The Siren's Dream

by Amber Belldene

  Her gaze found the photo of Dariya’s mother. “I’m sorry your mom didn’t get better.”

  Dariya rested her head on the back cushion of the sofa, directing her attention to the photo too. “I miss her.”

  “What was she like?”

  “Like having a best friend who didn’t let me get away with shit.”

  “Such as using the word shit?” Katya raised her eyebrows. She’d never sworn in front of her mother, but if she had, Svetlana Dvoynev wouldn’t have bothered to correct her, if she’d even noticed.

  Dariya chuckled. “Exactly. And even when Kolya was busy saving the world and pissing off Ukraine’s rich and powerful, he would come to dinner every Sunday night. He always arrived with a frown and seemed so serious. When I was little, I would feel shy. Then mom would pour him a glass of wine and coax stories out of him. He would relax, explain obscure things to her, tell jokes I didn’t understand, but I loved the way they used to laugh together.”

  Katya couldn’t help but sigh. A weekly family meal with real conversation sounded like a fairy tale compared to her childhood—dragged to fancy charity events where she was dressed up and paraded before cameras by her parents like she was their cherry on top, or just as often plopped in front of the TV by indifferent babysitters to eat alone.

  “I started reading Kolya’s articles,” Dariya said, “even though they were way over my head and usually not appropriate for a young girl. He’s never really figured out how to talk to kids. Or fifteen-year-olds.”

  Katya cast her a sympathetic smile. “Maybe he’s a little clueless, but he really loves you.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Dariya closed her eyes and leaned her head back again. “We’ll find our way.” She cracked one eyelid. “So, what’s up with you two, exactly?”

  “What do you mean?” Katya asked.

  “He’s never brought somebody home before, and you’re like, spending the night and wearing his clothes. I would have put money on him shuffling a girlfriend out of here before I woke up.”

  Katya swallowed. If only she and Nikolai had worked out a story about this part.

  She opted for playful, poking a finger into Dariya’s upper arm. “I’m guessing that’s because he knew you would ask nosy questions.”

  “Hey, what can I say?” Dariya held up her hands in defense. “I get my investigative instincts from him.” She grinned, reached over, and fingered one of Katya’s turquoise highlights. “And no offense, but you’re not exactly how I pictured his type.”

  Katya couldn’t suppress her curiosity. “Am I different from the other women he’s dated?”

  He’d enthusiastically welcomed her into his bed, but that had been a dream. It suddenly mattered that their attraction was mutual and that he didn’t only want her when she flipped on the siren voice. God, she wished she understood what it meant to be a vengeful ghost with a siren voice. At least she wasn’t craving Nikolai’s life force. The longer she spent in her skin, the more sure she became that her new desire qualified as normal human lust and not the urges of a succubus. But how could she use these strange siren powers to make Lisko pay?

  Dariya grabbed a black sweater from the laundry pile and folded it, revealing a pink skull and crossbones on its front. “I have no idea. I’ve never met a girlfriend of his before. I thought maybe he was gay, but mom said no, just private. He’s pretty good looking for an old guy, though, isn’t he?” The girl was clearly fishing.

  Katya shrugged. “He’s not old.”

  “And…?” Dariya tilted her head forward.

  Katya chuckled. “Yes. He’s good looking.” Hot enough to turn on a bodiless ghost, in fact. So sharp in that crisp gray suit, and with a sense of gravitas that skinny Fedir in his baggy clothes had lacked, even if he had been her knight in shining armor.

  “Be nice to Kolya, okay?” Dariya said. “He’s been through a lot.”

  Katya had watched this pair for weeks, not quite realizing how she was coming to care for them, but the girl’s words cut right to her heart. The clumsy way they looked out for each other and attempted to express their affection—it was so much more of a family than she’d ever had. She couldn’t help but envy them, but she would try to avoid doing so bitterly.

  “I won’t hurt him. I promise.” But she also couldn’t get sidetracked from her mission.

  Dariya flung herself into Katya, who wrapped her arms around the warm girl.

  Warm? She hadn’t even noticed the cold beginning to creep up on her again until the other, very alive body came into contact with her.

