He whistled. “The Belovs are big time. Nasty. Even having a friend on the edge of their organization is dangerous. Anyone nearby can get sucked into the black hole.”
“I know.” That’s how she’d wound up in their clutches in the first place.
“But Fedir—?”
“He was a good man.”
Nikolai watched her over the rim of his mug as he drew it to his thin-lipped, sensual mouth. “You loved Fedir? Is that what this whole ghost thing is about?”
How could she explain the kind of love she’d felt? He’d saved her, been eternally kind to her, and above all, he’d loved her, practically worshipped her, when to everyone else she was an extra in the cast of her parents’ lives. He’d brought her flowers, left her sticky notes with hearts on them, told her stories about his friends that had made her laugh so hard she’d gotten stitches in her side.
She’d done her best to return his love, though her grateful sentiments weren’t quite a match for his passionate ones. It wasn’t Fedir’s fault she had so many hang-ups in the bedroom. But he’d been sweet and patient about her being such a cold fish.
“Yes. I loved him.” Another shiver shook her, an icy ache blooming in her bones. Boy, she’d forgotten being alive came with so many discomforts.
Nikolai cast a glance at his bedroom door. Was he judging her for having sex with him if she’d loved Fedir?
No, surely she was just projecting her own guilt on to him. Fedir had saved her life, and she could barely stand for him to make love to her, while all Nikolai had to do was stroke himself off once, and she’d been all over him. Salt tears burned her eyes, just one more loud sensation in her alive-again body. Time to wrap this story up before she turned into a blubbering mess.
She took a deep breath and blew it out with control. “So, in death, I’ve been given the task of making sure his killer is brought to justice.”
Nikolai took another sip of his coffee, watching over his mug as if he could glare her into telling him the truth. Of course he was skeptical. Who would believe her? I know you think I’m your crazy one-night stand, but really, I’m a nightmare and sometime-succubus on a mission of justice.
If only she hadn’t slipped into his dream, this would have been so much easier…
No. She wouldn’t regret even a second of that passion. Alive, she’d never felt so aroused, so free of inhibitions. Why Nikolai and not Fedir? Yes, he was more strapping, more handsome. But she knew all too well how shallow beauty ran, and she’d held a deep appreciation for the beauty of Fedir’s soul.
Or maybe the strength of the attraction simply came down to being a succubus. She shivered and wiped her eyes. Her tears felt icy cold on the backs of her fingers. She sucked in a breath as the full import of the word finally penetrated her overwhelmed brain. A succubus? Had she stolen some of this vibrant man’s life?
She glanced up at Nikolai. “Listen, about last—”
He held up big palms. “Hey, it’s none of my business. We all grieve differently, and it’s been how long?”
“A year, but—”
His glare softened. “Sweetheart, you’re still a woman. A beautiful woman.”
“Nikolai, shut up and listen to my question.”
His eyes dilated to just that tiny ring of blue. “Yes, a very beautiful woman with a voice like pure sex.”
Crap. She was doing it again. She slapped both palms over her mouth and cleared her throat, hoping to dislodge the succubus’s siren song from her throat.
“I’m just asking, do you feel strange? Tired? Drained?”
He smiled a wolfish smile, full of male pride, and her sex clenched. “Remarkably, after a marathon like that, I’m feeling like a freshly saddled horse.”
She remembered sitting astride him and blushed yet again. God, she’d never blushed so much in her life. His grin widened. In all the weeks since he’d moved in, she’d never spied him smiling. It was glorious, and possibly the only damn thing she’d accomplished in a year.
“Good. That’s good,” she muttered.
“Why?”
“I was just worried that my, um…powers might hurt you.”
He stiffened and crossed his arms. “Let’s stay focused on Lisko. Agreed?”
She nodded. He was right. Lisko was the important thing.
“So why did he kill your Fedir?”
“I don’t know. He broke down the door and called for him. He said, ‘Time’s up.’ Fedir ran into the bathroom where I was getting dressed, and Lisko shot us both.”
