by Joy Preble
Ethan’s face tightens. “I’m not happy about letting you out of my sight,” he says. “It’s too dangerous right now.”
What does he honestly expect? That I’ll just say okay, let me go pack a bag, and I’ll move into your destroyed loft? Or perhaps bunk here with the professor for a few months? Or however long it takes to—?
My heart rams its way into my throat at the firm knock at the professor’s office door. Ethan grabs me and yanks me behind him. “Stay back,” he hisses at me. “It might be—”
“Anne?” a familiar voice bellows through the professor’s door. “Anne, are you in there? Say something. Open up, or just shout if you’re there.”
“Stand down, Wolverine.” I shove Ethan aside, walk over, and unlock the door. “It’s okay.”
And with that, Tess—carrying a delicious-smelling bag with the Wrap Hut logo in one hand and her little Burberry purse in the other—enters.
“Well,” she says, setting the bag down on the professor’s desk, where it immediately starts to ooze grease all over some student’s essay, “you weren’t that hard to find. I just asked a couple of frat guys headed for a party if they’d heard of some professor named Olensky, and they walked me right over here.”
I guess I’d told her Olensky’s name when I called her. On Ethan’s cell phone.
“I figured if you were saving the world or whatever,” she rattles on, “you probably needed snacks by now. Plus, to be honest, I couldn’t handle another phone call from your mother.” She places her hand on my arm. “Remember when you get home that the sandwich she packed for your lunch gave you food poisoning or something. So we kept studying, but you were in the bathroom puking every time she called.”
I’ve been standing, my mouth hanging open, just kind of gaping at this vision that is Tess. I sneak a sideways glance at Ethan and the professor and see that they’re pretty much doing the same thing.
“How did you get here?” I move the bag off the papers and try to mop up the grease with the palm of my hand. “You can’t drive alone yet.”
“I called Sarah,” she says to me, even though she’s not really looking at me. Instead, she’s eyeballing Ethan with that same evil, squinty look she’d directed toward Neal Patterson and Kate Harris earlier. “She dropped me off in front of the campus. I told her I’d get a ride home from the guy you were with.”
She stomps over to Ethan, stretches up on tiptoe—something she does quite gracefully, by the way—and directs her glare straight into his blue eyes. “You are going to take us home in a minute, you know. She may believe all this crap you’ve been telling her. And who knows? It may all be true. But she hasn’t known you very long, and I don’t trust you. So you guys will finish up whatever you’re working on, eat the sandwiches I brought, and then we’re out of here. Get it?”
I think she’s done speaking, and so does Ethan, who opens up his mouth to respond. But Tess—well, she’s Tess, and she doesn’t stop until she’s gone a few steps too far.
“Last summer,” she says, still eyeball to eyeball with Ethan—who’s looking amazingly uneasy for a man who just recently used magic to kill someone—“I was stupid enough to have sex with a guy who wasn’t who I thought he was, which was someone who wouldn’t cheat on me. So I don’t care what you’ve been telling my best friend here, or how hot you look—I’m not going to stand by and let something like that happen to her.”
Oh. My. God. Tess.
Ethan flushes from the part of his chest I can see at the top of his blue shirt to the roots of his chestnut hair. Then he flushes some more. It’s the reddest I’ve ever seen anyone’s face—and that includes my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Klinger, who once bent over to pick up something from the floor and farted—loudly—in front of our entire class during story hour.
Professor Olensky gives a snorting sound, then claps his hand over his mouth.
And I stand there thinking that being scooped up by a giant pair of hands or devoured by some magical whirlwind might not be so bad right now.
“She…you…she simply can’t be here right now!” Ethan sputters. His gaze seems to be fixed on some invisible point in the air. “Is this who you called when I gave you my cell phone? You told me you were leaving a message for your mother, not calling all your little friends.”
