His Cemetery Doll (15 page)

"You're afraid...I'll hurt her."

The graveyard changed, then. Conall glanced up, recognizing the slightest shift in the atmosphere: the feeling of another's eyes on him.

She
had
come. Standing between the two mausoleums, half-hidden in their silhouette. She waited.

"Am I right?" he asked. His voice had become hoarse. "Do you think...I would hurt Shyla?"

She remained still, and it agonized him. When she finally moved, she slid behind one of the tombs and disappeared. Then, as he began to lunge to follow her, she re-appeared, gliding out from behind one of the tall oaks. From there, she peered at him. Then, she descended the path down to the oldest graves.

He understood where she meant to lead him. So he followed, anxious.

Her ribbons drifted behind her in the moonlight. Yes, she must have been a dancer, in life: a ballerina. Earlier she had come to them with those jerky, uncoordinated, almost
painful
movements, but she'd recovered. She appeared to float—maybe she
did
float—and she carried herself with conscientious elegance.

Did her change in demeanor signify something? As he followed, he frowned to himself at the idea. He'd assumed when she lost her familiar grace, she'd been somehow...
less.
Less sentient? More animal.

More vengeful phantom.

When she returned to poise and polish, he found her more human. More understandable.

Those had been the moments when she
talked.

She waited for him again, standing by the rippling edge of the river, gazing into its depths. Conall hesitated a moment, simply watching her. For the first time, she appeared not like a ceramic construct, a ghostly golem of a china figurine. Perhaps the ribbons wrapped around her in exactly the right way, or perhaps the light hid the seams and joints of her inhuman body, but in one perfect, gleaming instant, he saw a real woman.

Except for the damned blindfold hiding her eyes.

"I'm here," he whispered to her as he drew close. On instinct, he put his hands on her cool shoulders and bent his head to touch his lips to her hair.

"Can you tell me why you keep coming to me like this?"

She slowly turned to face him, tilting her face up to his. He understood, whatever energy it took for her to communicate—either in those whipping, whispered words or the hopeless tears—she
wanted
to communicate now. He curled a knuckle under her chin.

"Please," he whispered. "Tell me. Tell me anything. I just need to know."

She hesitated. Nodded. Then she closed his hands in hers and her head bowed.

Finally, her voice came to him.

Are...you...afraid?

"I'm not afraid of you," he assured her with a shake of his head. "I want to help you, if I can. Is it what you want?"

She lifted one of his hands to her mask and leaned her cool cheek in his palm.

You...
her voice echoed in his mind,
are...good.

Conall...you are good.

He gave a little start at the sound of his name in her slow hush.

So why...

...are you afraid?

"I'm not afraid of
you,"
he repeated, this time stressing the last word. "But...what do you want with my...with Shyla?"

She paused in her gentle affections. Tilting her face back up to him, she guided his hand farther.

To the tightly-wrapped ribbons hiding her eyes.

"You won't cringe away?" he asked, though he understood this meant she wanted him to see, finally. She pressed herself to his palm again, and he took careful hold of the blindfold.

He didn't need to tug at the bindings. He didn't even need to untie them. When his fingers brushed the silky gray material, the ribbons simply fell away as if they'd been too loose to begin with, spiraling down to her feet.

Her eyes...

One blue, one green.

Exactly like Shyla's.

Conall sucked in a breath. He cupped her face in both hands, running his thumbs along her cheeks.

"You
are
her mother," he breathed. "Bloody hell...you are."

Her eyes weren't part of the mask. They were the truly human part of her: real flesh of delicate eyelids, real irises glistening wet with tears. He could see where the porcelain came to its edge and showed a hint of true skin beneath. When his fingers searched for the edge of the disguise along her jaw, by her ears, he found none. The doll's face proved one piece, jointed to the rest of her as everything else. Underneath the holes for eyes, however, he saw the real person, trapped.

Not
dead, he imagined. As Shyla had put it...
cursed.

