The Siren's Dance (7 page)

“The greatest.” Anya rotated her ghost form toward him.

A single glimpse of her sharp and unexpected beauty, her compelling, perplexing liveliness, left him reeling. What a shame he’d met her under these weird circumstances. And that she was dead. Even in his kinkiest dreams, he couldn’t imagine how that would work.

“It’s bizarre that you know so much about ballet,” she said. “I assumed you were a meathead, with your…you know…muscles.”

“Oh, I am.” He knocked his knuckles against his temple. “Total, grade-A prime beef in here. But in my defense, your muscles are impressive too, and I’m not calling you a putz.”

“Fair enough.”

He thought he heard a smile in the words, but he was afraid to look and learn he was mistaken. Had she ever been quick to laugh or show pleasure?

A picture surfaced in his memory. The cover of a tabloid newspaper, the most determined of the three TV ballerinas captured on camera with a broad smile. Months after the show had been cancelled, the news had broken that she’d been having an affair with the married director of the ballet. Sergey had grown furious on the woman’s behalf. Her ambition had made her vulnerable, and a powerful older man had taken advantage.

His gut tingled with a detective’s hunch, the sort he didn’t like to credit. But still… That ballerina had been the most like Anya of the three.

He inhaled and braced himself for another tornado before he asked, “Was Demyan your lover?”

She answered instantly and without a hint of surprise. “He was my teacher. Only that.”

Sergey didn’t believe her. Maybe it was the sudden hollowness in her otherwise beautiful voice, or the definitive hard stop that invited no further questions on the subject.

“Then tell me about your death.” He kept his gaze glued to the road as the traffic thickened on the approach into the city. “I read the police reports, but I gather Ivan and Gregor worked a whopper of a cover-up on those.”

In the corner of his eye, he saw her swivel her head toward him.

“Weren’t you ever taught some topics are taboo?”

“In my house it was politics, religion, and my father. Of course, my mother taught me not to ask a woman’s age, or her weight, but she never discouraged me from inquiring about how she died. Would you rather talk about the weather? The leaves have already turned. Fall came early this year.”

She burst out laughing, a sound so rich and full of those supernatural timbres that it washed him with pleasure. “Oh God, please. I want to talk about anything but autumn leaves. Death, Demyan, anything.”

Sergey didn’t get the joke, but he loved that he’d made her laugh. In the aftermath, the silence between them felt cleaner and easier.

Then she spoke. “Gregor did it, but I don’t think he meant to. I remember him calling out for me to stop running, but I’d just heard his brother shoot my parents and then Sonya, and I was too frightened to listen. I jumped into the river.”

He shook with rage, his jaw clenched, but he managed to bite out a few words, because he needed her to know them. “I hate crooked cops.”

“Of course you do, puppy.”

The nickname had grated, but it was beginning to sound almost affectionate.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

“I couldn’t care less. For most people, life is misery and then they die. Who cares if people are crooked and miserable, or honest and miserable?”

“Maybe if less people were crooked, we’d be less miserable.”

He believed it. At least he really wanted to. He’d often wondered if some secret injustice was at the root of his mother’s delusions. Still, the sentiment did sound naive when spoken to a victim of such blatant exploitation.

“How about I hold my breath?” she asked. “Oh, right. I don’t have one.”

A fact he was genuinely beginning to regret, though he chuckled at her joke.

“What were they like, your parents?”

She snuffled affectionately. “Like everyone’s parents. Boring, clueless as to what I felt or cared about. But also good and honest. They worked hard, loved each other, and Sonya, and they tried to love me. I just… Well, I’m me.”

Sergey had met enough troubled kids and desperate parents to be certain hers had loved her more than she’d understood. How sad that they’d all died before she could grow up enough to see it. But if he said so, she’d call him a sugarcoated puppy and roll her eyes at his every future attempt to speak.

Like Kiev, skyscrapers had been erected in Odessa, vastly transforming the skyline since the last time Anya had visited, but the heavy air felt familiar. Without an actual nose, she couldn’t smell the briny Black Sea as she had before, but the atmospheric change still triggered the memories of her first arrival at Demyan’s side.

