She stood, striking a curvy pose she probably practiced in the mirror. Conveniently, it made her nametag visible.
“Hi, Polina. Any idea where I might find my mom?” A question he’d never had to ask at Hospital No. 3. She’d been in her room twenty-four-seven.
She trailed her fingers down her sternum toward a deep V of cleavage. “I think Oksana is in the solarium.”
He turned in that direction, and the receptionist called after him. “Don’t forget to stop by and say good-bye. I’m due for a fifteen-minute break. We can--”
He pretended not to hear, quickly rounding the corner and plastering himself against a wall to make sure she didn’t follow. The frequency with which he got hit on was a backslapping joke around the station, and he used to find it as funny as the other guys. But he’d grown sick and tired of women propositioning him for a quick fuck in a broom closet or the backseat of a car. All any woman seemed to want from him took about thirteen minutes, left her breathless and him in need of a shower. In the end, even Iryna had really only wanted to fuck.
How the hell did he accidentally send out that all-I’m-good-for-is-a-quickie vibe? He marched toward the sunroom, replaying his every gesture and expression toward Polina to figure out what signals he’d unwittingly sent her, but he couldn’t think of any beyond a professional politeness.
His mother stood at an easel, painting the seaside, little tufts of sea grass sprouting from the sand dunes. A watercolor? Damn. If he hadn’t recently met a ghost, this would have been the most astonishing thing he’d seen in…ever. Quite the change from her pencil sketches of evil monsters in shadowy caverns.
She smiled up at him. “Serhiyko! What a wonderful surprise!”
Unlike Polina, plumper cheeks with a bit of natural color were anything but boring on his mother. A new, healthy radiance seemed to glow from within her. He closed the distance between them, embracing her to find a solid amount of meat had stuck to her bones. She no longer felt as if she were two days away from starvation. He risked squeezing her tighter, overjoyed to find her thriving.
She freed herself from his hug and dropped her brush into a jar of water. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m on a case in Odessa. You look great, Mom.”
She smiled shyly, blushing. “I feel very well.”
All at once, he dreaded the mission that had brought him to her. It had been years since he’d asked her a thing about his father, because even the slightest mention could send her into a tailspin. And she was flourishing here, more alive than ever. To see her like this, he would gladly go his whole lifetime ignorant of his paternity.
But it was because of Gregor Lisko that she looked so well, and Lisko wanted Anya to find Demyan. Sergey could imagine a dozen life-threatening situations on the beat in Kiev’s grittiest neighborhoods, all of which he would gladly drop into right now, if it would get him out of this bind. Mom’s mental balance versus a dying man’s wish, and Anya’s.
He stalled. “I didn’t know you liked painting.”
“I took a class. I’m not any good, but I like it. It keeps me focused on beautiful things.”
“It’s not bad, especially for a beginner. I’m impressed.”
“Would you like some tea or coffee?” In her room, she had a kitchenette, which allowed her the dignity of private meals or the independence to offer hospitality to a guest.
For that reason, and because they might need the privacy, he said, “Yeah, a coffee would hit the spot.”
Minutes later, he was installed on her sofa with a steaming cup while she drank herbal tea.
He inched away from a pot of the noxious plants she grew in all her window sills, more herbs meant to ward off demons. The damn things seemed to be multiplying, taking over the end tables. The purple flowers were pretty enough, but the smell of the leaves tickled the back of his throat and made him itchy all over.
He knew better than to suggest she ditch them, so he just scratched under the collar of his shirt. “Mom, I’m hoping you can help me with my case.”
“Oh?” Her eyebrows rose in unguarded curiosity.
Was it better to leap, or ease her in? He had no clue.
“There’s a girl. A ballerina, actually, and she’s searching for her former teacher, who doesn’t want to be found. I thought, maybe…”
She shook her head, wearing a puzzled smile. “I’ve had nothing to do with dancing for years. I’m sure I won’t be--”
“His name is Stas Demyan.”
