Chapter 30
Valya
Valya huddled under the covers in her cold, empty bed, clutching Ivan Morozov’s favorite book, Spirit Mediumship: A Guide to the Intuitive Séance.
She had taken to reading it with all her free time. Her clients now refused for her to visit their homes.
The fortunes emerged spoiled regardless of where she was.
The curse had not helped. The infernal spirit returned the very next day, when she found a few of the protective flower bouquets wilted.
Or perhaps the demon’s spawn empowered him when they tried to poison her granddaughter.
Now he was back, stronger than ever, tormenting her worse than ever.
All Valya could do was keep up the wards to the best of her ability and hope Zina would learn the spiritual expulsion to rid them of the nechistaya sila once and for all.
Then Valya would have her tearoom back. Her business and livelihood.
Her life. But the insect symbol in her coffee grounds that morning did not bode well. A warning—of unfortunate influences.
Alone, taunted the phantom voice. Always alone.
Valya’s eyes snapped up, her old heart nearly stopping.
The shadow materialized with a waft of rot.
She looked around for her amulet. Could she have forgotten a ward? Her gaze landed on an empty spot on the floor. She must have swept aside the salt and mustard seeds with her skirts when she had lumbered in earlier.
Valya slid along the bed, toward her nightstand and the salt container she kept there.
Everyone has left you, rasped the spirit.
Oh, but she could no longer stand it. “Shut your mouth!” she screamed.
The reason your patrons left you…Do you remember it?
“I said, shut your mouth,” she repeated, this time in a whisper.
The spirit was unfazed. You know the reason. He stepped closer. The truth—that you are a murderess…that you killed me.
“Begone, nechistaya sila,” Valya hissed.
He let loose an ugly laugh. The holes in his flesh were less pronounced. He looked solid, as real as her old, aching age. He took another step toward her.
In a movement quite belying her years, Valya hopped off the bed and backed toward the nightstand, using Ivan Morozov’s book as a shield, still keeping a close eye on the spirit, and he on her. Their gazes locked together.
I told you. She heard Svetlana’s voice from a long-suppressed past. It is kill or be killed with him. Maybe her daughter was right then, as her memory was right now.
Suddenly, quicker than Valya’s old senses could react, the spirit lunged at her.
Her beloved’s book slipped out of her trembling hands, and the spirit plunged his own hand directly into her chest. Valya heard her gasp, a horrible, choking sound. She couldn’t breathe, felt her heart momentarily, truly stop.
The spirit grinned, his eyes blazing white, like two orbs she had once glimpsed at a cemetery.
Valya’s vision filled with blood that she knew wasn’t there. The imaginary blood puddled on the floor, oozed from her skin, bathed her hands in a shocking, brilliant red. She blinked, and the blood and spirit were gone.
Valya was covered in salt. She must have grabbed the container and poured the salt onto the spirit. She was still panting, still clutching one salt-filled fist to her heart, as though to make sure it was back to beating as it should—when a loud noise startled her.
She stilled, listening. It was issuing from the tearoom. Glass breaking, tables and chairs being overturned, vases spilling and shattering.
“Oh no, you don’t.” She would choke that damn spirit by his shadowy neck.
But a horrific sight greeted her downstairs—her tearoom, destroyed.
The windows, mere shards of glass, the black night streaming in.
The tables and chairs, overturned and broken.
The large mirror under which she had taught Zina the art of fortune-telling, lying in fragments on the ground, beyond repair.
Valya covered her mouth, muffling the anguished cry, flashing back to that night those men had come for Ivan Morozov and their life together, their little bookshop, their home, the only true home she had ever known besides this tearoom, now in ruins.
“Come out, you filthy spirit! Show your face!” she shouted, feeling murderous.
But instead of the spirit, two very real, very alive men, masked and all in black, stepped out of the hallway.
This time, she cried out in surprise. “Who—?”
The men, reeking of rancid sweat and unfortunate influences, came at her too fast.
She put up her hands defensively—as her daughter had called her, a weak, old lady. “Don’t touch me—don’t you dare touch me—” Valya might be old, but she wasn’t weak. She grabbed a broom and brandished it like a sword before her.
But the men did not hear, did not listen to her. One grabbed the broom out of her hands as if it were nothing more than a pathetic twig; the other seized her by her bony shoulders and lifted her into the air, his fingers digging painfully into her flesh.
“Let go of me!” Valya flailed, her feet kicking at empty air. “I am a defenseless old woman! How dare you?” Her words became smothered, as if she were swallowing them. She realized the man had his hand around her neck and was squeezing.
She felt herself fly through the air, collide with something hard.
A crashing sound followed, echoing over and over.
It was the back wall with her tea tins, which were now all falling down.
Valya felt rather than saw it. Her entire body ached; her head spun.
But she understood this wasn’t a normal, run-of-the-mill robbery.
It was a search. A deliberate one. A ransacking.
It was the first time she thought she might die.
The first man came into view with something in his hands.
Valya screamed, threw her arms up again—to protect herself, to stop them, to do something, anything—but it was too late.
She felt a cold, hard object connect with her head.
A sticky warmth trickled down her forehead and cheeks.
She saw blood, blood, blood, her tongue blasted by the familiar iron taste of it, her mind flashing back to that image, the memory, of the Grand Duke’s motionless dead body lying in her tearoom.
Then all Valya could see were shooting stars, and then an endless blackness—like the sky on that night Ivan Morozov breathed his last. Yet her mind wasn’t still. It replayed what had brought her here. The plan of vengeance that, in the end, had failed so spectacularly.