Red Devil (Dangerous Spirits) (7 page)

He got up, then stared at the painting in horror. Meg saw where he was looking and sprang to her feet, her thick tail sweeping across several of the symbols. “Ask him how his date was,” she hissed. “Keep him talking until he goes to the bathroom.”

Alexei darted out the door. Sol, locking the front door behind him, turned just as Alexei reached the table. “Hey. On the computer?”

He hadn’t seen Alexei leave Meg’s room. Alexei gulped and nodded. “How was your date? You are back early.”

“He has a study session Sunday morning. It went pretty good.” Sol smiled, tail swinging lazily from side to side. “He kissed me.”

“Really?” The painting fled Alexei’s mind. “A real kiss?”

“Well, on the side of the muzzle.” Sol smoothed his whiskers back. “But it was nice. We had dinner, and talked about food and wine. He knows a lot about wine. And then we talked about movies and his college and where I was going.”

He started to walk to the bedroom. Alexei stepped into his path. “Please, tell me about it.”

The black wolf stopped, looking bemusedly at Alexei. “All right. Well…let me go to the bathroom first.”

“Yes, of course.” Alexei couldn’t stop the first wag of his tail, but then he curled it around his leg.

Sol disappeared into the bathroom, and Alexei ran to Meg’s door, only to nearly bump into her. She made as if to go past him, but he took the painting from her and ran to their room. As he got up on Sol’s bed, he heard the toilet flush. Alexei settled the painting against the wall and lowered it, but it didn’t stay. He tried again. The wire would not catch on the hooks.

The bathroom door opened. Desperate, Alexei lifted the painting, lowered it—and this time, it stayed against the wall. He hopped down from Sol’s bed, landing on the floor with a light jolt. “Hey,” Sol said, poking his head in the door of the bedroom. “Want to talk in here? Meg’s room smells funny. You know what—”

With a crash, the painting fell from the wall.

Chapter 5

Alexei stood and stared at Sol, and Sol stood and stared at the painting. “What were you doing with Niki?” he asked.

“I…” Keeping Sol unaware had made all the sense in the world when he’d started. But now, the wide eyes and gaping mouth of Alexei’s best friend swept all that nonsense aside, and Alexei stared at the confusion on Sol’s muzzle with no idea how to explain his actions, even to himself.

Sol strode forward and stood at the edge of his bed, one paw outstretched as though afraid the face-down picture would crumble if he touched it. “I’m sorry,” Alexei said, fumbling for the words. “I meant nothing harmful…”

His command of English deserted him. He stayed pressed back against the desk, watching Sol tremble as the black wolf reached out and tenderly lifted the frame from the bed.

Meg appeared at the edge of the door. Alexei waved frantically for her to go away, but she mouthed something at him. He couldn’t interpret it, so he waved harder, and finally, with an exasperated look, she left. The smell of wormwood invaded the room, strong enough for Sol to smell, but the wolf’s whole attention was focused on the picture he was lifting carefully from the bed.

He gave a low moan, and Alexei, without seeing anything, said, “I didn’t mean to hurt him. I promise.”

“It’s cracked.” Sol’s voice came low and rough.

“I’m
sorry
!” Alexei said. “Is…is the painting damaged?”

“I can’t tell.” Sol traced a finger along the glass. Alexei moved to his left and now saw a line running through the glass, through the base of the stone bench and through the leg of the fox. He winced, but could not look away.

“I will pay for the repair.” Alexei moved to his dresser and opened the drawer.

“Yeah, you will.” Sol turned; his voice was louder. “What were you doing?”

Alexei swallowed. “I was…I was lonely. I thought I could…I thought I could talk to him too.”

“So you had to pull the picture off the wall? Couldn’t you just stare at it?” Sol’s bright green eyes bored into his. “You could’ve broken the whole thing! I can’t just go down to the store and get another one.”

“I know,” Alexei said.

“I should never have moved in here with you,” Sol snapped.

Alexei folded his ears back. He wanted to pull himself inward and disappear, to get away from here; more than that, he wanted to go back in time and not take Sol’s picture from the wall, to find something else to use in the ritual or just to ask Sol’s permission. How would Cat have felt if he’d betrayed her this fundamentally? He had nothing but useless, inadequate words that sounded worse because they were not in his language. All the things he wanted to tell Sol were trapped in the only words he could think of. “I’m sorry,” he said softly, and ran out of the bedroom.

He yanked at the front door, found it locked, and threw the lock back, hoping Sol would tell him to wait. But Sol didn’t say a word, and Meg must have been staying in her room. He pulled the door open and slipped out, and ran to the front step.