She dropped her mug of tea. It shattered on the tile floor of her kitchen.
Yeah. Clearly, the guy was a mean bastard.
His mother collapsed onto her knees, as if to clean up the tea, no doubt scalding herself through her pantyhose. He leaped up and hefted her onto the sofa. She trembled in his arms, no longer feeling plump or sturdy. His selfish anger at her secrets warred with his concern for her. He couldn’t stand to trigger an episode.
From the pool of honey-colored water, a cloud of steam wafted upward, reminding him of Anya. Had his mother suffered the same horrible abuse? Had it stolen her will to live? Humiliation, shame, the systematic eroding of a person’s sense of worth. Sergey’s closure might have to include punching his father in the nose, once for Anya and twice for Mom.
Her face had taken on the familiar slack, vacant look.
“Don’t do this, Mom. Don’t retreat now. You’re doing great here. You’re happy.”
Her gaze flicked to him, and he exhaled. Any response was a good sign.
She let out a few quick ragged breaths and nodded. Sergey gave her some time, picking up the ceramic shards and then mopping up the tea with a dishrag. He set the kettle on to boil again, and when he returned to the couch, she seemed more or less recovered.
“What can you tell me?”
A swallow rippled down her bird-like throat twice before she spoke. “I don’t know where he is, or anything about him. Believe me when I say, you’re better off to leave the past alone, better off without anything to do with him.”
“But the girl… She wants justice. And maybe there are others like her.”
“I’m certain there are, but there’s nothing you can do for them, no justice that can touch him.”
He could do something for at least one of them, who wore a tiny pink nightgown and tossed him a steady sting of sharp barbs in her sexy siren voice. He could convince her she was lovable. But she had other plans, which likely involved a hurricane and his deadbeat dad.
One glimpse at his mother’s sopping knees and shaky hands, and Sergey realized he was on board with Anya’s mission, as long as he got his moment to look the son of a bitch in the eye and swing a fist.
“Who is he, Mom? Someone powerful, connected?” Maybe that’s why Sergey couldn’t find him. He’d gone off the information grid. But, hell, if he could do that, he’d have to be as omnipotent as Lisko. Then again, cancer was eating Lisko alive. No one was invincible.
“He is someone evil.” She whispered the words like a warning.
Maybe it was the secret, the strain of not knowing for nearly thirty years who his father was, but he threw them back in her face. “If he’s evil, and I’m his son, what does that make me?”
She shook her head. “You’re nothing like him. And I have thanked God for it every day.” She sniffed, her eyes shimmering as she wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “When I was pregnant, I was so afraid--but look at you. You are just a man, and a good one. So handsome, so strong. Why don’t you marry, settle down, give me grandchildren to spoil?”
He sat back, sinking deeper into the couch cushions. Maybe most mothers nagged their sons about this all the time, but it was the first time she’d ever said she would like to be a baba. She wanted something for herself, and for him. She wanted to live. More of that earlier joy welled up inside him, but as it ebbed, he saw it for the distraction it was. His tricky mom--more evasive than the sneakiest suspect.
“Do
I look like him?” The question had begun to niggle when it had seemed like Anya was appraising him, when her gaze lingered on his thighs or his arms, or held his stare with fierce determination.
There was something different in the way she took his measure, not like Iryna, or Polina, or the steady stream of strangers who came on to him. Anya looked deeper than his skin, like she could see right into him. It felt…hot, hotter than run-of-the-mill chemistry.
Maybe she’d noticed ways he looked like her former lover and the old attraction spilled out. Or maybe that was just how sex ghosts looked at men, to keep them wrapped around their sparkly little see-through fingers, although he was almost certain her siren powers had nothing to do with his baseline attraction to her.
His mother had gotten up and crossed to a shelf to pick up a photo. The one in the brown leather frame that he knew so well.
Still she handed him the proof. “No. You look like my father.”
His didus smiled back at Sergey from the photo. He wore his militsiya officer’s uniform, his arms around a young Oksana, made-up and in costume after a dance performance. Both their sets of muddy-blue eyes shone, alight.
