Dreaming Anastasia (15 page)

Ethan nods his head. “It's possible. Until I know for sure how much Viktor is involved in everything that's just happened, I can't really say.”

“Anyway,” Tess says, “this Baba Yaga—she's supposed to live in that little cottage with the chicken legs, right? And you said the legs were so she could move her house from place to place. So how's Anne going to find her? I mean, even if Anne
is
descended from some magical dynasty, if Baba Yaga moves around all the time, how will she know where to look?”

Ethan rubs his jaw. “We're working on it,” he says, and gets up to rejoin the professor.

“Terrific,” Tess says as she gathers the remains of her sandwich and wrapper. She lowers her voice. “Are you okay?” she asks me. “I mean, really? God, Anne, this is all so crazy. And what's even crazier is that I'm starting to believe it along with you. I mean, things like this just don't happen—only they
are
happening.”

“I'm okay,” I say. “I'm just so tired.” All at once, I really was. “I'm going to close my eyes for a minute, okay? I think it will help me clear my head.”

“I can call Sarah,” Tess says. “We'll just say you have to go, and we'll meet her and…”

Tess continues talking, but the exhaustion washes over me, as thick as fog. I stretch out on the carpet and cradle my head in my arms. When the dream begins, I know it, but I can't open my eyes to stop it.

I'm dreaming that I'm Anastasia again, and it's like I've dreamed before. I'm her, inside her body, her mind, there in that basement with her family when the killing begins. I can feel her panic. My heart is beating as hers is—unbearably fast. Her thoughts are racing. In those moments of my dream, we become one. Her flashes of memory become my own, and I know what I'm seeing as though I am her. Playing with my dog. Edging away from Rasputin when he comes into the room. Holding my brother Alexei's hand. Worrying that he will get sick again. Looking at myself in a dressing-table mirror. Laughing with my three sisters.

And talking in the park to a man named Viktor. He's tall and thin, with an angular face and dark, dark eyes—so dark they're almost black. “It will work,” he says to me. He's speaking Russian, I think, but because I am not me, I understand him. “I promise you. You just need to be brave, like the girl in that story you love: Vasilisa. Be brave, and do this for your family—and they will live.”

“Are you sure, my brother?” I ask him.

“I promise you, Anastasia,” he says. “I promise. I give you my word.”

These are the thoughts that fly through my head as I dream of Anastasia. In that horrible basement, the killing continues.
You lied to me, brother,
I think, and I see Viktor in my head as I say it. Then, in the corner of the room, I see someone in a long, brown robe crouched out of the line of fire. I feel my heart surge a little. Viktor. He is here. He will do as he promised. It will all work as he said. But even as I think it, I know it can't be true. My father is already lying on the ground, blood pouring from his wounds. My sisters are dead as well. Surely he must know this. Why isn't he stopping it?

Now I look closer. It's not Viktor. It is someone else—not my brother who made me that promise, but some stranger with blue eyes who is muttering words and looking at me with tears in his eyes. And I know what's about to come next. I know she's coming for me. Baba Yaga. But nothing else is like Viktor said it would be. My family is dead. When the hands come down to pull me away, all I'm thinking is that I want to die too.

“Anne!” Tess is shaking me. “God, Anne, wake up! Please. Wake up!”

I open my eyes. Tess is bent over me, just inches from my face, her eyes really, really wide. Although I don't mention it, she's breathing gyro breath in my face, and let me say, it's pretty rank.

“You were crying,” Ethan says. I realize he's kneeling on the other side of me.

I reach up and touch my cheeks. They're wet with tears.

Then I shove Tess away and sit bolt upright as it all comes rushing back to me. “She knew him,” I say. “Anastasia. She knew Viktor. I was dreaming I was her again. She knew who he was.”

Ethan shrugs, even though I can see he looks relieved that I'm sitting up. “He probably wasn't a stranger to her. I know he went to the royal palace now and then. Nicholas—the tsar—was not unfamiliar with the workings of the Brotherhood. We existed to protect the royal family.”

