The Darkest of Dreams

by Emigh Cannaday

  “Where’s everyone else?” he asked as he sat down near her.

  “Runa’s playing with Stella and Sloan up in the nursery, Nik and Justinian are bringing in wood before it starts snowing, and Sariel is taking a nap with Aidan.” She glanced down at the toddler in her arms and smiled. “I should probably lay her down for a nap as well, but the truth is that she’s keeping me nice and cozy.”

  “Then you may as well continue to wear her like a blanket. It’s a good look for you,” he said. “Much better than what you looked like a year ago.”

  Hilda lifted her eyes to meet his.

  “What did I look like a year ago?”

  Finn set down the spoon and leaned back in his chair, gazing at her with a thoughtful expression in his dark brown eyes.

  “You didn’t look half as happy as you do now. You’re on a good path.”

  “Am I?” she replied with a skeptical smile. “I don’t even know where it’s going.”

  “I’m not so certain we’re supposed to know where it leads…hopefully towards happiness and a sense of fulfillment with our lives.” He let his eyes rest on Violet before looking over at Hilda once more. “All I know is that you seem happy, which in turn makes me happy.”

  Hilda watched him carefully cut out another sensibly-sized bite of cobbler, and even though nobody was watching him except for her, she couldn’t help thinking how prim and proper he was in his display of manners. After living with Nikola for the past year, she’d gotten used to being around someone who didn’t care so much what others thought about him, no matter if it was the way he dressed, the way he ate, or the way he wore his hair. Nikola had a tendency to rest his elbows on the table, and he didn’t know the difference between jam and jelly. Even if he did, he wouldn’t waste his breath explaining it to someone. His manners weren’t particularly awful or even bad—they were simply unrefined. The only time he cut his food into dainty little bites was when he was feeding it to Violet. He never complained about Hilda’s cooking or left food on his plate. He never wore a belt or tucked in his shirts, and he rarely shaved his scruffy goatee, although he let Hilda trim it whenever it grew a little too wild. He said what he thought. And when he said he’d do something, he did it without hesitation.

  That was because—unlike Finn—Nikola didn’t need thirty years to make up his mind. He wasn’t even thirty years old, and yet he knew himself better than most of the men that she’d ever known. She thought of all the years that she’d waited for Finn to be ready to move forward with their lives together. He wanted to be ready, but he never was. She thought of all the time she’d spent waiting in vain, and all the time she’d spent mourning his death. When he’d walked through the front door she was elated to see him, yet it was only as a friend.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nikola heading upstairs to their room with a bundle of firewood tucked under his arms. She smiled and thought about how considerate and patient he’d been by keeping their relationship chaste and innocent. A kiss on the forehead or the hand was as far as it ever went. He didn’t dare push it further. They both knew that physical intimacy would cause her to lose her life as a samodiva and become human instead, and he wasn’t ready to take that away from her. Not without her being absolutely sure of how she felt about him. That, in turn, meant that she needed to be absolutely sure how she felt about Finn. Without any pressure at all, Nikola had waited so long for Hilda to be certain of how she felt. She peered down at their sleeping daughter and smiled. The wait was over.

  “I am happy,” she said, and ran her hand along the blonde wisps of Violet’s hair. She pushed back her chair and carefully rose to her feet. “And I think I know exactly where my path was meant to lead all along.”

  Finn’s ever-inquisitive eyes widened at her sudden moment of clarity.

  “Oh? And where, pray tell, does it lead?”

  Hilda grinned even wider as she held Violet close.

  “Upstairs.”

  The blizzard had come and gone, taking Finn’s discomfort away and leaving behind elegant snowdrifts instead. They looked like they’d been artfully cut by a razor, yet they had merely been shaped by the wind. The snow that had blown down from the mountains was so pure and pristine that it was tinged blue. There was one place where the snow wasn’t pure white or tinted blue, and that was up on the bluff where the man thought to be Finn Marinossian had been buried.