“This is Tess, Ethan. Not all my friends. Just one. And she cares about what happens to me. She—”
“This isn’t a damn game, Anne!” He whirls to face me, his blue eyes darkening. “Do you actually still think we’re just playing here? That this is still something you can go home and gossip to your girlfriends about? You think that’s what this is? After what’s already happened? After what you’ve seen? After what I—This is real, Anne. And now you’ve put your friend in danger by having her come here.”
“She didn’t tell me to come,” Tess says. Her voice quavers, but she continues. “I came on my own, because I was worried about her. And I still am. You’re right. None of this is a game—not to me. She may think she trusts you, but I don’t trust you. I don’t know you. I’ve seen you at the ballet, and once at school. I don’t know anything about you.”
“Tess,” I say. “Let me—”
“No.” Tess flashes me her pissiest look. “You let me finish.” Her gaze snaps back to Ethan. “Anne’s told me what you think she can do. That she’s supposed to save Anastasia, who’s trapped somewhere and didn’t really die back in nineteen-whenever-it-was. Well, I’m not buying a word of it—but let’s say it’s true. Let’s say that Anastasia did live through that massacre, like you say. So? This is the twenty-first century. What possible difference could it make? There’s no more Russian aristocracy. Hell, there’s no more Soviet Union. It’s all a bunch of little whats-it-stans and places like the Ukraine.”
“Not all that little,” Olensky observes dryly. “My dear, Russia spans eleven time zones.”
“Well, yeah.” Tess begrudges him that. “But still—what do they need Anastasia for? Why the hell would you want to save her?”
I don’t know what stuns me most—the fact that Ethan backs off and stands there silently, as does Olensky, or the fact that Tess actually seems to know something—most of it seemingly accurate—about Russian current events.
But whatever it is that’s pulsing in my hands does its thing again as I answer. “Because she’s a person,” I say. “Because Anastasia was a seventeen-year-old girl who never got a chance. She lost everything she ever had, everybody she ever loved. If she really still is alive, she’s been trapped this entire time, unable to do anything she was supposed to. No one deserves to lose it all like that. No one.”
I’m thinking about David, about what it’s like to watch someone fade away and become just a shadow of what he used to be. By the look on her face right now, I’m pretty sure Tess knows that too. And since she’s my best friend, she probably also knows I’m scared—and I’m tired and hungry and seriously overwhelmed by this whole destiny thing.
I look past Tess, over to Ethan. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, even though with Tess here now, I’m wondering again if I can really trust him. “I know I should have told you that I called Tess too. But it’s done now, and we need to just deal with it. You’re not making it any better by yelling again. We’re not getting any closer to the answers.”
“I wasn’t—I mean…” Ethan blows out a breath. “At the beginning, it was about restoring a Romanov to power. That was our mission. That’s what I believed when I pledged to do this thing—the Romanovs were the rightful rulers of Mother Russia, even if Nicholas was a poor excuse for a tsar. They were believers. They deserved our help. It made sense to me then. So when Viktor told me what needed to happen, I accepted it. I was eighteen. Lots of crazy things made sense then.” His lips pucker in a little half-smile. “But now—well, we’re all asking ourselves those same questions. Why Anastasia? And why Anne for that matter?”
He clenches his hands, then unclenches them. “I just want us to get through this safely,” he
says finally. “There are so many unknowns that I think we should—”
“What I think we should do, Ethan,” Professor Olensky cuts in, “is rest for a moment and eat the food that this young woman has so kindly brought for us. Surely we can take some time to refuel. Then we will put our heads back together and figure out what to do next.”
I’m waiting for Ethan to argue with him, but he doesn’t. He just sighs hugely and nods his head.
So we eat. I hadn’t been hungry before, but now I’m ravenous. Tess, thankfully, has brought enough for a small army. We break into the bag, dividing up the pita wraps, gyros, and little bags of chips. Professor Olensky goes into his whole tea routine again, and everyone digs in. Tess and I flop down on the carpet and spread our food on some napkins. Ethan and the professor stay at the desk, where the professor continues to scroll through a website while he eats.
