He’d called ahead to tell Oksana Yuchenko he was coming, but not about Anya. So his mother was waiting in her room, her careworn face still beautiful, thanks mostly to excellent bone structure beneath the aged skin.
Even though he was expected, his mother’s eyes lit up at the sight of Sergey. When Anya stepped out from behind him, the woman tilted her head. “Who’s this?”
He looked down at Anya, his lips parted but unspeaking. Clearly, he had no idea what to say. How would Anya have answered? He’d come to mean so much to her, in such a short time, and yet she was still a vila--not exactly daughter-in-law material.
“Mrs. Yuchenko, I’m Anya Truss. Your son’s been helping me find some--”
“I know, Mom,” he said. “I know the whole thing. Anya remembered.”
The older woman paled, her features slackening so that every crease and wrinkle deepened. She stared silently into the middle of the room for so long that Anya thought she might have fallen into one of her catatonic fits. If she did that a lot while Sergey was growing up, it would have scared a little kid senseless.
Then the woman exhaled a loud breath. “What did you remember, Miss Truss?”
“That Stas Demyan is a zmora.”
Oksana nodded.
“It was all true,” Sergey said. “Your hallucinations, your fears.”
She smiled sadly, still nodding. “Yes, but I’d so hoped you would never have to know it.”
Sergey’s throat rippled with a swallow. His chest rose, and then he blew out a long breath. “Will I become like him?”
“Why?” she cried. “Have you done something? Have you hurt someone?”
“No.” But his glance down at Anya painted his answer with uncertainty.
His mother sucked in a breath. “You must fight it, Sergey. If you resist, you will remain human.”
“I am. I will.”
“And no more helping Anya. She must help herself, or find someone else to care for her.”
Anya clenched her hand more tightly around Sergey’s, and to her relief, he returned the pressure. “I will help myself, thank you. I’m going to kill Stas Demyan.”
Oksana laughed. “Are you? You have no idea what you’re up against. I shot him in the head twice at close range, and the bullets didn’t even slow him down.”
Anya leaned closer. She couldn’t have heard that right.
“You what?” Sergey gave voice to her doubt.
“I wasn’t going to let him have you. He held me prisoner for months in his den. I finally escaped by driving over him with his car until I heard his bones crunching. That bought me enough time to get to the train station.”
She pointed at a picture in a leather frame and smiled. The photograph showed a young Oksana alongside a police officer. “I crashed the car outside of it and lit it on fire. My father falsified a police report and a death certificate, as if I’d been killed in the accident. You were born in Moscow ten days later, and we both became Yuchenkos so he couldn’t track us down.”
Sergey had leaned in, shaking his head in disbelief.
So Anya asked, “Why did you come back here? It must have been very dangerous.”
“No one in Odessa had seen Demyan in years. A friend of mine who’d gone to dance in New York had spotted him there, using a different name. Then the nightmares returned, the weight of him pressing the breath out of me, paralyzing me in the deepest hours. I couldn’t take it anymore. I snapped. When I was well enough to leave the hospital, I asked my father to come get me. I couldn’t leave Sergey alone if it happened again. He looks just like his didus, you know.” She might have pinched his cheeks if he were standing closer--she who had crushed a demon with a car while thirty-eight weeks pregnant.
She truly wasn’t even a little weak.
“Come sit by your mother, Serhiyko.” She patted the couch.
He obeyed and, still clasping Anya’s hand, steered her toward an armchair next to the couch.
Oksana eyed their interlaced fingers like Anya was the demon, not Stas Demyan.
“How far along are you?” she asked, eyeing Anya’s belly.
Heat rushed over her. “Oh no. I’m not pregnant.”
Wait. Were they talking about Demyan or Sergey? In the latter case, she could possibly be about two hours along. The idea didn’t upset her as much as she might have expected.
“Actually, I…we… Stas wouldn’t sleep with me.”