  The dazzling blanket of snow had been cleared off to reveal the dead grasses and brown dirt underneath—a clear reminder that the grave was not old at all. All the men living under the Marinossian roof had helped the Embassy-approved exhumation team with the arduous task of retrieving the coffin that was buried deep in the frozen ground. The undertakers that had helped bury Finn were present as well. The solstice had just passed and the days were still annoyingly short, which only left a handful of hours between sunrise and sunset where any useful work could be done. Even with lanterns, the nights were simply too cold from the harsh winds that shot up the cliffs from the river below. When the exhumation team’s fingers were too cold to go on and it was too dark to see what they were doing anyway, a canvas tarp was rolled across the hole and weighed down with rocks until the sun rose the next day and they could do it all over again.

  Ambrose wiped the freezing sweat from his brow and then jabbed at the cold hard dirt one more time. A deep, hollow thump greeted the tip of the shovel underneath his foot, and he nearly dropped it when the medical examiner’s team yelled at him to stop digging before he damaged the casket. Now, finally, after hours of clearing off snow and hours of digging in the cold, hard ground, the moment they’d all been waiting for had arrived. The exhaustion from so many days of physical labor was quickly forgotten as everyone’s hearts beat harder and faster with newfound anticipation. Justinian extended a muscular arm from above and helped Ambrose out of the grave as the two younger members of the exhumation team descended into it. They brought with them smaller hand trowels and other gardening-type tools. Soil samples were collected from all four sides of the coffin, including above and below it. Then they labeled the jars with identification tags and packed them up in their bags.

  “Shall I go down to the house and fetch Mother?” Finn asked, and took a drink of hot cider from one of their many thermoses. Ambrose shook his head.

  “No. She didn’t want to be anywhere near here when they open the lid. She didn’t want to see anything that might upset her. Neither did Anthea.”

  “Nor Hilda,” added Nikola. “Or Runa, for that matter.”

  “I don’t particularly want to see it either, but it is my grave, after all,” Finn replied. “I’m afraid I have a slightly morbid curiosity to see what or whom it was that you buried in my place.”

  “Don’t we all?” Nikola agreed with a cautious expression. He rested his hand on the white knife at his hip, although he didn’t anticipate needing it. Still, it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

  “We won’t know anything for absolute certain until we bring the body to the mortuary and perform a thorough examination,” said one of the younger team members down in the grave. “If there are any in discrepancies with our results, we’ll have to bring them back to the Lennadon lab for additional testing.” She and the other excavator continued to carefully brush away the crumbled chunks of cold dirt until an outline of a wooden casket began to take shape. Then ropes were brought underneath of it and handed to each person who was fortunate enough to be standing above ground. They pulled carefully from each side, slowly lifting up the casket until it was placed securely onto a large sled.

  “How long before sunset?” the examiner asked.

  “Two hours or so,” said Nikola. The examiner nodded and gave a weary sigh.

  “You might want to step back. Even though it’s winter, it won’t be pleasant. The body will have decomposed enough that there will be fluids. We have masks filled with potassium permanganate if you need them.”

  “Potassium pomegranate?” Justinian laughed. “That sounds tasty
!” The examiner’s aged eyes shared a tired glance with the two undertakers. It wasn’t the first time they’d heard that joke, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  “No, not pomegranate. Potassium permanganate. It’s not tasty at all. It’s a solvent we line the masks with to help with the odor. We use them more often when it’s warmer, but it’s best to be prepared all the same.”

  Justinian waved his hand and continued to grin.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  The examiner glanced at Ambrose, who turned to the others. Instead of stepping back, they all remained squarely in place. “Ready then?”

  “Yes,” Ambrose said, and the signal was given to remove the lid.

  The sound of wood groaning cut through the still air, followed by the sound of wood scraping against wood. Then the lid was laid down alongside the coffin.

