The Shopgirl's Prophecy (Beasts of Vegas Book 1) (22 page)

Connor coughed quietly into his hand, stalling. “Before he gutted me, the Destroyer said, ‘Are you the one keeping Anya from me?’” He caught the quiver in Ali’s bottom lip. Crap. “The Oracle.” How to explain Caitlyn’s drama? “She knew you, called you Anya, and then told me to stay away from you.”

Alina sat very still, her expression closed. He wished he knew what she was thinking. Because he might be able to reassure her. Just because stuff seemed messed up, there was always another move to make. So what if Olek knew her? Lots of people had read the Anya from Nadvirna prophecy. And who cared what the Oracle thought? She was a silly little girl with poor fashion sense.

Finally, Ali shifted in her seat, her gaze finding his. Her lower lip quivered, and he braced himself.

“Will you?” she asked.

Easy one. Connor nearly laughed aloud. Stay away from Ali? “I haven’t been able to yet.”

She covered her face with both hands, but she didn’t cry. “I wish I’d never come to this godforsaken country.”

“It’s not America’s fault you’re a danger magnet,” Roz said, but her heart wasn’t in the insult. She looked just as shocked as Ali.

Alina asked him, “Does he want to kill me?”

“We don’t know yet.” He gestured to the mess of papers spread across the table, though she still had her face hidden. “So far, he seems to want to take you alive.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re not dead.”

Unamused, she groaned, and he gave up trying to make her smile. “What will he do to me if he captures me?”

Connor was wondering the same thing. Because Olek didn’t keep political prisoners, never had, and he didn’t exactly follow the Geneva Convention guidelines when he encountered civilians. If he got a hold of Ali, he’d hurt her. For a moment, Connor’s vision blurred as raw fury swept through him. Never gonna happen. He’d die first.

“I’m not sure.”

“Come on!” She smacked her hands on the chair’s armrests. “You have to know something.”

“It has to do with the prophecy,” he said. She rolled her eyes at him, but he continued. “He called you Anya not Alina. He might see you as a bargaining chip of some kind.”

“Or?”

“Or,” Connor said, wishing he could spin this some other way. “He might think that if he kills you then the prophecy about his final battle is nullified.”

“But you said whatever Ilvane writes happens. If I’m Anya, then I stand with him. Not against him, with him.” She leaned forward, every ounce of her willing him to say anything but the truth. He wished he could lie to her.

“Look. He came after you himself. We’ve been hunting him for three months with zero success. Until you showed up. You’re important to him. But it’s not going to get as far as who stands where. I’m going to kill him before he even lays eyes on you.”

“I found something,” Roz exclaimed, holding up a homemade diary bound with string and glue. Connor dragged his attention off Ali. “This lady kept a record of all the weird stuff that went on in her village. Nadvirna.”

Chapter Sixteen

Connor leaned forward in his leather chair, gripping the armrests so tight they creaked. “Nadvirna?” he repeated, glaring at Roz. “Are you sure?”

She leaned a hip on a shelf stuffed with local atlases. “I’m sure.”

“Yeah. And?” Ali said.

“There’s a bunch of stuff. She wrote in ‘94 that shapeshifters were stealing from her garden at night.” Roz flipped several pages. “And in ‘97 a two-headed pup was born. After that, no women got pregnant. One of the men killed the dog. Seven boys were born the following year.”

“I’m not in the mood for fables,” Ali grouched, wilting in her seat.

Connor rounded the long library table and placed his hands on Ali’s narrow shoulders. She flinched, but he smiled down at her in a reassuring way. Blinking rapidly, she relented, and he pressed the pads of his thumbs into her spine. He could feel every fragile rib, every crushable vertebra.

Clasped at her waist, her fingers looked too small for fighting, her arms too thin to protect herself. He had to be more careful with her. One round to his brain, and he’d be light’s out long enough for anyone to swoop in and take her away.

Roz scowled in their direction, but got over it, and kept reading from the handmade journal. “The lady wrote that a dark-eyed demon stole Katya and her newborn child from their village. She left a grieving husband behind.”

“You’re not serious,” Ali said, but the venom had leeched from her voice in the same way the muscles under his hands released their tension.

Roz snapped pictures of the diary’s pages with her cell phone. “What was your mother’s name?”

