The Siren's Dance. Amber Belldene

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СКАЧАТЬ gaunt, aged man looked straight at Anya. “I’ll be damned. She is there.”

      Anya hovered, motionless and astonished. He could see her. Besides her fellow vilas, this man was the first to set eyes on her since she’d died.

      Nothing about their arrival here made a drop of sense. How could Sonya be alive, and why was this man, of all the strangers who’d passed by in all her years here, able to see Anya?

      Behind a cloudy veil of age and pain, his sharp eyes held her fast. In a rush of recognition, the answer came. She’d seen those steely gray irises before, on the other side of a gun aimed at her. He’d chased her into the river, called out to her to stop running, begged her not to jump. And now, he could see her--this man who’d caused her death and been an accomplice to Sonya, Mama, and Papa’s murders.

      Anger poured off Anya, raising up a hot gust of air over the water, even though the autumn morning was brisk. Summoning the wind ranked among the best perks of being a vila, one of the few she was able to enjoy.

      The third visitor was a sturdy man who took lookalike-Sonya’s hand. Thanks to Anya’s gale, the woman got a mouthful of hair and raked it off her face. “What’s she saying?”

      If she really was Anya’s sister, what was she doing here with one of the men who’d murdered them? And why hadn’t she aged since their deaths half a century ago? Confusion kept her fluttering hope just out of her reach, and far too risky to boot. A girl who got her hopes up was asking to be hurt. But this woman looked so very much like Sonya…

      “She’s not talking, just…glaring at me.” His Adam’s apple bobbed with a forceful swallow. “Miss Truss, I’ve come to beg your forgiveness.”

      He had to be joking. Her parents’ screams were still fresh in her mind. “You can go straight to hell.”

      He blanched, nodding. With the help of a silver-tipped cane, he took a hobbling step closer. “It’s what I deserve, and will likely come to pass any day now. But you should know, if you forgive me, you’ll live again.”

      “How convenient for you,” she replied, and immediately wished she could take it back. He could see her, which meant he could help her after all. Snide comments had never been a good negotiating tactic with her parents, and yet they’d always slid so easily from her mouth. A second on the lips, a lifetime doing extra chores.

      “You don’t believe me, even after seeing Sonya?”

      Unseeing, the woman took her cue from the old man and stared in Anya’s general direction. “Anushka, it’s me, Sonyusha.”

      The familiar forms of their names prodded inside Anya’s incorporeal self. If she’d still had a heart, it might have felt a bit squeezed. “Sonya is dead,” she told the emotions stirring inside her.

      But instead of the feelings, the old man answered. “Not anymore. And you don’t have to be either.”

      Another impossibility. Anya knew her options, and life was not one of them. Still, this man was her ticket to achieving the best possible outcome--freedom.

      She strove for a compliant tone. “All right, I will consider forgiving you, but first, you must help me.”

      “I’ll do anything.”

      “Take me to Stas Demyan.”

      The old man turned back to the couple. “She wants to see someone named Stas Demyan.”

      So-called Sonya smacked her forehead, still looking in Anya’s direction with an unfocused gaze. “No. She doesn’t. Not really.”

      The woman’s earnest expression was too much. Her sister had always been just as naively sincere. And that you-don’t-really-mean-it was classic Sonya. Funny how easy it had been to forget all that bossy older sister stuff when Anya was guiltily mourning her. Because this woman was most certainly her murdered sister, alive again.

      The dam of emotions Anya was trying to shore up cracked. She sniffed, as if her nose could actually run, and her eyes could truly shed tears. Sonya lived. Anya had a million questions for her sister, and she would ask them all if the old man would let her. But first came the matter of her freedom. “I want Demyan.”

      He repeated the message with the shake of his head.

      “Stas Demyan, she said?” The younger man scratched his hard-lined jaw, a crease deepening between his black brows. His pensive expression surfaced a strong family resemblance to the sickly fellow.

      “Just let the past go, come home with us,” Sonya said. “You only have to forgive Gregor right now, and you can live again, like me.”

      Her sister’s dismissal only heightened Anya’s determination. No one in her family had understood what she’d suffered, what Stas had done to her.

      And what was this nonsense about living again? Jerisavlja, queen of the wind nymphs, had been clear that the best Anya could hope for was peace in the afterlife. Second best, and more likely, she might gain her freedom from the ballet shoe that shackled her alone on the riverbank. Vilas did not come back to life.

      “No forgiveness until I see Stas.” He was the key to her freedom.

      “She insists, Sonya, and so we will comply.” Gregor spoke like a perfect gentleman, instead of the man who’d helped to murder her family.

      The younger man shrugged and pulled a small rectangular box from his pocket. “I’ll call Yuchenko. He can unearth anybody. And I’ve got a feeling this case will interest him.”

      “Oh, Anushka, I miss you,” Sonya said.

      Sobs, dry and silent, shook Anya. She’d missed her sister too, every day since her death, even if Sonya was an insufferable goody-two-shoes. Thank God she couldn’t see Anya’s tearful display.

      * * * *

      Junior Inspector Sergey Yuchenko of the Kiev politsiya unscrewed the cap on his bottle of wheatgrass juice and shot the whole thing in one bitter glug.

      Stas Demyan.

      Sergey had taken the call from Dmitri Lisko more than two hours ago, and still his blood pounded in his ears. Out the window of the police station, the Kiev skyline looked as crisp as after a rainstorm, like his eyes had gone into hyper-focus.

      Demyan was the name his mother muttered in the throes of her most frightening delusions but refused to speak aloud if she was in her right mind. He’d pressed her during those hallucinations, and every single time she’d said the same thing--Stas Demyan was his father.

      It sounded like a common enough name. If he hadn’t already searched for it in every database he had access to, he might believe it was a coincidence. But he’d turned up zilch on the man, aside from one stint at the National Ballet before Sergey’s ballerina mother was even born.

      At the desk opposite him, his partner, Pavel, glanced up and cringed at Sergey’s bottle of bright green liquid. “God, how do you drink that stuff? It looks like something oozing out of the ruins of Chernobyl.”

      Sergey took a lot of shit from his fellow cops for his clean living--no coffee, no hard drinking, no smoking. But he was a СКАЧАТЬ