Anastasia Forever

by Joy Preble

  “Well, in that case, I’m going to need some more chips.”

  Tuesday, 5:02 pm

  Ethan

  I’ve been the one to reach out, but still I feel myself tense as he walks into the café on Armitage, a tiny storefront sandwiched between two antique shops. Meeting here meant coming back into the city, but somehow it feels safer—as though the distance from the suburbs will protect Anne if this goes badly. It’s a foolish illusion, but I hold it to me as Dimitri—heavier now than when I’d seen him last—settles his bulk in the chair opposite me at the small table.

  “You’re looking well, Brother.” He holds out his hand, and after a moment, I clasp it. The greeting startles me. Viktor’s betrayal destroyed any connection to the Brotherhood I might have still felt. The risk of what I’m doing stands out in clearer relief as we shake hands; this is the man who kidnapped Anne. The man who would have gladly killed me last fall—if I had been able to die.

  But he, too, was betrayed. We have spoken now and then, never in person. He has sworn that he has no further allegiance to Viktor—the man who lied to all of us. I do not know if I believe him. But I’ve chanced this meeting nonetheless. If I’m to go after Viktor, I need allies. And Dimitri is where I’ve begun. There are others scattered throughout the world—only a handful of us became immortal during the Revolution—but I have not seen or spoken to them in decades. I had no need. I was Viktor’s right-hand man. And Dimitri sat at his other side.

  “And you?” I ask him. “How is the world treating you these days?”

  He smiles slowly. His face has changed some since the last time I saw him. Like me, Dimitri is aging again. He was at least ten years older than I was in 1918. Soon, I think, he will turn thirty. This time, it will show.

  “It has been, well, an adjustment, has it not? Or perhaps our current condition was what you wanted all along, Ethan. To be like everyone else, counting down the days until we are no more. I have come to terms with it, but it is different, no? This newfound mortality of ours. We can break now, like the rest of the world. It has taken some getting used to.”

  I shrug. Take a sip of the tea I’d been drinking while waiting for him to arrive. Annoyance ripples over me. At Dimitri for considering only himself. At myself for realizing that I’ve thought the same thing. And because of this, I find myself saying, “Is that all you have to share with me? That you’re still too good to just be human? Perhaps I was wrong in asking you here. Maybe there is nothing for us to discuss after all.”

  Dimitri signals the waitress before he responds. “Is that how it is, then, Brother? So be it. I will not question your motives if you will not question mine. We will have our meal. Talk like old friends. And if I don’t quite believe that you are as selfless as you would like me to think, then that is my business. It won’t alter what we decide here.”

  Like his use of my former title, his words catch me off guard. He’s right, of course. Here is the truth I learned in my second visit to Baba Yaga’s forest: like Dimitri, sometimes I miss not being able to die.

  “Coffee,” Dimitri tells the waitress. “And eggs over easy. Bacon, crisp. And rye toast, two slices, dry. Butter on the side. And potatoes—you have hash browns, yes? Make sure they’re well done. And jam, if you have some.”

  If she’s put off by his dismissive tone, she hides it well. The two piercings in her left eyebrow move slightly as she scribbles his demands on her order pad.

  “Can I get you something else?” she asks me, and when I tell her no, she tucks the order pad in the white apron that’s tied around her black pants and black shirt and strides to the kitchen.

  “Americans,” Dimitri says after she’s gone. “They need direction to make a proper meal.”

  I choose not to respond. We have more serious matters to discuss than his general disdain for the world or the condition of his rye toast.

  “Thank you for meeting me,” I say instead.

  Dimitri dismisses my attempt at polite small talk just as he’d dismissed the ability of the waitress to bring him an acceptable meal. “Have you seen him then? Alive?”

  “Very much alive. And still a threat—to all of us.”

  The waitress returns with a mug and the coffeepot. We pause until she’s filled his cup—“to the brim,” he directs her—and then he responds.

  “To the girl, you mean.” He grins at me. “If only you could have seen his face the day he realized that you’d actually found her. You know he never believed you had it in you, Etanovich.”