“No, Ethan. I don't mean like that—not like she saw him around the palace or even got introduced to him and knew his name. She
knew
him—really knew him. At least, that's how I saw it. She kept calling him her brother, but it didn't feel like a title—not like when you use it and call him Brother Viktor. I could feel that she thought of him as an actual brother, like her brother Alexei, only not exactly the same. He'd promised her something. She was remembering how she talked to him. They were standing in a huge park, I think. ‘You just have to be brave,' he told her. ‘Like Vasilisa.' He said if she was brave, then she could save her family, and that's what she was thinking while she watched them die—that he'd promised her, and she'd agreed, and she knew Baba Yaga was coming for her. Only he'd lied. He'd lied, and you were there instead of Viktor, and everyone was dead.”

In that moment, it's like a whole bunch of things suddenly make sense to him in a way they just haven't before. Professor Olensky is at my other side now, glancing back and forth between me and Ethan and looking like he's about to jump out of his skin with excitement.

As for Tess, she just looks relieved that I'm conscious.

“You're very clear about this?” Ethan says then. “That Anastasia wasn't surprised? That she knew—at least in some way—what was about to happen to her?”

I nod. “Yeah. There was nothing uncertain about it. She knew. And she knew him. And when she realized it was you in the corner, she—well, that's when she started thinking that he'd lied to her. I mean, I know it's a dream, so I'm not sure if we can—”

“We must believe it,” the professor says. “We're dealing with magic and folklore here, so we must accept those parameters—let them mesh with our world and see what happens. Your dreams are part of it, so we have to take them as they are. In literature, you'd call it a suspension of disbelief. For example, we have to accept that in a fairy tale, animals can talk. For our purposes, it's really the same thing. We figure out the rules and accept them.”

“He sent me,” Ethan says, and I can see him going back there in his head. “Viktor knew the tsar, but he sent
me
that day. He told me he wasn't even positive the assassination would occur right then, but he'd heard rumors that the time was close, and he wanted me to be there. He didn't go himself. If he knew how crucial this was, why would he teach me the words? Why would he set up something this monumental and then not go himself?”

“So what then?” Tess stands up, then reaches out her hand and hauls me off the floor too. Ethan and the professor follow our example. “Did this Viktor guy have something to hide? I mean, why would he not want to be there? Maybe he just couldn't watch it happen. If he knew her like you said, maybe he just couldn't stand to be there. You guys were supposed to be protecting them, right? So if he knew most of them were going to die, maybe he just couldn't handle watching it.”

“But she kept thinking that he'd promised her she could save them—and that he'd broken his promise,” I say. “She was really clear on that. It wasn't just that it didn't work out, but that he'd lied to her.”

“Well, that's original.” Tess snorts. “A guy going back on his promise. Big deal. Men are bastards. Nothing new about that.” Her eyes go squinty again, and I'm pretty sure she's thinking about Neal.

“Oh,” the professor says. “Oh! I can't believe I didn't—oh!” He claps Tess on the back a couple of times. “Young lady, you're a genius, an absolute genius!” He's grinning hugely at her, and his eyes are lit up like two little candles.

“Because I said men are bastards? Present company excepted and all that, but is that like a surprise to you? Being that you're a guy, I figured you already knew.” Tess shrugs Olensky's hand away.

“Alex,” Ethan says. “What are you—? Oh!” Whatever it is that the professor has figured out, Ethan seems to be on the same wavelength. “Oh my God! It's the first thing that finally makes sense.”

“Not to me,” I say. “Want to clue us in?”

“Viktor was her brother,” Ethan says.

“Well, I told you she thought about him like that, kept calling him her—oh. I get it. I mean, I think I do. You mean like—”

“Like Tsar Nicholas had an illegitimate son,” Professor Olensky says. “Viktor. And Anastasia knew.”

“Whoa,” Tess says. “You mean
that
kind of bastard. This is finally getting really interesting.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But would it have been a secret all this time? Wouldn't other people have known?”

“Yes and no,” the professor says. “First of all, you have to remember that this was the late 1800s and early 1900s. No Internet. No instant communication. No cell phones snapping pictures and sending them around the world in the time it takes for you to press a button. And no media like we know today. This was tsarist Russia. No freedom of the press either, like here in America.”

“And the yes part?” I ask.