“Hmm.” The older woman examined Anya more closely. “You are a dancer?”
“I was.”
“You are very thin.”
“So what?” Anya had actually put on several pounds after Stas dumped her and before she’d died. Her parents and the orderlies at the mental hospital had all pushed food on her non-stop, and she’d been so sedated she hadn’t bothered resisting, even though the hospital food had been vile.
“Do you have your period regularly?”
Sergey cleared his throat, and a glance at him revealed him to be blushing. Silly, after he’d pressed his face to her and licked her inside and out.
“I didn’t.” Missing her monthly cycle wasn’t unusual for someone who trained as hard as Anya.
Oksana clucked. “There you have it. Why would an incubus seduce someone who likely could not conceive his child?”
A strained sigh came from Sergey’s parted lips, like his heart was groaning. Anya squeezed his hand.
“But he pressed me to lose weight, to work harder. He controlled everything I ate. It makes no sense if he wanted to”--all the words she could think of seemed a slight against the mother and son--“impregnate me.”
Oksana’s eyes were a crystal blue, and they crinkled around the edges, softening with compassion. For some reason, it was harder to bear than her scornful attempts to protect her son. Anya looked at the floor, the window, anywhere but at a woman who knew exactly what she’d suffered.
“He wants to break you, destroy your career, sever your ties to your family, steal your will to live. Then no one will be surprised if you disappear, and he can take you into his den.”
“It’s in the catacombs?” Sergey asked.
“Yes. Once a baby is born, he and the child feed on its mother for days and weeks, as long as she lasts, until she is only a husk. Then he abandons the babe, leaves it to grow up tainted by evil, only to be drawn back to him as an adult.”
Her eyes had gone glassy and vacant, and she fingered her arm in the same place as Anya’s scar. Had Oksana seen him do it to someone else? God, no wonder she was a little crazy. A baby demon suckling its mother’s life force until she died.
Admiration for the woman welled up in Anya. What a battle she had waged for her life and son.
“I was not as brave as you. Stas pushed and he pushed, and I gave and I gave. And still he chose another, and I gave up.”
Oksana waved away Anya’s claim. “That’s a ploy. If you do not give in, surrender your ambition, your loyalty to your family, he chooses another, so that his love becomes all that matters to you. He lets you languish and then comes back for you.” A bit of the same admiration Anya was feeling seemed to have crept into the woman’s voice. “If he did this to you, it is because you are strong, and he could not break you easily.”
“He did break me, but he didn’t come--” Though her parents had put her in that hospital. “Or, perhaps he couldn’t find me.”
Sergey cast her a stricken look. She would have given anything for the reassurance of one of his effortless smiles instead.
But she would have to find the reassurance herself. “Regardless, I’m not broken anymore, and I’m going to find Demyan. I have to stop him.” Because it was no longer just about her vengeance, it was about all the women Stas had hurt, all the babies he’d turned into monsters.
“Do you know where we can find him?” Sergey asked.
“Sergey, you cannot help her with this. If you go with her, he will have you, in spite of everything I did, and
everything you have made of yourself.”
“I have to go, Mom.” He glanced at their clasped hands, and Anya’s stomach sank.
Was there any way she could get to Stas without letting Sergey near to him?
Chapter 23
Sergey’s mother’s revelations had set his mind spinning. He had so many questions, and so many apologies to make. But they’d come for advice, and if Demyan was on their trail, they needed to act fast. So he cut to the chase.
“Do you know what will kill him?”
She fingered the cross she wore. Under her pillow, there would be a satchel of caraway seeds, just as there had been all through his childhood. She hadn’t started growing the noxious purple flowers until he moved out. Now, he knew exactly why the stuff made him itchy, its smell revolting, and why he hated rye bread and any dish cooked with caraway seeds. Considerate mother of an unknowing incubus--she’d used it to protect herself, but never fed it to him.
