The other man lifted his chest, narrowing his eyes to crescents, as if somehow he’d sensed Sergey’s rush of testosterone. “She’s mine.”
Reason broke through the primal haze that had taken hold of Sergey, and he took a couple slow breaths. Where the hell had that need to posture come from? He was not prone to fits of machismo.
He held up his palms. “I’m just here to ask some questions.”
“Sure you are.” Alexei cracked the door and the girls rushed inside. He flashed perfectly charming smiles at all their mothers, though his hostile stare stabbed at Sergey the moment the path was clear.
There was something familiar about the man. Had he gone to school in Odessa? Or had Sergey met him elsewhere? His accent wasn’t local, maybe even Belorussian. Sergey held the jealous gaze for a long second and grabbed a brochure from a holder hanging outside. “For my goddaughter.”
Alexei bared his teeth and closed the door loud enough that a few of the dancers started and turned to stare. Sergey marched back to the car, giving silent thanks Anya had enough sense to stay out of sight. Behind the wheel, he put the brochure on the dash.
The ghost eased up out of the foot well and peeked at the studio. “There’s a man staring at you.”
“I know. But he’s not a lead, just a guy jealous I’m going to steal his cougar.”
“He has a cougar?” Her brows furrowed as she continued to stare at the man.
He chuckled. “Not exactly.”
“Oh.” She pursed her lips, not liking being laughed at, even a little. God, this little vila could use a sense of humor.
“Did you learn anything?” she asked.
Sergey blew out a breath, rubbing at an itch on the back of his neck. He glanced one more time at the Académie de Ballet, where Alexei stood like a sentinel at the door. “Nope. Complete dead end.”
Chapter 9
The ballet class came to order inside the studio, the redhead clapping and pointing at where she wanted the girls to stand. It stirred memories inside Anya, of a pure time before ambition and obsession, when she’d just loved to master steps and sway to music, loved to watch the beauty of bodies lengthening and leaping in the mirror and to emulate them.
The man in the door remained, a dark silhouette looming like the Stas of her memories, tainting the wholesome scene with his presence. “Who is he?”
“The instructor’s boyfriend and business partner. And a jerk, but otherwise he claims no similarity to Demyan.”
From what she could see, he bore none at all to her former teacher. He was shorter, stockier, and the thick hair falling to his chin was fair. Then Yuchenko’s little joke penetrated her preoccupied mind. This man and Stas shared the trait of both being jerks.
She cracked a smile, giving her attention to Sergey, who was by all evidence completely free of that particular flaw. “What now?”
“I’m not sure.” He rubbed at the back of his neck as if the muscles there had grown tense.
Stas had liked her to knead the knots of tension there--one of the only times he’d permitted her to touch him.
She glanced down at her translucent hands and clenched them into fists, surprised by the desire to touch the puppy in the same way.
Sergey dropped his own hand to the parking brake. “I know I said I wouldn’t go until later, but my mom has lived in Odessa almost her whole life. Maybe she’ll know something useful.”
Anya barely stopped herself from shouting no. She didn’t want to be alone again, even for a little while, after the experience of having a companion--being seen and spoken to--the prospect chilled. Some part of her couldn’t help but fear he may never return.
But her best--maybe only--lead had just fallen flat. If his mother could provide one, being alone was worth it.
“Yes, of course, go.” But please come back fast, she added silently.
In only a few minutes, he was pulling up to the white curb outside the Hotel Bristol’s baroque entryway. Anya ghosted through the passenger door of the car.
Sergey grabbed Gregor’s ring and pocketed it before tossing the car keys to the valet. “Keep her here for me. I’ll be right back.”
She floated inside the lobby. The stunning opulence left her frozen, suspended in midair as she took in the enormous room, bright with gilt and peacock-blue drapery. An icy wave passed through her, sending her into a choking panic. But then a man’s gray head bobbed away from her--he’d walked right through her. He shivered and rubbed his upper arms through his suit jacket.
Anya propelled herself toward Sergey, trying to catch up. As he checked in, she twirled, inspecting each enormous chandelier and estimating the height of the mirrors that reached from the floor to well over the patrons’ heads. Since Gregor’s ring was safely tucked in Yuchenko’s pocket and no one could see her, she gaped freely at the extravagance.
Their room--and apparently they were sharing because ghosts didn’t need a bed--was done in warm, soothing colors, but was equally luxurious. Behind the privacy of the door, Sergey dangled the signet ring, and she whooshed up to wear the thing.
Relief took over his face when she became visible, and a flutter answered in her ghostly chest. He was probably just worried he was going to lose her and have to explain to Gregor. But it was nice to pretend he was happy to see her, even if he was about to leave her alone again, for who knew how long.
“I’ll turn something on the TV for you,” he offered. The flat black rectangle hung on the wall like a painting. Along with Sergey’s mobile telephone the size of a deck of cards, the newfangled technology was astonishing.
“No, thanks.” She should have been grateful, but she could only manage to sound sullen in the face of his imminent departure. The scenery had changed, but she was about to be alone with her slipper again. Same as always.
“I’ll turn the sound off, but putting on a show makes me feel better about leaving you alone.” He began to flip through the stations.
