Haunted (4 page)

“I talked to her every week.”

“And she lied to you for most of them.” Tess says this as though it’s the plainest of facts, but the words feel like stabs, mostly because she’s right.
Have I really not listened carefully enough to Anne these past months? Did I just not want to know?

“Like I was saying before Ben almost got dragged down by whatever the hell it was in the pool.” Tess’s tone shifts to something a little less even. “All that energy or power or whatever it was that you zapped Anne with to save Anastasia? It hasn’t gone away. Oh, she’ll keep telling you it has. But it hasn’t. In fact, I think there’s more of it. I think she’s full of stuff she’s not telling you or me about.”

I glance behind me at Anne and Ben. As though Anne feels me watching, she turns, meets my gaze, then looks away. Ben coughs some more, spits water onto the pavement.

“I didn’t do this, Tess.”

“Maybe not,” she acknowledges. “But you started it all. Everything was fine before you started following her around. And now it’s not. So don’t even try to deny that part, Ethan.”

“There was something down there.” I don’t mean to tell her this, but I do anyway. “It was only a flash. A shadow. But I saw it. A woman, I think. And then there was a voice. Did you hear it too?”

“I’d have told you if I did.” Tess flips that long blond hair behind her. “But I bet Anne did.” She sighs, seems to push all that flaring anger down a few notches. “I hate this. Watching her. It’s like when her brother died. She got all quiet then too. That’s just how she is—private like that. But I guess you know that. Or if you don’t—well, you should.”

“Of course I know it
.” Only if I did, then I should have pushed more for the truth, rather than accepted Anne’s silences. But I didn’t.
“And for the record, I didn’t start all this. It would have happened whether I was there or not. She was the one, Tess—the girl who could save Anastasia. I was just the person who figured it out.”

Tess is quiet for a moment. This unnerves me almost more than the rest of it. In my thankfully limited experience, Tess has never been quiet.

She looks at me, her expression intense. “Ethan—what made Ben jump into the pool?”

“I don’t know. But I’m going to try to find out.”

Tess pokes a finger at me again. “I’m holding you to that.” Her voice lowers to almost a whisper. “She feels responsible, you know. For Anastasia’s death. Probably for that rotten Viktor, too. That’s what I think, anyway. I guess that might not be worth much to you, it being my opinion and all. But that’s how I see it. And now this thing with Ben is going to make it all worse.”

She places her hands on her hips and seems to wait for me to disagree with her. My jeans and T-shirt continue to drip pool water.

“So that shadow woman,” Tess asks. “What exactly is it that you thought you saw?”

The answer rises from me quickly. Like the tales of Baba Yaga that I’d once thought were just stories, another tale comes to mind: one that the women in my village had told when our neighbor’s nineteen-year-old daughter had drowned in the river a few days after her lover had died of influenza. She was pregnant, and he had promised to marry her, and then suddenly, he was gone. She grieved and grieved, and then one day, her father found her floating, her hair wild around her in the water.

“Rusalka,” I say. “Russian mermaid.”

“Ru-what? Don’t just say that like I’m supposed to know what you’re talking about. Mermaid? Like Ariel in that Disney movie?”

I smile in spite of myself. “More malevolent. Less cheery singing. Definitely less cheery outcome. Women who’ve been wronged. Sometimes murdered. Always near a body of water. They transform sometimes. That’s how the legends go. They become this other thing—this water creature. In some stories, they find release. In others, it’s more—um, permanent. But I’ve—well, I’ve seen things. They’re real. Rusalkas exist.”

“Terrific. You know it might be easier if you made us a list, Ethan. You know—crazy Russian folklore shit that’s going to appear, freak us all out, and try to kill someone’s boyfriend. That kind of thing.”

“I’ll consider that. So he really is her boyfriend?”

Tess raises an eyebrow. “Yup. So this mermaid thing—is it dangerous?”

My silence is my answer. It’s broken by the sound of sirens. Someone’s called an ambulance or the fire department.

“Ben has been really good for her,” Tess says. “So while you’re screwing things up again, you remember that.”

“I’m here to help. That’s why I came back.” It sounds as foolish coming out of my mouth as it did in my head before I said it.

Tess laughs. “Right,” she says. “So start helping.”

