Panic and you drown, rusalka bitch, her father snarled, and somehow she got her limbs under control even as her mind melted with terror. She could swim—there wasn’t a child who grew up on the Old Man who couldn’t—and she pushed herself forward, wriggling like a lake seal. Up to the surface, lungs bursting, air searing fire-hot as she gulped it in.
The terrifying sound of another shot.
Nina dove under the surface again, not sure if she’d been hit or not—the fear held her in such an electric grip, there was no room for fresh pain to report. Bullet grazed or not, there was a stark choice in the middle of this thicket of horror: struggle out to the deeper lake, out of range, until the water numbed her limbs and she sank into exhaustion and cold, which would not take long . . . or thrash here in utter panic like a U-2 pinioned in the white glare of a searchlight and be shot at every time she surfaced. Or—
Nina jackknifed underwater, flipping before she could change her mind and kicking blindly back in the direction of the dock. Lungs almost exploding again, she slipped between the pilings, kicking up off the soft mud, surfacing in a silent sucking gasp for air. The dock was built low to the water; there wasn’t even ten centimeters’ clearance between the surface of the lake and the underside of the boards above. Nina clung to the piling, a splinter piercing her hand like a needle, head tilted back to keep her mouth above the water. Her limbs were already numbing. The pine boards creaked overhead, and there was the sound of metal clicking on metal.
She is standing right above me, Nina thought, and she is reloading. If she fired straight down between her feet into the dock, the bullet would take Nina through the eye.
Terror shattered her like new ice.
Let go, the lake whispered. Sink into the blue. Let the rusalka have you.
Disjointed images fluttered like bad film. Yelena’s laughing face. Little Galya muttering in a terrified monotone, We’re not going to drown. Her father, baring his yellowing teeth. Comrade Stalin, his mustache and his heavy feral scent . . . Nina tread water to keep her face above the frigid surface, listening to the blue-eyed huntress shift her feet just centimeters above as the lake continued to croon.
Let go, Ninochka.
She kept moving her legs, but she couldn’t feel them.
Let go. Let the rusalka have you. She’s the first night witch, the one who comes from the lake with ice-cold arms and a kiss that kills.
No, Nina thought. I am the rusalka. Born from a lake to find home in the sky, come back to the lake.
Then die here in your lake. Easier here than up above at her hands.
No, Nina thought again. I may fear water, but to fight a Nazi in the dark of the moon holds no terror for me.
She had no idea how long she hung there in the dark prism of Lake Rusalka, face tilted above the water, fingers fighting for a grip on the slimy pilings, numbed feet spasming to keep her afloat, as the blue-eyed huntress above kept watch. Only minutes, surely. It felt like hours.
Over the lapping of the water Nina heard the woman call out in German. Even Nina understood the three simple, desperate words.
“Where are you?”
Nina clamped her chattering teeth.
The woman’s shoes shuffled. Her breath came unevenly. Nina heard the hiss of pain. I cut her. The red line opening across the nape of the neck, a kiss from the razor. The huntress would be bleeding, free hand clamped to her neck.
“Please be dead,” the woman above muttered as if in prayer, her voice thick with fear. “Please be dead . . .”
A rusalka cannot die, Nina thought, cold making the thought stutter. And you’ve been kissed by a rusalka, which means you’re mine forever, you blue-eyed bitch.
A long ragged breath from the woman overhead, another hiss of pain, and then footsteps retreated unsteadily down the dock toward the shore. The huntress must be dizzy from blood loss, Nina thought; she would have to go inside, bandage herself. Nina did not move, remained floating under the dock. The woman above her was coolheaded even if she was bleeding and afraid. She might retreat and wait in the shore’s shadows, watching to see what came from the lake. It was what Nina would have done.
She hung there in the dark, in the lake, barely breathing.
Move now, her father said at last, or you will freeze and drown.
She might still be there, Nina thought. Waiting.
Move now.
Nina had almost no strength to haul herself from the lake onto the dock. She lay limp, trying to flex her fingers and toes, almost too stiff to move. She could have lain there forever, but she forced herself to her knees to look around. No waiting female form, no blue eyes watching. The ocher-walled house had gone dark. It would not stay dark. The huntress surely had friends; they would come to aid her.
Move.
But Nina couldn’t. Sebastian Graham’s body lay dark and silent on the dock. Still warm.
She knew it was hopeless, but she still crawled shivering to his side. The shot had taken him at point-blank range in the back of the head. He didn’t have much face left. That handsome, chivalrous boy with his long lashes and high forehead, now turned to red ruin. “Poor malysh,” Nina whispered through her frozen lips. “I should have gone in with you. I let you go, and I lost you.” Guilt raked her soul, scarlet clawed, but she couldn’t put her head back and howl under the stars the way she wanted to, she couldn’t sink down on his dead chest and weep. She couldn’t even bury him. Time was slipping past; who knew how long it would take the murderess to tend her bleeding neck and summon help, and though Nina thought she must have been in the water less than ten minutes, possibly not even five, she was soaked to the skin on a black autumn night and her limbs felt like they were made of ice. To her astonishment she still had her razor, swinging by its loop about her wrist—she kept that and her boots and trousers, but wrestled Seb’s limp arms out of his jacket and his other layers, tossing her overalls into the lake and fumbling into Seb’s blood-spattered but dry clothes. She flinched to leave him half naked under the stars, but without dry layers she would die. She made herself take his prisoner’s tags, the ring on his hand. His older brother would want them. Cool as ice, Seb had said of him, and about as trusting.
“I’ll tell him you died a hero,” Nina told the boy who had been her friend for a few short, desperate months. “I’ll tell him you saved my life, that you fought a Nazi murderess and made her bleed.” She’d make him more than what he was, a warmhearted boy who died because he trusted that people were good.
No, she thought. He died because he had the bad luck to meet you, Nina Markova. Because you fail every team you ever join, and then you lose them. You lost your regiment of two hundred sestry, and then you find Seb, and even though your team is now only one, you lose him too.
Weeping, Nina kissed Seb’s bloodied hair and lurched down the dock without looking back. She glanced once at the yellow house, feeling the primal desire to creep inside, track down that blue-eyed German bitch with her slashed neck, and finish what she’d started. But it would take everything she had just to get back to her campsite alive.
I am the rusalka of the world’s deepest lake at the world’s farthest end, she told herself, staggering delirious and blood light under the new moon. I am a Night Witch of the Forty-Sixth Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. I do not fear Germans, or the night, or any lake in the world. She did not think she would ever be afraid of drowning again.