Chapter 28
We buried Mariya on one of the hottest days of the year, under the beating sun. Her family gathered on the far side of the grave, while I stood with my comrades from the Guards, my adopted father Vasily, and the nurse I had hired to tend to my son.
Mariya’s family panted, even sheltered under their white parasols, their russet fur darkened almost to brown in the shade they created. We Guards, more disciplined, kept our muzzles shut and suffered the heat, knowing the limit of our tolerance. There was much weeping on their side of the grave; on ours, only the nurse wept, her large black ears flat against her head, tears staining her fur. Not even my one-week-old son cried. Not once, the whole day he rested in her arms.
I looked over to make sure he had not passed out from the heat, but even though his ears were perked and his eyes precociously open, he could not possibly have known what was transpiring. For all he knew, the nurse using the corner of his blanket to wipe her eyes was his mother, and we were at the funeral of a distant relative. His eyes, the clear blue of the sky, took everything in without reaction.
After the service, only Mariya’s sister came to talk to me and tell me how sorry she was. Mariya’s mother, her aunts, her uncles and cousins, all stayed clustered in a tight group, anger the only emotion they showed me when they looked at me at all. As if there were more I could have done, as if I had not had a doctor standing by her side throughout. Mariya’s sister said they were merely grieved, that they did not understand. I said that I did not care whether they understood. They had already grown accustomed to living without her, while that long and unwelcome task stretched ahead of me still.
Barely were the funeral clothes pressed and folded before I had to don them once again. Where Mariya’s funeral had been a small, personal affair, the passing of Tsar Alexander II brought most of Moskva and a good portion of the populace of Petrograd, who made the journey to stand in the ceremony. The Semenovsky Guards presented arms second, after the Preobrazhensky regiment. There were speeches and wailing—again, not from the guards. Alexander III, who would be inaugurated later that year, spoke in his loud, forceful voice about continuing his father’s work and keeping Siberia whole. The Tsarevich Nicholas stood at his side, like a reed beside an oak tree.
Nicholas came to express his condolences to me as well. I told him I had named my son Nikolai for him, and he beamed and said that he hoped my son would prosper in his service. He said he would like nothing better than to see my son in the Guards uniform, joining me in protecting our native land.
At the time, that seemed the only brightness in my future.
*
The time of Alexander III began with promise. The Tsarevich returned to the palace of Petrograd, his time in the Guards over. Now that he was next in line for the throne, he would have to learn affairs of state, visit foreign nations, and so on. I devoted my life to the Guard, knowing that someday I would be called upon to protect him.
For the first two years of his life, I left my son in the care of his nurse. He grew strong and healthy, worthy of his father. I would say that those were good years, but they seemed to pass by in a blur. I watched Nikolai crawl, saw him notice his tail for the first time, watched him stand and then talk, and his first word was “milyenkiy” (darling), something his nurse said of him all the time, though he could not say more than “mili.” It was clear what he meant, though, because he pointed to himself.
I rose to third in command of the Guards. Vasily showed some pride, though always with the expectation that I would rise higher. Prior to Nikolai’s birth, he expressed this through moderation of his compliments: that is not bad, he would say. It is what I would expect. After Nikolai’s birth, he greeted news of my promotion with mild congratulations and a wish that Nikolai would someday rise to the heights that I could not. As though my career were already on its decline, as though I had nowhere left to go but to live through my son. He insinuated that Mariya’s death had changed me, that I was lost in grieving and dreaming of what might have been. I brooded over these remarks when we parted company, and perhaps I should have been more careful around my son, or left him at home—but I wanted him to know his grandfather, and I wanted Vasily to be proud of Nikolai.
He never got to see my son’s life, nor even his third birthday. My father had always imagined his death would come in battle, but we do not control the manner of our passing. He complained of chest pains one night in fall, retired early to his bed, and never rose from it again.