“I can’t believe you,” I whisper to Tess as I watch her pick the onions out of her half of the gyro sandwich. “How could you look him in the eye and say all that stuff? Did you see his face? God, Tess.”
She plucks out another sliver of onion and lays it next to the others she’s got lined up neatly on a Wrap Hut napkin. She’s made a cute little onion border around the picture of the pita shaped like a little cottage.
She shrugs. “It’s the truth, isn’t it? Neal’s an ass, but this Ethan guy is seriously yummy looking—don’t deny it.” She grins at me. “I can’t remember ever seeing anyone turn that color red. That was amazing. So don’t even try to tell me that he hasn’t been thinking about you as anything other than the super special savior of old-timey Russia. I don’t buy it.”
“Lower your voice,” I hiss at her. “He can’t possibly. No. I mean he’s—well, no way.”
I take a bite of my half of the gyro and busy myself with chewing. Nothing like the thought of dating your great-great-grandfather to make you a little queasy.
“So,” Tess says. I’m grateful when she swivels her attention to a topic other than hooking me up with the world’s oldest teenager. “Tell me about this witch again. Baba Yaga—the one from the Russian fairy tale who has supposedly carried off Anastasia.”
“What about her?” I crumple up my dirty napkins and sandwich crumbs and toss them into the wastebasket next to Olensky’s desk—well, I try to, anyway. What I actually do is toss my garbage on Ethan’s foot.
He sighs—his favorite form of communication since Tess’s arrival—then picks up the garbage and places it in the can. Then he scoots his chair over to sit with us. Olensky remains where he is, hunched over the computer, sort of muttering under his breath.
“Well,” Tess says, “she’s a witch. So—with all due respect to the Wizard of Oz —is she a good witch or a bad witch? I mean, if she’s saved someone, that would make her a good witch. But if she’s trying to hurt you, then she’s not so good. It’s confusing.”
“It’s part of what we’re trying to figure out,” Ethan says. I guess he’s resigned himself to including Tess in our conversations as long as she’s here. “She’s not really good, at least not in all the legends. When she—well, when the Brotherhood’s magic compelled her to help us, she did a good thing, but it was forced on her. She is still compelled by that magic, as far as I know. Where she stands now on the spectrum of good and evil—that’s a lot harder to say.”
There is way more of a gray area here than I’d like. At least in Swan Lake , when Prince Siegfried screwed up, it was just because he was a stupid twit, not because Rothbart was evil only on odd days of the month or something.
“So when she chased us back at school,” I say, “you’re saying it’s possible that she wasn’t trying to hurt us?”
Ethan nods his head. “It’s possible. Until I know for sure how much Viktor is involved in everything that’s just happened, I can’t really say.”
“Anyway,” Tess says, “this Baba Yaga—she’s supposed to live in that little cottage with the chicken legs, right? And you said the legs were so she could move her house from place to place. So how’s Anne going to find her? I mean, even if Anne is descended from some magical dynasty, if Baba Yaga moves around all the time, how will she know where to look?”
Ethan rubs his jaw. “We’re working on it,” he says, and gets up to rejoin the professor.
“Terrific,” Tess says as she gathers the remains of her sandwich and wrapper. She lowers her voice. “Are you okay?” she asks me. “I mean, really? God, Anne, this is all so crazy. And what’s even crazier is that I’m starting to believe it along with you. I mean, things like this just don’t happen—only they are happening.”
“I’m okay,” I say. “I’m just so tired.” All at once, I really was. “I’m going to close my eyes for a minute, okay? I think it will help me clear my head.”
“I can call Sarah,” Tess says. “We’ll just say you have to go, and we’ll meet her and…”
Tess continues talking, but the exhaustion washes over me, as thick as fog. I stretch out on the carpet and cradle my head in my arms. When the dream begins, I know it, but I can’t open my eyes to stop it.
