“IT’S TOO LATE!” I bellow. “You’re going to get us all killed!”
I see the wild look in her eyes, that savage determination that I’ve never seen falter, never once in my life.
Then reality hits her harder than any hammer.
Her face slackens, and she looks back toward the cliff with pure misery instead.
“Come on,” I say, grabbing her hand and swimming for the boat.
I’ve barely managed to haul her in before the Malina reach the edge of the cliff and begin firing down on us. Splinters explode off the railing. A bullet hits the deck an inch from my foot.
Freya opens the throttle, speeding us out of the harbor.
I look back at the flashes of gunfire still lining the cliff.
My father can’t protect us anymore.
2
Nix Moroz
Present Day
I was born on an island in the Black Sea.
My mother had come boar hunting with my father and his men. She didn’t know she was pregnant.
She had always been a tremendous athlete—hurdles, high jump, and the four-hundred-meter dash. Later she turned to long-distance swimming.
She swam the English Channel in less than eight hours and set a record for the 25 km open water race at the European Aquatics Championships. She swam from Florida to Cuba without a shark cage, stung on the face and hands three separate times by jellyfish, but never stopping.
That’s how she met my father—when she returned to Kyiv, she was invited to a dinner hosted by the Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was a country girl, and though she didn’t mind donning a gown for formal affairs, she found the conversation tedious and the canapés highly unsatisfying for someone accustomed to eating a lunch of twenty potato pancakes smothered in sour cream and fried onions, and then an entire herring for dinner.
My father had never seen a woman like that, with a back almost too broad to zip into a dress, and welts from the jellyfish tentacles still marking her cheeks and throat and the backs of her hands like whiplashes. She was scowling at everyone because she was hungry.
When he tried to approach her, she rudely rebuffed him, having no idea that she was speaking to a man far more powerful than the minister hosting the party.
“Where’s your manners, girl?” my father said.
“I don’t have any manners,” she replied, tossing down her drink in one gulp. “I never said I did.”
He liked her boldness and the strong column of her throat as she threw back that drink.
“How did it feel swimming with all those sharks?” he demanded.
My mother had been followed for several miles of the swim by two hammerheads, and later by an ugly bull shark.
She regarded my father and his two lieutenants with a cool stare. “It felt very like this,” she said. “Only my wetsuit was more comfortable.”
My father had already decided he would marry her. He simply had to convince her to come to dinner with him first.
She said she would, if he took her somewhere with proper Georgian food.
“None of this foreign shit,” she said, sniffing at a passing tray of spinach puffs.
They married within the year. My mother agreed to it on the condition that my father wouldn’t interfere with her athletic pursuits. She had dreams of crossing the Adriatic next.
In the meantime, she joined my father skiing in Bukovel and hunting red deer in Manchuria. She was six feet tall, built like an Amazon, and so relentlessly active that she hadn’t menstruated in years.
That, combined with her love of food, meant that she disregarded any changes to her figure, thinking that the bit of belly she had grown was simply the result of my father spoiling her with honey cake and toffee.
The boar hunting was closer to home—on Dzharylhach island, which some call the Ukrainian Maldives because of the clear turquoise water. Warm sea, clean sand, and four hundred salty lakes scattered all over the island—a lonely and beautiful place, perfect for pig-sticking.
They hunted the boars in the old way, with spears. The spears had a cross guard to prevent the enraged pig from driving its own body further down the spear so it could at least have the satisfaction of mauling you as it died.
By that time, my father knew my mother well enough to be concerned when she failed to charge after the boars with her spear upraised, fleet as Artemis on the hunt.
Instead, she pressed her hand against the cramp on her side, telling my father to go on with the men. She planned to sit and soak in one of the warm, salty pools.
She thought it was indigestion. As the cramps worsened, she considered that perhaps she was about to have the long-delayed period in spectacular fashion.
It was only when the pain overtook her to the point that she could no longer stand that she began to realize how deserted the long section of beach really was, with barely a gull in sight, let alone any humans.
She wondered if her appendix was the issue, or her gallbladder. The sight of blood in the salt pool disgusted her more than it alarmed her. She forced herself to hobble down to the ocean instead, where the waves would wash her clean.
The steady surf was immensely soothing to her, the rhythm of the waves as familiar as her own heartbeat.
And then, out of nowhere, the irresistible impulse to bear down . . .
The birth itself took less than ten minutes.
She reached between her legs and felt the curve of the infant skull—my skull—with comical surprise. She made a sound halfway between a shriek and a laugh of pure astonishment. It seemed like I had played a trick on her, appearing out of nowhere, uninvited, and unexpected.
She lifted me out of the water, as if it were the sea that had birthed me. The placenta she left for the crabs to eat.
Though she had never seen it done before, she successfully knotted the cord and severed it with the edge of a scallop shell.
When my father returned an hour later, triumphant with a bloody boar carcass strung up on a pole, he found his new bride sitting topless in the sand, her shirt wrapped around the infant at her breast.
I was small, having arrived, by the doctor’s estimate, at least a month early.
My father thought it was just as good a joke as my mother.
He marveled at my copper-colored hair and appetite all out of proportion to my size.
He wanted to name me after his grandmother.
But my mother had already named me Nix, the word for a water sprite that can shift back and forth to human form.
My father liked that even better. He said, without any evidence to the contrary, and whether I shared his red hair or not, he could never be entirely sure that my mother hadn’t found me on the beach.
That’s the first bedtime story I remember: the story of how I was born.
It was my favorite, and I begged to hear it again and again, though my father had dozens of tales to tell, all equally full of mystery and adventure. He’s a fantastic storyteller to this day. Even his men shout for their favorites when they’ve all been drinking together.
My father’s stories center on himself and his soldiers: legendary tales of bravery, bloodshed, and revenge, epic in scale and rich in detail.
My father looks like he should be carved on the side of a mountain. He’s seven feet tall with a ginger mane of hair and a flaming red beard. He’s ferocious and clever. All girls idolize their fathers I suppose, but none with better reason than me.