Nikolai, ever precocious, understood that the funeral service had something to do with Vasily, but he did not yet understand death. The nurse had to take him aside several times to answer his questions, spoken so loudly that all of us standing at attention in the Guard could hear him. Where is he? he wanted to know. Why is he not here?
Eventually, at the conclusion of the service, the nurse made him understand that Vasily was in the ground, in the box, and Nikolai ran to the edge of the grave and stared at the box, his eyes wide with wonder. Why does he not come out? he asked, turning to me. Is he playing?
The nurse pulled him back, strewing apologies before her. I had thought my son would miss Vasily, and it was pleasant to see it so, not because Vasily’s death was causing him sadness, but because he might be of an age where he would remember his adopted grandfather.
So I thought, until the conclusion of a speech by the Grand-Duke Demenok, the commander of the Preobrazhensky regiment, praising Vasily and his service. I had not been called upon to speak, but the Grand-Duke knew my story and signaled down for the commander of the Semenovsky regiment to ask me if I would like to speak. I was not prepared, but I felt I owed Vasily this acknowledgment. So I told my story briefly, how I had been rescued from a terrible life by Vasily and given the chance to serve the Tsar, which I had striven my whole life to repay him for.
And at the end of my speech, Nikolai burst free from the nurse and ran to the coffin again, pointing at it and calling out, He was a bad tiger!
The nurse leapt and nearly fell in her haste to recall him. The other guards stood at perfect attention, showing no sign of the embarrassment I am sure they felt on my behalf. I allowed the unpardonable sin of faltering in my speech, and then mumbled an apology on behalf of my son—cubs, I said, did not understand the totality of a life lived. In looking back on it, I see that this apology only worsened the moment. It allowed the mourners to believe that Nikolai was justified in what he said.
My comrades, perfect gentlemen, said nothing more of the incident, and Vasily was interred with all honor, guns fired off a in salute that made Nikolai press his little paws over his ears. I exchanged solemn words with Gregor, Vasily’s natural son, now a captain of the Preobrazhensky regiment, and I was somewhat surprised to hear that he, too, thought he had disappointed our father, and hoped that his cub, now five years old, would have redeemed him in the old tiger’s eyes. I said that now it’s his son who must please him, but the prospect did not seem pleasant to Gregor. We promised to meet again, but both knew that with our separate lives, this would never come to be.
I had previously left Nikolai’s discipline to the nurse, but that night I struck him on the arm five times, once for each misspoken word. He cried then, as he had not cried at the funeral, and afterwards I asked him, Why did you say that? What evil spirit possessed you to dishonor your grandfather?
His eyes, now sea-green, looked guilelessly into mine. Because, Papa, he said, he made you sad.
Chapter 29
Alexei sat staring at his phone. Still muzzy-headed from sleep and fatigue, he felt a creeping wrongness around Cat’s message. Fifty rubles? No, the program he’d gotten into had been paid for by the state. There was a program for disadvantaged cubs from small towns, a fund that covered their expenses and gave them some living money. Perhaps this Bogdan did not know about the fund, but that did not make sense if he were as clever as he claimed. It could be that the fifty rubles was simply his way of extracting a bribe from a young cub who might not understand that she was meant to offer one, but…
No, it did not feel right, but none of this felt right. Konstantin must have reached Bogdan, gotten him to call. There was his proof that Konstantin had kept his promise, and therefore Alexei would have to fulfill his end of the bargain. He could not give up being gay while living here with Sol and Meg; he would need a fresh start.
Numb, but with a small sense of relief at having the decision made for him, he dialed Liza’s number and listened to the ring-ring, ring-ring, until her voicemail picked up. Her friendly, accented voice said, “This is Liza. Say what you have to say, I’ll call you back.”
“Hi,” Alexei said into the phone. He pictured Liza’s brown and white muzzle, small nose, kind eyes. “I might need your help. I mean, I do need your help. I need to find another place to live. I will talk to you later.”