I’m dreaming that I’m Anastasia again, and it’s like I’ve dreamed before. I’m her, inside her body, her mind, there in that basement with her family when the killing begins. I can feel her panic. My heart is beating as hers is—unbearably fast. Her thoughts are racing. In those moments of my dream, we become one. Her flashes of memory become my own, and I know what I’m seeing as though I am her. Playing with my dog. Edging away from Rasputin when he comes into the room. Holding my brother Alexei’s hand. Worrying that he will get sick again. Looking at myself in a dressing-table mirror. Laughing with my three sisters.
And talking in the park to a man named Viktor. He’s tall and thin, with an angular face and dark, dark eyes—so dark they’re almost black. “It will work,” he says to me. He’s speaking Russian, I think, but because I am not me, I understand him. “I promise you. You just need to be brave, like the girl in that story you love: Vasilisa. Be brave, and do this for your family—and they will live.”
“Are you sure, my brother?” I ask him.
“I promise you, Anastasia,” he says. “I promise. I give you my word.”
These are the thoughts that fly through my head as I dream of Anastasia. In that horrible basement, the killing continues. You lied to me, brother, I think, and I see Viktor in my head as I say it. Then, in the corner of the room, I see someone in a long, brown robe crouched out of the line of fire. I feel my heart surge a little. Viktor. He is here. He will do as he promised. It will all work as he said. But even as I think it, I know it can’t be true. My father is already lying on the ground, blood pouring from his wounds. My sisters are dead as well. Surely he must know this. Why isn’t he stopping it?
Now I look closer. It’s not Viktor. It is someone else—not my brother who made me that promise, but some stranger with blue eyes who is muttering words and looking at me with tears in his eyes. And I know what’s about to come next. I know she’s coming for me. Baba Yaga. But nothing else is like Viktor said it would be. My family is dead. When the hands come down to pull me away, all I’m thinking is that I want to die too.
“Anne!” Tess is shaking me. “God, Anne, wake up! Please. Wake up!”
I open my eyes. Tess is bent over me, just inches from my face, her eyes really, really wide. Although I don’t mention it, she’s breathing gyro breath in my face, and let me say, it’s pretty rank.
“You were crying,” Ethan says. I realize he’s kneeling on the other side of me.
I reach up and touch my cheeks. They’re wet with tears.
Then I shove Tess away and sit bolt upright as it all comes rushing back to me. “She knew him,” I say. “Anastasia. She knew Viktor. I was dreaming I was her again. She knew who he was.”
Ethan shrugs, even though I can see he looks relieved that I’m sitting up. “He probably wasn’t a stranger to her. I know he went to the royal palace now and then. Nicholas—the tsar—was
not unfamiliar with the workings of the Brotherhood. We existed to protect the royal family.”
“No, Ethan. I don’t mean like that—not like she saw him around the palace or even got introduced to him and knew his name. She knew him—really knew him. At least, that’s how I saw it. She kept calling him her brother, but it didn’t feel like a title—not like when you use it and call him Brother Viktor. I could feel that she thought of him as an actual brother, like her brother Alexei, only not exactly the same. He’d promised her something. She was remembering how she talked to him. They were standing in a huge park, I think. ‘You just have to be brave,’ he told her. ‘Like Vasilisa.’ He said if she was brave, then she could save her family, and that’s what she was thinking while she watched them die—that he’d promised her, and she’d agreed, and she knew Baba Yaga was coming for her. Only he’d lied. He’d lied, and you were there instead of Viktor, and everyone was dead.”
In that moment, it’s like a whole bunch of things suddenly make sense to him in a way they just haven’t before. Professor Olensky is at my other side now, glancing back and forth between me and Ethan and looking like he’s about to jump out of his skin with excitement.
As for Tess, she just looks relieved that I’m conscious.
“You’re very clear about this?” Ethan says then. “That Anastasia wasn’t surprised? That she knew—at least in some way—what was about to happen to her?”
I nod. “Yeah. There was nothing uncertain about it. She knew. And she knew him. And when she realized it was you in the corner, she—well, that’s when she started thinking that he’d lied to her. I mean, I know it’s a dream, so I’m not sure if we can—”