Chapter 27
Zina
“I do not like it, Zina,” said Katya.
“The cigarette or the séance?”
“Neither! You looked like death when you came in after your little outing earlier, and here you are, smoking and looking to expend more energy!”
I laughed and took another drag of my cigarette, pushing the kitchen window open wider, letting in more of the night—Madame Sherbatskaya had already yelled at me once for smoking.
“Have I told you that you worry entirely too much?” I stubbed out my cigarette on a cracked porcelain plate. “And anyway, I rested earlier.”
“No,” Katya countered. “You lay down, then became distracted by Zefir.”
Katya had picked up my cat when she had visited Samovar that day.
I grabbed Zefir and pressed her furred, wriggling body to my chest. She was soft and warm and very cuddly, but she kicked at me with her hind legs and yowled in indignant protest. “How could I resist this gorgeous creature? I missed her so.”
“Even still. Can’t we practice tomorrow?”
“No, the meeting is tomorrow.” Though I did feel a little faint just holding Zefir.
I turned back to the table, square and rickety, but it would have to do.
I placed Mama’s deck of cards in the middle and lit the candles, my hand trembling.
I was nervous for this séance, given my last one with the Grand Duke.
But I had no choice. I needed the practice, needed to try summoning Mama, protection or no.
I had to convince whoever would be at 40 rue de Paradis tomorrow to help me.
Zefir settled at my feet as Katya sat across from me with a resigned sigh. I studied my friend. “Are you all right? I can do this without you.”
She shook her head. “Absolutely not. But would you mind awfully if I didn’t accompany you tomorrow?”
“I wasn’t planning on it. Marie-Louise is…particular about who she invites to her gatherings, and this is my test, not yours.”
Katya let out a relieved little laugh. She was all fluttery and unsettled, very unlike her usual self.
“Who are you meeting?” I had been a poor psychic indeed for not noticing the change in my friend—her normally yellow-hued aura misted reddish and smelled of roses. “Who is he?”
Now she turned red. “Your doctor and I got to talking when he was tending to—”
“Dr. Misha?” I blinked at her, stunned. He seemed so old to me.
“He is not that much older than me,” she insisted, as though reading my mind. “We have been seeing each other, meeting up at a café here and there, taking walks.” She saw the question in my face and added, “That is all, but I like him. Very much. He is kind and caring. He is Russian. And he is…”
“Experienced?” I couldn’t help but quip. Katya shot me a dark look, and I caught her cold hands in mine. “All right, handsome. Oh, all right. I will try. If you like him.”
“I do, Zina. He is a fine man.”
“Then I am happy for you,” I said, not quite meaning it, but trying very hard.
I couldn’t help but think of Inspector Allard, our sitting together in the gloaming as it lowered on our attempt at intimacy, an unlikely courtship cut off too soon.
A togetherness that should never have happened.
An anomaly. A conundrum. I had nothing against Dr. Misha; I even liked him.
But I was jealous, and misery adored company.
Though our hearts weren’t into it, we closed our eyes, and I said the words to summon Mama, thinking of her.
It was quiet in the apartment, shadowy and cool, the night streaming in through the open window I hadn’t bothered to close.
I heard its scrape, sending an uneasiness through me that I also felt in my cat, a tense, rigid ball of fluff at my feet.
I started to feel warm, heating up with every minute, especially in my chest, when there came a rush of very cold air with a dead quality to it.
It emptied me entirely and left salt crystals on my tongue.
My eyes flew open to the yellowish-gray spirits, their shadowy faces and limbs tangling like a nest of branches, encasing my body.
Dozens of lustrous eyes blinked at me. I peered back at them, searching for Mama.
Trying to parse through their moans, trying to hear her voice, though I could only imagine it.
A girl medium! How refreshing, someone said.
Not Mama. This voice was reedy, childish.
A ghost of no more than seven or eight years materialized.
Matted hair, a skirt flaring gold, a gray face marred by a rash now blackened.
A sure sign of illness and eventual death.
Well, girl medium, what do you have to say?
Don’t look at me so dumbly, the ghost said with a hint of spite.
“W-who are you?” I whispered, teeth chattering, heart quaking at this child, too malicious for one so young.
Her mouth curved at the edges in a simpering smile.
Katya still had her eyes closed, oblivious, apparently not hearing us.
The girl spirit giggled. You aren’t very good at this, are you?
I stared at her. “How do you know?”
I hop from séance to séance, looking for doors to the living. I like to show myself to them, to surprise and frighten them. Some séances are fake, others real. This one is real, but you have no control over it, do you?
“Who are you? Why are you here? I was summoning my mother, Svetlana Lenormand. Have you seen her?”
No. The girl spirit glanced at Katya. She was thinking of me and drew me to you.
