The Siren's Dance (21 page)

“Anya, my mother has this exact same scar. In the very same place.”

“Your mother?”

Fuck. That was a mistake. There would be no way to explain the connection without coming clean, and he’d already strained the trust between them with that stupid lie about Polina.

He had to tell her--had known he would have to all along, but it had came too soon, only moments after their bliss. He swallowed hard, choking on the truths he’d omitted.

“She was a dancer like you. Not as promising from what I gather, but…the truth is… She was never married to my father. She refused to tell me a thing about him. But when she was hallucinating, the name she called him was Stas Demyan.”

All the air deflated from her, leaving her compact body looking so fragile. “He’s your father?”

The wind whistled through the room all at once. A voice poured out of Anya’s mouth, but it wasn’t hers. It was the
vila
, its seductive siren voice twisted in anger. “Find Stas. Kill him. Find Stas. Kill him.”

Her chant was beautiful, hypnotic, and frightening. After everything he’d learned about the man, he didn’t pity Demyan for what was coming, nor grieve for himself.

He held Anya close, stroked her spine, hoping it would soothe the
vila
as it had last time. When the wind abated, leaving only the normal stirrings of the room’s heater, Anya whimpered. “I’m angry,” she said, but small sobs shook her, and she clung to him, laced her arms tightly around his neck. “Angry at you for not telling me.”

He pressed his forehead to the crook of her neck and drank in the sweet smell of her. “I’ve been searching for him my whole life. He’s impossible to find. Dmitri had seen his name on my desk before. That’s why he called me. I never told him why I was looking. I just had to see if you could lead me to him. And then I started to like you, and I didn’t know how to explain. Didn’t want to lose your chance, or mine, to find him…”

“This is why you lied about Polina? You thought I’d…
been
with your father?”

The moment sizzled with tension, as if the
vila
would rage if he said the wrong thing. He pressed his closed eyes against her soft skin and nodded, biting his lip. What if she pushed him away, disgusted that she’d slept with a man descended from her nightmare abuser?

“Yes.”

She ran her hand up his spine and scratched her fingers through the hair at his nape, soothing him. “Tell me about your mother.”

“She’s broken, and from what you’ve told me, I suspect he’s to blame.”

She hugged him tighter. “He broke my spirit.”

“But you’re so much stronger than her. Your anger gives you power.”

“I wasn’t, though, not before I died. I was like that--like your mother. I’d given up. It’s the
vila
making me strong.”

“No. You’re strong.” He pulled back to look at her face. “I’m sorry I kept it from you. I’ve been so afraid I would lose you over it.” In whatever sense he actually had her, that was.

She shook her head. “He hurt you too. And your mom. I’d like to meet her, hear her story.”

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. His mom would not like Anya for the simple fact that she pushed him to pursue Demyan.

Her gaze danced over his face. “Sometimes, I thought you looked like him, and I laughed it off.” She smoothed a finger over his brow, then screwed her eyelids shut. “You have his eyes. If I’m looking right at yours, I can’t see it, because yours say such different things to me. But if I picture them in my mind’s eye… The similarity is clear.”

He brushed his fingers over the peculiar scar, like someone had tapped a giant chisel into her skin just deep enough to break it but didn’t keep hammering to carve off flesh. She shivered, and goose flesh rose up on her arm before she gasped and pulled her arm away.

If only he could let her keep forgetting. “Sometimes witnesses need to do the same thing to remember details they saw, especially traumatic things. Not to come at the memory straight on, but sort of sideways, by starting somewhere else.”

She let out another giant breath, clearly anticipating what would come next.

“Can you try to remember about the scar?”

She stared up at the ceiling and nodded.

“Close your eyes. Hold your arm like this.” He angled it upward, in a dancer’s pose, and her feet turned out at the same time. His heart stuttered at the sight of her naked and beautiful. Desire simmered up in his belly, but he blew it out on a deep breath.

Not now. If she was going to be brave enough to remember, she needed him fully present to her story, not wrapped up in his lusty urges.

He was right. The posture unlocked Anya’s memories, as if they were stored in the muscles she’d regained with Sergey’s touch.