“The yes part,” Professor Olensky says, “is that the history books are filled with stories about Tsar Nicholas and his possible affairs—particularly because his father, the previous tsar, didn't want him to marry Alexandra. We know, for example, that Nicholas had a well-documented affair with a dancer from the royal ballet. But there have been rumors for years that there were other affairs, other women. It seems very possible that one of these other women was Viktor's mother.”

“Do you think Viktor knew? Who he was, I mean?”

Ethan blows out a breath. “Of course he knew. And he told Anastasia. It all makes sense. It explains what you saw in your dream and why she would have trusted him. Who knows? Maybe that's why they all trusted him. Maybe they went down there like lambs to the slaughter because of it.”

“I don't think so,” I say to him. “I know you were there and I wasn't, but every time I relive it—it's not like that, Ethan. It's only her. She's the only one who's looking for it to happen.”

Ethan shrugs. “Nicholas had to have known who Viktor was. He had four daughters before the tsarina finally gave birth to Alexei, to a son. If he had another boy out there, he'd have known it. But I don't see any way for us to find that out for sure—at least for now. Even if we go on the assumption that this is the truth—that Viktor was Anastasia's illegitimate half brother—it still doesn't tell us why he wants to stop us—why he wants to keep her trapped. Or why I was so blind to it all back then.”

“It's the Neal factor,” Tess says. “People tell you one thing, but they're really doing another. Not everyone is a good guy.”

Ethan rolls his eyes at that.

“Enough with Neal,” I tell Tess. “Seriously. Give it a rest.”

“It's relevant,” she says. “You can't deny it. Besides,” she eyeballs Ethan, “Anne says that you were a monk back then, right? So you wouldn't have been thinking about all that kind of stuff anyway, would you? Tsars fooling around and all that?”

“No,” Ethan says evenly. “I suppose not.”

We all ponder that for a minute. In the silence, Professor Olensky strolls back to his computer.

“So how does this all lead back to Anne?” Tess grabs up her purse from the chair where she'd tossed it, pulls out her lip gloss, and re-glosses her lips.

“I guess I could be related to any of you,” I say. “How many brothers were there, anyway?” I direct my question to Ethan. “Come to think of it, I could even be related to you somehow, couldn't I?”

“Yeah,” Tess adds, then dumps the lip gloss back in her purse. “You've been around a long time. Maybe you've got some love child out there you don't know about.”

Ethan scowls. I press my hand over Tess's mouth and then take it away all covered with peach-colored gloss. “Gross,” I tell her, and I'm not sure whether I mean the gloss or the love-child comment.

“You're not the only people to ask questions like that,” the professor says as he settles himself back in his chair and starts clicking the mouse again. “So when we research, we work systematically—cross off stories that aren't really plausible and work with what is. Like those stories that existed for years about the woman named Anna Anderson who claimed she was actually Anastasia. Some people believed. Others examined the evidence—eventually even DNA evidence—and declared she was a fake. The tale of Anastasia is so powerful, it seems to attract people and stories like a magnet.”

“Imagine if anyone knew all the stuff you guys are talking about,” Tess says. “You wonder if they'd believe you or think it was just too crazy.”

“You'd be surprised at what people are capable of accepting, whether it's true or not,” Olensky says. “For instance, there was a woman who contacted me a few years ago through one of my colleagues in Prague. Nadia Tauman was her name. She sent me—here let me show you.” He gestures for us to join him at the computer and brings up a document for us to see.

“It's a family tree she sent me. I've received dozens like this over the years, but this was one of the most intriguing, even if ultimately it was a dead end. Now, I suppose, we could insert Viktor's name into it, see if that took us anywhere different—although it's a time-consuming task and—well, look.”

Ethan, Tess, and I read the letter over the professor's shoulder. Nadia Tauman, it seemed, had helped her friend Lily give up Lily's newborn baby girl for adoption. By itself, that wouldn't be out of the ordinary—just sad, maybe, because Lily didn't want to give the baby away. But her husband had been gunned down in a jewelry-store robbery in Chicago, and she had no means of support to keep her baby. Nadia was claiming that there was more to the story. Her cousin in Prague had heard Olensky lecture about the Romanovs and given her his email, because according to Nadia, Lily was not just any ordinary young widowed mother. She claimed she was the great-granddaughter of the last tsar of Russia.