Haunted (2 page)

Ethan

The subway platform at 79th Street is almost deserted as I step off the train. I walk briskly up the stairs and head east, stopping only to pull out a cigarette, turn my back to the breeze, and cup my hand as I light it. I take a deep drag and blow out the smoke. It hovers in the humid New York summer air like a misty veil. One of the neighborhood bars is still open. I contemplate a beer. Or better still, a vodka. But I head to the hotel instead, nod at the doorman as I step inside and wait for the elevator. If I drink tonight, I’ll drink alone.

It’s taken me too long to come back to the States. Too long to come back to Anne.

In the room, I pour two fingers of Stoli in a glass, flip through the channels on the television, find nothing to distract me, and sip some more. The liquor takes the edge off. But only a little.

Do you need me to come back?
I’d asked her a few weeks ago. There’d been a long pause on her end of the line. And when she’d told me no, I knew she was lying. I’m not linked with her the way I used to be. The magic I’d both loved and hated has almost left me. No need for it now that Anastasia is both freed and dead—which was not the outcome I’d imagined back when I was really eighteen.

But still, when I’m quiet, when I concentrate, I can sense Anne’s emotions. Something’s happening again, and she’s not telling me what it is. I should push her for a response. In my mind, I do. I imagine hopping a plane, returning to Chicago, and figuring out the rest of this with her. So why have I waited? Why did it take me so many months to arrange to come back? Why, even now, have I made it across the Atlantic only to New York—close but not close enough?

Even the Stoli doesn’t make the truth any easier. But here it is. It’s not a simple thing to accept your life back from someone. Anne Michaelson—she of the auburn hair, brown eyes, and prima ballerina posture—gave me just that. I know she mourns for the girl she couldn’t save. But Anastasia was beyond saving. I—it turns out—was not. I’m starting over at eighteen. For better or for worse, that’s the way it is. The past is not erased, but the future’s a lot different.

But how do you find equal ground to love someone when this is how you’ve begun? How do I get beyond that debt? It’s selfish and small and foolishly male. And it’s the truth. How can I know for sure that anything we feel for one another is real? That it’s not colored by the past? By peril and danger and the loss of the girl we both tried to save? Isn’t it better to just let Anne be? She has no tie to me now. Our lives are no longer linked. Just because I get to start over doesn’t mean that she has to start over with me.

But what I think and what I feel are two different things.

I drain the glass. Pour another. And try once again to sort it all out.

Anne

Aren’t you going to open it?” Tess waggles the envelope with the Kennedy High School return address and my name peering out of the little see-through waxy strip in the lower right-hand corner. She had snagged it from the pile of mail on my kitchen counter when she came to pick me up—something I’ve only just now discovered.

“No.” I fish a Diet Coke out of the cooler settled between our two bright yellow lounge chairs, unscrew the cap, and take a swig. On the other side of our neighborhood pool, a girl who looks about thirteen adjusts the bottom of her lime green bikini and looks up hopefully at Ben Logan, the lifeguard. She’s smacking her gum so loudly I can hear it even from over here.

“But you have to know.” Tess pokes the envelope at me again in her persistent Tess way.
I’ll take it from her,
I think.
Be like everybody else who just ended junior year and open the letter so I can find out my grades.
Of course, I could have checked online too. But I didn’t, and Tess knows it—just like she knows the things that happened last October.

“I don’t have to do anything.” I swallow some more Diet Coke. “They’re
my
grades. I don’t have to look at them if I don’t want to.”

“Then
I’ll
open it.”

I grab the envelope from her hand. And lacking any better plan, fling it into the air. It floats around for a few seconds, then the breeze catches it. Just like that, it’s floating in the shallow end. I watch as the water soaks it.

“You’re crazy.” Tess shifts in her lounge chair and shoves her Oakleys back on her long blond hair. For a second, I think she’s going to dive in after my report card.

“Leave it.”

She gives me her squinty-eyed Tess look. But she doesn’t get up. She just blows out a
humph
ing sound, flops back on her chair, and drops the Oakleys over her eyes.

In the shallow end, the woman in the frothy, lilac-colored gown gliding across the bottom of the pool darts up, grabs the soaking envelope in one very pale hand, and takes it back down with her. She smiles at me, and I think she even winks, except it’s hard to tell, what with her being underwater and all. She kicks gracefully a couple of times and heads for the deep end, winding around two little boys playing Marco Polo. If they notice her, they don’t show it. Neither does Tess.

Lifeguard Ben—who also happens to be my boyfriend and is thus sensibly ignoring the flirtations of the girl in the lime green bikini—doesn’t see her either. Although unlike Tess, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t believe me if I told him.

Lime bikini girl, having failed to get Ben’s attention, climbs the diving board steps, walks to the edge of the board, then executes a double flip and cuts neatly into the water. She barely misses a head-on collision with the woman in lilac, who’s now settled on the bottom of the pool, her dress fanning out in waves around her as she opens my envelope, slides out the paper inside, and nods her head over my semester grades. She grins at me, baring her teeth in a way that’s even more unsettling than any of the rest of it. This time only a fish tail peeks out from the tattered hem of her lilac dress.