  “Thank you.” Dariya squeezed her tighter. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

  “Ditto. I’ve been a little isolated myself lately.” Patting Dariya’s back, Katya suppressed a shiver. The cold was starting to seep into her bones.

  “Really?” Like a big child, the girl turned her head so her cheek rested on Katya’s shoulder. “I don’t know if Kolya told you, but I haven’t left this apartment since we moved in. To get me here from the old one, he had to feed me a handful of tranquilizers. Before that, I hadn’t left my mom’s apartment since she died there three months earlier. I tried, but I had panic attacks.”

  “You poor thing.” Katya switched to long strokes down Dariya’s back. And poor Nikolai. His niece’s distress would have been a lot for a new guardian to handle.

  “The doctor says I have acute agoraphobia, and I should take the medicine so I can go to school. But I don’t want to.” Dariya sat back, sniffing and wiping her nose with her knuckles. “When I take it, I sometimes forget she’s gone. Then I remember, and it hurts even worse.”

  “Oh, Dariya. I’m so sorry.” Tears blurred Katya’s vision and streamed hot down her cool cheeks.

  “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a bummer. We were having fun. It’s just that months have passed, and my friends call less and less, and Kolya saves all his words for his articles, and—well, it’s just really nice to talk to you.” She yawned, opening her jaw as wide as a roaring lion cub.

  Something about that yawn tugged at Katya’s heart. If she could have had a niece, she would have wanted one just like Dariya.

  “You know, I feel like I’ve known you a long time. It must be all Nikolai’s stories—I promise we will talk again. But now I think you need to rest. A healing heart needs a lot of sleep.”

  Katya had slept twelve or sixteen hours a day when Fedir had first brought her to his home, as she’d tried to process the shock of her kidnapping and her parent’s betrayal.

  “Promise me we can have another Femme Fatale marathon soon and that you will put away your laundry when you wake up?”

  Dariya grinned and her pink spikes bobbed a little bit. “Yes and yes. Will you be here then?”

  Again, her question plucked at Katya’s heart. Did she face the fresh memory of her mother’s absence every time she woke?

  “I’ll try to be. Right now, I have an errand I need to run.” While she was still in possession of her skin, she wanted to head up to Mr. Kulish’s apartment and learn whatever she could about maras. And apparently, she’d be doing it in Nikolai’s socks.

  As soon as Dariya disappeared behind her closed bedroom door, Katya dashed into the hallway and up two flights of stairs. The other day, she’d overheard Mr. Kulish tell a neighbor he was leaving to spend several weeks at his dacha. She’d also seen him tape a spare key to the backside of the framed watercolor of the Opera House that hung opposite his door. Probably for Mrs. Lutsenko to water his weird night blooming whats-his-name.

  “Sorry, Mr. Kulish, I mean no disrespect,” she whispered, slipping the key into the knob, even though she’d ghosted into his apartment countless times uninvited. After a furtive glance left and right to check she was unobserved, she let herself inside.

  Her teeth began to chatter. Hugging herself tightly, she scanned the room. The patriotic old gentleman had attempted to immortalize the glory age of the Cossacks in his living room by displaying
centuries-old uniforms, fur hats, swords, and rifles. Every item of furniture was an impractical, uncomfortably rustic antique except for his dusty orange plaid recliner aimed at a large flat screen T.V. Some nights, when Fedir had worked late, she’d drunk pepper vodka and watched soccer with Mr. Kulish. But more often, they’d pored over his books.

  She darted into his small spare bedroom, which he’d turned into a charming library with shelves from floor to ceiling. The lush, musty smell of the books nearly knocked her over. Oh, how she’d loved that odor when he’d first showed her his collection. Now, when she’d smelled nothing for so long, it was even more intense, connecting her back to the old tomes in her university library, and even further back in time, to the ancient stories of the Ukrainian people recorded in them. She slid out the water pan from the dehumidifier that kept the valuable books safe and dry. Less than half full, but she dumped it into the bathroom sink, the least she could do for entering his home uninvited. Then she cranked his thermostat up to the temperature of a nice warm day in the Sahara and just barely managed to get her shivers under control.