“When you were a boy, I read everything that’s been written about zmora. I wanted to be ready, in case Stas found us, but”--she sighed--“the recorded methods of killing them are all so mythical. I never trusted they would work.”
Resignation had long ago carved deep lines in his mother’s face. For a moment, they’d faded to reveal her fierceness at the way she’d protected him.
“You’re not going to let Anya do this alone, are you?” his mother asked.
“No.”
“Heaven help me, by raising you to be an honorable man, I’ve doomed you.”
He caught his mother’s gaze and sucked in a breath--the fear he saw there was as wild as any he’d ever seen on a victim’s face at a crime scene. She’d been so brave, gone to great lengths to save him.
A gentle breeze rustled his hair, so intimate he could imagine Anya blowing it across his forehead. God, she was amazing, and still by his side after finding out he was a demon. He could almost believe he’d fallen in love in this short time he’d known her. A quick avalanche of strange, new emotions that had never even flickered through him.
Or maybe that was just the demon inside him, trying to tempt him to use her. Hell, he may never know the difference, but that didn’t change his objective.
“So what are these mythical methods to kill a demon?” he asked. “Stake through the heart? Holy water.”
“Nothing so easy. Some stories say you have to trick him into a Sisyphean task. Hauling sand with a rope or carrying water with a sieve. Zmoras are prideful. If they are baited with an impossible goal, they will attempt it at their own neglect and wither away trying to accomplish it.”
How the hell could they trick Demyan into something like that?
“I can see from your face you’re perplexed, and rightly so. I spent many nights lying awake trying to dream one up. I don’t advise dwelling on it. I eventually decided a demon as clever as Stas would be impossible to trick. Otherwise, he would surely be dead.”
“Is that the only way?”
“You could try to find his egg.”
“His what?”
“Zmoras are Lucifer’s demon offspring, each hatched from a black egg that re-forms and acts as their heart. If the egg is found and destroyed, the nightmare is truly dead.”
“I don’t have an egg out there with my name on it, do I?”
“Oh, no, sweetheart, and I don’t expect you’re immortal either. But that didn’t stop his other sons from committing pure evil.”
His other sons? Again, he thought of jealous Alexei. Was he one of them? Did he feed off the ballet teacher Sergey had called a cougar? Draining the life right out of her? It might explain the man’s caveman behavior toward Sergey.
Anya blew out an exhausted breath. “If Stas does have an Achilles’ heel, it will be impossible to discover. He hates to show weakness.”
“She’s right.” His mother nodded.
“So you vote for the impossible task?” Sergey asked Anya, beginning to wish he had a horse upon which he could carry her away from their fate at full gallop.
“Actually,” she said, “I have one more trick up my sleeve.”
“I think you have a death wish, and if Stas has anything to say about it, that death will be long and miserable. I just wish you would keep my son out of it.”
Sergey didn’t have the energy to tell his mom that Anya was a vila, but he wanted to leave her with some hope. “Trust me, Mom, she’s very resourceful.”
Huffing, his mother went into the kitchen to pack them some cookies--because, in addition to watercolors and demon slaying, she baked at the Sunrise Villa. Thanks to her cooking when he grew up, he didn’t have high hopes, but Anya would probably be hungry enough to eat wood, so they would get devoured.
While his mother was in the other room, Anya wrapped her arms around his neck. “Thank you for sticking with me.”
He kissed her and didn’t rush to stop when his mother reappeared. In the end, Anya pushed him away. Under Mom’s glare, she blushed, as sheepish as if she’d just started another tornado.
At the entryway, Anya went through ahead of him and partially closed the door, still holding his hand but allowing him some privacy.
He turned back to his mother. “One last question. Does Demyan think he loves his victims, or is he aware of what he’s doing?”
“Love? I don’t think he could even say the word with conviction. He is all hunger and possession, selfishness veiled by unctuous charm. Not what a mother feels for a son, and not what you feel for that girl.” She took hold of his forearm. “But, Sergey, he does not tolerate rivals. If he knows you’ve been with her, he won’t bother trying to corrupt you. He’ll simply kill you both.”