A dark night in Kiev, snow sifted onto the frames of the windowpanes, forming a grid of crescents. The studio was empty, but for the two of them, lingering long after a rehearsal, when all the other dancers had gone home. Her parents didn’t like it, but they’d come to accept that she would train for hours after class.

Stas had straddled the back of a chair with his long, lean legs clad in tan corduroy trousers, his ropy forearms crossed over the top rung. He barked out instructions to her.

“Straighter. Sharper. Now the adagio--more fluid, let the movements flow together. Now the arabesque--taller, longer.”

“Almost, Anushka, you are so close to perfection.”

He turned the music on and watched her in silence. When the record ended, he began it again wordlessly and immediately, until she’d repeated the same dance two dozen times without even a break, her muscles on fire, trembling with fatigue. His gaze burned into her, a heat that felt like desire.

And then came the part of every night that she craved and feared, when he would weigh her, measure her with a dressmaker’s tape, clucking his disappointment at her waist, her thighs, even though she had grown impossibly thin. The diet he’d put her on had already begun to sap her strength.

“You are pretty, Anya, but to be my Giselle, you must be ethereally beautiful, a sylph who is barely there, who floats on the music.”

Then he touched her, his fingers firmly manipulating her limbs, moving possessively over her body to position her in
une attitude derrière
, one leg behind her, extended parallel to the floor, one arm raised and the other in second position. In the mirror, he snagged her gaze with his and squeezed her breast, slid his finger under the edge of her leotard from her hip down to her sex, always teasing.

“Aren’t you ready for me, Anushka? Why do you make me wait?”

“Me? You’re the one who is making me wait.”

“If you were truly ready, we would not continue this tedious
pas de deux
. You would have achieved perfection, you would already be my prima, and I could claim you.”

With her arm overhead, he kissed her there, in the soft flesh at the inner curve of her biceps. His mouth hot and firm, stinging at first as teeth met skin, then drawing on her there. He put his hand on her belly, and she swooned, bringing her raised leg
à terre
. Even lightheaded from the dizzying effects of his mouth on the sensitive spot, she wondered if his bruising kiss would leave a mark the other ballerinas would see tomorrow when she lifted her arm
en haute
.

Then her knees gave out.

“Yes. Just like that,” he said. “Give in to it, give in to me.” He caught her weight. She was putty. He could have laid her on the floor and done anything to her at that moment, her body a husk, hollow and aching to be filled.

“Anything, Stas.” She stroked her thigh and lifted her knee in a pose she hoped would tempt him. That he would kiss her lips, take off his clothes, and pour some of his strength into her. “Anything to be the dancer, the woman you want me to be.”

“You still do not understand.” He shook his head, his upper lip curled slightly in disgust as he turned to retrieve her coat.

Later, in her bed, nightmares tormented her. All night, she danced with demons. They snapped their sharp teeth at her and tried to drag her out of the theater as all the other dancers looked on blandly, arms crossed, whispering to one another as she fought, as if they’d seen the coda rehearsed a thousand times and her performance was unimpressive.

The next day in class, he announced another dancer would be Giselle…and his wife. Anya felt a strange force drag her slowly backward until she was a million miles away from the pair who stood across the room, as if she were watching an opera from the space beyond the highest balconies. Then Stas glanced at her before he bent to kiss the girl’s lips, and something snapped inside Anya’s overworked body. She ran to the bathroom and vomited up her meager breakfast.

The future Mrs. Demyan was plump, with breasts too large to look truly graceful. But her technique was undoubtedly beautiful. It more than made up for her ungainly curves. Yes, she might well be a better dancer than Anya. Even worse, she looked at Stas like they’d shared something intimate, like he’d made love to her all night after rejecting Anya.

Burning with shame, Anya ran out of the theater as if the demons chased her, and she never went back.

Sergey held Anya’s hand and tucked the blankets up around her neck. Her lovely complexion had gone gray, lying there, her eyes closed and recounting her nightmare. And that--a nightmare, like in those old fairy tales--was precisely what they seemed to be dealing with. If she hadn’t been there, lost in her horrible recollection, he might have succumbed to the sickening feeling curdling his stomach.