  “Ethan. I haven’t been Etanovich in a long time. Won’t be ever again. And yes, I’m certain he was surprised. But that’s in the past. It’s what’s going on now that concerns me. As I told you on the phone last night, she—”

  “Yes, yes, Ethan. You told me. And I have decided to believe you. What is my alternative, really? I should have been dead long ago. It is not much of a stretch to accept that your little Anne has made a new bargain with Baba Yaga. Or that she wants to save a rusalka you say is her grandmother. Which would make the rusalka Viktor’s descendant, yes? Oh, this gets quite tangled, Brother.

  “But here is what intrigues me. Viktor has found a way to regain his immortality. Fascinating, yes? The hag took him away to her hut, kept him in God knows what condition, and yet somehow he walked out of that forest and made a bullet rise from his chest. This is what you’ve told me. What I’ve stayed up all night considering.”

  “And?” I sip my tea, now gone cold. Dimitri stirs more sugar into his coffee. We watch each other—like two chess players considering our next moves, trying to anticipate what the other might do.

  “You tell me, Ethan. And what? Why are we here? What would you like me to do?”

  I hesitate. The waitress returns, sets the plate of food in front of Dimitri. He nods, then pokes a fork into the eggs. The yolks flow onto the plate, pooling around the potatoes and bacon. He takes a bite of his dry toast. Chews. Then scrapes a small bit of butter onto the remainder with his knife.

  I hesitate, then: “Figure out how he’s gotten back the immortality the rest of us have lost. And what he plans on doing now that he thinks himself invincible again.”

  Dimitri’s dark eyes glimmer. “I thought that was little Anne’s job. And so, Brother Ethan, what does this mean? Do you love her now?”

  Inside me, the small bits of magic that have inexplicably returned rise dark and angry. I push them back. Set my cup on the table. This is neither the time nor the place to reveal what I still don’t understand. I sacrificed my power to Anne as we stood together in Lake Michigan. Now magic once again stirs in my veins. I wish I knew what it was. Or whose.

  I look Dimitri in the eye. “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to be. You, me, Anne, the witch—we all need to know how to stop Viktor. If that frees the rusalka, then that is a good thing. You and I both understand what it is to be bound. What you’ve done or haven’t done over the years—I’m not asking for a confessional here. All I’m asking is that you help me find a way to end this.”

  Even as I say the words, I know it’s not that simple. Anne has bound herself to Baba Yaga. Stopping Viktor won’t change that. But it’s a step in the right direction.

  Dimitri forks more egg into his mouth. Lays two slices of bacon on his toast and eats that as well. Takes another swallow of coffee, then dabs his mouth with his napkin.

  “You are not an innocent in this, Ethan,” he says. “You killed a man, remember?”

  “He would have killed me if he could have.”

  “So what then, collateral damage? His name was Anatol, by the way. If he had a last name, I never knew it. I—but that’s history, eh? Here’s what you really want to know. I think that Viktor wants what he’s always wanted—to live forever. To show the tsar and the rest that he managed to achieve what they could not. Power. Money. Life eternal. It drives him now as it al
ways did. The things most men want even if they cannot admit it. This is what I believe.”

  “Just that?”

  Dimitri laughs. “Is that so little? Immortality is not enough to make a man kill? To motivate a man to figure out how to escape the Death Crone?”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But it’s never served us well to underestimate him.”

  Dimitri nods. “Perhaps.” But I see in his eyes that perhaps there is something else. Like the strange new magic floating in my veins, something very dark.

  “Are you with me, then? You’ll help? If you betray me, I will come after you. So I need you to promise. After all, I don’t know what you want out of all this either. But for now, I’m choosing not to ask.”

  “I like a happy ending,” he says. “Let’s leave it at that.”

  Tuesday, 5:58 pm

  Anne

  Here’s what we know after two hours of research: the world still thinks Anastasia died with her family. Baba Yaga appears only in stories and on fairy tale sites. And rusalka curses may or may not be lifted by avenging the death of the rusalka and shedding the blood of the person who attempted to kill her or caused her to leap into the water in the first place. As for the Alexander Palace, home of my doomed Romanov ancestors, we’ve stared at tons of pictures of the rooms and grounds, but it’s not like some piece of text said, Hey, the secret clue you’re looking for is right here. Nothing to support the things I saw with Ethan during our little time-travel visit that may or may not have been real.

