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.

She was afraid of something else now instead.

SHE ALMOST DROWNED in her own lungs by the end of winter, when the pneumonia settled in and shook her in bone-rattling spasms. But Nina Markova survived, coughing and emaciated, filthy and ravenous, until the Germans pulled away from Poznań in January of the new year—until she could emerge blinking and staggering from her forest into the sterile white arms of the Polish Red Cross pushing through the liberated camps and stalags. There were months of thermometers and medicines, months being moved from one hospital berth to another, tossing and turning as she dreamed of a blue-eyed huntress until she knew that face better than her own. Nina was thinking of that face as she sat upright in the latest hospital cot, deliriously tracing a star on the sole of one foot with a red navigation pencil and vowing to do it over in tattoo ink, when a whip-lean Englishman with desperate eyes came running at her with a torrent of questions, and she had been able to recite the first line of the story, the myth. Not Your brother is dead because I failed him but Your brother died a hero.

Chapter 54

Ian

September 1950

Boston

Nina avoided Ian’s eyes. The woman who had stared down Comrade Stalin, Ian thought, now staring at her own interlocked hands to avoid his eyes. The Ford had wound its way out of Boston and was speeding northeast.

“I lie to you,” Nina said, ignoring Jordan and Tony in the front seat, speaking only to Ian, her Russian accent thickening. “Is my fault Seb dies.”

Ian didn’t answer. Jordan and Tony exchanged glances, said nothing either.

“I should have stayed with him. Die J?gerin, she wouldn’t catch me off guard. Or I should be faster, join him on the dock. I hesitate too long, is done.” Nina sighed, and Ian heard the layers of guilt and pain in that sigh, the long nights she’d thought about this in the years after the war.

“You did your best,” he managed to say.

“Not enough. Seb should have lived.” Nina looked at him then, unblinking. “Is what you’re thinking.”

Part of Ian did think that. The unthinking rage of a brother too swamped by loss to be fair: You knew how trusting he was, and you left him to be slaughtered. Then the rage of a betrayed lover: I slept beside you, I trusted you, I told you about the parachute, and you keep this from me?

“I fail him,” she said again, more softly. “Is what I do, when I have a team. I fail my regiment, I lose them. I fail Seb, I lose him. Is why I don’t have a team anymore. I shouldn’t have come, joined you . . .” Looking from Tony to Ian. “But I want to find the huntress. Since I have to stumble away from her by the lake, I want to find her again. It makes me selfish, so I join you. I shouldn’t have.”