Read Online Dreaming Anastasia by Joy Preble - Free Book Online Page A

humming some wordless tune I do not know.
    I nod. “Yes,” I whisper. “Yes, I will.” Then, gently, I slide my matroyshka under the red and blue quilt. Tuck her away where Auntie will not see. And with half-closed eyes, I watch, and I wait.
    The fire burns lower, its embers glowing red in the hearth. Auntie rocks in her chair, hums that same wordless tune. The room is warm, close. I think for a moment that I might drift off to sleep. And then the rocking stops.
    Auntie reaches with both hands into the front pocket of the apron she wears over her dress. Her huge, wrinkled, brown hands—the same hands that hold the mugs of sweet tea I bring her. And from inside that pocket, she brings forth a skull.
    In the life I used to have, I might have gasped. Certainly my stomach still clenches, and my skin feels flushed with the panic that never really leaves, just recedes from the surface and lets me seem braver than I am. Although in my old life, I would have screamed or run, I do none of those things. Instead, I watch.
    She holds the skull, its surface smooth, bone bleached and pale like the twelve skulls that surround this hut. Skulls that stand on wooden spikes in even intervals and remind me, even when I try to pretend that this place is now my home, that I am somewhere I do not want to be.
    The skull floats into the fire, the flickering flames dancing in and out of its empty eye sockets.
    â€œ Ya khachu videt! ” Auntie calls to it.
    Three times she repeats it. “ Ya khachu videt. ” I want.
    I think for a moment of my mother—how she scolded my sister Olga just before Christmas the year I turned thirteen. The year Olga desperately wanted a pair of diamond earbobs. “Do not say that you want something,” she told Olga. “Polite young ladies say, ‘I’d like,’ not ‘I want.’” And I almost laugh aloud as I imagine my mother standing here, scolding Baba Yaga the way she once reprimanded Olga.
    Only then I remember. My mother is dead.
    Inside the skull, the flames glow red, then yellow, then blue. Stronger and stronger, they have now become a single ball of fire that swirls and opens. Ya khachu videt. I want.
    And then, inside the flames, I see him. The man with blue eyes who was there the day I disappeared. The man who was not the one I expected. Not at all. The one whose blue eyes, ever watchful, ever serious, filled with tears as my family died, one by one.
    What did he know as he stood there? What had he been told? Did he know the lies I had been fed? Or was he betrayed as well?
    â€œThe time is coming,” Auntie says. “Soon.”
    Ya khachu videt. I want. But what I want, I am not certain.

Wednesday, 2:00 am
    Anne
    It’s the middle of the night, and my parents are sleeping. I, however, am huddled in my brother David’s bed, clutching so tightly at his navy blue comforter—the one that still smells faintly of boy sweat and Lucky cologne—that I think the feeling is going to leave my fingers. I’d curled up here a couple of hours ago, chasing sleep. Sometimes, this helps. Neither Mom nor Dad has had the heart to change this room yet, even after almost two years—as though changing it might erase David even more than he’s already been erased. In fact, for a while they didn’t even turn off his cell-phone service—not until they got the bill and realized I was calling his phone two or three times a day just to hear his voice when it flipped over to voice mail.
    But right now, I’m not sleeping. Far from it. Oh, I was. But now I’m sitting bolt upright, willing my pulse to settle and failing miserably.
    She’s invaded my dreams again: the girl with the long, brown hair and the white dress spattered with blood. Around her, like last time, people were dying. A family, I realize now. Probably her family—a man and a woman, who I assume were her parents, and some other girls and a boy. Even a couple