“Except for his eyes. Do I have Demyan’s eyes?”
“Honestly, Serhiyko, I don’t remember. I tried to forget everything.”
The investigator in him knew it for an evasion. The answer seemed a likely yes. And he hated to push her, but she was holding strong in spite of the moment of weakness with the teacup.
“Tell me this, Mom. Did he have a dance studio here? A small one next to Plotkin’s Timepieces.”
She crossed her arms. “Let it lie.” Again, it seemed her evasion was an answer in itself.
“Even if I did, the girl wouldn’t listen. So brace yourself, I’m going to find him.”
She sniffed, tears sliding down her cheeks. “Then I’ll try to stay strong, because you will need me.”
“I’ll be fine, Mom. But stay strong anyway.”
When he settled back behind the wheel of Lisko’s car, his phone rang. An Odessa number. Maybe the hotel, or the ballet teacher, or God forbid, Polina.
“Yuchenko here.”
“That’s Inspector Sergey Yuchenko, is it?” A man’s voice. Instinctively, he catalogued its features. Refined, cultured, middle-range in terms of pitch, an accent from Odessa or surrounds.
“The very one. Who’s this? Alexei?” Though it didn’t really sound like the ballet teacher’s boyfriend.
“No. Not Alexei.” The way he said the name might have implied he knew Alexei, but that was quite a leap. “Sergey Yuchenko,” he repeated. “How are you finding the Hotel Bristol?”
Sergey went cold. The man knew where he was staying. Did he work there? An associate of the Belovs, or some other piece of scum Sergey had arrested. Thank God, Anya would be safe there, unseen.
“Who is this?”
The stranger replied in his smooth as satin voice, “You don’t happen to be Oksana Mimirov’s son?”
Anticipation crawled up Sergey’s spine. “My mother’s name is Yuchenko, like mine.”
“Pity. I’d dearly like to see her again.”
“Is this Stas Demyan?” Sergey demanded. The man on the line hardly sounded like an eighty-year-old, but he couldn’t be sure.
The was no reply. The line had gone dead.
He ran back inside Sunrise Villa and gave instructions that no one should be permitted to see his mother without Sergey’s approval. His insistence had Polina nodding gravely, her eyes wide.
He called up to his home station and got one of the techs on the line with a request to trace the phone number. In five minutes, the tech sent a text. The number is a burner.
He’d promised to get back to Anya straight away, but first he drove by the Académie de Ballet. Dark. Doors locked. He knocked loudly but got no response. The only thing left to do was go back to the ghost.
Chapter 11
The second act of Giselle blurred with Anya’s memories of the visits Jerisavlja and the vilas had paid her. Now Anya confused the choreography of Hilarion’s death with the time the nymphs had brought a man with them to her riverbank, a murderer they’d caught in the act of disposing of a woman’s body. The queen of the vilas had called the dead girl’s spirit out to join them, and then they’d coaxed the man along for hundreds of miles to meet Anya.
By the time they’d reached her, it hadn’t taken long for the exhausted man to dance himself to death, enthralled by the siren songs of the vilas. Anya had watched the ghost of his victim, waiting to see if she would intervene as Giselle did for her Prince Albrecht. She had not. Had she hated the man as much as Anya hated Stas?
Giselle’s final scene was danced so beautifully. When the ballerina laid herself down for eternal rest, Anya shook with longing and envy. Would she ever find such peace?
The performance ended and another program began, about the life of a famous but uninteresting painter. Anya drifted over to the window and hovered, staring out over the tree-lined streets that seemed unchanged until she focused on small details--the shapes of the cars, the bright signs in doorways.
When Demyan had brought her to Odessa, she’d hoped the trip would be their honeymoon, but it had become just another time of endless striving. They’d often walked by this very hotel, her stomach grumbling as lovers passed, holding hands, and licking ice cream cones. She’d found herself staring at the gelato shop where one couple had come from, their pastel scoops already dripping in the heat. But she looked away before he could notice, controlling herself the way he required. And still, fifty years later, he was controlling her, leashing her to him with that damn slipper.