Nikolai rubbed at his now-smooth jaw but failed to hide the tiny shake of his head. He didn’t believe her. Not about being a ghost, for sure, maybe not about Fedir being a good guy, either.
“Was he skimming from the pharmaceutical business?”
“No!” Outrage shook her shoulders.
“Selling pills to the Belovs?”
“No.” That time, hot pricks of fury tingled up her back. Fedir hated those gangsters as much as she did. “Absolutely not.”
“Then what?”
“I wish I knew.”
Nikolai shrugged. “Right. Well, even if Fedir wasn’t crooked, Lisko murdered him, and you saw it. Chert. No wonder you’re hiding out here, pretending to be a ghost.”
She straightened her spine, even though the cold ache in her bones practically begged her to hunch over and curl into what little warmth remained inside her. “I’m not a coward, and I’m not pretending. And you’re the one who said let’s stay focused on Lisko.”
“Fair enough.” His gaze sharpened, transforming his face into a mask of keen interest that hid any emotions he might be feeling. “Now Dmitri Lisko heads up one of the largest corporations in Ukraine, with hundreds of valuable government contracts. I don’t care why he killed your Fedir. I just want him held responsible.”
Katya did too. Ever since she’d woken up a mara, she’d been obsessed with making him pay—but not in a court of law. She couldn’t be satisfied with anything less than a life for a life. But Nikolai didn’t need to know that. He only needed to be persuaded to bring the man to her so she could kill him and finally avenge Fedir. Relief seeped through her. He didn’t have to believe her. He only had to help.
“Thank you.” She sighed. Finally, she had a chance.
Another fierce shiver shook her. She gritted her teeth and looked around for a coat rack. Why on earth did he keep the place so cold? The heaters had worked perfectly well when she’d been alive.
And then suddenly, the freezing sting stopped, entirely gone. In fact, she was numb.
“Katya?” Nikolai turned his head from side to side as if searching the room, though she sat right before him.
“Yes?”
“Katya?” He repeated her name like he hadn’t heard her.
“Chert.” He came to stand at her side, his gaze searching all over but seeming to see right through her.
“What is it?” she asked.
He reached straight into her belly and grabbed his sweatshirt off the chair. The sensation of his big hand passing through her ghost body caused whatever she was made of to loosen like she might dissolve and disappear entirely. She cried out in sudden panic. When the unsettling feeling abated, it left something even worse in its wake—the realization he could no longer see her. She’d lost her chance.
Chapter 4
Nikolai gripped the sweatshirt in trembling hands. She’d vanished before his eyes—going pale, translucent, and then completely gone.
He looked around the room—maybe she would appear again as she had in the bathroom and prove that flickering image of her disappearing had been a hallucination. But she was nowhere.
Needles of shock stabbed into his limbs and his heart thumped. “Katya?”
She really was a damn ghost. No other explanation made a shred of sense. A nightmare, except instead of terror, she’d appeared to him as a mind-blowing sexual fantasy.
Why the hell had she done tha
t? To recruit his help, maybe? There’d been no need, but she hadn’t known that.
Goddammit. Was he really admitting ghosts were real? It was somehow more comforting than believing he’d brought a woman home with no memory of his actions.
Where was she now? Watching him unseen? Or did she go off to some strange ghost place, an underworld or something?
More importantly, would she come back, or was she gone forever, unable to help him take down Lisko after all?
He balled the sweatshirt up under his arm. A pair of white panties fell to the floor—the final proof.
A hinge creaked. Was it her?
No. It came from the direction of Dariya’s room. Quickly, he pocketed the underwear, like a pervert.
Sure enough, with her nose in one of her American comic books, his niece beelined for the coffee pot and poured herself a steaming mug. It was enough to distract him from the problem at hand.
He crossed his arms and tried for a stern voice. “Fifteen-year-olds do not drink coffee.”
“This one does.” She raised the mug to her lips and blew over the surface before taking a sip. She hadn’t even added cream or sugar.