Tess sighs. “Spill.”

She’s said that to me before. Back last fall, when Ethan and a not-so-dead Russian princess named Anastasia and a crazy witch named Baba Yaga turned my pretty ordinary world into a crazy mess.

Tess was there when it all happened. When I discovered that I had power. And a destiny. And a really nutty great-great-whatever-grandfather named Viktor who also happened to be the illegitimate son of Tsar Nicholas and had found a way to live forever. He’d recruited Ethan to his mystical Brotherhood and convinced him that they were saving the Romanov family. But after he had used ancient magic to compel Baba Yaga to save and hold Anastasia, the only one Viktor was really interested in helping was himself: eternal life for the Brotherhood guys as long as Anastasia remained in the witch’s forest. Only Viktor never counted on Ethan finding me, the girl the prophecies said would be able to free Anastasia.

Somehow after all of that, school didn’t quite do it for me.

“Coach Wicker’s world history final,” I explain to Tess. “I couldn’t answer the essay.”

“Oh?”

“Let me quote.” In the deep end, the woman perusing my grades shakes her head. If I’m not mistaken, she even wags one long, pale finger at me. “Discuss the series of events that led to the assassination of the Romanov family in 1918.”

“I see your point. But weren’t there other choices? I helped Neal study for that one.” Neal Patterson is Tess’s boyfriend—the same Neal she’s broken things off with two different times now. Tess is persistent in every area of her life. “He said there were two other questions to pick from. You didn’t have to answer that one.”

I shrug. She’s right. I didn’t have to answer it. I could have answered the question about the downfall of the Roman Empire instead. But by then, everything had sort of dribbled out of my brain.

In the deep end, the woman holding what is most likely my failing grade on the world history final—disappears.

I flick my gaze over to Ben, sitting in all his lifeguardy goodness on the stand, his red life preserver board slung over his shoulders. This is a new thing, Ben and me. About two months new, to be exact. He’s smart and sweet and on the cute side of handsome. Sandy blond hair that’s cut short but not buzzed, brown eyes a little darker than mine. He just graduated a few weeks ago and is headed to U of I in the fall to major in economics: Ben Logan, who’s eighteen years old for his first time. Who, unlike a certain mysterious Russian, isn’t actually closer to one hundred. And who has never been part of a mystical Russian Brotherhood that was supposed to protect the Romanovs. Ben has never been whammied by ancient magic to stay young and hot-looking until I finish his mission for him, rescue Anastasia and let him become mortal again and start over from where he’d stopped. Tess has both questioned and applauded my motives for going out with Ben. As she so delicately put it,
You know, if you’d only give in and hook up with water stud instead of moping about old Russian blue-eyes, then maybe you’d be fun again. Did you ever think about that? He’s just what you need. Fun. Sexy. And seriously normal.

Most days, I think she’s right. Like right now, when Ben glances back at me—just me—even though he’s supposed to be scanning the pool to make sure everyone’s safe. He smiles his sweet Ben smile, and I smile back and feel all warm and tingly and think about what a fine kisser he is. And then I feel guilty—the kind of guilty a girl feels when she knows that a guy likes her way more than she likes him. Not that I don’t like Ben. I do. But the liking is diminished by the knowledge that I’m using him because he makes me feel normal. And the more the dreams continue and strange aqua women in lilac stalk me in the neighborhood pool, the more attracted to Ben I feel…which is followed by more guilt.

Ben gestures with his shoulder toward the kiddy pool area. One of the other guards has called in sick today, so the kiddy pool with its frog slide is currently closed. Most of the little kids prefer the spacious shallow end of the main pool anyway. I glance at the clock on the storage shed wall by the Coke machine. It’s almost Ben’s break time.

“Gonna meet Ben by the frog slide.” I slide the bottle of Diet Coke back in the cooler and hoist myself off the lounge chair. The pavement feels warm under my feet. But my arms are prickled with goose bumps even though it’s in the low eighties and fairly humid. It’s mid-June, and even Chicago heats up—at least occasionally—by this point in the summer.

Tess lifts her Oakleys briefly. “Now that’s the spirit. You and lover boy go wade in the baby pool for a while. See if that perks you up. Maybe you can let him give you a little mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or something.”

Sometimes, ignoring Tess is the only solution. So I do just that as I cross the hot pavement to the kiddy pool and wait for Ben on a bench in the shade. The huge frog slide—kids climb up the back side of the frog and zip out of its mouth—blocks my view of the rest of the Aqua Creek complex. I scan the empty baby pool—no woman in lilac. Maybe she didn’t notice me leave my lounge chair. Maybe she just prefers deeper waters. Relieved, I close my eyes.

“Hey, Sleeping Beauty.” Ben ruffles my hair affectionately, then flops down on the bench next to me. His skin smells of suntan lotion, sweat, and chlorine—like a personal embodiment of summer. He’s wearing his navy lifeguard board shorts, flip-flops, and basically nothing else. It’s a good look on him. He leans in and kisses me lightly on the mouth. Ben’s not big on public displays of affection—at least while he’s working.