The hotel room’s curtains fluttered, her anger escaping her in gentle gusts. It felt so good to release it, the way stretching warmed and lengthened muscles, made one’s body feel more expansive.
Once, in the weeks between Anya’s heartbreak and her death, she’d tried to explain her despair to her mother, but Mama had said, “It’s just a broken heart, Anya. It will heal.”
So Anya had told her all the promises Stas had made, all the ways he’d controlled her. Mama’s mouth had fallen open, her head turning quickly from side to side, and for a moment, Anya had thought she might understand.
Then, shrill, Mama had said, “Why did you let him do that to you?”
Anya, already convinced she’d deserved his rejection, had heard her mother’s meaning loud and clear--she’d been a fool to try to win his love.
All these years later, the hotel room’s curtains flapped again, billowing like sails away from Anya, her hot ire beginning to churn round the room. The heat excited her ghostly particles, and she shivered with the pleasure of venting the emotions.
Her vila nature taught her to rage instead of despair, and Yuchenko’s outrage had assured her the anger was justified. She would be eternally grateful to the puppy for that. She let her fury pour off her in bursts of fierce, hot energy.
A binder of papers flapped in the quickening wind, one blew loose--the menu for the elegant restaurant plastered to the mirror over the vanity. The photo of a piece of chocolate cake made Anya’s ghost body echo with the memory of impossible sensation--hunger--and her mouth watered with longing.
Voices shouted in the hallway, loud enough to be heard over the wind, then a knock sounded on the door. “Hello? Inspector Yuchenko?”
She tried to dampen the energy pouring out of her in forceful tendrils, but another paper tore free of the binder, flapping across the room until it slapped against the door.
“Maybe someone left a window open,” shouted the man on the other side of the door.
“But there’s not even a breeze outside,” a different voice replied just as loudly. “Maybe someone opened a portal to another universe and we’re all about to be sucked inside.” He shouted it cheerfully but matter-of-factly. Was the idiot joking?
“God, Oleg,” the other man chuckled out the words, “you gotta quit with those
sci-fi novels.” The crack of another knock sounded. “But you’re right. Look out that window. The leaves aren’t even rustling, but my trouser cuffs are.”
Like a kite pulled taut, the wind shook her against its steady force. It hollowed her out, took away all thought, all memory, except one determined resolution. Find Stas. Kill him. Be free. Now.
The door swung open, two men in burgundy bellhop uniforms stood just outside, their caps instantly blowing off their heads.
“What the hell?” one said. Not Oleg, from the sound of his voice.
“Whoa.” That one had to be Oleg.
They stared right at Anya, but somehow she knew they didn’t see her. They must only feel the wind and be able to observe its action in the flapping drapes, the scattered papers, the paintings rattling and askew.
Invisible again.
Loneliness whipped through her, and with it, fear. What if she failed and this was her future? She closed her eyes and gave herself over to the worries. They blended with her determination, whipping up a full-blown storm inside the room. A chair blew over.
“What should we do?” Oleg asked.
“Call the cops?” asked the other guy.
“More like Mulder and Scully.”
“That some of your sci-fi shit?”
“Uh-huh. X files, American show. They handled this kind of paranormal stuff all the time. It was usually aliens.”
“Yeah, I buy that,” the other man said.
“What’s going on here?” asked a familiar and very welcomed voice. “I damn well hope you had a good reason for entering my room, boys.”
Yuchenko didn’t sound at all puppy-like at the moment. His features had hardened into powerful, masculine lines. His appearance anchored her, lending her a sense of weight. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t only air and anger. She had a mission, and maybe, she had a chance to be free.
She clenched her ghost hands and bore down on the energy, containing it.
“We got a call,” said not-Oleg. “The boss sent us up because somebody complained about a draft blowing down the hall.”
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