Baba Yaga

Through the skull in my fireplace, I watch Anne. The one who is mine but not mine. The one who is not gone from me. I had not known what losing Anastasia would feel like: the pain of it; the wrenching bitterness.

The loss of that one girl has weakened me. Changed me. I had not known that I could be other than I was. But I have learned that there are things beyond what even I know.

Maiden. Mother. Crone. These are what I am. What I have been. Goddess, but more than goddess. And now—something else. The emptiness of it creeps into me, worms its way deep inside and holds fast, even as I struggle to shake it loose.

“Ben.” Anne hugs the boy on the ground tightly in her arms. “Oh, Ben. I was so afraid.”

“Me too,” he tells her. “I don’t understand what happened. I saw her, Anne. I saw her. You did too, didn’t you? Tell me I wasn’t seeing things.”

She does not answer, only pulls him even tighter, and her thoughts float out to me as mine sometimes float to her. She feels responsible for what happened. For what might have happened. This much I can see. Does she love this boy whose life almost disappeared in front of her eyes? I believe she wants to. But Ethan is back. Love does not always obey logic. It is as I am—impossible to predict. It can empower as much as it can destroy. It can hull us empty, or it can fill us with great joy. But we cannot know which is our destiny. Not even I can know for sure.

I lean closer to my fire and try to warm myself. I study the face of the man who has been my prisoner—the one who offered himself in place of my other girl. My Anastasia. He let her free. Does he know that she chose death? I have told him, but he is quite stunningly mad these days, and so I do not know if he has heard me.

“Mother,” he whispers to me. “Baba Yaga.” And sometimes, when the madness digs deeper, “Darling.”

When Anastasia was in the hut, things were different. She swept and brought me sweet tea and pretended not to understand what I was. In her bed, she hid the doll that her mother had given her, the one that spoke to her. She believed that it protected her, and I let her have this thought. Perhaps it was even true sometimes. Like love, magic is a strange and mercurial thing. Its strength comes from the object and the user, but also from the giver. Anastasia’s mother gave her that doll, and so the wishes and dreams and hopes she had for her daughter came with it. Potent magic. More powerful than this man who now shares my hut could ever believe. I could
make
him believe, of course, but I see no need. The truth would not set him free.

“Yaga,” he calls to me. It is my name, and names have power. Viktor knows this. He knows many things. But he has never known what I truly am.

Had he come to me like Anastasia, when the magic was at its height, when I was compelled to take a girl against her truest will, as well as mine, things might not have gone so badly for him. Anastasia suffered here, but she did not age. That magic has not been so kind to Brother Viktor.

I look at his face now, and I laugh. Time—as always—follows its own rules here in my hut. Once, long, long ago—so distant that I can barely see it now—I was human. Or at least, closer to human than I am now; than I have been for a very, very long time. I ran through meadows, wove flowers through my hair, felt the earth’s power beneath me. I was beautiful then. My hair flowed long and thick. My eyes were bright, my hands small and smooth, my body young and firm and strong. And I thought I would be young forever.

When he offered himself to me—a Romanov in blood but not in heart—Viktor too looked different than the man I see now, crouched by the fire, his hair matted, his eyes rheumy, his face lined so deeply that were there a mirror in the hut, he would scream if he saw himself. But there is not. Still, he runs his hands over his face. I know he feels the change, and I know it frightens him. And in those moments, I feel a bitter kind of pleasure.

“Yaga,” he says to me now. “My dear Yaga. What will we do today?”

Because the possibilities are many, I ponder this. And because I can, I concentrate, feel the power surge inside me as my right hand releases, drops heavily to the wooden floor of the hut, then crawls—huge and brown and wrinkled—on its finger tips to this man whose gaze skitters from the fire to the hand to my face.

“No,” he says softly.

But I do not listen. Instead, I smile as my hand strokes his hair. I see him shudder. I concentrate and move the hand to his cheek, run one finger across those deep grooves. He bites his tongue so he will not scream, and somehow, in my own mouth, I taste the copper tang of it.

“If I find a way to let you go,” I say, “what will you do?”

For a moment, my hand still on his cheek, his gaze clears. He was, after all, a powerful magician. Not as powerful as I am. Certainly not as powerful as those whose magic resides in me: The Old Ones. The ones who came before. The ones who changed me, who made me what I am now.

