by Kate Quinn
“Maybe our hunting cabin on Selkie Lake. It’s more than three hours outside Boston, very remote, no swimming beaches or promenades. Just a big pond in the middle of the woods, really. We stopped going after Dad died, left it locked up. There’s a big stiff old key . . .” Jordan flashed downstairs to her father’s study, the others jostling behind, and began yanking desk drawers open. A cabin on a lake, framed by woods—Ian wondered if it might have reminded Lorelei Vogt of her precious house on Lake Rusalka where Seb had died.
Jordan rummaged every gaping drawer, looking up at last with cheeks blazing scarlet. “The key’s gone. She went to the cabin.” Lips trembling. “But she won’t stay long. She’d know I’d remember it. And she’s at least an hour and a half ahead.”
We will never catch up. Ian heard his whole team think it.
Tony fumbled for the Ford’s keys. “We’ll try.”
“We’ll fail. We need to move faster.” Ian knew how to make that happen, though everything in him turned to ice at the thought. “I’ll tell you on the way, but first, Jordan—tell us about this rusalka dream your stepmother has. Every detail.”
They headed for the door, Jordan recounting a surprisingly specific description of the lake-born nightmare from which die Jägerin apparently suffered. So the huntress doesn’t sleep well, Ian thought in a surge of vicious satisfaction. I’m glad.
As Jordan finished, Ian looked at his wife as they came down the front steps outside. “Lorelei Vogt is afraid of the rusalka.” Quietly. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
A tiny nod as Nina went to the car, head down. Tony and Jordan exchanged glances.
“We can use that,” Ian went on, “if we know exactly what it is she’s afraid of.”
Nina reached for the door handle, her every invisible bristle showing to Ian’s eyes, but he wasn’t backing off this time.
“Spill, Nina.” He dropped a hand over hers on the door handle before she could open it. “I know you don’t want to say what happened on that lake, but we’re out of time. Tell us.”
Chapter 53
Nina
November 1944
Lake Rusalka
The soup was thick with potatoes and cream. The woman in the blue coat had brought two steaming bowls out behind the ocher-walled house, once Nina flatly refused the invitation to come into the kitchen. Sebastian took the bowl with barely contained eagerness, but Nina stood arms folded.
“Don’t be rude,” Seb whispered in Russian, his mouth thick with soup.
Nina’s mouth watered, but she still didn’t reach for the bowl. “She has a pleasure house on the lake and real cream for her stew.” Looking at the slight blue-eyed woman. “That means she’s a friend to the Germans.”
“I told you, she’s a widow. Her husband was German and died before the war began, so the Posen administration leaves her alone.” Seb and the woman had had a lengthy conversation in English, which the woman apparently spoke. “She studied English in university, she’s never had Reich sympathies.”
“So she says.” The woman looked so soft, her smile so warm. As if reading Nina’s suspicion, she bent her head and sipped from the remaining soup bowl. She swallowed, holding it out again indulgently as if to say See? No poison.
Nina glowered, but took the bowl. The first spoonful nearly exploded her mouth with flavor, heat curling through her belly. She couldn’t help bolting down the rest. The woman smiled, said something to Seb. There was another eager exchange.
“What?” Nina asked, swallowing the last drop from the bowl. “Thank her for the meal and let’s be on our way.”
“She’s offering to let us stay the night.” Seb’s face glowed. “She says we can sleep in the kitchen, it’s warm, she’ll make up beds—”
Nina seized Seb’s arm, dragged him a pace or two back away from the woman. “No.”
“Why not? Sleep under a roof for a change, under clean blankets—”
“Seb, no woman living alone would bring people who look like us into her house!” Gesturing at their filthy clothes. “Which means either she isn’t alone, or that she’ll telephone the Fritzes and turn us in as soon as—”
“Is it impossible to believe someone might take pity on us? Might offer help just to be kind?”
“Yes. That is impossible to believe. And we don’t need her help.”
“You don’t trust anyone. That’s your bloody problem.” Seb’s thin face flushed at the hunger-sharpened cheekbones. “And we do need help. We’re hungry most of the time, running our bowels out eating nothing but game and roots. Why can’t we accept help when it’s offered?”