She’d been defeated, humiliated by him in Lyubashivka, but as they’d driven into Odessa, with its tree-lined streets, she’d regained her determination. She would win his love, would be the dancer and woman he wanted. Now, all these years later, when that determination had long ago proved futile, the bitterness of the humiliation lingered as an acid edge to her every thought.

She glanced over at the strong profile of her driver. His silence only added to her old and angry shame. She’d admitted she knew she was unlovable, and he’d held his tongue, too much the sweet puppy to agree outright. But she’d heard it in his failure to speak, the absence of an argument or even a self-effacing joke.

He rubbed his nose, slid his sunglasses onto the top of his head, and then drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to a silent beat. His every gesture lacked Stas’s elegant grace, and yet Sergey’s movements were thoroughly masculine and quite attractive in their own way.

Ridiculous that as her chance for freedom from her stupid slipper drew near, she was longing for some handsome man to tell her she was lovable. Had she really expected him to argue? He was such a nice guy that even if he had, it would have been honey meant to soothe her.

She’d always known, from her first years of school, that she didn’t have the temperament or the looks to be treasured the way Sonya and other girls were. She’d been bony and sharp instead of soft and pretty, assertive and acerbic in the face of the other girls’ docility. That’s why, when Demyan had shown interest and praised her technique as particularly stark and beautiful, she’d been shocked. Slowly, it had seemed that with him her faults might be attributes--her razor edges and cutting tongue signs of her determination, her discipline, her individuality.

Then she’d begun to disappoint him. She’d tried to take each instance as an opportunity to improve her dancing, but in the end, his rejection had proven she would never be truly worthy of love. And Yuchenko seemed to agree.

Maybe she should tell him how Stas had humiliated her. If she confessed just how worthless she was, she could finally kill her incessant need for approval and stay focused on her mission. Once she’d joined Jerisavlja’s sisterhood of
vilas
to roam the forests and tundra, it wouldn’t matter if men thought she was a harpy anymore.

She sucked in an imaginary breath for courage.

“You really want to know what Stas Demyan did to me?”

The car glided to a stop under a maple with rippling fire-red leaves. Wordlessly, he’d parked alongside a playground, clearly not their destination. Then he turned and gave her the full force of all his attention. “Yes. I do.”

That intense gaze inflamed her ghostly body with strange heat, and she glanced away, focusing on the road because she couldn’t bear his stare.

“He groomed me to be his prima ballerina. He worked me hard, shaped me with a cruel blade, subjected me to humiliations to make me disciplined and strong.”

“Like what?” he almost growled, angry sparks flaring in his hazel eyes.

That outrage made him a good cop, the instinct to do right and protect everyone and everything, his indignation over the fate of even a harpy like her. She’d called him a puppy, but he was more like a noble guard dog on the verge of growing into his oversized paws.

“He controlled what I ate. Planned my meals, measured my portions, ordered for me in restaurants. When he thought I was getting fat, he gave me ipecac or laxatives. He was trying to make me perfect.”

Yuchenko’s second growl was barely even a word. “Why?”

She turned to him, puzzled. Wasn’t it obvious? “To make me the best ballerina.”

“I mean, why did you let him?”

Wasn’t that obvious too? “To be the best.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “You loved him?”

“With everything I had.” Though forced to voice it aloud after all these tortuous, angry years, the emotion shattered, its many layers crumbling apart like fragile slivers of shale, each one suddenly clear and distinct. Need, insecurity, loneliness, but not the bonds of loyalty and commitment she shared with her family, even though she’d felt like an outsider with them.

Maybe she had merely loved the idea of Stas loving her, how it had represented her mastery of herself, and redeemed all those traits everyone considered flaws.

By simply considering that liberating possibility, the bonds that held her ghost body together relaxed. Not frighteningly loose, just spacious. Yes, she could take a modicum of pride in not actually having loved the cruel man.

“What happened, Anya?” Yuchenko’s obvious effort to gentle his voice didn’t succeed in hiding his impatience.

“Finally, when I knew I was ready to be Giselle, knew I’d finally earned his approval, he gave the part to another dancer and announced he planned to marry her.”