“If you don’t let me go, what will become of you, Yaga?”

The question lies between us. My hand moves from his cheek, slithers over his shoulder and down his back, scuttles back across the smooth wooden floor and up my dress, and reattaches itself to my body. My arm tingles, tiny prickles of sensation. In the fireplace, the skull gleams brighter, its bleached bones almost sparkling. In its eyes, Anne strokes the hair of the fragile mortal called Ben. Ethan watches them, his blue eyes missing nothing. His heart, I fear, is missing everything. And deep in the water, so deep that none of them can see her, the rusalka swims and smiles. I know she is there. I just am not sure what she wants—or what she will do to get it.

Here in my hut, I know that if I do not free this man I’ve held captive, his presence will weaken me further. He is a Romanov, yes. But he is not the Romanov who is supposed to be here. That one is dead—or if not dead, not here nevertheless, and that is all the same to me. It is not his magic that weakens me. It is my own. The Crone’s magic. Virgin. Mother. Hag. The girl awakened my middle nature. Mother. And it was that which almost destroyed me. The grief of giving her up clawed at my insides. Burned me from within.

I do not harbor those feelings for Viktor. Only rage—hot and red, or sometimes black as night, an oily rage that slicks about the hut like a presence. I cannot kill him, and I cannot love him. He is linked by blood to my two girls, Anastasia and Anne, and blood is powerful. The first night he was with me, I dreamed of slaughtering him where he lay, cowering and whimpering like a mewling infant, the smell of fear so strong on him that I could almost see it rising in waves. I hated that I had taken him, that he lay on Anastasia’s bed, clutching at the red and blue cotton quilt she had used, that his skin touched something that had touched hers.
Impossible.

That first night, I rose from my chair, fetched a knife from the table. I would not send my hands alone to do this business. I would do it with a whole body. This man had tricked the tsar’s youngest daughter, had tried to kill Anne. What kind of man uses a seventeen-year-old girl for his own power? What kind of man tries to kill another innocent girl to keep that power? I raised the knife. I felt only calm. Only peace.

Viktor watched me. He was in his prime still. The youth he’d killed for had not yet abandoned him. If there was fear in his eyes, I couldn’t find it. “Can you do it, Yaga?” he asked me. His tone was even. His breathing calm. “If you want to kill me, then kill me. Don’t toy with me. We are old friends, you and I. Perhaps it is only fitting that you are the one to do it.”

I didn’t believe him, of course. Some men are willing to die for what they believe in. Viktor believed in nothing but himself. And men like that don’t court death. Even ones like Viktor, able to trick me into doing his bidding. Able to compel me to save a girl who in the end, wanted only to die.

I had thought that nothing more could surprise me. But I was wrong. I am the Death Crone, but I am more than that. And in that moment, perhaps because I sensed he wanted me to choose death, I chose to keep it from him. I set the knife on the table. I let Viktor live.

But that kindness has weakened me. I am, after all, not human anymore. I gave that up a long, long time ago. The price was steep, but I did not understand that then. Now, like my hut, I obey a different set of rules. The Crone in me understands, but the mother and maiden suffer when I destroy. It is a precarious balance, harder and harder to manage with each passing day.

We talk about this sometimes, Anne and I. At night she comes to me, a dream but not a dream. Real enough for both of us. We walk in my forest, and we talk. I try not to frighten her, but it is my way, and thus impossible to avoid. We speak of magic and life, of love and loss. Of the things that foolish girls do. She does not ask to see Viktor. And I do not offer. Sometimes, I catch her thinking about Ethan. Sometimes, I catch her grieving. She has much to grieve. I invite her to drink of the stream near my hut. So far, she has declined.

And now there is the rusalka. Once more, forces are ready to collide—just as they were when the time came for Anne to claim her power and free Anastasia. I know this in my deepest self. I wait for it. But I fear it, and this is strange because I have conquered fear.

At my feet, Viktor smiles. The madness has returned. In the skull in the fireplace, Anne strokes Ben’s hair. Ethan talks to the one called Tess, the one whose friendship shines like diamonds.

“Come to me,” I tell my captive.

Still smiling, he does as I command.