Haunted (19 page)

Anne

I
can do this. I can do this. Both hands out in front of me, Ethan’s fingers still linked with those of my left hand. Visualize what I want. But what is that? Think. Think!

In my mind, I picture Tess. Blond hair, denim skirt, footless tights, T-shirt. Tess Edwards. I say her name over and over, because names are important and powerful, and even if they aren’t, it feels like the right thing to do. Then I hear myself scream without knowing that I’ve even made the sound, because out in the lake, one of the rusalkas edges closer to Ben.

“Ben! God, Ben! Come back!”
Can he hear me? Can we save them both?

“Promise me, girl!” Baba Yaga says again. I refuse to listen. I can’t listen.

“I can’t. Ethan, I can’t. I can’t think. Help me think!”

Ethan’s grip tightens. I feel him hesitate. Then he pulls me to him, cups my face with his hands and kisses me. “Whatever I have left in me, let it go to her.” His voice is fierce as he speaks the words against my lips. “
Ya dolzhen
. I must.
Ya dolzhen
. I must.
Ya dolzhen
. Let her take what has been mine. Let it be hers.”

The force of what he’s just offered smacks into me like the waves crashing against us. “No, Ethan! Don’t! You shouldn’t!” Before the words are out of my mouth, I feel a surge of energy course through me, rushing from toes to my scalp, more potent than when we opened the locked gate at the pool, stronger even than when I wrapped my hand around his and healed his cut.

“Shh,” he says. “It’s done.”

I start to protest again, but he places a finger on my lips. “It’s the only way I can help you.”

A million thoughts race through my mind, but only one stands out. I need to save Tess and Ben. I close my eyes. There’s no time to think about how I’m going to do this, so I just focus on getting it done. Picture them both coming back to me in the first image that pops into my head. Waves.

“Anne.” Ethan’s voice is low and steady, so low I can barely hear him above the roar of the surf that now crashes into our legs, slapping hard enough that I’m knocked off balance every few seconds. My feet shift in the sand at the bottom of the lake. “Anne,” Ethan says again. “Can you control this? Anne. You need to open your eyes.”

He says it like you’d tell someone to bring you a drink or pass the salt—no hint of panic or anything. Just hey, Anne, could you do this little thing for me, please?

Lake Michigan has waves. In storms, they get dangerous. The undertow can be deadly. But what I see when I open my eyes is more than deadly. It’s huge. Tsunami huge. And it’s chugging steadily toward us. A rusalka dances on the crest of it, her tail beating against the water, her arms fluttering in the air like she’s conducting an invisible symphony.

“You need to push it back,” Ethan tells me. “You need to hold it.” His voice is still unnaturally calm.

I, however, am not.

“I can’t! Did I do that? How the hell did I do that? I’ve killed them, Ethan! I know it! I’ve killed them! Shit! Shit! What am I supposed to do?”

“No choice, Anne. Stop talking. You need to hold that thing off and lower it. Lessen it. That’s what you need to visualize.”

Visualize? Everything is as wrong as it can possibly be. For the millionth time in the past few minutes, I wonder why Baba Yaga has appeared if she’s doing nothing to intervene. Except maybe that’s the whole point—some kind of sick challenge to see if I’m worthy of something I don’t even want.

“Make her help me!” I’m crying now, clutching at Ethan. “Don’t any of you understand that I don’t know what I’m doing?”

“Anne. Stop! There’s no time. You need to do it now.”

I glance back at the beach. My mother is standing there, staring out beyond us to the impossibly large wave of doom that continues to push toward shore. Lily stands near her, but Mom seems unaware of her presence. It’s just another crazy piece of this whole mess: a rusalka who wants me to give her a chance for vengeance. A witch who won’t explain herself. And the rest of us out here in the water, where we’ll probably die if I don’t get my act together. Not exactly how I planned on spending the first week of my summer vacation.

It’s the absurd humor of that last thought that actually yanks me out of the paralyzing fear that Ben and Tess might be lost forever: the ridiculous realization that other girls might spend their summer getting a tan, earning money, and hanging out with their friends. But I was never going to be one of them. Why? Because I have a destiny. And a formerly immortal guy who’s given me magic and told me he loved me, possibly because he figured I was too panicked to hear him. I’ve just outed my magical self to my mother. My boss—the one with a secret identity—my best friend, and my almost former boyfriend have been dragged off by mermaids. And if I don’t pull off a miracle in the next five seconds, we’ll all be pulverized by the humongous wave I’ve conjured up while trying to save everyone.