“Anya?”

Her lids flew open. “He’s a…” But the word didn’t come, as if her mouth refused to expel it.

“He’s a
zmora.”
Just like Sergey’s mother had always said. A monster, an incubus, who visited women in their dreams and sucked the life out of them, or impregnated them with his demon spawn--

Oh, fuck. Fuck.

Pity creased Anya’s brow, and the same horror he felt widened her eyes.

The dark hunger to possess her lapped at him again. That insane need to get inside her without a condom. Not merely extraordinary attraction, but some evil appetite. It had awakened as they’d drawn closer to the
Académie de Ballet
and the mouth of those tunnels that had lured his young self like a lover. It all made sense. His father was an incubus.

“And I’m one too.”

She would hate him. How could she not? He hated himself, hated to think he was like this man who’d hurt Anya and Oksana and God knew how many others. And he was a demon? Not only were ghosts real, and his mother’s delusions--but he was part of the crazy, supernatural world that tormented her.

“You’re nothing like him.” She sat up and wrapped one small hand around each of his shoulders. “He crushed me, Sergey. He built up my hopes to crush them, to wring everything he could out of me.”

“Maybe I would--”

“No.” She shook him with a powerful show of her dancer’s strength. “Every time you look at me, smile at me, I feel like I’m enough. His every glance assured me I could never be. If you have that cruelty in you, you’ve proven yourself stronger than it.”

He bit his lip, taking hold of her hand and flinging himself back on the pillow. He wanted to believe her. But still he reeled. Could he really be a demon? His heart galloped in his chest and he shook his head, a part of him still needing to deny this world his mother embraced. “Believing in ghosts is one thing, but demons--”

“I’m not just a ghost. I’m a
vila
. And if one old story is true, then maybe they all are.”

Sergey grimaced. “I hope not.”

“Tell me, what do you know about
zmoras
?” she asked.

He knew a lot, as it happened, because of his mother’s hallucinations. “They torment you in sleep, but by day they can be very seductive, sucking away a victim’s energy and stealing her life force through sex.”

He almost choked on his own words. Was that really so different from his love life up until now? He wanted desperately to trust he could avoid becoming like Demyan. But what if the desperate way he’d fallen for Anya was only the beginning? What if he would become a parasite, sucking the life out of her, then moving on to others?

His whole life, he’d feared succumbing to his mother’s mental illness. Turns out he’d been trying to outrun the wrong fate.

He fisted the bed sheets. “I’m a monster.”

“No. Think about your outrage over what Demyan did--not just on my behalf, but for all the other victims he must have had. That’s not the sentiment of a man likely to follow the same path.”

He considered all the abuses she’d suffered, then imagined his mother belittled and dominated in the same way. Rage clenched his free hand into a fist. He wanted to pummel Demyan’s jaw, and he would do the same on behalf of any of the female officers he knew, the woman who worked at the juice stand. Anybody.

Anya was right. He found Demyan’s behavior despicable through and through.

“Maybe there’s a way to be a nice
zmora
?” she suggested.

“A friendly nightmare? Pretty sure that’s an oxymoron.” From good cop to evil demon, all in one day. His brain was having trouble keeping up.

“Okay. But if it’s any consolation, I think you just
zmorad
me very nicely.” She flung her leg over him and sat astride his hips, her lean form, her upturned breasts, the gentle muscles of her abdomen--so beautiful. “You can impregnate me with your demon seed whenever you want, and then I’ll go ghost. Foolproof birth control.”

He grimaced again, and she pulled a mirroring expression. “Wrong time for a joke?”

“Your timing’s just a little off.” He raised himself up to kiss the corner of her mouth, and she followed him back down, nestling her whole little body against him. Amazing, considering they’d just deduced he was the life-force-stealing demonic offspring of the man who had tried to break her and whom she intended to destroy.

“Speaking of timing”--she stroked absently along his arm, still seeking sensation even after she’d had by his count two and a half or three explosions of the most intense sensations a body could endure--“this does explain some things. Demyan was thirty-three when I died. He would have been a lot older than your mother when they conceived you.”