  Her finger grew numb from cold as she ran it along the shelves, searching for the volume—one of several in an extensive set of encyclopedias of folklore. If she remembered correctly, it was an emerald green, leather-bound book with its title embossed in gold. Not a bit of dust dirtied her finger. Tidy Mr. Kulish.

  Finally, she found the set. Had the entry been under M for mara or a more general list of female spirits? She took down both books and began flipping pages as the freezing cold coiled through her core. Her fingers faltered as her mind stopped receiving signals to help her locate her limbs. She was fading fast, and she hadn’t found the damn page.

  Only by watching her fingers and showing her mind where they were could she make them keep turning. And then, finally, the picture she sought appeared: a frightening drawing of a menacing mara. In another second, the aching cold flipped off like a switch, and she knew she was only spirit again. But at least she could still read.

  Mara. From the Proto-Indo-European for mare, a female horse. The mara is a malicious female dream spirit that can take the form of a succubus or a bloodthirsty avenger who hijacks the souls of murder victims on their way to the ever after. The spirit torments the soul until she avenges the unjust death. Legends attribute to the mara the ability to enter the dreams of any creature she has ever set eyes on. Some are also said to have siren powers. The folklorist M. Ludovska also claims maras are thought to feed on blood offerings, poured on the place where blood was spilled violently. However, he has not been able to document this theory with any historic evidence. All sources agree the possessed soul will only find eternal peace and freedom from the mara by bathing in the blood of her murderer.

  Hijack? Torment? Possession? Katya had never considered her ghostly existence like that at all. More like lonely and desperate. To the extent the mara felt separate from her, they were aligned in common purpose.

  Find Lisko, kill him, the mara hissed, as if on cue.

  “Yeah, Yeah, I know,” Katya replied, reading over the entry again. She had to avenge Fedir by bathing in Lisko’s blood to be free?

  Yikes. Hopefully, that was a metaphor, just as feeding on blood offerings must refer to temporarily regaining her fleshly form when Nikolai shed his blood. Yes, it made sense. How else could she bathe in Lisko’s blood if she wasn’t human?

  Still, she’d been so focused on the Find Lisko part. She hadn’t given the imperative to kill him nearly as much thought. She raised her spectral hands—the mara’s, with pointy claws to match the demon’s pointy teeth—could she really bring herself to shed a man’s blood and take his life?

  She spirited herself to Mr. Kulish’s impeccably clean bathroom and stared the mara down.

  The ghoul stared back at her. “Remember that night,” she rasped, her throaty, hollow voice strange. She’d never spoken so much as a complete sentence to Katya. “Your blood. Remember the bodies. Lifeless on the floor. Your future stolen.”

  Katya pictured Fedir. In death, he’d seemed so young and vulnerable, hardly older or wiser than Dariya, though in life he’d been a businessman, a hero.

  “I remember.”

  “We shall make Lisko pay.” The mara’s serpent-like hiss spread over Katya’s form, sending more spectral energy through her. With Nikolai’s help, they might just succeed.

  Chapter 7

  Nikolai’s stomach had begun to protest his skipping breakfast. He dropped by a cafe and grabbed a pint of porridge and a couple of hardboiled eggs to go, and then he hoofed it another three blocks to work.

  Last year, pro-Russian rioters had burned out half of the hundred-and-fifty-year-old building that housed the venerable headquarters of the Kiev Times. The golden marble of the classical columns flanking the front doors remained blackened with soot. Inside, the offices also remained unrestored, and every time Nik entered the edifice, the charcoal and chemical smell hit him fresh, as if someone had just burned a giant piece of toast smeared with interior paint. He loved coming to work in the ruins, like he still qualified as a real reporter, even as the culture editor.

  Thankfully, no one had been hurt in the fire or laid off in its aftermath. Nikolai’s old friend, Leonid Lytvyn, the editor and chief, had expended herculean effort to keep the paper afloat, steering a centrist course down the river of Ukrainian politics.

  Nikolai raised his chin in greeting at the security guards and took the stairs three flights to the top floor. Neither of his reporters were in. Good. He couldn’t stand them driveling on about operas and ballets.

  He dropped into his seat and turned on 24TV, hoping an update on the Lisko trial would turn up quickly in the news cycle. As the anchors droned on, he ground his teeth. If he hadn’t taken this culture job, he could be there in the courtroom covering real stories.