  “That’s not so bad,” Justinian announced with a resolute expression. “I’ve changed nappies that were a dozen times worse than this.” He peered at the remains, and then promptly sank to his knees in a daze. Suddenly the wind shifted, and nine pairs of hands rose up to cover nine cold noses. Regardless of what exactly the creature was that lay in that coffin, one thing was for certain—it was long dead.

  “Give it a moment or two,” said the young woman on the team.

  “The stench, or my brother?” Nikola asked, still pinching his nose shut. The woman glanced down at Justinian and gave a soft smile.

  “It’s always the last person you expect it to be,” she said as if his woozy reaction were perfectly normal. “Shall I fetch you a mask?”

  “I’ll manage without one,” he said, and pushed his long black braid over his shoulder. Instead of rising back up to his feet, he remained seated on the dirty snow. “Don’t tell my wife that I nearly fainted.”

  “It happens, but don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone,” one of the undertakers assured him with a sympathetic smile.

  Once the casket had aired out a bit, the medical examiner began dictating notes to his other assistant while the younger woman pointed a camera down inside. The curiosity was too much for Finn, and he took a step forward…then another. Shivers ran up his spine and back down again as he laid eyes on a perfect replica of himself, albeit a partially decomposed one. He’d never seen a body like this before. He’d seen them recently dead and long dead, but never in this horrific state that fell somewhere in between. Fluids had oozed out of holes made by worms and other insects, and the eyeballs had been devoured as well. The stained satin was littered with little brown cocoons and dead bugs, and lying in this mess was a man whose hands still lay at his sides. His lips had dried out and curled away from his teeth, leaving a perpetual grimace on his decaying face. The brown curls had continued to grow. So had the fingernails, which protruded from the dried out fingertips like thin sheets of wax.

  “You put him in my favorite jacket,” Finn remarked. Tears had begun to sting at the corners of his eyes.

  “Yes, we put him in your favorite jacket,” his father replied, and pressed a handkerchief to his nose. “I hope you aren’t crying over it being ruined.”

  “No…” he said, having suddenly become overwhelmed by what he now saw before him. “I couldn’t care less about the jacket. It’s just that I hadn’t fully realized how much you went through. Somebody had to go into my empty bedchamber, look through my clothes, and pick that out specifically for me to be buried in. There’s a difference between being told something, and truly knowing it.”

  “And now you know?”

  “Yes,” he said, and looked his father directly in the eye. “Now I know.”

  Together with help from Justinian, Asbjorn, and Nikola, they replaced the lid and loaded the coffin onto a sled and pulled it carefully down the hill and down to the stables. Then they loaded it into the undertakers’ carriage to haul down to the morgue for further investigation. Since it was a funeral carriage, the sidewalls were made of glass, which would be noticed by half the village if they happened to glance out their windows. More gossip would fly about town as to the identity of whoever lay inside, but the Marinossians didn’t care.

  “How long until we have some answers as to who—or what—this is?” Ambrose asked as the undertakers shut the doors.

  “Hopefully within a week. We have strict orders from Director Sinclair to expedite the testing process,” the examiner assured him. “He specifically said to do it fast and to do it right, although if we run into any complications then it’s going to take some time to sort it all out. If that happens then we’ll take tissue samples from the body and bring them back to the embassy in Lennadon. When it comes to determining the most accurate test results, our laboratories are far superior to anything you have this far out in the countryside. We’ll be sure to notify you as soon as there’s more information.”

  “What can we do in the meantime?” Finn asked. The examiner picked up his bag of equipment and climbed into the carriage that he and his team had arrived in.

  “Well…you’re all bundled up and you have your shovels handy. You might consider filling the grave back in as a safety precaution.” He adjusted his hat and gave them a sympathetic look. “No matter who this turns out to be, I doubt you’ll want us to put him back in your family’s plot.”

  “Absolutely not,” Ambrose replied in both relief and disgust. “What will become of him?”

  “Imperial regulations require us to keep what samples we can preserve, but the body will be cremated unless we find someone to claim it. The coffin’s quite lovely, though. Do you have any requests on what we do with it?”