He hung up and sat there with his phone in his paws. He had done it now, had spoken the words to make it official. Curling his legs below him to sit on the bed, he pulled his tail around into his lap. Now that he wanted to talk to Konstantin, of course, the ghost was nowhere to be found. He’d fallen asleep twice since seeing Konstantin in the alley, and had talked to him neither time.
“Hey,” Meg said, poking her head in the door, “dinner’s about ready.”
When Alexei sat down at the table, she asked, “Do you know where Sol is?” He shook his head, scooping a big hunk of casserole onto his plate, cheese dripping and pooling around the pieces of tuna. His stomach growled; it smelled wonderful. The slightly burned cheese concealed soft noodles and cream sauce as well as tuna. He returned the spoon to the casserole dish and looked up to see Meg and Athos both looking at him.
“What?” He looked at his plate, but they both had scoops of the casserole on theirs as well. He flicked his ears toward Athos. “Did you want to say Grace?”
The grey fox smirked. “Only to Count Dracul, or perhaps Baron Samedi in these parts.”
“Dracula?” Alexei had always heard it with the trailing ‘a.’
Athos rolled his eyes, and Meg cut in. “So what’s with you moving out? You said something earlier, but I didn’t think you meant now.”
Alexei folded his ears back. “That was a private conversation,” he muttered.
“Then you shouldn’t be having it in a room next to someone with fox ears.” Meg pointed to Athos, who did not even look abashed.
He’d forgotten about the fox. Meg usually couldn’t hear what was going on, but they must have stopped the music or come out to the kitchen at just the right time. “Well,” Alexei said, “I have to move out. That is what is with my moving out.”
“Is it something to do with Sol?” Meg said. “Come on, I mean, you guys have had fights before.”
“It is not—not entirely about that.” Alexei hesitated.
“So what is it? Is it me? Because fuck you if it is. I mean, I know I’m not your best friend like wolfy-boy there—”
“He is not my best friend,” Alexei said, “and it is not about you.”
“Then what?” He stayed silent in the face of her demand, scooping a forkful of the casserole into his muzzle and chewing stoically. The food was hot but he did not taste any of it. Meg shrugged and took a bite herself. “Okay,” she said, “you don’t have to tell me. But Sol’s gonna be upset, so I’m giving you a chance to rehearse what you’re gonna say to him. And I’ll tell you the parts that are stupid.”
“You cannot change my mind,” Alexei said.
“I’m past trying to figure out boys.” Meg grinned when Athos, next to her, snorted. “I don’t know why you would leave a place where your best friend—sorry, I guess a good friend—lives, and another friend who helps you perform nonsense rituals—”
“They are not nonsense,” Alexei snapped, feeling his ears flush. The paw holding the fork itched; he scratched around the pads with claws.
“So is it about these hallucinations?” Meg laid her fork down. “You know, if the voices are telling you to move out…”
“They are not hallucinations.”
Though he was staring down at his plate, he saw Meg and Athos exchange glances. Athos spoke. “I understand the need to believe that there is more than just what we see with our eyes, smell with our noses. But you have to keep it all in perspective.”
“Your absinthe started this,” Alexei said.
“My—” Athos faltered, ears askew, bewildered. “How?”
“Jesus,” Meg said. “All right, you remember that absinthe you sent me for the school project? Sol got buzzed on it and had some weird dreams and that’s what turned his eyes bright green.”
“The absinthe?”
“Probably. I dunno, the doctors just said it happens sometimes and that it wasn’t going to hurt him. He thinks it happened from talking to some ghost in his dream.”
“It did,” Alexei said.
“And now,” Meg said, “foxy here is convinced that
he
is having dreams where he’s talking to ghosts too. Only instead of turning his eyes green, they’re telling him that he has to move out. Is that about right?”
“They are not just in dreams,” Alexei said. He lifted a paw to his muzzle, rubbed where it was still sore.
“Right, hallucinations too.” Meg sighed. “Does that under-the-table job you got have benefits that cover mental health programs, by chance?”