  Here’s what we don’t know: everything else.

  Tess stretches her legs into the sitting version of a split and rests her chin on her elbows. “You know, I’d sort of forgotten since we looked at all this last fall. These stories don’t end well, do they?”

  “They’re not that bad. Vasilisa gets the better of Baba Yaga in her stories.” Vasilisa, the girl whose stepmother sends her to Baba Yaga’s forest to get rid of her but whose magical doll helps her. The girl who manages to get out of the forest alive. Her story ends; mine seems to keep spinning out with no end in sight.

  “Yeah, well, you over-identify with that one.” Tess grins. “But the rest of them?”

  She scrunches her nose. “Lovers killed. People ripped apart. Some guy who dies when he gets hit on the head with an egg, if you can believe that one. A bad wife sitting in the dark. Some of them just end with the narrator drinking beer. I mean those Grimm brothers weren’t always happy either, but this stuff is rough. Except I guess we already knew that. But maybe we just don’t understand all the rules or something. Isn’t that what Professor Olensky kept saying last fall? That we have to see everything like a story?”

  “Except that he was wrong, remember?” The image of the professor’s dead body flickers through my mind and I work to push it away. “The way to the forest wasn’t through a story. It was me. My blood. Even that stupid lacquer box turned out to be just a prop. I didn’t even need it the second time, did I? I just bled on all of you, and zap, there you were.”

  Almost dying because of me, I don’t add. But Tess knows what happened. I don’t have to say it.

  The thought makes us silent—so silent that we both jump when there’s a tap on my bedroom door. “Anne?” my mother says. “Your father’s going to be home soon. He’s bringing home Chinese. I told him to get enough for Tess.”

  She opens the door and walks in, but just a few steps. Even though we’re talking again, and she knows I’ve got a Destiny—definitely with a capital D—she still seems hesitant to come into my territory or ask questions to which she might not want the answers. Our cat, Buster, slips in with her and, after one slight meow, leaps onto my bed where he immediately curls up, a soft gray ball of fur, and closes his eyes.

  “Can you stay, sweetie?” Lately my mom is skittish around Tess. Almost like she’s worried that she might have to ask Tess something like, “How are you, honey? Any residual effects since you almost died in the freak tsunami my daughter caused in Lake Michigan while trying to save you from the evil mermaids, one of whom is my birth mother?”

  Better to discuss our takeout order.

  “Will there be egg rolls?” Tess looks at Mom hopefully.

  Mom smiles. “I’ll text Steve and make sure he gets extra.”

  “Then I’m staying.”

  “You done for the day?” I ask her.

  Mom nods. “Just a phone call to a vendor for that show at the Merchandise Mart next month. Honestly, I don’t know how much longer I can keep things going. Maybe it would be best to just put it all in storage until…”

  We all let her sentence hang there. No point in finishing it. With her boss, Mrs. Benson, still MIA and the Jewel Box basically smashed to pieces again because of me, my mother is keeping the business going by selling the remaining jewelry out of a makeshift store in our living room. A couple of folding tables, a small cashbox, and a handwritten inventory sheet—this is how Mom is conducting business. Mostly people make appointments, but lately they’ve started to drop by whenever they feel like it.

  Mom worries that the neighbors will complain that we’re running some kind of home pawn shop. That isn’t going to happen now that I’ve put a protective warding spell around our house to keep out negative influences, but I’ve kept that fact to myself—mostly because I’m not totally sure I’ve done the spell correctly. It’s entirely possible that I’ve cursed the jewelry to disintegrate once it leaves our house or something.

  Mom pauses to run a hand over David’s comforter and then straighten it—a long slow silence for all three of us—and then says, “Ethan isn’t coming back tonight, is he? I don’t think your father ordered enough if he is. So I’d have to call him and—”

  “It’s fine, Mom. I’m sure there’ll be enough either way.”

