by Joy Preble
Viktor’s secret affair, and the tryst of his father before him, have resulted in the very person the Brotherhood had pledged to find.
It is a pledge that Viktor now seems determined to break.
But why? And how much of this does Viktor actually know? Does he have knowledge of Anne’s lineage? Or does he just see her as the girl foretold by prophecy?
“We still don’t understand why Viktor has turned,” I say. Dozens of questions hurtle their way through my brain—dozens of questions, but no answers.
“I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that some witch from a fairy tale really managed to somehow change history,” Anne says. “Even if I’ve seen her. It just seems so damn impossible—but I guess so did seeing her hut move on that Russian lacquer box.” She smiles. “You know, my mother figured I was so fascinated with that box that she bought it for me. She gave it to me this morning. It really is beautiful. And I love that little key shape inside.”
“Key?” My heart gives a little thump. “The box has a key?”
“It does now,” Anne says, and my heart smacks again because this is something new. “Raised up in the center. Like if you could just find a way to get it out, you could—”
This time, all four of us suck in a breath almost simultaneously.
“So what now?” Tess asks. “You figure out a way to get that key out, and you can let yourself into the witch’s house and spring Anastasia—if, that is, you can find the place?”
Alex strides over to his bookshelves, scans through the volumes, then reaches up for a thick volume on the top shelf. “Why didn’t I think of this before?” he says.
He turns to me, his eyes glittering. “It’s a story, Ethan. We’ve never thought of it that way, but it is.” He taps two thick fingers on the book he’s pulled from the shelf, Slavic Folklore. “We’ve been treating Baba Yaga as though she’s real. It’s never occurred to us to think about her as though she’s not. It’s the story, Ethan. That’s where the clues lie. I’m sure of it. A pattern of some sort in the fairy tales like Vasilisa’s. How Baba Yaga’s hut is accessed in those stories. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”
My pulse skips a beat. “Then we need to read,” I tell him. “Figure this out. Here.” I take the book from his hand. “Let me—”
Alex glances at the clock. I do the same. It’s after ten. He pulls the book back from me. “What an evening this has been, my friend. Take these two lovely young women home. Let Anne get some rest. I’m certain her parents are worried about her by now. Give me some time alone with all this.” He raises a graying eyebrow. “Without distraction.”
I hesitate. We need to go to Anne’s house at some point, if only for the lacquer box. But if Viktor’s men came after us once, they can find us again. It’s safer for us to stay together.
Nevertheless, Alex is right. Anne’s parents are probably more than worried at this point, and with good reason, if only because they’ve already lost one child.
“Okay,” I say, even though I don’t think it’s okay at all. “Come on.” I motion to Anne and Tess. “Get all your things. I’ll drive you home.”
I reach in my jacket pocket and pull out the gun I’d taken from Dimitri’s partner. “Here.” I toss the gun to Olensky. “If you need it. I’ll be back in a few hours. I’ll drop them off and then go check the loft. That should give you enough time to search this out.” I start to say more, but he’s already settled at his desk with the book. His thick fingers rustle through the pages.
So I leave him, and, with Anne and her friend in tow, head out into the night.
Wednesday, 10:48 pm
Anne
You simply can’t involve her in this anymore,” Ethan mutters as we watch Tess make her way up the driveway to her house. “This whole situation is dangerous enough without adding another person to the mix. You have some power now to protect yourself, Anne. Tess doesn’t. She’s a smart girl, but that’s not going to matter if something comes after her.”
Ethan’s mood has darkened ever since we left the professor’s office, stopping first so Ethan could ward it with his magic. Not that those wards had stopped Viktor at Ethan’s loft, which is something neither of us has mentioned.
“It’s not like I forced her to come find us,” I say. My own temper spikes a bit at his annoyance, but I stamp the irritation back down. It’s late, I’m exhausted, and he’s right—at least, mostly. Regardless of what he thinks about Tess, he’s right to be concerned about her safety and her impulsive behavior.
