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

of dogs. All of them executed. All of them bleeding and screaming and dying.
    I still couldn’t understand what they were saying, only this time, I did pick out a name. Anastasia . The woman I guess was her mother screamed it as she tried to reach for her. Anastasia. Over and over as those same two giant, wrinkly brown hands came down from that black cloud that appeared out of nowhere and grabbed her—carried her off as her mother fell to the floor.
    But that’s not what has me sitting here, certain that I’m not going to fall back asleep anytime soon.
    This time, there was one other person in the room. He was standing behind a pillar, clothed in a brown robe. A wooden cross hung from his neck, and his brown hair was long and disheveled. When he lifted his head and stared straight at me, his deep blue eyes burning with anger, fear, and tears, I didn’t have to listen for someone to call his name.
    I already knew it. Ethan.

Wednesday, 2:05 am
    Ethan
    I awake with a jolt, the mark on my arm burning. It’s all happening faster than I ever imagined it would. Finding Anne has set it all in motion. The mark. The lacquer box that her mother believes came to her through a simple sale, which was, in truth, not simple at all. The hut that moved in ways that only the right girl—the girl who is Anne—could see. The dreams we’ve both had now of that day in 1918. The moment that Anne’s sleeping self looked up and saw me looking back.
    All this is good. It is what I have worked toward for so many years. She is the one. I am absolutely certain.
    Only there is one problem. She is absolutely nothing like what I imagined.
    And I—well, I am behaving nothing like I imagined either. And as I am no longer the inexperienced boy who once crouched in that filthy basement and watched the Romanovs die, said the words that Brother Viktor taught him so that Baba Yaga would come for Anastasia and at least one life would be saved, I would expect things to work differently.
    But they’re not.
    Because, as I’ve been saying, I’m a zalupa . In more than one lifetime, by the way, if my fashion sense and regrettable hairstyle from the dream I’ve just had are any indication.
    Also, because this girl is the most frustrating female I have met in a very long while. For me, that’s considerable—long-term relationships are out of the question since I am—well, much more long-term than most.
    Even so, I had thought that over the years, I’d figured out some things about women. It is clear now that I was very wrong about that.
    â€œAbsolutely not,” she told me this evening when I asked her to sit down with me at the coffee shop. “No. Absolutely not.” This, of course, after she had asked me if I was following her.
    Of course I am following her. I have to follow her. It just hadn’t occurred to me that I was so clumsy at it that she’d have noticed.
    Still, the time is here, and Anne’s power—the power she does not yet know she has—is growing. So I fumble for my cell phone on the table next to my bed and punch in the proper numbers.
    I wait as it rings.

Wednesday, 2:30 am
    Anne
    I pull David’s comforter tighter around me and wait for my laptop to power up. I’m back in my own room now, sitting on my own bed, and my pulse has settled back down to something resembling normal, but I’ve taken the comforter with me. The weird dreams have come along too. And so, it seems, has Buster, who pads in, looking sleepy, and curls up at my feet. The vibration of his purr tickles my legs.
    I guess if I’m going to dream about a witch, I might as well do it with my cat keeping me company.
    As for the girl—well, at least now I know her name. Anastasia. I don’t have a clue why she’s haunting my dreams or why an oddly dressed Ethan just appeared in the middle of the last one, but at least I know who she is.
    I log on to the server.