He ran on thumb over the cracks on the left side. She flinched, as if it hurt her.

"Sorry, sorry," he murmured. "What did this?"

She touched the uneven cracks. Then, her hand drifted to her chest.

"You? You broke your own mask?"

She blinked—
oh,
how the simple gesture changed everything about her, true
movement,
so slight but so
real.
Next she nodded.

"You broke the mask," he pondered, "to..."

To break free.

Her other hand touched the side of his cheek, slid up to his temple. Conall closed his eyes with a soft sigh. When he opened them again, he beheld her as she must have been thirteen years ago. Her cheeks, pink with the warm rosy glow of life; lips, satin red; her small ears hung with tiny crystal drops, definitely the striking fashion of some faraway stage. Those mismatched eyes glittered with mirth, and instead of sorrowful weeping there came the distant echoing sounds of her laughter on a night breeze, the music of grand parties and the voices and applause of a crowd. The gray shroud of ribbons had been replaced with a sparkling evening gown of white and a silk scarf draped over her arms. She had the smile of a woman who could make any man believe himself the only man in the room, and if he kissed her lips he imagined they would taste like sweet champagne.

She linked arms with him and said something in rich, enchanting Russian. Though Conall recognized the language well enough, he'd never learned it for himself. Even so, here in the doll's unfurling visions, he found he understood her perfectly.

"It is so very nice to finally meet you, sir. I have heard so many exciting things...you must walk with me now and tell me all about your life."

This is a memory
. He slipped into it with her like donning a tailored suit, and they moved through a strange dichotomy of sound and sight. His riverbank and the woods hadn't disappeared. Underneath the lovely reflection of her living self, Conall could still make out the doll herself, cracked and strange. She conveyed flashes and glimpses at a time and place once all hers, a world in which she had been like a bright evening star. She couldn't transport him completely, but if she couldn't speak for herself, she would tell him her story another way.

"Do you dance, Captain?"

She had a gentle voice in the memory, but underneath, her words came still in the furtive hush of a ghost. Hollow and urgent, uttering secrets in the night.

Standing by the river, they merely continued looking into one another's eyes, her fingers touching his, his hand caressing her cheek. He remained aware of all this, but in the sweeping tapestry of the spell they moved out onto a grand dance floor, and he cordially drew her into a waltz.

"Your name?" he asked her, struck dumb as his dream self took the lead, sure of his steps. She fit in his arms as prettily as though they had been molded together, two figures designed in deliberate, artistic balance. How naturally it fell into place, each step and turn, the easy weight of her body in his hands. No, he didn't speak Russian; he didn't waltz, and he wasn't a Captain. As he moved through
her
memory, however, he recognized it as easily as any of his own.

Her smile made his heart rate quicken.

"Asya," she said. This time it came definitively in the voice of the doll, not the dancer. It hovered above and apart from the sound of the party and her many admirers. A conversation of its own.

"Asya Kariyeva. I was a ballerina, then."

"The Captain?"

A conversation in whispers. Did she fear certain ears might hear them? Conall remembered the doll's broken mask, the oddity of her crumpled form in its stiff, perhaps painful pose.

"My lover. A British soldier. We met in France before the first offensive, and he brought me here to England when he believed it would become unsafe."

"He was..."

"Yes," the doll replied. "Her father."

The Asya of memory laughed at something her Captain had said. Conall glided through a series of steps, and the music played on.

"Is he alive?"

"No. He died in the bombings."

Shyla, then, really had been left alone in the world. Orphaned by the war, like him.

"And you? How did you..."

Doll and woman both glanced askance. He sensed the instant tension.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You needn't say."

"Be assured, sir...I would regale you with all, if we but had the time."

These words, part of the vision, nonetheless rang true, and her mystifying eyes flashed at him.

"You are stunning, Miss Kariyeva," he murmured with the memory of the nameless Captain. "A treasure of the stage. Tell me, has your company not considered coming to London?"

