by K. Panikian
We wound through the trees for a few minutes, stepping over roots and around giant ferns. Finally stopping, she pointed down at the waist-high bushes that surrounded us. I peered closer and then happily exclaimed, “Blueberries!”
They were all around us, scenting the air with citrusy freshness. We started filling our buckets and soon my fingers, lips, and tongue were purple. The berries burst with honeyed sweetness and I popped one in my mouth for every two I dropped in my bucket.
Working industriously, it didn’t take long until our buckets were full.
Suddenly, Josephine whispered to me, “Start backing up, back to the four-wheeler. Don’t make any quick movements.”
I looked up slowly from my bucket and saw her point at a large, dark shape in the bushes just a few feet away. The shape moved and I saw a snout and sleepy brown eyes. A black bear. It sat up, its hind legs sprawled in front, and scooped blueberries into its mouth with its front paws. Its rounded ears flicked as we slowly retreated, but it didn’t stop munching, pulling the berry branches toward its snout and using its long pink tongue to swipe at the ripe shapes.
As soon as we were out of sight, we picked up speed to the four-wheeler. Josephine didn’t seem concerned as she tied the full buckets back on the machine.
I asked her if we needed to worry it would follow us and she shook her head.
“A black bear in a berry patch is not a troublesome thing. It will sit there for hours eating those blueberries.”
I nodded in relief and we climbed onto the long seat, heading down the ridge. At the store again, I helped Josephine carry the buckets around the back and into the kitchen.
Then we made blueberry pies. We pulled some dough out of the big, industrial fridge and started rolling it out. We washed the fresh blueberries and mixed them with sugar and cinnamon and lemon. Josephine showed me how to crimp the edges of the crust.
When the pies were finally in the oven, we walked down to the dock and sat, dangling our feet in the cool, clear water.
I tried to think of a way to bring up the missing people we’d been discussing yesterday. Specifically, I wanted to talk about Grace some more. She didn’t fit the pattern and I wanted to hear more about her life.
I cleared my throat and then Josephine turned to look at the store. A young woman called her name and waved. We put our shoes back on and hurried across the road.
“Emergency call came in,” the woman said. “There’s a guide at one of the western lodges that didn’t come home last night.” She nodded at me and smiled. “I’m Esther.”
I smiled back at her and introduced myself.
Josephine went inside and then returned a moment later with a notepad in her hand and a satellite phone in a pack over her shoulder. She waved goodbye to me and climbed into one of the old pickup trucks in the lot, driving off down the gravel road. Then she stopped, reversed, and rolled her window open. “Pull those pies out in five minutes!” she shouted and then drove away again.
I talked to Esther for a few minutes before heading to the dock again. I knew Julian would be along at some point to find me and, sure enough, as soon as I stepped on the planks, I saw him motoring toward me and waving. I waved back. He pulled up alongside and I maneuvered carefully into the boat.
He’d been fishing again, he said, and cruising the river.
I told him what I’d been up to and that Josephine had just left to go investigate another disappearance. Julian wanted to go see the methane pond so we pointed the skiff westward and headed parallel the shoreline. Peering closely at the different trails that snaked up into the trees, I saw the trail marked with the red blaze on the log.
Julian aimed the skiff at the shore and lifted the motor up out of the water as we coasted and then scraped onto the gravel beach. We climbed onto the rocks and pulled the skiff the rest of the way out of the water. I pointed to the red blaze and we started up the path.
We reached the still, green pond, the woods silent around us. The birds and bugs were quiet and motionless. We stood at the edge, looking out across the scum and algae, and then I saw them—footprints in the mud.
The prints were large, likely from a man’s shoe, and I could see a clear trail in the mud coming up the path, stopping at the pond’s edge. I didn’t see a return trail.
Julian crouched, looking closely, and then rose again. “Definitely a regular, modern boot print.” His voice was loud in the silence.
I nodded and peered around us, my senses prickling.
In a blast of damp air, a woman appeared next to me wearing a long, dirty dress.
No, not a dress, I decided, a nightgown.
She stared, frowning, into the water for a moment and then turned to look at me. Her skin glowed and she had dark, purple circles under her vivid eyes. Her hair looked matted, green with algae.
“What happened here?” I asked carefully.
Julian looked over at me and froze when he saw the woman.
Cocking her head, the woman said in a low, sad voice, “I couldn’t resist. His heart was so dark and malicious.” She straightened and peered into my face. “I’m sorry if he was a friend of yours.”
I shook my head and whispered, “No. Not my friend.” My blood felt ice-cold in my veins.
“Good,” she said. Her eyes were dark pools of madness.
“Grace?” I asked.
She looked down into the pond, silent for a long moment. Then she hissed, “Yes, that is my name.”
“What happened to you, Grace?”
She turned to me again and her hair started waving on an invisible current. The green color grew more pronounced and the air filled with magic. I swallowed past the knot in my throat, feeling her malevolent aura reach for me.
Keeping my expression calm, I ignored her sharp teeth as Julian stepped closer.
“I don’t know,” she finally answered, her voice uncertain. “I have always been here.” She paused for a long moment again. “No, that’s not true,” she said more clearly. “I was not here, and then I was.”