But he stopped there, breathing in the hot evening air, insects and cars buzzing low in his ears. Up and down the sidewalk, streetlights cast islands of light onto the cement, but the light in front of their stoop was broken, and Alexei stood with the dim light of the windows behind him, murky clouds above him, and the cement walkway stretching through relative darkness ahead of him. He had no idea where he was going to go or what he might do. He didn’t really know anyone else in Vidalia except Vlad and Liza, and didn’t know if either of them would welcome him showing up at nine-thirty at night needing a place to stay.

He sat down on the stoop, and curled his tail around his hips, then sank his muzzle into his paws. It wasn’t as if the ritual had even worked. It had all been for nothing, and worse than nothing, because he had betrayed his best friend.

The sick feeling in his chest grew stronger and stronger, and the urge to get to his feet and leave this place grew with it. He stood, took a step toward the street, and then stopped. A pair of goats walked by, into light, into darkness, and back into light. He watched them walk on, envying them the surety of their destination.

His feet took him to the edge of the sidewalk, to the edge of one of the pools of light below the streetlamps. To the left, their street met a large busy road; that was where the bus picked him up. To the right, it stretched down into block after block of streetlamps and anonymous apartment buildings, broken by the glow of an all-night convenience store and, perhaps half a mile down, the rush of cars along a freeway overpass. There were busses there, too, he knew; they ran to other parts of Vidalia, places he’d never been.

This was not at all like leaving Samorodka and his parents behind. He had been moving forward then, toward a brighter future. Now he was living in that future and he had ruined it, tainted it. Did he have another future to go to? He thought about Cat’s words, that one should always run toward something rather than away. What would she do, in his place? He ached to ask her, hated that he could not.

In the tortured moments weighing his decision, the front door opened behind him. He swept his ears back to listen, but didn’t turn around.

Sol’s voice came through the night. “Hey,” the wolf said. “Come back inside. I’m—I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

Alexei shook his head slowly, and turned. “You were right. I did a terrible thing.”

The black wolf did not contradict him, but he did stare down at the pavement and his tail was as tightly curled as Alexei’s was. The mirrored emotion relaxed the fox a little. “I still shouldn’t have yelled.” Sol took a breath. “Meg said…she said it was all just a mistake.”

Alexei nodded, hesitating. “But still, I should have asked.”

“Well,” Sol said. “Yeah.” Undercurrents of anger remained in his voice. “But it’s…it’s okay. I mean, you said you’d pay for it.”

“I will.”

“So…come back inside.”

It was half a request, half an order. Sol’s ears remained flat and he didn’t meet the fox’s eyes, but Alexei believed the apology was sincere. He looked again to his left and his right, and then stepped toward Sol and back to the apartment.

“Thank god,” Meg said as the two of them walked back in. “I can only imagine where you might have ended up, going off on your own. Where
were
you going?”

“I don’t know,” Alexei said.

Sol leaned against the kitchen table, his back to the bedroom. “Meg said you were really down. I guess I didn’t realize that.” His words came slowly and begrudgingly, but Alexei found it easier to listen for the sincerity behind them. He was aware that things were not the same with him and Sol, might not be again for a long time, and he chose his words carefully.

“I never meant any disrespect to Niki,” he said softly. “I would never do anything like that.”

Sol turned away. Meg coughed and said, “Hey, he even remembered your dream-fox’s last name. How’s that for caring?”

“Last name?” Sol flicked his ears, his eyes narrowing. “He doesn’t have a last name.”

Meg’s expression when she met Alexei’s eyes was part apology, part conspirator. “Well, he made one up for him, then,” she said.

Alexei knew that Sol didn’t want to hear the name, and knew that Meg knew that, and also knew that she was about to make things worse by telling him. So he broke in. “It is not important,” he said. “I will take the picture to a shop this weekend.” He had no idea where to take a broken picture, but Vlad would tell him. “I will have it fixed.”

And that was the end of it for that night—almost. The matter certainly remained in the minds of each of them, Alexei most of all. As he lay in bed trying to sleep that night, one thing kept returning over and over. When he’d said, “Konstantinov,” it had had the certain feeling of an uncovered memory, something Sol had mentioned and Alexei had forgotten. But Sol had been immediately certain that Niki didn’t have a last name, which meant that he’d never known it.

Then where had that name come from?

Chapter 6

The people of Siberia belong to the land, and the land belongs to the tsars. We are born in the smell of earth and carried on our mothers’ and fathers’ backs for the plowing, the planting, the harvesting. We know hay from wheat before we can count to ten; we can swing a scythe before we can hold a pencil.