“I have been under a great deal of stress.” He focused on the food in front of him, but the rich, hot smells seemed faded now. He didn’t want to talk about Konstantin’s reality, but if he had to, these were the second and third people in the world he would want to tell. “And anyway,” he said, “he has gone into the dreams of a fox and made him call my sister. To help her.” I hope, he added silently.
“Did you talk to this guy?” Athos’s voice had a soft edge, the way you talk to someone who might go crazy and hit you if you said the wrong thing. “This fox? Did he tell you he had a dream?”
“No,” Alexei said. “But he called my sister.”
“Obviously it’s a ghost, then,” Meg said. “Because there’s no other way someone would call your sister. I mean, people in Siberia don’t just use phones to call each other.”
“My friend at the exchange program could not find him.” Alexei glared at Meg. “She has not called me back to tell me any news.”
“Look.” Meg glanced at Athos.
“Don’t tell him,” Athos said.
Alexei swung his muzzle back and forth, between the two of them. “What? Tell me what? Have you seen him?”
Meg sighed and looked at Athos. “I have to. Otherwise he’s gonna end up like Sol, freaked out over nothing.”
“It is not nothing,” Alexei said. He leaned forward. “What? What is it?”
Meg put her fork down again and leaned forward across the table. “You know that e-mail Athos sent me with the ritual?”
Alexei nodded quickly. Athos had leaned back in his seat as though he wasn’t feeling well from the meal, staring down into his lap. “I did not look at it,” he said.
“Well, what it said was…” Meg took a breath. “It said, ‘Burn some wormwood, get something related to the spirit, and say something about summoning the ghost from beyond. Oh, and use a bell.’ That’s all it said.”
Alexei blinked. “You made up the words?”
Meg nodded slowly. He leaned forward. “But…but it worked.” He turned to Athos. “It worked, I promise you.”
She sighed. “It can’t have worked. It wasn’t a real ritual.”
“Well,” Athos said. “Let us hold on for one moment here.” Alexei’s ears perked up and he turned to the grey fox. “A ritual doesn’t have to be something that’s been used over and over again. I mean, technically that is the root of the word, from
rite
, which was a word used to describe religious customs, things which had been repeated.”
“I’m not a priestess,” Meg said. “And you’re not helping.”
“Rituals exist outside the supernatural, too,” Athos said.
“But…” Alexei leaned across the table. “Perhaps the words did not matter. Perhaps it was the intent.”
“Yeah.” Meg tapped her claws on the table. “Listen, Athos, I’m trying to help out foxy here. I’m trying to narrow down what’s happening to him to ‘things in the real world.’ You told me it didn’t matter what I said.”
Alexei looked between the two of them. “Perhaps it did not matter because the incense and the item were most important.”
“What I’m saying is,” and here Athos leaned forward and uncrossed his arms, “that people who claim that these things do work use the rituals as a sort of crutch. If a ritual fails, they will decide that it was something minor they forgot, or that the phase of the moon was wrong, or that the subject of the ritual was flawed—you know, like, if your ritual had failed, you might have explained it by saying you couldn’t summon a ghost outside his native land. If rituals succeed, though, people attribute the success to the ritual even if many of the elements weren’t quite right. The most important element is the belief of the people involved. They can trick themselves—”
“It is not a trick!” Alexei tried to stop his voice from climbing, but he was trembling now. “It is not in my head, it is not! He helped my sister—that fox called her, when he had no reason to, and she is going to Moskva to be safe now.”
“Okay,” Athos said, again in that soft voice that people in movies used when they were telling their friends that of course they were not crazy, “what I’m saying is that because you didn’t know it wasn’t a ritual that had been used before, for you, it held power.”
“So it might have worked.”
“No.” Meg clutched her head in her paws. “Jesus, have you not been listening?”
“You will have to see him,” Alexei said.