She turned to Julian and her eyes started to glow. Then she spun away. “He is not for me.”
In a sudden movement, she dove into the pond and vanished. Her dive created no splash or movement on the surface the water. I looked down at the mud where she had been standing and saw no footprints.
Grabbing my hand, Julian started tugging me back through the trees, away from the pond.
In the skiff again, Julian steered us away from the shoreline and then dropped the anchor. We sat, drifting in the clear water, and he asked, “What was that?”
“A rusalka,” I said. “That’s so sad. The poor girl.”
“Poor girl?” he asked. “What about all the men she’s killed?”
“Yes, well, poor them, too, I guess. But she doesn’t have a choice. She’s not Grace anymore. Grace was murdered and likely her body was tossed into that pond. Her essence must have mixed with the portal magic and it created a rusalka.”
I continued before he could ask. “A rusalka is an unquiet spirit. It’s always a woman. In life, she was probably unhappy in love. Now that she’s dead, she’ll haunt the water where she was murdered until she’s avenged. Then her soul will be free.” I shuddered. “Until she’s avenged, she’ll continue to lure faithless men to her pond and drown them there.”
We were both quiet, thinking.
“We have to tell Josephine. She’s the village police officer. She needs to keep people away from that pond,” I said.
“Will she believe us?”
“I don’t know. But we have to try and convince her.”
Nodding, Julian turned the skiff in the direction of Iliamna. When we pulled up to the dock, he tied us off and we crossed the road to Josephine’s store.
Esther still stood behind the counter and the air smelled like blueberry pie. She smiled at me and I asked if Josephine had returned yet. Esther shook her head.
“Can you tell her I need to speak to her? If she can’t get away today, I’ll come back again in
the morning. It’s important.”
“Sure,” Esther said.
Then she went in the back and grabbed a pie for me. She’d wrapped it prettily in a pastry box. I thanked her and we returned to the lodge.
LATER that afternoon, I sat on our cabin porch, my feet up on the rails, and wrote a long email to Very and Bard, telling them about the rusalka and the portal in the pond. I told them we were going back the next day to try and talk to the spirit again. Maybe she could help us find the key. I had no idea though, how often she was lucid.
Julian was at the lodge talking to Ken, trying to find out what he knew about Grace’s disappearance two years ago. She wasn’t a guide at this lodge, but surely everyone knew everyone in this small town? We needed to know whom she particularly spent time with, and if they were here again this summer.
After dinner, when the guides and guests gathered around the bonfire again with their beers and pie, Josephine motored up in a blue skiff. Waving at me, she beckoned down to the water. Julian saw her, too, and he joined me on the dock. We climbed into the blue boat and sat on the bench opposite Josephine.
“Did you find the missing man?” I asked.
Josephine shook her head. “He was expected late, after taking a client to the airport. He didn’t sleep in his bunk. No one’s seen him.”
I shared a look with Julian. His eyes were grave.
“I think we might know what happened to him,” I told Josephine.
I explained to her we’d gone back to the methane-exploded pond after she left this morning. We saw the footprints. Then I told her about the rusalka. When I was done, she sat quietly on her bench, staring at her hands.
She finally said quietly, “I wondered.”
Then she cleared her throat and sat straighter. “We have many Russian families in this area. My father-in-law is Russian. I have heard stories of rusalka before. When Grace vanished, and then men started disappearing, I speculated that it could be something supernatural, something vengeful. That pond has always made me uncomfortable. It stinks and you find bones there all the time, bubbling up from the mud.
“But for the past two years, I haven’t gone to the pond at all. It makes my skin crawl. Yesterday when I showed you, that was the first time I’d been there since Grace disappeared.”
“You have to keep people away from there,” Julian told her. “We’re going to try and help her spirit move on. We also need something from her—that pond is part of a job we’re doing. But in the meantime, you can’t let her murder anyone else.”
Josephine peered carefully at us. “Who are you?”
I shared another long look with Julian and then he waved his hand at me resignedly. So, I told her everything else.
Her eyes were round by the end of my story but she looked excited too. “You’re really from another world? Can I see some magic?” Then she colored. “Is that a rude question?”
I laughed. Calling up a small breeze, I twirled my finger in the air, stirring it gently. The whirlwind spun toward Josephine and then encircled her briefly before I released it. It swirled her hair before it dissipated. She grinned at me, then sobered.
“We will go tomorrow to the pond and you will show me the footprints. I can give you two days before I call the missing man in to the State Troopers. This man was having girlfriend problems, and several of his friends suggested he may have left town to avoid it all. So, that gives us a window.”
She continued in a firm voice. “If the pond is a gate and it’s full of the bodies of missing people, you need to shut it so the police can retrieve the bones and return them to their families.”
Chapter 10
After Josephine sped off into the night, Julian asked me if I wanted to head back to the bonfire. I looked at the cheerful figures silhouetted by the orange and yellow sparks and told him, not really.
My heart hurt. I felt the sting of Grace’s life cut short, plus the shocking degradation of her transformation. I wanted to be by myself so I could process the pain of it all and then try and separate myself from the hurt.