“I said no.”
But Inspector Puppy ignored her as if he knew what was best for her. She tried not to be mad, tried not to look, but the images that flashed on the screen were so colorful, so captivating. A busy street in an Asian country. A vast cruise ship. An operating room. And then--
“Oh.” A ballet. She swished closer to the screen, so near that her parents would have warned it was bad for her eyes.
It took her only a second to recognize the music, then the choreography--Giselle.
“Should I turn the sound off then?” Sergey asked.
She jerked, yanked from her focus by his question.
The grin on his face assured her he knew damn well she wanted to hear the music. Smug did not suit him at all. “Guess not.”
Then, with the press of his lips, his smile transformed into a grave expression.
“You better give me the ring, just in case.”
He was right. The thing made her just real enough that she could grasp it and lift it over her head. When she dropped it into his open palm, his eyes jittered, searching for her, though he knew she was close.
“Take care, Anya,” he said, with that unfocused glaze to his stare. “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
A confusing mess of emotions tangled inside her--fear, frustration at him for leaving her, and gratitude that he spared concern for her feelings about the very thing--sentiments altogether too complicated and uncomfortable to voice. If she tried, she might start another cyclone. So she turned her back on him and let herself get lost watching the ballet.
The door shut behind him with a quiet click.
On the television, the vilas came onto the stage, circling Hilarion as he grieved for Giselle, and Anya remembered the first time her sister vilas had come to her.
When the other ghost first appeared, Anya had no idea how long she’d been dead for--the weeks had surely turned to months. In the otherwise unchanging scene of her life after death, this sight was a refreshing novelty--the spirit of
a woman in a wedding gown.
Or a girl, really, barely old enough to marry by Anya’s standards, wearing a crown of flowers on her head. And most satisfying of all, the pretty thing stared right at her.
“You can see me?”
“Of course I can.” She craned her neck and shouted over her shoulder. “She’s over here.”
An entire company of similar beings emerged from the trees--young women, dressed in white gowns, some with veils, others crowned with those wreaths of flowers on their heads. Which could only mean one thing. Anya had died and gone not to heaven or hell, but had received a sentence of eternal damnation far worse than an inferno. She was stuck in the ballet Giselle. The part she’d always wanted but failed to earn. What a cruel twist of fate.
A sylph-like woman emerged from the group. Her dress sparkled as if covered in diamonds, and she floated with a bearing of authority. “Who are you, child?”
Anya lifted her own chin. “I’m not a child.”
“To us, you are. Even if you’ve been waiting here for a hundred years, you are an infant among us.”
Anya tried out her Giselle hypothesis. “I don’t suppose you are Myrtha, queen of the vila, and you want to help me find Duke Albrecht?”
“I know not this Albrecht, nor any Myrtha, though I am queen of the vilas, called Jerisavlja. We have come to gather you into our sisterhood.”
Anya had never been great at sisterhood. Not with schoolmates or the other dancers, and worst of all, not with her actual sister.
Perhaps she could try again with these vilas, who whispered and giggled and held hands, a pair peeling away now and again to dance and frolic around the trees, their movements graceful, while Anya’s movements were proscribed by her anger and limited by her damn slipper. Joining them would be far better than being alone.
“But how do I get free from my slipper? It’s stuck under that rock. I can’t go more than fifteen yards from it.”
The queen of the vilas swooped to the rock and flew low to examine Anya’s slipper. “This binds you to the one who jilted you?”
Behind their queen, the pretty little brides all tittered and whispered. Two of them broke off to spiral upward in a hauntingly beautiful pas de deux, singing in ethereal sopranos. “She is bound to him still.”
Oh, yes, she was bound to him by the heartbreak he’d dealt her, and the anger that wracked her so hard the forest itself shook. At the thought, a gust of wind traveled over the river, raising up white-capped waves on its normally smooth surface.
Jerisavlja raised one diamond-frosted eyebrow. “This is a rare condition for a vila,” she said. “You shall have to kill him to go free.”
Kill him.
The idea made Anya’s ghost-self buzz, the urge to fly into another frenzy of dancing pulled her in every direction and the wind whipped off the river, wrapping the vilas in a cloak of mist.
They began to sing, “Kill him. Kill him.” The righteous chant of women scorned. The fairytales promised handsome young men could be lured to dancing themselves to death by the vilas’ siren song, and hearing it, Anya could easily believe it.
“If I kill him, will I be freed from the slipper to join you?”
“I do not decide these things.” Jerisavlja frowned as if this were an injustice. “It is also possible you will be sent to your final rest, to find everlasting peace.”
Just like Giselle, once she saved Prince Albrecht from a malicious band of vilas.
It was all Anya wanted. Peace. Rest. Nothingness. Never to think of her failures ever again. And short of that, to pass her eternal damnation with the vilas would be far preferable to this isolation.
Jerisavlja must have sensed Anya’s thoughts, because she touched her cheek. The caress passed through Anya like the gentle press of a cool breeze. Far from the warmth of human contact, the gesture of concern was still welcome.
