The Siren's Dance (22 page)

“But if he’s a
zmora
, he hasn’t aged any more than you have in all these years.” Clues fitted themselves together in Sergey’s mind. Alexei? Was that strutting prick his father? “Did you get a good look at the man at the ballet studio?”

“Good enough. I saw him hold the door for you. Not Demyan. But…” She squeezed her eyes shut as if she were picturing the man. “He does resemble him somewhat. About as much as you do.”

Great. A demonic and jealous half-brother. Good thing he’d already given up his hopes for a happy family reunion.

“For all those years I was trapped at the river, I feared he would die before I found him. It seems that worry was wasted.” The wind kicked up around them, but wrapped in her arms, Sergey was in the safest of places--the eye of the storm.

“I think the
vila
still wants her vengeance in a hurry.”

“Yes. But how do you kill an immortal
zmora
?”

Sergey thought back to Oksana’s arsenal. Knives, a pistol, a crucifix, herbs. “I think we need to ask my mother.”

“Yes. I’d like to meet her. But first…” She bent to kiss him, and no trace of shyness or hesitation lingered. She parted her lips, slid her tongue between his, and explored his mouth. The muscles around his heart loosened, the soft mattress cradled him, and he had a new appreciation for why she liked gravity so much.

She reached behind her to where his cock lay flaccid against his thigh. “Oh. Is it too soon to do it again?”

Under normal circumstances, probably not, but finding out he was an incubus was the biggest turn off in the history of sex. He wasn’t sure he wanted his dick to work ever again.

She slid off him and sat at his side, stroking the soft organ, her gaze volleying between his face and his groin. “It’s so different now,” she said, like she’d never seen one before.

An out-of-character ring of innocence sounded in her voice. What had she said about not having had a hundred lovers? He studied her face. In profile, her nose and chin were a little sharp, not an ideal of beauty, but somehow that made her even more appealing.

She tugged on his scrotum, rolled his balls between her fingers, slid his foreskin up and down the soft length of him. His cock did not respond, but she didn’t seem to take offense, as if she had no expectation the thing should be standing straight up under her sweet scrutiny.

He glanced at the bed and those white sheets, which had brought her so much pleasure. A medallion of blood stained the linen where she’d laid.

Hell. She’d been a virgin, had given herself to him for her very first time. And he was a goddamn
zmora
. He shuddered, ashamed he had taken such a precious gift, no matter how perfect it had been in the moment. He was a monster, and he had no right to a woman like her.

Anya wore another of the outfits Sonya had sent. A smart gray wool pencil skirt, ivory blouse, and blazer. This time, she chose the most beautiful alligator-skin black pumps, exactly like a pair Anya had once admired in one of Sonya’s contraband
Vogue
magazines. Clearly, her sister had not forgotten them.

Anya had never been able to wear shoes like these when she danced--they were torture on her arches. But Sergey wasn’t going to make her run the Potemkin stairs, so she risked them. When she slid her feet into the supple leather, the kindness of her sister’s gift wrapped her in a feeling almost as pleasant as Sergey’s arms.

With him to hold, and her sister alive, a second chance at life held more than a little appeal. Yet Jerisavlja had been clear. Life among the
vilas
or a peaceful afterlife was the best she could hope for. Saying good-bye to Sergey and Sonya would be like dying all over again, and it was inevitable.

Resigned, she slung her purse with the slipper onto her shoulder. When Sergey opened the door to the room, a bellhop stood just outside carrying an enormous flower arrangement. Fern leaves spilled out of a bronze urn, and at the center, an almost luminous golden blossom turning red at the edges of its petals.

“A delivery for Miss Truss,” said the bellhop.

Foreboding slithered over her skin, stirring up a memory.

It was midsummer when they arrived in Odessa, Kupula Night. While the citizens of the city celebrated by lighting festive bonfires, Anya practiced diligently in the studio. She fell short on a jump and bruised her knee badly, and afterward he was so full of praise for her.