“It will stunt your growth,” he grumbled. The hell if he knew whether the old saying was even true, only that his parents had warned him of it. Such was the extent of his child-rearing skills.
“I’m already five-nine. I’d be glad to be stunted.”
With a piercing stab of pain, he recalled having nearly the same conversation with his sister when they were teenagers. The grief twisted his gut, stole his will to argue with the girl. Now they were both orphans, the last of their clan. And he would make Lisko pay for the senseless loss of Sofiya’s life.
He’d spoil Dariya rotten too, if it would take away her pain. Only that was probably an even worse parenting strategy than letting her drink coffee. She’d refused to go to school since her mother’s death, and he didn’t have it in him to force her, even though the grief counselor insisted it would be best.
She pointed at the table where two mugs sat. “I heard voices. A woman’s voice, actually.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Meet somebody?”
Chert. Heat crawled up his neck. Was he blushing? He hadn’t bargained on this particular loss of privacy when he’d stepped in as her guardian. Not that it mattered much, given his barren wasteland of a sex life since he’d begun investigating Lisko Enterprises.
Dariya snickered, twisting a short lock of her hot-pink hair around her finger. “Where is she? And why are your socks on the floor?”
He bent to pick up the pair he’d lent Katya. “I did not meet a woman.” Technically not a lie, since Katya was a mara. His forehead itched, begging for a smack. Was he serious? Was he really accepting the existence of ghosts?
What else could a logical man do, when he’d seen a woman whose flesh and blood he’d experienced—intimately—disappear before his eyes? She’d mysteriously developed a gunshot wound to the heart and had a voice like a thousand tongues on his skin. As a rule, he subscribed to Occam’s razor—the simplest possibility was always the most likely. In this case, ghost actually qualified as the simplest explanation. Unless… Well, he could doubt his sanity. But Dariya had heard her, and the socks were here on the floor, the panties in his pocket. Katya wasn’t just a hallucination.
“If you say so.” Dariya popped a slice of bread into the toaster and turned on a news channel. A little pride squeezed his chest. At least his comic-obsessed hermit of a niece also cared about current events.
He glanced at the framed photo of his sister they’d hung next to the television. She’d been religious, spiritual, far less afraid to die than he and Dariya had been to lose her. If he’d have told her he’d seen a ghost, she would have nodded sagely and said the universe was full of mysteries science could not explain.
In all the reports he’d read, no one had actually seen the ghost. But he had, and it had clearly surprised her. What had she said? “Something brought me back to life.”
What something? And could he do it again?
This required some research. He took his now-cool coffee over to the couch, flipped open his laptop, and ran a search for mara.
Wikipedia contained an exhaustive survey of Slavic lore. He had to hand it to the occultists, they were very precise crowdsourcers, and their pages were some of the best documented and cited on the encyclopedia. But they shed no light on how to make a mara appear. Next up, several religious Web sites explained how to have a priest exorcise a demonic nightmare. Hell, if he had to be plagued by a demon, he wanted it to be one as pretty and lusty as Katya. She was welcome to appear in his dreams every night, especially now that he knew she wasn’t a nut job.
He shook the thought off. She wasn’t just his sexual fantasy—she was a murder victim.
Chert, he’d been a jerk about not believing her. If he found a way to bring her back, he owed her a massive apology.
He clicked through page after page of search results, ready to scour Wikipedia one more time.
But just before he hit return, he saw the final result at the bottom of page eighteen. How to summon a mara. In archaic Russian, the instructions were clear. The spirit required an offering of blood.
Blood.
More crazies, like those wannabe vampires who had fangs implanted. His first frivolous story when he’d taken the lousy job as culture editor.
Except he’d thought Katya crazy and had been wrong. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and read the page in detail.
Mara—among the oldest classification of demons appearing in Proto-Indo-European mythology. In that language, it is the word for a horse, because the demon rode the sleeper like she was mounted on his back. In some legends, the demon is brought to life by making a blood offering into the earth. Such myths are perhaps the roots of modern day vampire lore.