She kissed his cheek, and he hugged her with his free arm. She’d told him everything he needed to know. And she was right about his feelings for Anya.
There was no way he was going to let his vila anywhere near that monster. She and her slipper were just going to have to stay at the hotel until he faced Demyan.
Chapter 24
Anya liked Oksana Yuchenko, even though the woman clearly didn’t reciprocate the feeling. She made a point of not listening as Sergey said his good-byes to his mother. They deserved that much privacy. It was easy to avoid eavesdropping--her mind kept playing his mother’s warning over and over again.
“Sergey, you cannot help her with this. If you go with her, he’ll have you, you will belong to him in spite of everything I did, and everything you’ve made of yourself.”
And his face at those words--not shock, not skepticism, just simple fear. The warning had echoed something that frightened him, like he knew he might just give in to his inner zmora. Was being a zmora similar to the vila inside her--not really separate creatures at all, just two aspects of the same nature?
After she’d climbed across the driver’s seat and settled into her chair, he started the car. But before he could drive, his phone chirped and he looked at the screen.
“Lisko says they’re at the hotel.”
Good. She could find some way to enlist Sonya to take her to Demyan.
“So, I’ve been trying to think of Sisyphean tasks,” Sergey said with dubious levity. “Do you think you could convince Demyan to shovel all the sand off the city beaches?”
“No.”
“How about to keep pigs in a muddy sty clean?”
“I’m sure he’d fall for that one. He’s a real animal lover.”
“Really?” He stopped backing out of the spot to glance at her. The look on her face must have said, No, not really, you putz. He blew out a breath. “Right. I’ll think bigger. How about reversing global warming?”
“What’s global warming?”
“Shit. Don’t worry. You have enough on your plate as it is.” He cranked the wheel hard to the right and drove out of the lot. “Maybe world peace? You could say ‘Can’t a man as handsome as you, with such intelligence and charm and skill directing ballet, usher in an era of global peace?’”
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br /> She couldn’t help but laugh. “Maybe I should challenge him to compose and choreograph a ballet better than Giselle. That’s the sort of thing that would appeal to his ego. But…I agree with your mom that it seems unlikely to work. He’s prideful, but not stupidly so.”
“Do you have another plan?” His tone had flipped, his gravelly words no longer held even a hint of humor.
She swallowed past a lump in her throat. “I’ve been trying to imagine how to use the wind without too much collateral damage. From what your mom said, I could take down a city block, and he would be the only one to get up and walk away.”
“Right.”
“So I was thinking about passing through him and starting a cyclone. Literally blow him up.”
He grimaced. “It’s a nice idea. The problem is, you’re the eye of the storm. Wherever you are is the safest place to be.”
“Funny. It feels like where you are is the safest place to be.”
In reply, he squeezed her hand. The drive back to Odessa passed in comfortable quiet. There wasn’t anything more to say. Somehow, she had earned the loyalty and affection of this remarkable man, and she wouldn’t withdraw hers because of his unfortunate parentage.
Now all that remained was to face Stas and win or lose. The only thing for sure was that she wouldn’t let Sergey anywhere near the demon who’d tormented her, and so she would have to get away from her sweet inspector somehow.
“How far are we from the hotel?”
“About ten minutes.”
“Let me use your phone. I’ll send Dmitri a message that we’re getting close.”
“I can’t believe you already figured out how to use it. My mom still hasn’t gotten the hang of hers, and you’re nearly fifteen years older.”
She shot him the glare that comment deserved. “Hand it over.”
The truth was she hadn’t yet used it to type out words the way he did with his thumbs, but once she found Lisko’s message, the U-turn shaped arrow seemed to imply a reply. Then a keyboard appeared and she pecked out the letters with one hand.
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