“He used you.” Sergey’s jaw worked, its muscles flexing and relaxing as he gripped the steering wheel.

“Yes. He pitted me against her, had been grooming her too, holding his love out as a prize. And she won. I was not good enough to be prima or his wife.”

“Humph.” In the single syllable, guttural and non-committal, she was reminded of everything she loved and hated about Ukrainian men. Too masculine for actual words when it mattered most.

“Humph?” She wanted to shove him. Unfortunately, she was a ghost. “Humph? What does that even mean?”

He combed his fingers through his cropped hair. “Among other things, it’s a polite way of calling your bullshit. If you really weren’t good enough, why are you angry at him?”

“Because he was a jerk.”

Finally, he turned to look at her, his knowing, green-flecked eyes too wise. “I mean, that wasn’t a tornado of self-pity and inadequacy. It was pure, righteous fury. The ghost inside you believes you were wronged, not that you got what you deserved.”

“Huh.” It came out almost as a laugh.

She’d been wracked with vengeful anger for so long, and yet she’d never noticed that. At the time of her death, she’d felt only utter despair from his rejection, but as a
vila
, she’d been consumed instead by a supernatural longing for freedom from the slipper that bound her to him.

Ever since Jerisavlja and the
vilas
had first visited her, she’d known what she had to do to get that freedom. Kill Stas. Not a drop of mercy or pity tainted her determination, though she felt no violence toward anyone else. Killing Stas was her sole reason for being. And the puppy was right--death had already freed her from the obsessive need that had been her love for the man.

She tossed her head back and, for a moment, actually enjoyed being weightless, free of the compulsive longing. “Not bad, Yuchenko.”

He grinned and scratched his chin where light brown stubble had begun to grow, making him look older and shaggier and--God, that smile was breathtaking. That is, if she’d had a breath to take away.

“A compliment from the prima ballerina? A screw must be loose in your ghost brain.”

She shook her head and banged on her temple with the heel of her hand, a pantomime of motions she couldn’t feel at all. With her other hand, she caught the imaginary screw and held it up for his inspection. “Here it is. Big one. No wonder I was malfunctioning so severely.”

He plucked the non-existent screw from her fingers and tossed it into the backseat. “I think I’ll let you stay broken for a while. I prefer the occasional kindness.” Then his voice dropped and he flexed his hands on the steering wheel so hard the tendons rose up in relief. “But when we find Demyan, I’ll put this screw back and tighten up the rest, so you can lash him with all your fury.”

The thought of him putting a screw inside her sent a blast of that desert wind through her ghost body. But there had been no flirtation in those menacing words. He most certainly hadn’t intended the double entendre she’d heard.

“Aw, thanks, puppy. That would be the nicest thing anyone ever did for me.”

Not strictly true. Her parents had granted her plenty of kindness, gifts, treats, efforts to indulge her. Sonya had sewn her beautiful clothing, generous with the scraps she collected, making Anya the best-dressed dancer in the national company. But she’d always thought those acts on her family’s part had been obligatory, as if they were trying to be devoted and to live up to their expectations of themselves. From her earliest memories, she’d felt like the wrong puzzle piece, forced into her family with a bad fit, leaving gaps here and rubbing uncomfortably there.

Yuchenko’s outrage on her behalf didn’t feel forced at all, but like a natural kindness, like something true. Gratitude washed through her.

“Seriously, Anya. I know you said that you just want to talk to him, but that tornado didn’t look like the invitation to a friendly chat.”

It was hard to argue with the observation, but to her relief, he wasn’t freaking out or threatening to turn around and head back to Kiev. “What are you getting at?”

“Promise me you’ll let me talk to him first. I have some questions of my own I’d like to ask.”

“Why?”

“What if he’s a serial predator? What if he hurt other girls too?”

“Then they were as foolish as me to let him get close.”

“No.” He banged on the steering wheel, the first flash of temper she’d ever seen from him. “You were a victim, and there were probably more. They deserve justice.”

The sudden wind rose up from inside her, so cold it numbed her before it broke free, ruffling his hair and forming ice crystals on his eyelashes. He shivered, batting them away.