“Katherine Kirstak Rusenko. And she was too busy dying during childbirth in Odessa to run away with a vampire.”

Connor paused in his massage and bent forward, gazing at her upside down. “As long as both Ilvane and Oleksander think you’re Anya, you won’t be safe. Is there anyone, anywhere, who knows about your family?”

Ali shook her head sadly. “There’s no one left. My parents are both gone. I don’t know any other relatives. My father was in charge of names and addresses.”

Roz released a torturous sigh of resignation. “Fine. We’ll keep looking.”

While Roz alternately clicked through sites and examined diary pages, Ali dozed in her chair, and Connor paced along a wall of bound, local biographies. He wasn’t hungry, but he was restless. He may never sit still again. Another side effect. He crossed the room, back and forth, back and forth, pausing only to grab a new sheaf of papers about Oleksander from the desk.

The vampire lord had more than one hole in his past. The public became aware of him when he and his three brothers infected their holy warriors twenty-five years earlier. Stories of their vicious attacks on innocent victims spread across the Ukraine, catching the interest of the international press. The nickname Four Sons went viral, and the infection became a global sensation. The fame must have gone to Olek’s head because he’d published a rambling, only somewhat coherent manifesto declaring him the Destroyer of Mankind.

The Four Sons attacked Prague with fifty minions, including Maksim Volk, but they were beaten back and shipped to the secret military installation where Connor had found them.

Fine. Good stuff. But nowhere did any of his biographers go into where Olek was born. Or when. How had he been infected? Was he born infected or had he been bitten by a vampiric squirrel? Or more frightening still, did he have a sire even older and more bloodthirsty than him?

How much blood did he need to drink? Had he always been a raging sociopath or only after he’d been infected? These were the questions Connor wanted answered, but they weren’t so easy to find.

Probably the most interesting thing about the Four Sons was when they rose, it opened a Pandora’s box of supernatural tendencies and mutations. Suddenly, there existed witches, shapeshifters, and seers. Over the years, more and more aberrations were born and discovered until paranormal creatures were present in every corner of the world. The Four Sons had thrown the entire natural order of human beings out of whack.

“Holy shit,” Roz exclaimed. “I found something.”

Ali jerked awake. “What? Is it bad?”

Connor tossed his pile of papers on the table and stood over Roz’s shoulder.

“I poked around in some government records. Before you were born, your dad lived with Katherine Rusenko in Nadvirna, Ukraine, but after you were born, he lived with Irina Kirstak in Ploska, Ukraine. Your name doesn’t pop up until you reach Britain.”

“Who is Irina Kirstak?” Ali asked. “And what happened to Katya’s missing baby?”

“Exactly. We need to find out.” Roz clicked onto a search engine and typed Irina’s name. A lot of hits, but only one or two had a chance of being their girl. Roz opened the first one, a genealogy website. “Says I have to offer personal information and pay a monthly fee.” She snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She quietly called her power, bringing with it a tiny, invisible charge in the atmosphere. Click-click, tap-tap-tap. “Okay,” she said, her magic fading. “Irina’s still alive. Her daughter’s deceased. Any guesses what her name was?”

He didn’t need to guess. He knew. “Katherine.”

“Bingo.”

Ali sat very still for several seconds, and then cleared her throat. “I have a grandmother?”

“Apparently.” Roz made notes on her phone.

“Where does she live?”

A few minutes of clicking through sites, and Roz triumphantly announced, “Boulder City, Nevada. Looks like,” she said, raising her eyebrows, “she moved out here to be close to her dead daughter’s in-laws.”

A huff of interest escaped Connor’s throat. There were answers, he could feel them, and they were close. “So, both sides of your family came out west after fleeing the Ukraine.”

“Not me or my dad.”

“Roz,” he said, “get Irina’s address. Let’s go see what she has to say about Ali and her parents.” Connor collected all of the materials from the table, stacked them neatly, and returned them to the file boxes. He patted his pockets. Wallet—check. Truck keys—check. .44 Mag tucked under his waistband—check. Good to go.

“She hasn’t tried to contact me.” Ali caught his eye and grimaced. “She may not be too welcoming.”

“Doesn’t matter.” He opened the door and gestured for the girls to proceed. “I can be very persuasive.”