Then he vanished into the basement before returning to bring her the bloom, its stem surrounded by leaves and tied with ribbon. “A fern flower for you.”

Everyone knew the tradition of couples traipsing into the forest on Kupula night to find the fern flower. The girls wore garlands on their heads and if, when they came out, their men wore the flower wreath, the couple had become engaged in the woods. Not that anyone ever actually found the magical blossom said to bestow luck and fertility on the one who could see it, but plenty of couples used the excuse to seek out a dark, isolated spot in the woods.

“There’s no such thing as a fern flower,” she said.

“Oh, but there is, fortunate Anya. And I have chosen you to receive it.”

It was as good as a marriage proposal, and she took it as one.

“Let me see the card,” Sergey demanded.

Her name was printed on the envelope in a familiar and menacing looping script. Sergey frowned at it, then handed it to her. The ivory card slid out easily.

Darling Anya,

Is it really you wandering the streets of Odessa with the dashing young Yuchenko? I thought you dead, but I should have known you were too stubborn to give up so easily. You remain so youthful and beautiful. I thrill to think of what this means for our future.

Come to me. You know the place.

S.D.

She shivered, Sergey’s voice hauling her from the memory.

“Let me see.”

She passed him the card.

Sergey’s eyes widened. “Damn it. He knows our every move.”

“And he’s making plans.” The thought chilled her.

Sergey kneaded the back of his neck. “I don’t want to lead him to my mom. Guess I’ll have to do some sneaky driving.”

Getting in the car made skin-to-skin contact tricky. Anya had to climb through the driver’s side. Once in, they couldn’t exactly hold hands as he put a key in the ignition and lowered the parking brake. He rolled up his sleeve, and she rested her hand on his forearm, tracing the ridges of muscle and playing her fingers in the fine straight hairs there. Stas had never let her touch him like this, another reminder of how different they were.

As Sergey drove, she tried to listen to the torrent of anecdotes and random associations that he made. Now that he knew about Demyan, he could find endless evidence from his upbringing to support the hypothesis that he was some sort of demon. But her thoughts repeated Stas’s words on the note.
I thrill to think of what this means for our future.

He’d rejected her. Why would he pretend to want her now? What could he be planning?

“I should have known,” Sergey ground out. “I’m a cop. I’m paid to figure shit out.”

Self-criticism was a web Anya had been caught in many times, and it pained her to hear it in her golden boy’s mouth. “Come on. You didn’t even believe in ghosts until you met me. How could you have possibly assembled those random bits of data into this scenario?”

“I should have trusted my mother.”

She gave his arm a squeeze. “You were a kid with a mom too sick to take care of you, bearing all the burdens of your family. You needed the support of the adults around you, and they told you she was crazy, so you believed them.”

“Yeah, but she’s my mom. She loved me, raised me in spite of…”

Anya cringed to think how he might be completing that sentence in his mind.

He cleared his throat. “She protected me from the truth.”

“She also raised you to be a fine man, even though Demyan rattled her brain.” If Anya hadn’t died and become a
vila
, she might never have found the strength to go on after what he’d done to her. “She must be incredibly courageous.”

He glanced at Anya and then back at the road, the veins and tendons of his hands straining against his skin as he gripped the wheel. “I always thought she was weak.”

She held his arm more firmly. “But now you know otherwise, and you can tell her.”

“Yeah.” He pulled into the parking lot of a picturesque building of ivory stucco roofed with terra cotta tile.

“Wow. This looks like a beach resort. No wonder you’re willing to kiss up to Lisko.”

“I don’t--” He glanced at her, saw her smile, and laughed. When the moment passed, he kept looking at her, an odd expression on his face.

Her heart got all fluttery, and she grinned back. Whatever that feeling was, she was almost certain no one had ever felt it while gazing at her before. It was enough to make a girl feel all tingly--better than how she’d felt after those orgasms, plus the buzz from receiving a standing ovation.

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?”