacky? What on earth else was there to talk about? Jason was looking from Alexei to me, mystified. Jason’s idea of history was remembering Jimmy Carter’s embarrassing brother.
    “When the big grave was found, Master knew they would find my sister and me soon. We overestimated the searchers, perhaps. It took sixteen more years. But in the meantime, we revisited the place where I was buried.”
    I felt my eyes fill with tears. The place where I was buried . . .
    He continued, “We had to provide some of my bones for it, because we had learned about DNA by then. Otherwise, of course, we could have found a boy about the right age. . . .”
    I really couldn’t think of anything remotely normal to say. “So you cut out some of your own bones to put in the grave,” I said, my voice clogged and shaky.
    “In steps, over time. Everything grew back,” he said reassuringly. “We had to burn my bones a little. They had burned Maria and me, and poured acid