#

An oasis in the desert, Boulder City seemed to Ali to spring up out of the sand, a zigzag pattern of tract homes broken by sidewalks and white picket fences.

They cruised past a strip mall and then the local high school. It was a quiet city, for such a large community. Roz turned the Ford into a neighborhood with identical homes, identical landscaping, identical sedans and mini-vans in identical driveways. Somewhere among so much conformity lived an old Ukrainian woman hiding from her past.

Her grandmother. The idea floored Ali. Her whole life she’d assumed she had none. Her dad claimed to be an only child. His parents were dead. And not once during all their conversations had he mentioned that her mother’s mother was still alive and living it up in rural Nevada. A grandmother who’d never called, written, or e-mailed. Ever.

How many secrets had her dad kept from her? Because she could have really used a grandmother growing up. Why hadn’t she written? Why hadn’t her father mentioned her? Deep down, under the pain of being ignored, sprouted a grain of hope. Maybe Grandma was like her. Maybe Ali wasn’t alone anymore.

Roz parked, and they marched up to a perfectly ordinary one-story, single-family home with a gray door and white shutters. At the bell, Ali hesitated. Roz re-checked her notes and then nodded.

Ali pushed the button once.

Someone shuffled around behind the door, and then a voice called out, “Go away. I don’t want any.”

“Irina?” Roz shouted through the closed door. “We’re here to talk about your granddaughter.”

The lock clicked, and the door opened. Roz spoke again, but the woman cut her off.

“Who are you?” Her gaze found Ali, and she stared for an absurdly long time, her expression slowly hardening with recognition. “What do you want?”

Connor stepped forward. “Information.”

“I have none.” With a last look at Ali, she reached for the doorknob, presumably to slam it in their faces. Not exactly a soft, warm granny from nursery rhymes.

He placed his hand against the door, and Ali knew an army couldn’t close it. “Your daughter’s not dead, is she?”

Ali startled, stumbling back a step. Where the hell had that come from? Not dead? She palmed the wall for support. He thought her mother was alive, and he hadn’t mentioned it? A head’s up would’ve been nice.

Irina narrowed her blue eyes at Connor. “Who are you?”

“She didn’t die in childbirth, did she?”

She shrugged. “Yes. And no.”

Hope flared. Her mother could be alive. She could be the Katya from the journal. She could be anyone, anywhere.
But alive
.

Ali closed her eyes, focusing on breathing normally. The constraints sealing her emotions inside slipped a notch. If she weren’t careful, she’d lose control. Too many heavy-duty feelings fought for supremacy within her—grief, fear, rage, and now hope. It was a wonder she didn’t split in four different pieces.

“Tell us what happened,” Connor prompted.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Where is she?”

“I haven’t seen her since the day that one was born.”

Ali opened her eyes and caught Irina staring at her again. “You know who I am?”

“You have her face.” For the first time, the woman’s voice registered a hint of remorse. It didn’t last long. “But her hair was red, not yellow.” She eyed Connor, and then Roz. “Leave me be. I don’t know anything.” She tried to close the door, but it didn’t budge an inch. “Go!”

“Two more questions, and then we’ll leave.”

“Fine,” she said, fuming, “but come inside before someone sees you.”

They stood awkwardly in the entryway. Irina didn’t offer them a seat or cookies or anything. She watched them, though, very carefully.

“First question,” she barked.

“What happened to your daughter?” Connor asked.

Irina stepped around him and spoke directly to Ali. “Is that what you came to ask me, Anya?” She said it with almost the same tone as Connor once had, like it was a dirty word. “Your mother was a whore.”

Emotions too numerous to name swamped Ali, and she leaned against the wall, struggling to reign herself in.

“She was having an affair with a demon the whole time she carried you inside her. And that day in Nadvirna, the bastard came for her. I saw it happen. She ran to him like a cat in heat.” She pointed an accusing finger at Ali’s chest, as if it were all her fault. “He infected her right there in front of us, and before anyone could do anything she whelped you in the grass.” Irina waved her hand in a wide arc. “And then you were gone. She took you away, but she left her husband, her village, me…for life with a monster.”

“No. That’s not true,” Ali hissed, sliding down the wall onto her bottom. Not true. Not true. Her breath came hard and fast. Not true.

“Katherine and the vampire took Ali with them?” Connor confirmed, sounding aghast.