  Ambrose reached up to stroke his beard, frowning in thought as he recalled how much damage this body had caused. Whoever it was had nearly ruined his life and broken his wife’s heart, along with everyone else who ever loved or cared for or simply knew the Marinossians. True, he’d spent a pretty penny when choosing a casket to house his eldest son’s remains, and yet now it was the least of his concerns. His eldest son was alive, and his youngest son hadn’t murdered him. That was worth more than any amount of gold in the world. He watched as Justinian, Nikola and Asbjorn headed back up the hill each with their shovels in hand.

  “My only request is that I never, ever want to see it again,” he said, and picked up his shovel to join the others. “As far as I’m concerned, you can burn it.”

  17

  The Ace in the Hole

  Four months earlier…

  The sound of a courtesy knock at the door hit Merriweather like a brick upside the head. Bleary-eyed and fuzzy-brained, she crawled out of her covers and pulled a blanket around her shoulders right as the Polish hotel maid swung the door open.

  “Bardzo mi przykro!” she squeaked, and took a step backward and into the hall. “I am very sorry! I was told that you are already gone.”

  “Clearly I’m still here,” Merriweather muttered, and reached for the light switch. Her eyes squinted in discomfort the moment the lights came on.

  “I’ll come back later,” said the maid, and pushed her supply cart away.

  Once the door shut, Merriweather glanced around her room. Her luggage seemed to have been drastically reduced. The small travel bag containing her clothes and personal items was still sitting on the floor behind the bed where she’d left it last night, but the bag which held her portable printer was missing from the chair at the desk. She quickly rifled through her bag, making sure that her phone, wallet, and passports were still there. The relief at finding them was short-lived as she headed straight for the landline and dialed the adjacent room. There was no answer. Holding her robe tight against her body, she marched over to the door that joined her room to the adjacent one. She could see the maid had already begun stripping the sheets from Talvi’s bed. A sneer like no other quickly spread across her face, while a soft grumble rose from her chest. She pushed the door shut, then headed straight for the telephone and dialed the front desk down in the lobby.

  “This is Mrs. Smith calling from room 307,” she explained in
a short clip devoid of all patience. “Could you tell me if my husband has checked out or not?” There was a brief pause as Talvi’s status was confirmed.

  “Yes ma’am…Mr. Smith already checked out quite some time ago,” the clerk replied. Merriweather slammed the phone down, having a good idea of what had happened. She’d worked with Talvi long enough to know when she’d been left behind during an assignment. After all, it had happened only a matter of weeks ago when he flew to Paris on the pretense that there was a family emergency.

  “You impulsive, short-sighted, arrogant bastard!” she seethed out loud. “So you thought you’d cut me loose now that you’ve found your missing wife? Yes, I suppose you can’t be weighed down by a useless junior agent since you’re suddenly so bloody important now! Why waste your precious time helping me earn back my position now that you’ve found your precious, darling Annika? Why bother finish our investigation when you could be at your family’s farm, no doubt being waited on hand and foot by your wife and mother? Ugh!”

  Her fist sank into one of her pillows. Then she punched it again, this time much harder. It still didn’t get rid of the image of Talvi’s face smirking back at her.

  “Stupid bloody country boys!” she howled as she swung a left hook into the pillow. The physical exertion and her raised blood pressure only seemed to make her head throb even more, and that made her even angrier. “You catch a whiff of something sweet and you’re off running through the fields willy-nilly like a March hare!”

  She yanked open the curtains, recoiling in pain from the intense light. When she felt it was safe to open her eyes, they looked at the Warsaw streets below, watching as a young police officer chatted with a shopkeeper down on the sidewalk across the street. Merriweather wasn’t sure if it was the sight of a handsome man in a starched and pressed uniform, or just something about the uniform in general, but she couldn’t look away from his hat, his trousers, or his radio. She grabbed her phone from her bag and dialed the only number that she trusted.