I told him to go ahead; I was going to sit by the water for a while.
Julian looked at me earnestly, his face still clearly visible in the sunlight, despite the late hour. His blue eyes reflecting the dark surface of the lake, he lifted his hand toward my cheek, then stopped himself.
“Look,” he started to say, “there are some things—”
I shook my head at him. “Sorry. Now’s not the time for this. Whatever is going on in your head, I can’t deal with it right now. I just want to be alone.”
He gave me a short nod and tucked his hands in his pockets. Then he strode up the lawn and over to the fire pit.
Sitting on the flexible planks of the dock, I thought about my mother. She and my dad hadn’t married. They’d met in the soldier barracks at the citadel, as was often the case with Varangian citizens. They moved together into the partnered soldier quarters almost immediately after they met, and then had Bard and me in quick succession.
I couldn’t really remember that time—maybe snippets of being tucked into my bunk under Bard’s, my mother singing to me. The scent of cloves from the oil she used to polish her sword would linger in the air.
Then they started having problems. They shouted a lot. When soldiers were needed in the field, they preferred to deploy separately and when they were home at the same time, it was hard.
My mother started spending more time away from the citadel with her scout troop and Rurik took over the majority of the childcare.
She got pregnant again and Cato was born. Then she left the citadel. She left Cato with my dad and went to go live in a village to the north with one of her former scout partners. I never saw her again. I was five, I think.
She died soon after that in a bauk attack—one of the first coordinated by Abaddon’s newly cohesive army.
My dad never let me feel the gap. He supported me, taught me, and when I was 16 and getting ready to move to the women’s dorm, he reassured me. He told me that I was strong and capable and he was proud of me, unreservedly.
Rurik had other partners over the years—some I liked and some I didn’t. I asked my dad once how he could stand it; how could he keep making himself vulnerable to love?
He told me that love is a gift. Whether it lasts for one night, one month, one year, or a lifetime, it’s always a gift. He loved my mother, even though it didn’t last forever. And he had no regrets.
To share your body with someone, your vulnerabilities, your hopes, he said, it requires you to trust in love. Otherwise, life is just an unbearable harshness.
I took that to heart with my relationships too. I tried to have no regrets. I tried to believe that one day I would find love.
Like me, Grace trusted. To end up as a rusalka, she’d loved someone until some betrayal ripped them apart. I promised myself I would help her.
I felt the planks on the dock shake and looked up to see Julian walking back to me, a beer in each hand. He handed me one and said, “You can tell me to go again and that’s fine, I only wanted to say a few things.”
I took the beer and waved him to sit beside me. It was late now and the sky was starting to show signs of red, orange, and pink clouds to the west. Sitting beside me, his long legs stretched out and his thigh muscles flexing, Julian swallowed a long pull from his beer. He smelled like woodsmoke.
He said, “I know I’ve been sending mixed signals about my interest in a relationship with you, and I know that’s unfair. I want to try and explain what I’ve been thinking and how I feel.”
My heart sped up and I nodded.
“When you told me a few months ago that you wanted to be with me—”
I controlled my blush with an iron grip.
“—I was worried you didn’t know enough about me, about your situation in this world, to make that sort of decision.”
His words hit me and my blush faded. What?
“You were far from your home, among strangers, in a wor
ld wholly unfamiliar to you. I thought it was only natural for you to want to hold onto the attachments you made initially, like with me and Very and the others.”
He paused again to take a sip from his drink. “I didn’t want to lock you into a relationship that maybe you would regret once you started to explore this world.”
My jaw tightened as I flexed my hands on my own beer bottle.
“I also didn’t know how experienced you were with relationships. I knew Rurik and Bard treated you like an adult, but that didn’t mean you’d actually been an adult in your world. Did you have boyfriends or lovers? It seemed unlikely, given what I know about primitive societies and the restrictions they place on women.”
I sucked in a breath. My heartbeat pounded in my ears.
“Plus, you’d just lost your dad.”
That was it. I had heard enough. He tried to go on and I raised my hand, stopping him.
I said through clenched teeth, “I came to you, a fully rational and adult woman, and told you that I had feelings for you. You decided, without discussing anything with me, that I couldn’t possibly feel the way that I felt. That what, I was confused? Naïve? Immature? Primitive? You made decisions about what was and wasn’t reasonable for me to feel.” I stared at him. “Right?”
My voice reflected the dangerous glint of fury that was coursing through me. Julian blinked.
“It seems like a lot of those choices you had to make were actually taking my choices away from me,” I continued. “Why on earth would I need you to filter my feelings through your fears?”
Julian gazed at me, nonplussed. Then he opened his mouth to try and speak.
I raised my hand. “No, just stop, I’m too angry to talk to you right now. You had no right to make those assumptions. You didn’t even try to talk to me about it. You should have trusted me to know myself. I am an independent adult person and I own my decisions. Me.” I thumped my chest.
“If you didn’t want to be with me, fine. No one was twisting your arm. At least have the guts to own it.”
I got to my feet, leaving my beer on the dock, and walked down the dark path heading back to our cabin, my shoulders hunched and my stomach tight.