“Ah.” Baba Yaga is still above me, but her voice feels like it’s inside my head. “That’s my girl.”

This time, I ignore her.

“
Ya dolzhen!
” I call to the wave. I have no earthly idea if I need to start like Ethan did or if I’m even saying it correctly, but I figure it can’t hurt. The words feel potent, and I need to feel strong. “I must.”

I force myself past my main desire right now—which is to squeeze my eyes shut and just pretend this all isn’t happening.

“
Ya dolzhen!
” I shout into the wave that’s riding toward us, impossibly tall. And then, because it feels more like me, “You need to listen to me, wave. You will do what I say. You will not kill my friends. You will not let the rusalkas take them. Whatever I have—whatever it is that I’ve been given—it’s mine now. I am not Baba Yaga. And I am not Lily. I’m Anne. And you will listen to me. You will give me back my friends.”

“Keep going,” Ethan says. I risk a quick glance at him. His blue eyes are as intense as I’ve ever seen them. His jaw is set tightly, and his thick brown hair is blowing in the wind. “I’m here. I won’t leave you, no matter what happens. I’m here, Anne. Keep visualizing what you want.” He nods at me, then sloshes through the water to stand hip to hip with me.

My own hair whips around my face, and because it distracts me, I pull Lily’s hair clip from where it’s still shoved into my pocket. I snap it into my hair so quickly and clumsily that I scrape my temple—hard—as I do so. But it’s not just to keep my hair out of my eyes. I need Lily to think that I’m on her side. If she and the witch are both unpredictable, then maybe that’s what I need to be too. Let her think that I’ll do her bidding, that when this is over, I’ll go back to Baba Yaga’s hut and let Viktor free. If they can be cagey about everything, well, so can I.

I stare down the wave. It’s so close now that I don’t have time to think about anything else except what I want. Tess and Ben. Tess and Ben. A smaller wave that does no harm. A wave that won’t kill us all. Keep me safe. And Ethan. And my mother, whose life just got as crazy as mine and who—I realize with a sharp pang of fear—has just waded into the water next to me and Ethan.

Mom’s hair is plastered to her head. Her white blouse is ripped and splattered with mud from the rain and blood is oozing from a cut on her forehead. She pulls on my arm. “You can’t stay out here, Anne! Look at that! What are you doing? It’s going to kill you! It’s going to kill us all! Please, get out of the water!”

“Mom, no. I can’t talk right now. It’s going to be okay. You need to let me do this.” My fingers suddenly ache to press themselves to my mother’s forehead, to heal that cut, which wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for all this mess.

“Do what? What is it that you think you can do?”

Ethan moves around from the other side of me. “Mrs. Michaelson. Laura. She can’t listen to you right now. You’re not helping her. You have to believe me.”

I tell myself to block out whatever else they say to each other. I can’t block out my mother’s presence next to me, though, so I use it to intensify my focus. If I don’t finish this right now, then my father will lose both of us. Our family has lost enough. I can’t let that happen to him.

So I take all of it: the pain and the fear and my magic mingle inside me with Ethan’s. With whatever it is that connects me now to something greater than myself. “Let me do this,” I say. “Please. Please! Please let me do this!” The wave is so close now that its own power crashes against me as I fight to control it.

I force myself to imagine a calm day at the beach. I’m walking along the shoreline with Ethan and Tess and Ben. Other people sun themselves on towels. A guy in board shorts, hooked up to his iPod, jogs at the water’s edge. A boy about six is building a sand castle. The sun is shining, and in my mind’s eye, I see a school of silver fish darting through the water. In the distance, a sailboat steers south. Farther out, a couple of tankers chug along slowly. I can make out the water pumping station in the distance, the red buoys bobbing peacefully. A lifeguard sits atop his tall white stand, his nose covered in zinc oxide. The old lighthouse sits behind us, and farther west, on Sheridan Road, traffic moves steadily.

I force myself not to doubt.
I can do this. I can stop this. I have the power in me.

This time, when the magic flies from my hands, it’s so powerful that it sends me stumbling backward in the water. Everything is churning around me, and I can’t look at anything but the wave. I sense rather than see Ethan holding my mother. But he stays next to me, just as he’s promised.

“
Ya dolzhen!
” I say again. “I must control the water. The wave must do what I want. I must bring back my friends.”

I’m hurtled backward again, and again I struggle up from the water. I dig my feet into the sand and push the wave back and down. Back and down—again and again. I don’t know how long it takes. It feels like hours.