"Thank you, sir." Her cheeks pinkened. "I'm afraid, though, with the war, we have found it quite difficult to think about performances abroad."

"Why have you come to me?" Conall asked in a whisper. "Why now?"

"I came for her."

It hung between them as their visions danced. Conall tightened his grip on her while the ballroom memory began to dim, but she stroked his cheek, reassuring.

"Is she in danger?" he hissed.

"Oh, dear one..."

The scene in memory changed. The dance floor disappeared; no more crowd, no grand music leading them into dance. The gentle strains of something quieter and more personal drifted from a little radio on a dresser, as the doll brought him to a room in Paris facing out on a view of the Eiffel Tower. Long white curtains billowed in a night wind, cool breeze buffeting skin electric for touch, to be touched, stroked, raked by Asya Kariyeva's tiny fingernails. The fresh hint of lavender perfumed her skin as his hands unraveled the white dress from her body, her Captain breathing hard between kisses to her neck, shoulders, and lips.

The doll pressed close to Conall, turning into the circle of his arms and pulling his hands to meet her over her chest, where her heart should be. Conall pulled her close, resting his head between her neck and shoulder, as she tilted her head to let him press his lips to her neck.

She whispered in his ear—he would have sworn her true, porcelain lips moved as the husky, voiceless words stole all the animation from the vision, silenced the memory of the radio, and everything faded away except the loud beat of their hearts.

"We are
all
in danger."

E
verything slipped away, and the doll brought him back to reality, pulling him into a kiss. Conall reacted, forgetting everything for the moment: he tightened his grip on her body, and underneath his pants, his erection already strained for her. He began pulling the ribbons away from her limbs, even as a new blindfold of gray silk crisscrossed over her eyes, hiding them again.

His hands found her breasts, smooth and beautiful, and he covered each with one palm possessively. Her throat, perfect white pillar, delighted him with its flawless stone smoothness.

The doll stepped out of the circle of his arms, but she did not let go of his hands. Instead she guided him, a girl leading her lover away, farther upstream, leaving the graveyard behind.

She brought him along in a playful step that was half-skipping, half-dancing, until she brought him up to a grassy bluff in the bend of river. There she paused, gazing at the sweep of broad countryside before her. Conall could see the main road in the distance—the same one where, farther along to the north and east, he had been accosted by thieves. Whitetail Knoll stretched out on their right, quiet and dark save for some few lights in the dark morning hours.

She stood, silently taking in the panorama stretching out before them. She'd come up on pointe—he'd never seen her do it before, such a natural and graceful move, as though built into her bones—and appeared to get lost in the view. The gray ribbons drifted behind her like a trailing banner in the wind.

"You want to run, don't you?" he asked after long moments.

She made no answer, but he could read it in the set of her body. On her toes, leaning ever-so-slightly forward, the tilt of her face looking up into the distance. She was nearly ready to
fly.

"But...you can't."

Finally, she faced him again, and her head dipped in a small nod. He reached out and drew her close to him. With one hand, he held her to his chest, as the other stroked her hair.

"I'll protect you," he said...but he hardly understood the words himself. Protect her from what? For what reason?

She settled against him, resting her brow on his chest. The ribbons drifting around her floated to fold him in their reach as well, returning the embrace.

They stood in quiet, Conall staring out at the countryside. At some point, he found himself tilting her face up to his, kissing her lips over and over in sweet, slow desire.

His doll extended her arms up and around his neck. Her little pink tongue—warm and soft—traced the line of his lips, and her hands ran up to cradle his head as she kissed him more deeply, drawing him in.

Conall let his hands slide down, over her breasts and around to cup her back. Ribbons unraveled, revealing her body to his touch. The line of her spine, so gracefully arched, so sensual and beautiful under his searching fingertips...

They slid down to the grass, never letting go of one another. Conall guided her hands to his belt and she undid it, slipping fingers underneath his jeans to find his ready cock. He stripped out of his shirt and guided her touch back up, around his neck, sliding her up to kiss her face again as he freed his wild erection.