For centuries, this was the order: the tsars ruled the people and the people worked the land. We would no more wish to rule ourselves than the tigers in Petrograd would wish to come to the sowing. We met in villages to decide questions that were not worth their time: which of us would work which field, who would care for the sick family, whether dim Sergei Alexandrovich, who was a good carpenter, was responsible for the roof he’d repaired that had collapsed when a child leapt onto it. Life was not easy, but it was simple.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Siberians began to look outward, to the nations where merchants were rising in power, to the great nations built on coin and trade rather than on honest work and earth. They saw the possibilities and grew greedy, and the village meetings became centers of revolution, discarding the words of our ancestors like wheat husks left to rot in the fall rains. Out there, they said, those who work reap the rewards, and the monarchs answer to them! Why should we labor for others? As a fungus will spread through a storehouse, these ideas clung and gnawed at the people, and grew potent.

But the emperors—what the tsars called themselves—were not yet weak, then. Alexander II bared his claws and crushed the would-be revolutionaries, raking the land and leaving scarred villages, empty seats at the meetings. The peasants left in their wake had to work still harder, but that is how a country heals.

Our village thought it had been spared, until one cold night two weeks before the end of the year. Under the new moon the tigers came, in the winter when their scent would not carry in the dead air and their feet could not be heard in the new-fallen snow. Silent as ghosts, they surrounded the cottages and houses, and then burst in, taking the villagers unawares. The soldiers pulled us easily from our homes, and we blinked stupidly and stumbled after them. There was no fighting; those who fancied themselves revolutionaries had only ideas and dreams, no real strength.

The tigers tied and gagged us, and threw us into a cart, piled atop each other. My parents and the others who would have fought against the Tsar were taken a mile outside of town, pulled from the cart, and made to kneel. A tiger pulled me down as well, but another stayed him, brought me around to the front of the cart to stand with the steaming, panting horses while the cracks of gunfire rained around us. I am ashamed to admit that I cried, I clung to his leg and breathed in his gunpowder scent as the bodies fell. He whispered down to me in the cold night that my parents were wicked people, and that my life would be different, better, from this moment on.

I had no way of knowing that he was right, but I had nobody else in which to place my trust. I was six years old.

Chapter 7

Alexei stands on a barren rocky field. The wind is familiar and cold, like a family member he left behind in Samorodka. In Samorodka, though, wind comes from one direction, blowing down from the north or the east; now, whichever way he turns, it burrows into his ears and chills his nose. He turns, looking for features on the land, and sees nothing but rocks stretching out to the horizon in every direction.

He wraps his arms and tail around himself. The shirt and light pants he wears around Vidalia have never met a temperature below sixty (or fifteen, as he still thinks of it), and offer no protection from the slicing wind. This cold is as sharp and bitter as the January wind in which he had to stand for an hour as punishment for “dreaming” when he failed to bring enough fish home.

The landscape is the same in all directions, and he has turned more than a full circle when he spots the other figure. Where there had been only rocks there is now a tall fox facing away from him, wearing a blue military coat with a gold belt—not the kind from the heroic pictures on the wall of Alexei’s schoolhouse, but the kind that he has seen mostly in old movies and history books, knee-length, drawn tightly around a scrawny body. The coat’s red collar bears dark stains, the fabric is torn in patches, and the gold belt is spotted with rust-red. His tail, ragged and so dirty that the white tip appears grey, shows below the edge of the coat, and a sword hangs from the belt.

Hello
, Alexei calls, but the fox’s ears do not move and he does not answer. Alexei takes a step toward him and finds himself the same distance away, perhaps ten feet. He takes another step, and another, and still the fox remains ten feet away, immobile as a statue.
Hello?
Alexei raises his voice.
Niki? Nikolai?

At that, the fox’s ears swivel back, but still he does not turn. A rough, cracked voice makes its way to Alexei, speaking Siberian:
Leave me alone
.

But I need your help
, Alexei pleads.
I’ve nobody left
.

The winds swirl, bite his ears, and he feels the emptiness all around him. The fox’s ears flick.
Why,
he says,
do you come to me, then?

Perhaps, Alexei thinks, this is Nikolai before Sol knew him, before his years in Lutèce. But this fox feels older, and Alexei knows it is not Sol’s Niki, not any Niki. He stammers.
I…I know you…someone…helped a friend of mine.

Then you have friends. You have family
.

That last word rings hollowly, is caught and swirled by the wind and driven into Alexei’s ears. He folds them down.
My family
, he says,
my family cannot help me. And my best friend…

He sees again Sol’s expression, the flat ears and flatter eyes. The wind rips the words from his muzzle to die.

The fox before him stirs. The ragged tail twitches.
Go
, he says.

The wind keens. Alexei struggles forward and reaches out an arm, but the wind sears his eyes, and when he blinks, he is alone again.