  The porridge had cooled to the perfect temperature, and he spooned in mouthfuls as he skimmed e-mails and half listened to the non-news.

  Chert. If he ever sank so low as to work for the ambulance chasers at cable news, he was quitting journalism to become a goatherd. Not that arts and entertainment was much better. Only countries not teetering on the verge of civil war could justify real estate in the broadsheets to music, paintings, and food.

  He took another bite of porridge and recalled Katya backing up Dariya on the matter of Femme Fatale with her svelte little arms crossed within the baggy sleeves of his sweatshirt—so tiny compared to his Amazon of a niece. But maybe the girl band wasn’t such a crap assignment after all, if Katya was even close to correct about the Nobel Peace Prize. Now that she’d enlightened him, Nikolai was impressed with Leonid’s decision to cover the band—honoring them with a feature in the Times’ weekend magazine wasn’t exactly centrist. It would legitimize the rebellious young women, even if he’d instructed Nik to remain pristinely objective.

  For Dariya’s sake, Nikolai was determined to keep his job, and his promise to Sofiya. He would package whatever he turned up about Lisko with perfect sourcing and share it with a buddy at the pro-national paper the Daily Ukrainian.

  Nik peeled an egg and swallowed half in one bite. A knock sounded on his office door, and Leonid strode in, his mane of gray hair long in back but not quite capable of hiding his shiny bald dome.

  “You see this?” He pointed at the TV with an unlit cigarette, then brought it to his mouth and flicked a flame from his lighter, bringing it to the tip of the smoke. Some of the younger reporters objected to his disregard of the smoking laws, but to Nik, it just made the editor more old-school. On the screen stood an empty podium, blue backdrop, and two white Л logos flanking the lectern. Then a banner flashed on the bottom of the screen announcing a press conference with Dmitri Lisko, CEO of Lisko Enterprises.

  The bite of egg in Nik’s mouth turned crumbly, the yolk suddenly unbearably sulfuric, like it had rotted right there in his mouth. He’d only seen pictures of the thug before, never heard him speak live. A m
oment later, Lisko sauntered out a door and seized the podium with two meaty paws—boxer’s hands. He offered a grave, reserved smile at the reporters there. The man’s nose was wrecked from the fight that had lost him his career, but with that controlled smile, he could probably still charm a crowd, the fucker.

  Until that moment, Nikolai had waged his crusade against the concrete and glass facade of the Lisko Enterprises corporate headquarters, an anonymous profit machine driven by a board of directors who saw dollar signs instead of human beings. But now his enemy had a face, and with those ice-blue eyes, he’d looked into Katya’s pretty features and put a bullet in her heart. Now Nikolai’s hatred burned with a new, more personal kind of vitriol.

  “Who’d you send to cover this?” he asked Leonid.

  “Lyuba.” He took a long, cool drag, like the old-school newsman he was.

  “Nice choice.” Nik grinned, searching for her glossy black ponytail in the crowd. People would underestimate the novice reporter, assuming that if she was on the case, it was essentially beneath the radar of the Times. No conflict of interest claims would backfire on them. Ah. There she was, in the third row, her ramrod-straight posture screaming an eagerness even he would translate as cluelessness if he didn’t know better. The story was in good hands

  Lisko tapped the microphone. “Hello. Can you hear me?”

  Nik clenched his fists and the cut in his arm throbbed dully.

  A chorus of yesses answered the thug.

  “You’ll have to excuse me. This is my first press conference as a CEO instead of a boxer, and I find I’m a little camera shy. I’m unused to appearing before such a big audience with all my clothes on, but my media department assured me it would be uncouth to address you wearing only my shorts.”

  The reporters laughed. Even Lyuba’s head bobbed. Oh yes, the son of a bitch was charming. The camera panned to where a woman stood next to the door from which Lisko had come. She smiled, her gaze affixed to the brute in the suit, her jaw a tense line. He couldn’t put his finger on why, but she had the uncanny look of a woman outside of her time—her floral-print dress, her long loose waves of hair, the stoic expression on her face, they somehow registered in his gut as from a different era. Nikolai had never seen her before and she wore no badge, as someone from the Lisko PR department would have.