“Because if she’s friendly, all we get is a night sleeping warm, but if she’s not, we get picked up by Germans.”
“Maybe more than one night. Maybe she’d agree to hide us for a while.” Stubbornness was falling over Seb’s face in a wave. He wanted to believe so badly. Wanted to trust. “Not everyone in this war is only out for themselves. Try having a little faith in human nature for once.”
“No,” Nina said again.
He tried a different tack. “What could she do, one woman against two of us?”
Nina stared. “You know me, and you ask what one woman can do?”
“That’s different.”
Because I’m a savage, she thought. Because to an honorable young man like Sebastian Graham, well educated and well meaning and knowing nothing at all about the female sex, a small woman with smooth hair and buffed nails simply did not register as dangerous. Nina glanced over his shoulder at the woman in blue. She watched with a slight smile, content to let them hiss back and forth.
“I’m going back to our camp,” Nina told Seb. “I’m not taking the chance.”
He folded his arms. “I am.”
Nina stood back a step, surprised at the stab of hurt. I’ve fed you, hunted for you, stayed with you and now this?
He flushed again. “Nina—”
“I’ll meet you tomorrow at our campsite.” Cutting him off. “If you don’t come, I’ll know you’re on your way back to captivity in cuffs.”
“Or I’m helping the good Frau about the garden in exchange for being allowed to hide in her cellar,” he said quietly. “There are good people in the world, Nina. I trusted you, didn’t I? When the only thing I knew was that you’d be shot if you went back to your regiment, I still trusted you.”
Nina held up her razor. “I only trust this.”
“Strange how much you remind me of my brother,” Seb said. “Cool as ice and about as trusting.”
“Smart man.”
“Not a happy one.”
“Happy doesn’t matter. I’ll settle for alive.” Nina hesitated. “Come with me, Seb.”
But he wouldn’t. And Nina took off into the trees, too angry to look back and see him disappear into the ocher-yellow house.
HALF A KILOMETER’S FURIOUS HIKE down the shore, and Nina’s steps slowed. Dusk was coming now, the dark of a new moon falling. Good flying weather, Nina thought. Good hunting weather. She stopped altogether, scuffing her worn boots through the dead leaves. Something was off, something was wrong, she had no idea what.
Yes, you do. That woman could be telephoning the Krauts now, telling them she has an escaped prisoner of war in her kitchen.
No. Something even more wrong than that. She could have turned him in without inviting him inside. Why did she do that?
Nina looked up at the sky. Blue dusk, blue eyes . . . that woman’s eyes, no fear at all when she looked at the pair of ragged refugees turning up on her doorstep. Nina’s matted hair, Seb’s dark stubble, their dirty nails—anyone would have been wary, yet there had been no fear in her calm bearing. Anyone completely unafraid when standing outnumbered among filthy strangers in a war zone was either idiotic, saintly, or dangerous. The woman hadn’t looked like an idiot. That left saintly or dangerous. Nina knew which Seb would have picked. I know what I’d pick too.
It was dark when she reached the house again. Light showed in a few of the unshu
ttered windows, throwing warm squares into the woods behind. Nina squatted in the shadow of a slender pine, watching. She’d half expected to see cars pulled up, German sentries posted to stand guard as the English prisoner was recaptured, but all was quiet.
It did not mean there wasn’t a trap laid inside. Perhaps Seb had already been recaptured; the blue-eyed woman could have told the authorities that there was a woman at large as well. Nina watched another hour, listening to the sound of lake water lapping on the shore before the house, open razor in hand with its leather loop about her wrist. Seb, where are you?
Probably curled under a quilt before a banked fire, not giving Nina a thought.
She still didn’t move. No moonlight, faint starlight silvering the lake. Good hunting weather. The thought kept echoing. Good hunting weather . . .
