Dreaming Anastasia (14 page)

The Forest, Evening

Anastasia

Auntie's cat curls up against me, his yellow eyes glowing with something I cannot even begin to name. My fingers search the pocket of my dress, feeling for the small bit of bread I have placed there. The tiny offering my matroyshka has said I might need.

“Here,
koshka
.” I hold out my hand as the doll has taught me, palm up, the coarse brown crumbs lying in the center.

The animal sniffs, considers. Then his small mouth opens, and he bends his head over my hand. My skin prickles as his wet, rough tongue runs across my palm.

In the fire, the images flicker. Baba Yaga and I watch and listen.

“Where is he, Dimitri?” Viktor rages at a man I do not know. His anger pours out of him. And I think of the day I found him pacing the stone chapel, the knuckles of his right hand dotted with his own blood, the skin shredded from pounding against one of those stone walls. That was the day he told me he had warned Papa of what was coming. The day Papa had dismissed him with a brief wave of the hand.

“He is dead,” the man called Dimitri says to Viktor. “Vladimir is gone. Ethan must have…he never came out of the building.”

“And Ethan and the girl?”

“They escaped. But it should not be too hard to find them. You've thrown Ethan off his game. I'm sure he thinks the whirlwind was Baba Yaga's doing, not ours.”

“Of course he does,” Viktor says. “He thinks whatever I make him think. He always has. But the girl—we will need to be much more careful in how we go about this.”

“She is strong,” Dimitri says. “And her strength—it is growing. If we are to stop her, we must do it soon.”

“We will,” Viktor tells him. “Oh, we will.”

Next to me, Auntie laughs, a wild sound that fills the room like a howl. “He thinks he knows,” she says, “because he was able to use us. Use the one they call Ethan too. But he has no idea about the girl's power. He thinks he understands. But he does not.”

“Understands what?” I ask Auntie Yaga.

“Many things,” the witch tells me. “But the one he understands the least is destiny.”

Wednesday, 8:10 pm

Anne

I unfold myself from the chair, arch my back, and stretch, trying to ease the knots out of my muscles.

Professor Olensky and Ethan are still hunched side by side, elbows on the desk, studying something on the computer monitor. They've been pulling up website after website, document after document. None of them seems to be doing us any good. We still don't know how to get to Baba Yaga's or why Viktor seems determined to stop us. I may have all this power, but I still have no idea how I'm going to use it, which let me say, is not thrilling me.

“Any luck, my dear?” The professor looks up from whatever they're reading.

“None,” I tell him. “Less than none. I thought—well, I thought it would help if I looked. But I guess I'm just as clueless as the two of you.”

A muscle in Ethan's jaw
clenches
at the word
clueless
, but he doesn't say anything.

“I know all this is supposed to be about me,” I say, “but you guys know it's ridiculously boring, right? All the ‘When there shalt cometh' kind of stuff over and over? How much of that can you read before you just feel like falling into a coma or something?”

I ignore Ethan's glare. And Professor Olensky's.

It's getting late, my eyes hurt, and I'm going to need to forge a note to explain why I wasn't in my classes this afternoon. Pretty soon, either I'll need to call and talk to my mother or father or show up at home, or I can kiss ever being a licensed driver good-bye.

“I'm going to have to get home soon,” I say. “Even with my parents thinking I'm at Tess's, they'll expect me back by nine or so. Ever since—” I pause, realizing that I haven't told Ethan about my brother. A part of me wonders if he somehow already knows. “My parents worry easily,” I say instead. It's the truth, even if it's not all of it. “There's only so much Tess can say to cover for me if they call her house.”

Ethan's face tightens. “I'm not happy about letting you out of my sight,” he says. “It's too dangerous right now.”

What does he honestly expect? That I'll just say okay, let me go pack a bag, and I'll move into your destroyed loft? Or perhaps bunk here with the professor for a few months? Or however long it takes to—?

My heart rams its way into my throat at the firm knock at the professor's office door. Ethan grabs me and yanks me behind him. “Stay back,” he hisses at me. “It might be—”

“Anne?” a familiar voice bellows through the professor's door. “Anne, are you in there? Say something. Open up, or just shout if you're there.”

“Stand down, Wolverine.” I shove Ethan aside, walk over, and unlock the door. “It's okay.”

And with that, Tess—carrying a delicious-smelling bag with the Wrap Hut logo in one hand and her little Burberry purse in the other—enters.

“Well,” she says, setting the bag down on the professor's desk, where it immediately starts to ooze grease all over some student's essay, “you weren't that hard to find. I just asked a couple of frat guys headed for a party if they'd heard of some professor named Olensky, and they walked me right over here.”

