Romanov(53)

“Alexei,” I tried to whisper. I wanted him to know I was here. I wanted him to hear my voice. But only a wheeze emerged from my throat. I took a breath. It burned and pinched and resisted. “Alexei.”

But his name was not what slipped through my lips. Instead, a hot coal of a spell tumbled out as I unwillingly said, “Ajnin.”

My pain evaporated. I turned weightless. I could no longer feel the vibration of the truck beneath me or Alexei’s hand in mine. I was neither hot nor cold. Neutral. Completely healed of all wounds. Energized. Renewed.

My mind rose from the slog of slumber and pain. Sparked to life. If I was healed, I needed to get to my family—to rescue them. I had survived—the soldiers might be trying to kill the rest of my family as I lay here.

I forced away the weight of the situation, the fear of execution, the despair of reality. Instead, I opened my eyes and scanned the inverted world for the presence of soldiers. None. I tumbled backward out of the truck and rolled into a shadow. I didn’t want to leave Alexei in there, but I didn’t have time to think.

The rest of my family needed me.

The Ipatiev House glowed under the low half-moon, ghostly and pale as though ashamed of what had taken place in its belly. I kept flat along the palisade and slid toward the basement door. Soldiers emerged, carrying a body so riddled with bullet holes I only recognized Papa from his shredded uniform.

I fell back against the palisade, a hand to my heart. “Papa.” My distraught croak seemed as loud as a bullfrog in the night, but no soldiers paid me any mind. They tossed him into the truck and took no notice of me.

As they returned to the house for another body I could not bear to identify, I rushed to the truck. To Papa. I couldn’t make out his face beneath the blood, just his mustache. His chest didn’t rise. Didn’t fall. It didn’t act like a chest at all, caved in from the impact of endless bullets.

I stumbled back and closed my eyes. No. Papa couldn’t be dead. I used his spell. I did what he asked! He needed to wake up and tell me what to do. I reached to shake him. To tell him I’d obeyed his instructions.

But my hand didn’t meet his shoulder. I couldn’t seem to touch him. Had my fear numbed me?

“Nastya?” Alexei’s scared, timid voice came like a bugle call from behind me. I spun, my heart galloping up my throat.

Alexei stood in the courtyard next to the truck, but he wasn’t himself. He shimmered of silver and moonlight and a splash of dimmed rainbow. An ethereal creature, still in uniform, but transparent. I could see through him to the soldiers carrying another body out of the basement toward the truck.

I froze. What happened to him?

We needed to hide. I glanced back at the truck at Papa’s body. Beside him lay Alexei’s injured body. And beside him lay a longer body in a black skirt and bloodstained blouse that clung to a jewel-lined camisole.

Me.

My body.

My knees buckled and I landed hard on the ground, holding my hands in front of my face. Moonlight glistened through my transparent palm. I was transparent, too. I was double. There were two of me—Nastya in the truck and Nastya on her knees. I was a terrifying duplicate of myself—a ghostlike copy that could move and think and see just like the unconscious body of me.

The soldiers paid me no mind as they tossed Tatiana’s body into the truck, half on top of my physical one. I fell to all fours and sucked in deep breaths. They couldn’t come fast enough. What happened? What happened?

“Nastya, are we dead?”

Alexei came up behind me, handling this odd state much better than I was. I used the back of the truck to claw myself to my feet. The machinery felt distant and less than sturdy beneath my touch. Alexei’s physical body lay prone, solid, and bloodied in the bottom of the truck. But an ethereal copy of him stood—stood—beside me, uninjured, relying on me for an answer.

“I . . . don’t know.” I reached for Alexei’s hand and we touched.

“They can’t hear us or touch us. But I can touch you. Why?”

“I don’t know, Alexei!” Panic sent my voice spiking, almost begging for a soldier to overhear and come explain the madness.

“If we’re ghosts, Papa and the others must be, too. We need to find them.” Like when he read Maria’s letter a lifetime ago, telling us we were going to exile in Ekaterinburg, he remained calm. Only thirteen, but a soldier from skin to marrow . . . and even to transparent soul.

“You’re right. If we’re like this, Papa’s soul, or ghost, or whatever we are must be somewhere.” My ghost-heart lurched at the need to see my papa walking and moving and smiling again. To hear his voice. To run to him and find a semblance of normal.

I moved to steady Alexei, to help lead him away from the truck, but he held up his hands. “I can walk. I have no pain. Nothing holding me back.” The awe in his voice buoyed me further. Whatever this state of existence was, it was freedom and healing and hope.

I took his hand. “Let’s find our family.”

The guards went about their work, hauling bodies from the cellar room to the truck. I couldn’t look at the bodies—I searched only for the ghost forms. With each step I knew my physical family was dead. We had all been shot. Executed brutally.

Zash had taken part.

But I couldn’t dwell on that now. Not yet.

Had my family’s souls gathered somewhere? Were they waiting for us?