The door opened. Wavering light spilling across the darkness like wine, two figures silhouetted as they came into the night. Nina blinked, her night sight ruined, but she could recognize Seb’s amble, his hair flopping on his forehead. The woman beside him moved lightly, hands in the pockets of her coat. She brought something out, and Nina rose fast from her crouch, but then there was the tiny scrape of a match, Seb leaning in gentleman-like to cup the flame, and the spark of a cigarette flared. The woman offered one to him, voices murmuring as they strolled toward the lake. Nina watched, still uneasy. Boards creaked as the pair stepped up onto the long dock that stretched out over the deeper water. Nina didn’t trust anything that let you walk on a lake, whether pine boards or two solid meters of ice, but Seb strode along without hesitation, his belly full, a good night’s sleep ahead, a civilized postdinner cigarette in hand, admiring starlight on calm water beside a woman who had been kind to him rather than hectoring him about keeping his boots dry and asking if he’d ever be able to tell which way was north.
Walk out there, Nina told herself, looking at the pair standing on the end of the dock. Join them. Maybe the woman really was just kind. Nina came out of the pine’s shadow, moved to the dock, but she couldn’t take the first step out over the water. She hesitated, flinching and cursing herself for flinching when the world was full of so many other things more terrifying . . . and at the end of the dock, as Seb tipped his head back to look at the night sky, Nina saw the woman flick her cigarette into the lake, reach into her coat pocket, and pull out something that glinted metallic in the starlight.
Nina launched herself onto the dock as the woman’s arm straightened at an angle. Too late. The shot cracked flatly across the water.
Sebastian fell.
Inside her skull, Nina screamed.
On snow or bare ground, she would have been as silent as a U-2 gliding out of the sky. She’d have cut the blue-eyed woman’s throat ear to ear before she realized there was anyone behind her at all. But the dock creaked under Nina’s sprinting feet, and the woman was turning before the smoke from her shot cleared. Nina’s night-trained eyes saw her in the faint starlight as though she stood under a noon sun: remote, calm, pitiless, gaze flaring only a little in the surprise of Nina’s reappearance. The arm came up again, straight and unhesitating, the pistol’s eye looking into Nina’s. Another crack; at the same time Nina jinked left as if she’d been sideslipping out of ground fire and brought the razor around in a whipping slash. The woman twisted back, the keen edge slashing the side of her neck to the nape rather than opening her windpipe, and Nina did scream then, seeing those pitiless blue eyes fly open in shock. The woman clapped a hand to her neck, blood spilling dark between her fingers, but the pistol was coming up again, and Nina’s sprint had carried her past Seb’s body and out of slashing reach. At this distance the bitch couldn’t miss and Nina couldn’t duck, and the decision made itself in an icy drench of terror. Nina kept running, two more sprinting steps, and as the third shot tore into the night, she flung herself into the embrace of the lake.
THE COLD STABBED her through with a thousand tiny silver knives. The iron tang of lake water invaded her eyes, her ears, her nose. Panic clawed Nina almost blind, the sensation of water moving through her hair. She had not sunk herself under the surface of even a bathtub since the day she’d turned sixteen, lying half drowned on the frozen surface of the Old Man as her father slurred, You’re a rusalka, the lake won’t hurt you. Nina opened her mouth to scream—she couldn’t help it—and the lake shoved its way down her throat like a claw of ice.
Panic and you drown, rusalka bitch, her father snarled, and somehow she got her limbs under control even as her mind melted with terror. She could swim—there wasn’t a child who grew up on the Old Man who couldn’t—and she pushed herself forward, wriggling like a lake seal. Up to the surface, lungs bursting, air searing fire-hot as she gulped it in.
The terrifying sound of another shot.
Nina dove under the surface again, not sure if she’d been hit or not—the fear held her in such an electric grip, there was no room for fresh pain to report. Bullet grazed or not, there was a stark choice in the middle of this thicket of horror: struggle out to the deeper lake, out of range, until the water numbed her limbs and she sank into exhaustion and cold, which would not take long . . . or thrash here in utter panic like a U-2 pinioned in the white glare of a searchlight and be shot at every time she surfaced. Or—
Nina jackknifed underwater, flipping before she could change her mind and kicking blindly back in the direction of the dock. Lungs almost exploding again, she slipped between the pilings, kicking up off the soft mud, surfacing in a silent sucking gasp for air. The dock was built low to the water; there wasn’t even ten centimeters’ clearance between the surface of the lake and the underside of the boards above. Nina clung to the piling, a splinter piercing her hand like a needle, head tilted back to keep her mouth above the water. Her limbs were already numbing. The pine boards creaked overhead, and there was the sound of metal clicking on metal.