“Sure.” Meg looked up at him through webbed fingers. “I’ll just hook up our ‘Inception’ machine. It lets Athos and I come into your dreams and find secrets.” She turned to Athos. “Got your token?”
“I told you,” the fox said evenly, “that it was not just in dreams.” He had to clasp his paws together to keep them from shaking.
Both otter and grey fox stared at him. Athos reached down to rub fingers along the side of his cape. “So,” he said, slowly, “you can just call him up?”
Alexei took a deep breath. He pulled his tail up into his lap and rubbed the tip, combing through the fur. The motion soothed him. “Not…exactly.”
Haltingly, he told them of his encounters, starting with the dreams. As he was describing the cemetery, and Athos was leaning forward with wide eyes, Sol came in the door. Alexei stopped, and all three of them at the table turned to the black wolf.
“What’s going on?” Sol let the door swing closed behind him and took a step toward Alexei. “Jesus, where the hell were you? You scared the hell out of us.”
“I know,” Alexei said. “I am sorry.”
“Sorry.” Sol shook his head. “You just fucking disappeared, didn’t answer your phone—”
“It was dead.”
“—we didn’t know where the hell you were, if you were dead—”
Alexei stood up, quelling the urge to meet Sol’s belligerence with his own so easily that he knew Konstantin was nowhere near. He met the wolf’s aggressive stance with swept-back ears, but he didn’t turn his muzzle aside. “I had to get away,” he said. “I am sorry.”
“If you remember,” Meg said, “you were kind of crazy last night. I probably woulda run away from you too.”
Sol’s tail flicked to the side. He didn’t look at Meg, but to Alexei he said, “I didn’t mean to scare you. But…”
It was a half-apology, and in the past, it would have been enough for Alexei. Now he stared levelly back at Sol and said, “Are you trying to say you are sorry?”
The wolf shifted on his feet and his eyes flicked down. “I guess so.”
“Then you should say it.”
Sol’s eyes widened, and Alexei felt the stiffening of Meg and Athos. “I…” Sol started to reply angrily, but he hesitated, and Alexei jumped in.
“I have said I am sorry,” he said. “But you also behaved badly.”
Now Meg looked at Sol, a grin twitching at the corners of her mouth. “He’s right, woofer. Come on, own up.”
Sol spared her a brief glare, and then, ears lowered, looked back at Alexei. “I shouldn’t have yelled,” he said. “I’m—I’m sorry. But it was Niki.”
“It is not Niki,” Alexei said.
“It’s his father,” Meg put in. “And he’s kind of a jerk.”
That got Sol’s attention. He turned to Meg and said, “Hang on, so you believe in this now?”
“Fox-boy believes in him, and thinks he can prove it, so I’m going along as official skeptic.” She looked sideways at Athos as she said that.
Sol rolled his eyes and looked back at Alexei. The fox managed to pull his lips into a weak smile and said, “At least she is willing to try to help look for a ghost.”
The black wolf surveyed them all and then grinned, his green eyes flashing. “That’s something, I guess,” he said. There were no more chairs, so he leaned against the sink. “So how are you going to look for him?”
With Sol’s acceptance, words came more easily. Alexei told about seeing Konstantin on the fields, about the encounter in the alley, all the while with an eye on Sol. The black wolf listened keenly, green eyes flickering with interest, especially when Alexei talked about the fox entering their world. He sucked in a breath when Alexei told them about being slammed into the dumpster, and his eyes flicked to the bandage still on the fox’s ear. Sol’s ears stayed as low as his voice. “Were you going to do something—something bad?”
“No. He did not—he does not want me to be gay.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Sol said. “What else could you be? That’s why you came all the way from Siberia.”
“He is helping my sister,” Alexei said. “I love her. I need to bring her safely out of Samorodka.”
“But this is who you are,” Sol said.
Alexei breathed in. “Yes.” He ran his fingers over the plastic wood grain of the table. “But it is not who I can be right now. And so I must leave.”