Ancient myths and vampires, the stuff of fantasy novels, nothing a serious journalist should spare a moment on. He rubbed his chin, passing over the raw place where he’d nicked himself shaving.
Where he’d bled on the floor.
In the bathroom where she’d died.
Chert.
He slammed the computer shut and ran for the room in question.
“Whoa, all right in there?” Dariya called out. Under the mocking sass of the question, her fear sounded. Any sign of distress, and she worried that he too was falling ill. His adolescent Amazon princess, beginning to look like a fully grown, if pink-haired, woman. And so afraid to be alone.
“Fine,” he called through the door as he rummaged in his drawer for a straight razor. “I’m not sick. Stop worrying.”
“I’m not worrying.” She sounded appalled, as if he’d accused her of having a crush on Vladimir Putin. But she’d also come to stand very near the bathroom.
There. He found the straight blade, part of a fancy shaving kit Sofiya had given him for Christmas years ago, and far too deadly to use on his face. He always shaved before he had coffee, which meant he would end up Sweeny Todding himself with this thing.
“Dariya, I’m fine. Go turn on the Femme Fatale videos. If I am going to turn in that stupid puff piece on the girl band, I will need all the help you can spare.”
“Femme Fatale is not puff-piece material. They’re activists. They’re fighting for freedom of speech. Shouldn’t you support that, Mr. Journalist?”
He grunted. “Just give me some space, kiddo.”
“Oh, right.” Her hollow voice sent him sliding to the floor and carved out another hollow place behind his ribs.
Chert. He was never going to get the hang of this parental-figure thing.
“I love you.” he called out. “You’re not a burden.” Actually, she was, but the best kind. He’d been so honored Sofiya had given him the duty instead of trying to find her deadbeat ex off in Siberia somewhere.
After a pause, the floorboards creaked as Dariya moved away from the door. “Thanks, Kolya. I love you too.”
<
br /> Now that his sister was gone, his niece was pretty much the only one to use the intimate form of his name, which made her declaration even more bittersweet.
He took a few deep breaths and then contemplated the razor. Exactly how much blood would be required to summon a mara? Not that it would work, because only crazy people believed in bloodthirsty ghosts. But for his sister, and for pretty Katya, who might not actually be a raving lunatic, he had to try.
Finger wounds bled a lot, but they also hurt like hell with all those nerve endings. And he typed for a living.
He opted for nicking himself at the inner arm. When the blade penetrated his skin, it stung and ached at the same time. He looked away, let the blood trickle from the seam in his inner arm onto the floor. He took a deep breath and cracked one eyelid. No sparkly blue toenails, no creamy, soft-like-peaches legs.
Of course not. Because ghosts and maras weren’t real. Imagine that.
He’d shed just a little blood, but the metallic smell of it made him dizzy. He squeezed his eyes closed one more time and tried to peel through the layers of hypothesis and hope. If she wasn’t real after all, or she was alive and pulling one over on him—either way, he was the one going nuts.
“Nikolai?”
He jumped and scrambled backward until he was all the way in the shower stall.
Katya stood exactly where she’d first appeared, her shapely arms crossing over her body to hide it, even as she graced him with her peculiar open-mouthed smile, such a vulnerable expression, as if she was wary and surprised to have a reason to be happy.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Chert—that look. It pinged around in the empty spaces inside him. “Don’t thank me. I was a jerk before.”
Something changed, eased in her posture. “Maybe a little, but it’s not exactly easy to suddenly believe in ghosts. And you just shed blood to bring me back. I think that more than makes up for a little gruffness.”
She extended a hand to help him off the floor. At her warm, soft touch, an unwelcome memory came—of her hands splayed on his chest, her breasts bouncing, her belly taut. It felt wrong even to think of it, now that he knew about her dead lover—hell, she haunted a building trying to avenge the guy.
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