She is standing right above me, Nina thought, and she is reloading. If she fired straight down between her feet into the dock, the bullet would take Nina through the eye.
Terror shattered her like new ice.
Let go, the lake whispered. Sink into the blue. Let the rusalka have you.
Disjointed images fluttered like bad film. Yelena’s laughing face. Little Galya muttering in a terrified monotone, We’re not going to drown. Her father, baring his yellowing teeth. Comrade Stalin, his mustache and his heavy feral scent . . . Nina tread water to keep her face above the frigid surface, listening to the blue-eyed huntress shift her feet just centimeters above as the lake continued to croon.
Let go, Ninochka.
She kept moving her legs, but she couldn’t feel them.
Let go. Let the rusalka have you. She’s the first night witch, the one who comes from the lake with ice-cold arms and a kiss that kills.
No, Nina thought. I am the rusalka. Born from a lake to find home in the sky, come back to the lake.
Then die here in your lake. Easier here than up above at her hands.
No, Nina thought again. I may fear water, but to fight a Nazi in the dark of the moon holds no terror for me.
She had no idea how long she hung there in the dark prism of Lake Rusalka, face tilted above the water, fingers fighting for a grip on the slimy pilings, numbed feet spasming to keep her afloat, as the blue-eyed huntress above kept watch. Only minutes, surely. It felt like hours.
Over the lapping of the water Nina heard the woman call out in German. Even Nina understood the three simple, desperate words.
“Where are you?”
Nina clamped her chattering teeth.
The woman’s shoes shuffled. Her breath came unevenly. Nina heard the hiss of pain. I cut her. The red line opening across the nape of the neck, a kiss from the razor. The huntress would be bleeding, free hand clamped to her neck.
“Please be dead,” the woman above muttered as if in prayer, her voice thick with fear. “Please be dead . . .”
A rusalka cannot die, Nina thought, cold making the thought stutter. And you’ve be
en kissed by a rusalka, which means you’re mine forever, you blue-eyed bitch.
A long ragged breath from the woman overhead, another hiss of pain, and then footsteps retreated unsteadily down the dock toward the shore. The huntress must be dizzy from blood loss, Nina thought; she would have to go inside, bandage herself. Nina did not move, remained floating under the dock. The woman above her was coolheaded even if she was bleeding and afraid. She might retreat and wait in the shore’s shadows, watching to see what came from the lake. It was what Nina would have done.
She hung there in the dark, in the lake, barely breathing.
Move now, her father said at last, or you will freeze and drown.
She might still be there, Nina thought. Waiting.
Move now.
Nina had almost no strength to haul herself from the lake onto the dock. She lay limp, trying to flex her fingers and toes, almost too stiff to move. She could have lain there forever, but she forced herself to her knees to look around. No waiting female form, no blue eyes watching. The ocher-walled house had gone dark. It would not stay dark. The huntress surely had friends; they would come to aid her.
Move.
But Nina couldn’t. Sebastian Graham’s body lay dark and silent on the dock. Still warm.
She knew it was hopeless, but she still crawled shivering to his side. The shot had taken him at point-blank range in the back of the head. He didn’t have much face left. That handsome, chivalrous boy with his long lashes and high forehead, now turned to red ruin. “Poor malysh,” Nina whispered through her frozen lips. “I should have gone in with you. I let you go, and I lost you.” Guilt raked her soul, scarlet clawed, but she couldn’t put her head back and howl under the stars the way she wanted to, she couldn’t sink down on his dead chest and weep. She couldn’t even bury him. Time was slipping past; who knew how long it would take the murderess to tend her bleeding neck and summon help, and though Nina thought she must have been in the water less than ten minutes, possibly not even five, she was soaked to the skin on a black autumn night and her limbs felt like they were made of ice. To her astonishment she still had her razor, swinging by its loop about her wrist—she kept that and her boots and trousers, but wrestled Seb’s limp arms out of his jacket and his other layers, tossing her overalls into the lake and fumbling into Seb’s blood-spattered but dry clothes. She flinched to leave him half naked under the stars, but without dry layers she would die. She made herself take his prisoner’s tags, the ring on his hand. His older brother would want them. Cool as ice, Seb had said of him, and about as trusting.