“Hey.”

He kisses me again, this time on the tip of my nose, then drapes one arm over my shoulders and pulls me close. I rest my head in the crook of his arm, feel packed, toned muscle against my cheek. His thumb rubs over my collarbone.

I wonder, not for the first time, what Ben would say if I told him how less-than-normal I really was. Would he still want to take me for pita and greasy French fries at the Wrap Hut or snuggle up next to me behind the frog slide if I told him that I know how to put a warding spell around someone’s house? Or that Ethan and I used a magic lacquer box to enter Baba Yaga’s forest? Or that a persistent mermaid in a lilac dress keeps swimming in my general proximity?

How about if I told him that I was there when Ethan’s friend, Professor Olensky, was murdered last fall because he tried to help us rescue Anastasia? Or that it was my own crazy ancestor, Viktor, that killed him? Would he still want to go bowling later?

Ben purses his lips, which I’ve learned is his serious look. “You trying to lose weight or something? Because you don’t need to, you know,” he says and pokes a finger gently into my side. “Do you know I can feel all your ribs?”

I overlook the rib comment—mostly because it’s true. I
am
thinner these days, but it’s hard to eat when you’re haunted by a persistent mermaid. And other things.

“I’m off at four, remember,” Ben says after a few beats. “You’re working today too, right? We’ll do something after.”

This is another part of why I’m with Ben. So many guys like to play the whole unavailable game. It’s one of Tess’s biggest issues with Neal. He pretends he doesn’t know her schedule, or he blows her off to go out boozing with his buddies and tells her that she’s making a big deal out of things when she reminds him that they had plans. But Ben’s not like that. He listens when I talk and shows up when he says he will and even calls me before he goes to sleep just to say good night.

“After is good. But it’ll be a little longer than that. Mrs. Benson has me scheduled from three until we close at eight.”

Mrs. Benson is Amelia Benson, owner of the Jewel Box antique and estate jewelry shop, where I’m a part-time salesgirl for the summer. It’s the shop that my mother helps manage—the same one that got pulverized last fall during the whole disastrous Anastasia rescue effort and has now been reroofed and restocked. Not that anyone seems to understand that’s what happened, of course, or that a witch called Baba Yaga caused the destruction. People’s memories seem pretty selective these days.

“I’ll meet you at Java Joe’s a little after eight,” I suggest. “You can buy me something with whipped cream.” The whipped cream reference is my feeble attempt at making light of the weight thing.

“Hmm.” Ben arches an eyebrow and smiles his cute smile. I’m sensing that the whipped cream reference has sent his boy brain to more interesting places than just fattening me up.

“I’m thinking venti mocha latte, Ben. Not whatever you’re thinking.”

Ben looks mildly disappointed. Back at the main pool, someone blows the safety break whistle. Ben unwraps himself from me.

“Gotta run, babe,” he says. “Duty calls. Have to do a pH check before the kids all crash back into the water.”

He’s all business then, striding away. I start to follow him, only some mom in a black suit with one of those skirts that’s probably supposed to hide her thighs but doesn’t steps in his path. She starts a mild rant about
why, why, why are there no peanut butter crackers in the snack machine
because that’s her son’s favorite. Safer to hide on my little bench behind the slide.

Only it’s not.

In front of me in the kiddy pool, the woman in the lilac gown slips down the mouth of the green frog slide and settles herself gracefully in its spacious lower jaw.

My heart goes thump. We stare at each other for a few beats. Me and my own personal mermaid, eyeball to eyeball. That’s what she is, by the way. Not that I understood, at first. But it’s amazing what I’ve learned in the wee hours when I can’t fall back asleep after yet another crazy dream. Eventually, it was easier to just stay awake, fire up the laptop, and figure out what was stalking me. And so I did.

Rusalka
. Russian mermaid. We haven’t ever spoken, so I don’t know if she’s actually Russian—but given who I am and what I’ve seen, it’s not that much of a stretch. Rusalka. A formerly human girl who somehow died tragically. Or got betrayed by the man she loved and
then
died tragically. Or whatever, blah, blah, blah, and then died tragically.

Emphasis on the
tragic
. And the dying.

According to every website I went to, she’s supposed to be haunting whatever body of water is handy near wherever it is she died. Only right now, I think she just has to haunt
me
.

“I know what you are,” I say quietly. I’m pretty sure that I’m the only one who sees her right now, but no sense gathering a crowd. My life is messy enough without everyone at the Aqua Creek Water Complex, including Ben and Tess, thinking that I talk to myself.

My mermaid smiles and runs a thin hand through her long, dark, wet hair. Shakes her head. Droplets of water fly around her, little wet sparkles in the patches of sunlight sneaking through the fabric canopy overhead. “Are you so sure you understand what I am?”

“Yeah. But you need to swim around someone else. Whatever it is you think you want from me, I’m not your girl.”