I guess I'd told her Olensky's name when I called her. On Ethan's cell phone.

“I figured if you were saving the world or whatever,” she rattles on, “you probably needed snacks by now. Plus, to be honest, I couldn't handle another phone call from your mother.” She places her hand on my arm. “Remember when you get home that the sandwich she packed for your lunch gave you food poisoning or something. So we kept studying, but you were in the bathroom puking every time she called.”

I've been standing, my mouth hanging open, just kind of gaping at this vision that is Tess. I sneak a sideways glance at Ethan and the professor and see that they're pretty much doing the same thing.

“How did you get here?” I move the bag off the papers and try to mop up the grease with the palm of my hand. “You can't drive alone yet.”

“I called Sarah,” she says to me, even though she's not really looking at me. Instead, she's eyeballing Ethan with that same evil, squinty look she'd directed toward Neal Patterson and Kate Harris earlier. “She dropped me off in front of the campus. I told her I'd get a ride home from the guy you were with.”

She stomps over to Ethan, stretches up on tiptoe—something she does quite gracefully, by the way—and directs her glare straight into his blue eyes. “You
are
going to take us home in a minute, you know. She may believe all this crap you've been telling her. And who knows? It may all be true. But she hasn't known you very long, and I don't trust you. So you guys will finish up whatever you're working on, eat the sandwiches I brought, and then we're out of here. Get it?”

I think she's done speaking, and so does Ethan, who opens up his mouth to respond. But Tess—well, she's Tess, and she doesn't stop until she's gone a few steps too far.

“Last summer,” she says, still eyeball to eyeball with Ethan—who's looking amazingly uneasy for a man who just recently used magic to
kill
someone—“I was stupid enough to have sex with a guy who wasn't who I thought he was, which was someone who wouldn't cheat on me. So I don't care what you've been telling my best friend here, or
how
hot you look—I'm not going to stand by and let something like that happen to her.”

Oh. My. God. Tess.

Ethan flushes from the part of his chest I can see at the top of his blue shirt to the roots of his chestnut hair. Then he flushes some more. It's the reddest I've ever seen anyone's face—and that includes my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Klinger, who once bent over to pick up something from the floor and farted—loudly—in front of our entire class during story hour.

Professor Olensky gives a snorting sound, then claps his hand over his mouth.

And I stand there thinking that being scooped up by a giant pair of hands or devoured by some magical whirlwind might not be so bad right now.

“She…you…she simply can't be here right now!” Ethan sputters. His gaze seems to be fixed on some invisible point in the air. “Is this who you called when I gave you my cell phone? You told me you were leaving a message for your mother, not calling all your little friends.”

“This is Tess, Ethan. Not
all
my friends. Just one. And she cares about what happens to me. She—”

“This isn't a damn game, Anne!” He whirls to face me, his blue eyes darkening. “Do you actually still think we're just playing here? That this is still something you can go home and gossip to your girlfriends about? You think that's what this is? After what's already happened? After what you've seen? After what I—This is real, Anne. And now you've put your friend in danger by having her come here.”

“She didn't tell me to come,” Tess says. Her voice quavers, but she continues. “I came on my own, because I was worried about her. And I still am. You're right. None of this is a game—not to me. She may think she trusts you, but
I
don't trust you. I don't know you. I've seen you at the ballet, and once at school. I don't know anything about you.”

“Tess,” I say. “Let me—”

“No.” Tess flashes me her pissiest look. “You let me finish.” Her gaze snaps back to Ethan. “Anne's told me what you think she can do. That she's supposed to save Anastasia, who's trapped somewhere and didn't really die back in nineteen-whenever-it-was. Well, I'm not buying a word of it—but let's say it's true. Let's say that Anastasia did live through that massacre, like you say. So? This is the twenty-first century. What possible difference could it make? There's no more Russian aristocracy. Hell, there's no more Soviet Union. It's all a bunch of little whats-it-stans and places like the Ukraine.”

“Not all that little,” Olensky observes dryly. “My dear, Russia spans eleven time zones.”

“Well, yeah.” Tess begrudges him that. “But still—what do they need Anastasia for? Why the hell would you want to save her?”

I don't know what stuns me most—the fact that Ethan backs off and stands there silently, as does Olensky, or the fact that Tess actually seems to know something—most of it seemingly accurate—about Russian current events.

But whatever it is that's pulsing in my hands does its thing again as I answer. “Because she's a person,” I say. “Because Anastasia was a seventeen-year-old girl who never got a chance. She lost everything she ever had, everybody she ever loved. If she really still is alive, she's been trapped this entire time, unable to do anything she was supposed to. No one deserves to lose it all like that. No one.”