He shifts the Mercedes back in gear and starts to pull away from the curb in front of Tess’s house. “Hey, wait,” I remind him. “Aren’t you going to do the same hocus-pocus protection thing you did when we left the professor’s? You know—the warding spell?”
“Don’t treat the magic like it’s something frivolous,” Ethan says as he parks again and turns off the engine. “It’s not some party game or circus trick. It is never, ever something to take lightly.” A scold-the-stupid-schoolgirl tone edges into his voice. He pushes the driver’s door open, unfolds from the car, and stalks off in the direction of Tess’s house.
I open my door, slide out, and jog after him until he stops in the deep shadows of the large spruce tree on the far edge of Tess’s front yard. “Ethan,” I say quietly. “Wait.”
I place my hand on his arm. He shakes it off. “Let’s get this done,” he says tersely. “We need to get you home, remember? And then I need to swing by the loft and then back to Olensky’s.” He looks like he’s about to say more, but he doesn’t. He just stands there, jaw clenched, and starts to stretch out his arms to do the spell. The air around us begins to crackle.
“Wait,” I say again. “Stop, Ethan.”
I can see him pull back into himself. The air settles. Next to me, the spruce actually gives a little shiver and sprinkles some of its needles on the ground. “What?” That dangerous tone in his voice moves from simmer to boil. Even in the darkness, I can see the straight line of his mouth.
I decide to ignore the pissy gaze he’s giving me. “Show me,” I say. I place my hand back on his arm. “I need to know what you’re doing, Ethan. If—well, if I’ve got all this power juicing up inside me, don’t I need to know how to use it? I mean, isn’t that the point? That I need to understand how to control what’s there so I can use it—somehow—to save Anastasia?”
Like the spruce tree next to us, Ethan gives a little shake. I can see some of the tension slough off him. A sliver of a smile plucks at his lips, and for what I suppose is the millionth time tonight, he sighs.
“Yes,” he says, running a hand over his chin. “Yes, you do.”
“Well, yay,” I say, although I’m certain there’s a more sophisticated response floating around in my brain somewhere. Unfortunately, I can’t think of it.
“Here.” He moves so I’m in front of him. “We’ll do this together.”
We stand in the blue-black shadows of the spruce tree. Ethan edges forward, not quite pressing against me, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath against my neck as he speaks.
“Place your arms in front of you,” Ethan tells me. “I need you to concentrate. You need to feel the power inside you. And then you—well, you need to imagine what you want it to do.”
Ignoring the fact that I can still feel his breath tickling the hairs on the back of my neck and the fact that he’s so close I can smell the cotton of his blue shirt and the sort of woodsy, musky smell that’s him inside it, I do as he asks. At first, I don’t feel much. I can hear the wind rustling through the spruce, a few cars whooshing by on the main street a few blocks over, and the even sound of Ethan’s breathing behind me. I close my eyes and try to block out everything but what’s inside me.
Think, I tell myself. I picture what my hands looked like when I first saw that blue-white glow; when the sparks flickered as we fought to open that elevator door back in the loft; when I’d shoved Ethan and watched him fly across the room; when I’d
realized that maybe whatever was now mine gave me the power to escape Dimitri.
When it begins, it feels like something fluttering lightly in my chest. Not my heart beating, but sort of similar. It’s electrical and pulsing. And powerful.
“That’s it,” Ethan says. He stretches his arms out and rests his hands gently on top of mine. His palms are warm, like they’d been when he held my hand out at the lake.
“Now you just have to use it,” he says quietly. “Look over at the house, and imagine a wall around it—something sturdy that will keep out things that don’t belong there.”
In my mind, I build that wall. Big, gray bricks, thick and wide. Heavy mortar slathered between them. All around Tess’s house it stretches, towering to the rooftop and then a short way beyond. My eyes still closed, I add more bricks, feel their heft and weight as they strengthen the barrier. Around me, I can feel the wind pick up just a little. The spruce tree wavers, its fresh, green scent perfuming the air.