“She knows you?”
Of me.
“Is there anything you wish to say?” I asked, though I didn’t like the girl.
Tell her I don’t know where my sisters and cousins are. The house burned down, you see. But I don’t feel them, so unfortunately, they must have escaped. She faded into the atmosphere with a cruel little giggle.
I waited, ignoring the beginnings of exhaustion, my back hunching from the effort of sitting up, my mind fuzzy.
Another female spirit materialized—this time, tall and frail.
Something shadowy rested on her eyes—a pair of spectacles—and while older than the girl who’d just vanished, she was also young.
Though I couldn’t tell exactly how old given her wasted frame.
“Welcome,” I said, still uncertain how to begin. “What is your name?”
That ghostly luster in her eyes made her look wicked. I rose and stepped toward her. She wavered in the doorway leading to the apartment’s one big room. Like the other girl, she unsettled me.
She is alive, and I am not, spat the older girl spirit.
“I…am sorry.” I tried for softness. “Do you mean Katya?” I thought I knew who this spirit was—Katya’s elder sister, Alexandra, whom she often talked about.
She had described the spectacles, the illnesses, how Alexandra had wasted away during the hard revolutionary years before Katya and her mother had fled Russia.
I hate her for living while I am…this. The older girl spirit pressed her hands to her ears. And I am still in pain, she wailed.
A gale blew through the little kitchen, not from the window.
The candles were snuffed out, leaving us in deep darkness.
The window banged closed, its glass shattering.
Cruel giggles erupted. Someone ran invisibly behind me, pulled at my hair, then climbed the table, which trembled and threatened to give, before pushing Katya off her chair.
I heard her cry out in surprise, but she was too far away from me. It had to be the younger girl spirit.
“Now, you listen—” I started to say, intent on wresting back some of that control.
But a gray blur took shape before me, a shadow figure, writhing, maybe struggling—trying to escape? My heart nearly pounded out of my chest when I saw the glint of red hair, the eyes that shifted to me desperately.
Zina. A never-before-heard voice, yet instinctively familiar. Mama’s voice.
The exhaustion was turning my limbs to liquid, my mind to a foggy, starry mess. “Mama?”
In that moment, clawlike gray fingers appeared—before wrapping around my mother’s shadow throat.
The Grand Duke’s eyes flashed at me—and before my vision went black, I thought I heard Help me on the dying wind.
I gasped awake to find Katya hovering over me. The floor was hard at my back. I felt so faint I couldn’t even lift a hand. “I saw your sister…” I forced out, my mouth dry and cottony.
“Shh,” said Katya, though her lips went white, her eyes large, haunted. “Try not to speak. I will fetch you a glass of water.”
“No.” I blinked, swallowed, forced myself to focus before I lost it. “She is full of such anger, such blame. You must make peace with her.”
Katya now shook. “I knew it! Every time I stumble on her things, such darkness overwhelms me. I constantly feel her beside me, especially at night.”
It was still quietly, uneasily dark in the kitchen.
The candles’ waxy smoke floated on the air; shards of glass glinted below the window.
I inhaled that non-smell, clinical, empty, as if the kitchen had been scrubbed raw after someone had dropped dead there.
“I saw another girl, younger—” I paused, struggling very hard to remember.
“She said she doesn’t know where her sisters and cousins are, as their house burned down.
But she doesn’t feel them with her, so she thinks they are alive. She said you knew of her.”
“W-what did she look like?” When I described her, Katya’s eyes went even wider.
“Xenia,” she breathed. “We were in Crimea when we received word she had died of scarlet fever. She was my Sherbatsky cousin, Irina and Lili’s little sister.
” Katya clapped a hand over her mouth. “Mon Dieu. Why, this means they might be alive after all. At least, there is hope.” She took my hand and shakily brought it to her lips. “Thank you, Zina. Thank you.”
I felt a similar satisfaction to when fortune-telling clients came to me about living auras, but not quite.
I had not only helped Katya but provided comfort to her about something Baba Valya and most other psychics could not.
About the dead, the dying, the lost. The beyond so out of reach for most of the living. Most, except for me.
I struggled up and pulled my knees into my chest, leaning against one of the table’s wooden legs. “There was something—someone else.”
Katya sat crossed-legged before me. We clasped our cold, trembling hands together and held on to each other in the darkness.
Unlike her, I never had a sister, but I suddenly felt that if I had, she would be exactly like Katya.
I had already thought of Katya as my family, but now I thought of her as my sister, too. This comforted me.
“I saw a pair of shadow figures,” I said slowly, envisioning it all over again. “One was strangling the other. It was the Grand Duke and my mother. I was right—she is in trouble. That’s why I haven’t been able to reach her. I think the Grand Duke’s spirit is imprisoning her.”