I'm thinking about David, about what it's like to watch someone fade away and become just a shadow of what he used to be. By the look on her face right now, I'm pretty sure Tess knows that too. And since she's my best friend, she probably also knows I'm scared—and I'm tired and hungry and seriously overwhelmed by this whole destiny thing.

I look past Tess, over to Ethan. “I'm sorry,” I tell him, even though with Tess here now, I'm wondering again if I can really trust him. “I know I should have told you that I called Tess too. But it's done now, and we need to just deal with it. You're not making it any better by yelling again. We're not getting any closer to the answers.”

“I wasn't—I mean…” Ethan blows out a breath. “At the beginning, it was about restoring a Romanov to power. That was our mission. That's what I believed when I pledged to do this thing—the Romanovs were the rightful rulers of Mother Russia, even if Nicholas was a poor excuse for a tsar. They were believers. They deserved our help. It made sense to me then. So when Viktor told me what needed to happen, I accepted it. I was eighteen. Lots of crazy things made sense then.” His lips pucker in a little half-smile. “But now—well, we're all asking ourselves those same questions. Why Anastasia? And why Anne for that matter?”

He clenches his hands, then unclenches them. “I just want us to get through this safely,” he says finally. “There are so many unknowns that I think we should—”

“What I think we should do, Ethan,” Professor Olensky cuts in, “is rest for a moment and eat the food that this young woman has so kindly brought for us. Surely we can take some time to refuel. Then we will put our heads back together and figure out what to do next.”

I'm waiting for Ethan to argue with him, but he doesn't. He just sighs hugely and nods his head.

So we eat. I hadn't been hungry before, but now I'm ravenous. Tess, thankfully, has brought enough for a small army. We break into the bag, dividing up the pita wraps, gyros, and little bags of chips. Professor Olensky goes into his whole tea routine again, and everyone digs in. Tess and I flop down on the carpet and spread our food on some napkins. Ethan and the professor stay at the desk, where the professor continues to scroll through a website while he eats.

“I can't believe you,” I whisper to Tess as I watch her pick the onions out of her half of the gyro sandwich. “How could you look him in the eye and say all that stuff? Did you see his face? God, Tess.”

She plucks out another sliver of onion and lays it next to the others she's got lined up neatly on a Wrap Hut napkin. She's made a cute little onion border around the picture of the pita shaped like a little cottage.

She shrugs. “It's the truth, isn't it? Neal's an ass, but this Ethan guy is seriously yummy looking—don't deny it.” She grins at me. “I can't remember ever seeing anyone turn that color red. That was amazing. So don't even try to tell me that he hasn't been thinking about you as anything other than the super special savior of old-timey Russia. I don't buy it.”

“Lower your voice,” I hiss at her. “He can't possibly. No. I mean he's—well, no way.”

I take a bite of my half of the gyro and busy myself with chewing. Nothing like the thought of dating your great-great-grandfather to make you a little queasy.

“So,” Tess says. I'm grateful when she swivels her attention to a topic other than hooking me up with the world's oldest teenager. “Tell me about this witch again. Baba Yaga—the one from the Russian fairy tale who has supposedly carried off Anastasia.”

“What about her?” I crumple up my dirty napkins and sandwich crumbs and toss them into the wastebasket next to Olensky's desk—well, I try to, anyway. What I actually do is toss my garbage on Ethan's foot.

He sighs—his favorite form of communication since Tess's arrival—then picks up the garbage and places it in the can. Then he scoots his chair over to sit with us. Olensky remains where he is, hunched over the computer, sort of muttering under his breath.

“Well,” Tess says, “she's a witch. So—with all due respect to the
Wizard of Oz
—is she a good witch or a bad witch? I mean, if she's saved someone, that would make her a good witch. But if she's trying to hurt you, then she's not so good. It's confusing.”

“It's part of what we're trying to figure out,” Ethan says. I guess he's resigned himself to including Tess in our conversations as long as she's here. “She's not really good, at least not in all the legends. When she—well, when the Brotherhood's magic compelled her to help us, she did a good thing, but it was forced on her. She is still compelled by that magic, as far as I know. Where she stands now on the spectrum of good and evil—that's a lot harder to say.”

There is way more of a gray area here than I'd like. At least in
Swan Lake
, when Prince Siegfried screwed up, it was just because he was a stupid twit, not because Rothbart was evil only on odd days of the month or something.

“So when she chased us back at school,” I say, “you're saying it's possible that she
wasn't
trying to hurt us?”