I open my eyes. In front of me, Tess’s house looks just like it always does—a two-story Cape Cod model with brown wood and white trim. But as I look down at my hands, still buzzing with that good old glow, and at Ethan’s hands, doing the same, I know the house isn’t exactly the same as it was. I can’t see it, but I can feel it—the wall I’ve constructed is there, under the surface of things, keeping Tess safe.
“Wow,” I say, and let out a breath I didn’t even realizing I was holding. “Wow.” Ethan drops his arms, steps back.
Without thinking about it, I turn around and hug him. “I did it!” I say as I squeeze my arms around him. “I could feel it. It’s amazing! I—I had no idea. I just didn’t—is it real? I mean, did I really do that? Is that wall really there, even though we can’t see it?”
“Hope so,” he says. His face is very close to mine when he smiles at me. “Yes, it’s there. Not forever, remember. But for now—if anything tries to harm people in that house, it will stop them, keep them from getting inside. By force or by magic.”
Even in the darkness, I see a flicker of worry cross his face. We both know that the whirlwind in his loft got through despite Ethan’s magic.
“Let’s get you home now.” He steps back from me—and for one tiny second, I think I might wish he hadn’t. But only for a second.
We head back to the car, then drive the couple of blocks to my house, stopping a few doors down so that, if I’m lucky, I won’t have to explain my getting out of a stranger’s car over an hour past my weeknight curfew of ten o’clock. I may be able to put a magic wall around Tess’s entire house, but if there’s a spell for dealing with two irate parents, Ethan hasn’t mentioned it.
“I’ll put the wards around your house too,” is what he does say. “And you need to get that lacquer box. Don’t let it out of your sight.”
“Look for my backpack,” I tell him as I ease quietly out of the car. “My parents are going to freak if I lose that cell phone.”
He just shakes his head and gives what sounds like a little laugh. “I’ll see what I can do,” he tells me. “Try to get some sleep, if you can. The magic drains you. You need to—well, recharge.”
I don’t hear him turn over the engine until I’m at the door, trying to insert my house key as noiselessly as possible. Then the door yanks open from the other side, my mother frowns at me, and my normal world hits me like a pile of those bricks I just conjured up a few minutes before.
Thursday, 12:05 am
Anne
I lean back against my pillow and study the lacquer box. No matter how many times I’ve flipped it open and run my finger over the key shape on the inside, it remains just that—a shape. Just a little raised outline painted on the inside bottom of the box.
I’ve even gone so far as to close my eyes and rev up my new, special glow hands to see if that would do anything, but all I managed to do was singe my sheets a little. Now, among my many other worries, I can add one that has my parents thinking that I’m smoking in bed.
Down the hall, I can hear the muffled sounds of my parents talking as they get ready for bed. “I’m sure Tess will have them in the car when she picks me up tomorrow,” I’d told my mother when she’d started ranting not only about my late arrival but also the conspicuous absence of both my backpack and my cell phone. Her response had included a wide variety of reasons why I no longer needed a cell phone—or a life outside the house, for that matter.
“Your mother’s right,” my father had added. It’s never a good sign when he takes Mom’s side. “I know you think that phone is something you absolutely must have, but trust me, I’m more than willing to let you learn that you can get along just fine without it. Especially if you’re just going to use it to make excuses as to why you can’t come home at a decent hour.”
“And don’t think we don’t realize that you and Tess weren’t at her house the entire time.” My mother lowered her voice ominously. “If you’re going to tell lies, Anne, at least have the grace to come up with something more believable than Tess saying that you’re having a bout of food poisoning but not to worry because you’re still studying. Give me a break, Anne. I’m not an idiot.”
What could I say to defend myself other than the truth, which would just loop us back to her telling me to come up with something more believable? So I held my tongue. In fact, I just about bit it off until they both ran out of steam and I could take a shower and crawl into bed.
That’s where I am now, poking at the stupid box and wondering where Ethan is—if he’s still at the loft or back at the professor’s. I’m ignoring the thought that his hands felt kind of good when he placed them on top of mine, because that is far too weird for me to handle.