“I knew you had it in you, girl!” Baba Yaga shouts to me.

What’s strange is that, somehow, I knew I did, too.

The sky grows blue. The wave shrinks, lowers itself so quickly that I don’t even see it all happen. My body vibrates with the power that’s streaming out of me and into the wave. When it hits me, it’s still big enough to wash over me completely. My eyes are open as I lose my balance again, and inside the wave, I see rusalkas tumbling about. And then it’s over. Ethan drags me to the surface.

My mother is pale as death and crying. “You’re bleeding,” she says. “Anne. You’re bleeding. Oh, sweetheart. Thank God it stopped. You’re okay.”

“Where are they?” I look wildly around me. The magic is still racing through my veins, my blood, my everything. Have I failed? Was I too late?

“Look!” Ethan points out into the lake that’s still choppy but slowly settling.

Lily wades toward us gracefully, like it’s no effort at all for her to make her way through the surf. In her arms, she carries Tess’s limp body.

“Tess. Tess!” Half wading, half swimming, I make my way out to them. “Tess. Oh, Tess.”

“Anne. Oh, my dear Anne. I’m so sorry.” This is what Lily says to me as I approach her—as I look at my friend’s arm trailing lifeless against the water. Her face is white. Her eyes are closed.

But Lily isn’t looking at Tess. Her gaze is fixed to her right. I track where she’s looking, see the body floating facedown in the water.

Ben.

I don’t really know what I do or say after that. Ethan swims swiftly to Ben, and somehow, we’re all on the beach except Lily, who stays in the shallows, watching silently, and Baba Yaga, who has momentarily disappeared into the clouds.

My mother and Ethan kneel over Ben and Tess. I stand there, numb. They can’t be dead. They just can’t be. How could I have brought them back and not have them be alive?

Ethan starts chest compressions on Tess. I think fuzzily that we really should try to revive Ben first. Ben’s a lifeguard, isn’t he? He’s trained in CPR. He’d know what to do. He’d be working on Tess right now. Except he’s not. Because he’s lying there dead.

Ethan lifts Tess’s wrist. Presses his fingers to her wrist. Dips his head to her chest. “There’s a faint pulse,” he says grimly. “She’s alive. But just barely.” He rolls her to her side and pats her gently on the back. She coughs—the barest of sounds.

I look out into the lake at Lily. Other rusalkas have joined her now, but they make no move to come to shore. Is she controlling them? Could she have stopped them from attacking us, from taking Tess, if she had wanted to?

“Is this what you wanted?” I scream. “Does this make you happy? Do you think I’ll help you with your vengeance plan now?”

I sink to my knees, place one hand on Tess and the other on Ben. Their bodies are cold from the water but still warm with life. Tess is clinging to a thread and Ben—Ben is strong. I know this. He’s strong and good and doesn’t deserve to be mixed up in my stupid world.

“Move.” Mom edges me over in the sand. She places her hands on Ben’s chest, and like Ethan with Tess, begins CPR.

How useless am I? Magic girl. Destiny girl. But it’s Mom who took the CPR class when David was first diagnosed with cancer. It’s Mom who said that if something happened and the ambulance was delayed, at least if she was there, she could try to do something. How stupid have I been for keeping my secrets from her? Thinking what? That she’s too fragile to handle them?

“Anne.” Mom continues her rhythmic compressions. “Pinch Ben’s nose closed, and when I stop, you need to breathe into his mouth. Like this.” She mimes what she wants me to do.

I do as she directs. Tears sting the backs of my eyes as I press my mouth to Ben’s and try to breathe life back into him. Ben, who I’ve probably killed. Ben, who I’ve betrayed in every way possible.

Ethan stays with Tess. Mom and I work on Ben.

“It’ll be okay,” my mother says each time she presses against Ben’s chest. “It’ll be okay.” Like a prayer. A mantra. I watch her hands. And then I think I understand something else.

Lily. My mother. Me. The women who came before us. Lily’s mother and her mother. I remember the way Mom’s hand gripped mine at the Jewel Box. The way the magic seemed to flow from both of us. But Mrs. Benson’s story was about more than that, wasn’t it? About more than just our line of descent from Viktor. I hear her words in my head again…
her mother had whispered to her about the Old Ones. About powers. About the old ways of Russia. Deep secrets that went back so far that no one really knew their source. About how her grandmother had told her that nothing was ever as simple as it seemed.