“There is one thing you should know. If this man dies before you find him, you may be bound to that slipper for eternity, long after it has rotted to only mud.”
“I see.” Anya did the ghostly equivalent of shuffling her feet as the magnitude of her predicament sank in. “Will you visit me again? I’m likely to go insane with only the river for company.”
“Oh, yes, we pass this way every Kupula Night. We will come to sing and dance with you. But dawn has arrived, and now we must go.” She raised her voice in a marching--or rather, floating--song and it rose up over the forest like the wind. Anyone who heard it would know all the frightening stories their babushkas had told them were true. Anya was a ghost and still she shivered.
The vilas flew away in a flurry of gossamer gowns, leaving her alone again to wonder if she would ever kill Stas and win her freedom.
Now, years later and closer than she’d ever been to finding him, the loneliness was a throbbing ache. She’d tasted the companionship of the handsome Inspector Putz, and she’d felt her own flesh and bones again. If she failed, she would never join the vilas, and if Gregor died, no one would ever see her again.
She watched the ballerinas dance on the TV and tried to contain the cyclone of fear inside her. It was so much easier when that puppy was nearby.
Come back soon, Yuchenko.
Chapter 10
After installing Anya in the Hotel Bristol, Sergey got behind the wheel. When he turned the key in the ignition, violins wailed--the classical music he’d turned on for her filled the car with melancholy strains. It was a little depressing, but this sort of music was supposed to stimulate learning and creative problem solving, and he sure as hell needed some of that. The GPS said he had a forty-five minute drive to see his mother. A solid chunk of time to absorb all the shit he’d learned from Anya and come up with a plan.
Stas Demyan had been a predator, a controlling son of a bitch, and a two-timer. In one single conversation with a ghost, the last of Sergey’s fantasies about finding an honorable father had been destroyed. His troubled mother would remain the only parent whose love he could count on. But still, he wanted to see the man, needed Demyan to look him in the eye and see the son he’d abandoned.
Sergey could ask his father if he was to thank for the chronically high cholesterol that even his fitness regime and a healthy diet barely controlled.
Wait--cholesterol? Is that all the emotion he could muster for the situation? He flipped off the radio and rubbed his eyes. It was probably proof that deep down he’d known his dad would be a disappointment for a long time.
The sun was setting behind the Sunrise Villa residential home, located in the quaint coastal town of Sanzhiika. The top-of-the-line private facility had a wait list as long as the thirty-six kilometers it would take Sergey to drive back to downtown Odessa. Until Lisko had gotten Mom into this fancy place two months back, she’d been living in a miserable state hospital.
During his childhood, his mom had been relatively stable, aside from one frightening episode of delusions, which had turned into a month-long catatonia when he was nine. When she recovered, she’d moved them from Moscow back to her hometown of Odessa, so her father could care for Sergey if she worsened again. But she hadn’t, until he’d left for the police academy.
In his absence, her mental balance had unraveled quickly. After a few worrisome conversations over the phone, Sergey had come home to find her stinking, emaciated, and her bedroom reeking of the caraway seeds she slept with to ward off demonic incubi. The whole apartment was suffocating.
The guilt over leaving her had crushed him. He’d thought that in his absence she would take more responsibility for herself, not less. When he’d said as much to her doctors, they explained that was a common misunderstanding of melancholy depression. No matter how much she may want to, she simply could not perk up, any more than she could snap out of her delusions about the demons she thought pursued her. The doctors recommended she be institutionalized and were not optimistic about her prospects for recovery.
He’d considered staying, quitting the academy
to find a job in Odessa and taking care of her. But she’d insisted he return to school. He hadn’t pulled the punch, explained that if he left, she would have to move into Odessa Mental Health Hospital No. 3’s long-term residential facility.
It was a bleak place, and he’d insisted she visit before she made her choice. They’d stood side by side in the cafeteria, which had smelled of stale coffee and artificial strawberry flavoring. “What you don’t understand, dearest Sergey, is that through my eyes, everything looks like this.”
He stared at the cinderblock walls, painted in alternating segments of glossy brown and mauve, the worn linoleum tiles, the dirty windows, and whispered a silent and selfish prayer. Please let me not inherit this disease.
Hospital No. 3 had in fact suited her fine for years, until a new director had arrived, and Sergey had found his mother losing weight again, her moments of lucidity fewer and farther between. On Sergey’s last visit there, Lisko had happened to call him for a favor, and in a moment of frustration, Sergey had explained the situation to the demanding oligarch. The next day, Oksana Yuchenko had a bright, private corner room at Sunrise Villa, with a view of the water. She’d improved almost overnight. Her new doctors had even suggested she might recover enough to live on her own again, with the right medication and therapy.
The moment he walked in, the receptionist smiled. “Inspector Yuchenko, what a nice surprise. Your mother will be so pleased.” She fluffed her blonde bob.
She’d been sending him signals on all his visits, and he’d briefly considered asking her out before things had heated up and then flared out with Iryna. But now her cute, round cheeks that had seemed so alluring bored him, bland when compared to Anya’s lively, angular beauty.
He had the ghost on his brain, and finding Demyan. No flesh-and-blood woman was going to distract him from either pursuit.
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