So is the sudden shuffle of footsteps in the hall outside my room. My pulse skips a couple of beats, and a montage of doom—Viktor and Dimitri coming to get me riding on Baba Yaga’s hands—races through my head. But it’s not supernatural doom lurking outside my room. It’s just my mother.
“Anne?” Her tone has settled down considerably since we last spoke. “Are you still up?” Light filters in from the hallway as my mother, wrapped in her long, blue robe, opens the door.
“Yeah,” I say, shoving the lacquer box under the covers on the far side of the bed and scooting over so she can sit next to me. “Wide awake.”
“So.” When my mom reaches up to brush her bangs off her forehead, her hand is thin enough that I can see the outlines of the bones, the blue veins pulsing under her skin. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“Going on?” I stall, because I don’t know what to say. Hey, Mom, did you know your birth mother’s probably descended from the Russian Romanovs through a magic-monk-turned-bad-guy named Viktor? And remember how you used to dream about Anastasia? Well, guess what? I’m the one who can actually spring her—yes, that’s right, the princess you thought was dead—from the hut of Baba Yaga, where she’s been in a sort of holding zone since 1918. And oh, yeah, Baba Yaga—the one whose hut is on that funky lacquer box you gave me? She’s real. And by the way, I’ve run for my life a couple times since yesterday, I’ve also developed glowing hands and super powers, and a minute ago, I think I just got warm and fuzzy feelings for a man who’s—let’s see—close to ninety years my senior.
Any place I begin is going to have Mom running for the Prozac prescription.
“Something’s clearly not right,” she says to me. Even with just the dim light from the hallway, I can see the worry in her eyes. “This morning—well, I guess it was yesterday morning, at this point—you were worried about some dream, and then coming in so late tonight. And lying to me about where you were—”
“Mom,” I start.
“No.” She rests a hand—gently, but firmly—on my shoulder. “I know you weren’t telling the truth. End of story. And it’s not like you, Anne. You and I—we tell each other the truth. I thought that’s how it was.”
“It’s nothing, Mom,” I say, knowing even as I speak that it’s just as she’s said—a lie. “I was
late, and I’m sorry. I know you worry more about me since—well, I was just late. That’s all it was.”
“I’m not going to push you on this, Anne,” my mother says stiffly, “but if something really is wrong, I’d hope you’d tell me. And I promise to listen.”
The emotions churning inside me bubble their way to the surface. I lean in and hug her. “I love you, Mom. I—I just can’t tell you right now. When I know what to say, I will. You’re just going to have to trust me. Really.”
“Is it Tess, honey?” she asks, clearly not willing to let me slide as quickly as I’d hoped. “Or someone else you know? Anne, is someone in trouble?”
“Yes,” I say, trying for some semblance of honesty. “I think someone is. But I—I’m not sure if there’s anything I can really do about it.”
My mother plucks at the material on the lap of her robe, pinching it and letting go in a pulsing sort of rhythm. “Sometimes, you can help people, Anne,” she says, “and sometimes, you can’t.” She takes a deep breath. I’m clear where this is going, and when she looks at me, I almost want to turn away.
But I don’t.
“I never told you what I’m going to tell you now,” she says. She reaches over and takes my hands in hers, holds tight. The edge of her wedding ring cuts a little against one of my fingers. “But maybe,” she tells me quietly, “it will help you with whatever’s going on.”
I nod silently and wait for her to continue.
“On the day that David died, you and your dad had gone to get some coffee. David was sleeping, and I finally dozed off in the chair next to his bed. I was dreaming that I was at one of his football games, and there he was, running for the ball. He caught it and raced across the goal line. I watched him jump up and down, this big smile across his face. He looked up into the stands and shouted, ‘Mom! I did it, Mom! I did it!’ And I was so excited that I leaped up and ran out of the stands and down onto the field to hug him. But when I got to the field, I couldn’t cross the sideline. I kept running and running, but David kept getting farther and farther away.”