The Forest of Vanishing Stars(33)

She finally looked up again, and Aleksander studied her face in silence. His jaw, firm and square beneath his beard, flexed a few times, and she could see the cartilage in his neck bobbing as he swallowed. She had the strangest urge to reach out and place her fingers there, to feel his pulse and the rhythm of his breath, so she looked away again before he could read her eyes. “Yona?” he said softly.

She looked back at him. Her heart was still thudding with a drumbeat of danger the way it sometimes did before a raging storm. But there was something else there, too, a heat, an unsettling warmth. “Yes?”

He took a step closer. She felt the frisson between them again, the change in the air, and this time, she didn’t stop her eyes from wandering where they wanted to go. His arms. The taut muscles that ran the length of his neck. The way his broad chest strained against his threadbare shirt. When she looked back at his face, he was watching her closely, and there was something in his gaze that hadn’t been there before. She couldn’t put a name to it, but it stirred something in her belly, something she didn’t know was there.

“Yona, I…” he began.

But then the low, plaintive call of a wolf nearby pierced the quiet, and it was enough to shake her heart out of wherever it had been, to remind her of the danger, to squeeze everything else aside. Aleksander seemed to feel the shift, too, for he took a step back and cleared his throat. “I’ll—I’ll go tell the others that it’s time to move,” he said.

She made herself smile at him, but now that her belly was no longer on fire, the tension that had knotted her insides was back. Something was coming; she could feel it. “Thank you.”

But after Aleksander had awoken the others and handed the rifle to Rosalia, sending her out on patrol with a warning to be on alert, they realized at the same time that Leib was gone. “Where is he?” Aleksander asked Miriam, whose eyes were wide and frightened.

“I have no idea,” Miriam said. “He was beside me when we went to sleep.”

Yona quickly scanned the clearing. She had left the gill net beside the smoker the night before, but it wasn’t there anymore. Smoke trailed lazily from the opening at the top of the tent, and the hairs on her arms stood on end once more. “He’s gone to the river to fish, I think,” she said to Aleksander. “I’ll go.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No. Stay here with the others. Break up the camp and prepare to move.”

She was gone, into the forest as quickly as her legs could take her, before he had a chance to protest.

She’d had this feeling before, this tightening of her abdomen, this tingling of her skin. Once, when she was just a girl, she had managed to scramble up a tree just before a trio of wolves emerged from the forest, running straight for her. When she was twelve, she had seen in her mind’s eye a massive oak toppling on them during a storm the moment before it happened, giving her just enough time to awaken Jerusza and pull her away. The last time had been four years ago, when she’d found Jerusza, her ankle badly twisted from a fall, cornered by a snarling brown bear. Yona had shot the creature with an arrow in the back and carried Jerusza away while it lay dying.

You have a sixth sense, Jerusza had told her then. There is a piece of me in you after all. Yona had protested, insisting that she had simply been in the right place at the right time. But it had been more than that, and she’d known it then, just as she knew it now.

As she drew closer to the stream, she slowed her pace and slipped silently toward the water. Her body thrummed with something foreign, something dangerous. She spotted Leib first, on her side of the stream, his back to her. He was bent over the gill net in a splash of morning sunshine, quickly plucking fish. For a second, she let herself breathe more easily. He was fine. She was imagining the danger.

And then she saw the movement in the bushes several yards away, to her right. She flattened herself against a tree and held her breath, watching.

Time seemed to stand still as two men emerged from the woods, one skinny as a twig, the other one thick as an old oak trunk, both wearing the same tattered uniforms Yona had seen on the men she’d spotted last year with Jerusza before they’d fled to the swamp, the ones Jerusza had said were Russian partisans. Both had rifles drawn, both were moving with the quiet ease of practiced hunters toward Leib.

“Ey, ty!” the larger man barked suddenly, startling Leib so severely that he lost his balance and tumbled into the stream. He straightened immediately, whirling around, his eyes widening as they locked on the two men.

The slender one was leering at him. “Ey, mne kazhetsya, on yevrey,” he snarled. “Eto tak? Ty yevrey?”

Leib stared at them blankly, fear in his eyes. He was right to be frightened; they were pointing the rifles at him now, asking if he was a Jew. Slowly, her heart hammering, Yona tracked backward so she could approach the men from behind. She had to move slowly to stay silent, but she needed to get to them as quickly as possible before one of them pulled the trigger. “Ja ciabie nie razumieju,” Leib stammered—Belorussian for “I don’t understand”—as he stood in waist-high water, dripping wet. There were many overlaps between the Russian and Belorussian languages, but in Leib’s terror, he was having trouble interpreting words that weren’t immediately familiar. He was in the worst possible situation; the water prevented his escape. He couldn’t simply turn and run and hope that the men missed if they fired at him. He was a cornered target. Yona crept silently closer.