Romanov(54)

I quickened my step and ran past the guards—and sometimes through the guards—to the basement. All I had to do was follow the trickle of blood from the bodies they were carrying out. The trail led down. Down. Down to the basement that smelled of smoke and defeat. Plaster fell from the ceiling and walls in chunks from the bullet holes. Blood coated the floor like fresh paint.

I managed only one glance before I scrambled back up the steps, dry heaving into the darkness. I was dead—or something—but the raw emotions and horror still boiled in my chest.

They killed us. They slaughtered my family. “Papa!” I screamed, abandoning any caution. “Mamma! Olga! Tatiana! Maria!” I ran in the dark, Alexei keeping up behind me. “Dr. Botkin! Anna! Trupp! Kharitonov!” But I could not find their ethereal forms. Only their bodies. Their dead bodies, which the soldiers searched and manhandled and treated like sacks of garbage.

“Jewels.” One soldier tapped Maria’s body with the butt of his gun. “She had jewels in her clothing. That’s why the bullets ricocheted. That’s why it took so many tries to kill her.”

My eyes burned, but my current incorporeal form would not allow tears. Only the burn. Only the emotions.

“Maybe they are in our rooms,” I said in a last desperate attempt, leading Alexei in a sprint around the house, through the door, and up the stairs. We didn’t need to touch the doors. They opened on their own, as though just for us, and then returned to their previous state, releasing no creaks or groans or slams. Did they open at all in the physical world, or was this merely the ghost world reacting?

Up in our rooms we found nothing but packed bags and our rooms as we left them. The only difference was Tatiana’s dogs. Both of them lay dead near her bed.

“No!” Alexei cried, running into the room. He searched for his spaniel. “Joy! Joy! Come here, girl!” He ran from room to room. I had never seen him run like this before—not even on his healthiest days. “Joy! Where are you?”

No answer. No bark. No response from his beloved spaniel. I didn’t help him search because I didn’t want to find her body. We both knew that had she been in the room alive, she would not have ignored his calls.

“Perhaps she escaped,” I suggested. “Or maybe she can’t hear your ghost voice.”

He bit his lip but didn’t cry. Always the soldier. I would cry for him if I could. He slunk to me and wrapped his arms around my waist. I gripped him hard, clinging to the comfort. The safety of family.

“What are we, Nastya?” He sounded so small. “Why is it just us?”

And finally I acknowledged the answer that I’d pushed aside until this moment. “I used a spell, Alexei. A spell from Papa. He gave me the family Matryoshka doll and there was a spell in it he told me not to use until we were desperate. When I reached for your hand in the truck, the spell came out. And here we are.”

“What does the spell do?”

I shook my head, a lump in my throat. “I thought it had healed me. But now . . . I don’t know what it did to us. Papa said each spell was for the good of the Romanov family. He said it could be our salvation.” It didn’t seem right to have salvation without Papa. It was supposed to extend to him. To everyone. I’d waited like he told me. I didn’t use the spell until the very end.

And it was too late.

Papa had been wrong.

“Maybe it is letting us escape.” Alexei leaned away and stared up into my face.

I glanced out our open window at the truck below. It was filled with bodies now—ours included. Yurovsky hissed orders at the guards, threatening them at gunpoint to turn out their pockets and surrender the jewels they’d torn from Maria’s clothing. Then he took a bayonet from one of the soldiers and speared a moving body in the back of the truck. I flinched. Had that been mine? Or Alexei’s? Or someone else?

Would I feel it if they destroyed my physical form?

I couldn’t handle the moment—the truth of our executions and the betrayal that came from our country, from the soldiers . . . from Zash. So my mind turned blank—a defense against the emotions. It knew they were too much, so it allowed only a drop here and there. A drop that carried the weight of a broken and torn country.

“I think you’re right,” I said in a dead voice. “The spell is letting us escape.” But I didn’t know if I had the will to escape. To survive without my family. To run with the knowledge and memories of tonight.

Then I looked at Alexei, standing tall with his chin lifted. Emulating Papa’s calm and ferocious strength. For him. For Alexei I would escape. I would not give up. We would survive . . . for our family.

*

Yurovsky was quick. He had the bodies in the truck and the soldiers in their vehicles within a half hour of having executed us. When he was the only one left to climb into a truck, he pulled out his pocket watch.

Alexei and I huddled near the truck but hadn’t gotten in. We couldn’t bear to sit among the dead bodies that no longer felt like family. They felt like tragedy and grief.

Yurovsky consulted the watch face. Then he walked toward the truck until he stood over my body. He stared down at me as though I were sleeping. In that moment I wished him dead. I wished to see him shot from behind, crumpled on the ground, devoid of all dreams and pursuits and hopes and honor.

Papa would be ashamed of my thoughts. Even Alexei would likely parrot Papa and say I ought to forgive this terrible man. But my will to forgive had died with the first bullet sent into Papa’s chest.