  My tone is sharper than I want it to be. Mom deflates and goes silent, then closes the door behind her as she leaves.

  Tess purses her lips.

  “What?” I ask irritably. “Did you want to talk about Chinese food some more? Well, neither did she.”

  On my bookcase, the two candle flames flicker, then burn taller and brighter.

  “Settle down there, Sparky,” Tess says dryly. “It’s tense with you two. I get it. What else did you expect? I mean seriously, you don’t see me having discussions about magic with my mother, do you? Speaking of which, yours isn’t going to say anything to her, is she? I mean I figured that this was all too weird, and it’s not like they’d start talking about it over a glass of wine or something, but—”

  “I think you’re safe, Tess.”

  “Well, good. ’Cause you don’t want me to panic or something.”

  I shake my head. Tess rarely panics. Sometimes I wish she would. It might make her less likely to do things like try to save Ethan from rusalki all on her own.

  I turn my attention to the laptop. Press Save and close our useless list. What was I thinking? I wonder. That it would be like last fall, and we’d research and suddenly figure out the answers? I’m silly for thinking that any of this is easy. I should know better.

  I’ve left some pages open, reduced on the toolbar, and I start to close those out too.

  “You talk to Ben lately?”

  I stop what I’m doing and look at Tess. She narrows her eyes, which is never a good sign. There is only one topic that is a problem for me and Tess, and this is it.

  “You know I have.” This is true; I’d gone for coffee with Ben a few days ago. “We’re not going out anymore,” I told him. His answer had been, “That can change.” And then somehow I’d promised to go to a Swedish film festival at the Art Institute with him. Ben’s got this thing for movies with subtitles. Personally, I don’t get it.

  But there I was agreeing to see some movies that will probably be about people in boots and hats looking cold and depressed. Like winter in Chicago
, only in Swedish. And since the Jewel Box is destroyed again, I don’t even have a summer job as an excuse—unless you count the time last week when I helped Tess teach the preschoolers basic ballet steps at Miss Amy’s. Which definitely does not constitute gainful employment.

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Well, something. I’m going to this foreign film with him. But it’s nothing. We’re not—”

  “If you’re not, then why are you going to the movies with him?”

  I shrug. I don’t seem to have any answer that makes sense. “It’ll be okay. I just can’t—it’s hard. I mean it’s my fault that he—plus, he’s Ben. He’s so—”

  “So in love with you?”

  I frown. “So exactly why are we talking about this?” Even as I ask the question, I already know the answer. Ben is safe. Ben is normal. Ethan is everything but. Tess knows it. I know it. Everyone knows it. Only it doesn’t make things easier. It doesn’t change how I feel—which is still not in love with Ben.

  Tess reddens—a slight blush that works its way up her neck to her cheeks. “Well,” she says, then stops. I look at her more carefully.

  “What? And why are you turning red?” A thought comes. Ben and Tess? Is this possible? And how do I feel about this? Suddenly I feel awkward.

  Tess sighs. “I saw him at Java Joe’s the other day. I needed a jumbo latte before tap and jazz. It’s like herding cats with those girls. I am seriously never having kids. First one needs her shoelaces tied. Then another one has to pee. Then there’s the twins—Lacy and Hannah. I swear, if I let them, they’d be rolling on the studio floor ripping each other’s eyes out. I’ve never seen anything like it. They—”

  “Tess. Focus. Ben?”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “Get there faster.”

  “He’s still freaked out, Anne. I think half the time he wants to pretend that none of what happened a couple of weeks ago really happened. I mean, let’s face it—that’s what everyone else around here keeps doing. A witch flies over Second Street in her mortar, steering with a giant pestle? Just a thunderstorm. A horde of crazy mermaids crash into the Jewel Box? Probably some kind of hail or once-in-a-century winds. You’ve said it yourself. It’s like last fall. The truth doesn’t make any sense, so they come up with something that does. Do you know Ben’s quit lifeguarding? That’s why he was in Java Joe’s. He was applying to be a barista. Ben was captain of the swim team, Anne. And now he hates the water. He can’t even look at the pool anymore because it makes him think of Lily and everything else.”