“That’s different.”
Because I’m a savage, she thought. Because to an honorable young man like Sebastian Graham, well educated and well meaning and knowing nothing at all about the female sex, a small woman with smooth hair and buffed nails simply did not register as dangerous. Nina glanced over his shoulder at the woman in blue. She watched with a slight smile, content to let them hiss back and forth.
“I’m going back to our camp,” Nina told Seb. “I’m not taking the chance.”
He folded his arms. “I am.”
Nina stood back a step, surprised at the stab of hurt. I’ve fed you, hunted for you, stayed with you and now this?
He flushed again. “Nina—”
“I’ll meet you tomorrow at our campsite.” Cutting him off. “If you don’t come, I’ll know you’re on your way back to captivity in cuffs.”
“Or I’m helping the good Frau about the garden in exchange for being allowed to hide in her cellar,” he said quietly. “There are good people in the world, Nina. I trusted you, didn’t I? When the only thing I knew was that you’d be shot if you went back to your regiment, I still trusted you.”
Nina held up her razor. “I only trust this.”
“Strange how much you remind me of my brother,” Seb said. “Cool as ice and about as trusting.”
“Smart man.”
“Not a happy one.”
“Happy doesn’t matter. I’ll settle for alive.” Nina hesitated. “Come with me, Seb.”
But he wouldn’t. And Nina took off into the trees, too angry to look back and see him disappear into the ocher-yellow house.
HALF A KILOMETER’S FURIOUS HIKE down the shore, and Nina’s steps slowed. Dusk was coming now, the dark of a new moon fall ing. Good flying weather, Nina thought. Good hunting weather. She stopped altogether, scuffing her worn boots through the dead leaves. Something was off, something was wrong, she had no idea what.
Yes, you do. That woman could be telephoning the Krauts now, telling them she has an escaped prisoner of war in her kitchen.
No. Something even more wrong than that. She could have turned him in without inviting him inside. Why did she do that?
Nina looked up at the sky. Blue dusk, blue eyes . . . that woman’s eyes, no fear at all when she looked at the pair of ragged refugees turning up on her doorstep. Nina’s matted hair, Seb’s dark stubble, their dirty nails—anyone would have been wary, yet there had been no fear in her calm bearing. Anyone completely unafraid when standing outnumbered among filthy strangers in a war zone was either idiotic, saintly, or dangerous. The woman hadn’t looked like an idiot. That left saintly or dangerous. Nina knew which Seb would have picked. I know what I’d pick too.
It was dark when she reached the house again. Light showed in a few of the unshuttered windows, throwing warm squares into the woods behind. Nina squatted in the shadow of a slender pine, watching. She’d half expected to see cars pulled up, German sentries posted to stand guard as the English prisoner was recaptured, but all was quiet.
It did not mean there wasn’t a trap laid inside. Perhaps Seb had already been recaptured; the blue-eyed woman could have told the authorities that there was a woman at large as well. Nina watched another hour, listening to the sound of lake water lapping on the shore before the house, open razor in hand with its leather loop about her wrist. Seb, where are you?
Probably curled under a quilt before a banked fire, not giving Nina a thought.
She still didn’t move. No moonlight, faint starlight silvering the lake. Good hunting weather. The thought kept echoing. Good hunting weather . . .
The door opened. Wavering light spilling across the darkness like wine, two figures silhouetted as they came into the night. Nina blinked, her night sight ruined, but she could recognize Seb’s amble, his hair flopping on his forehead. The woman beside him moved lightly, hands in the pockets of her coat. She brought something out, and Nina rose fast from her crouch, but then there was the tiny scrape of a match, Seb leaning in gentleman-like to cup the flame, and the spark of a cigarette flared. The woman offered one to him, voices murmuring as they strolled toward the lake. Nina watched, still uneasy. Boards creaked as the pair stepped up onto the long dock that stretched out over the deeper water. Nina didn’t trust anything that let you walk on a lake, whether pine boards or two solid meters of ice, but Seb strode along without hesitation, his belly full, a good night’s sleep ahead, a civilized postdinner cigarette in hand, admiring starlight on calm water beside a woman who had been kind to him rather than hectoring him about keeping his boots dry and asking if he’d ever be able to tell which way was north.
Walk out there, Nina told herself, looking at the pair standing on the end of the dock. Join them. Maybe the woman really was just kind. Nina came out of the pine’s shadow, moved to the dock, but she couldn’t take the first step out over the water. She hesitated, flinching and cursing herself for flinching when the world was full of so many other things more terrifying . . . and at the end of the dock, as Seb tipped his head back to look at the night sky, Nina saw the woman flick her cigarette into the lake, reach into her coat pocket, and pull out something that glinted metallic in the starlight.
Nina launched herself onto the dock as the woman’s arm straightened at an angle. Too late. The shot cracked flatly across the water.
Sebastian fell.
Inside her skull, Nina screamed.
On snow or bare ground, she would have been as silent as a U-2 gliding out of the sky. She’d have cut the blue-eyed woman’s throat ear to ear before she realized there was anyone behind her at all. But the dock creaked under Nina’s sprinting feet, and the woman was turning before the smoke from her shot cleared. Nina’s night-trained eyes saw her in the faint starlight as though she stood under a noon sun: remote, calm, pitiless, gaze flaring only a little in the surprise of Nina’s reappearance. The arm came up again, straight and unhesitating, the pistol’s eye looking into Nina’s. Another crack; at the same time Nina jinked left as if she’d been sideslipping out of ground fire and brought the razor around in a whipping slash. The woman twisted back, the keen edge slashing the side of her neck to the nape rather than opening her windpipe, and Nina did scream then, seeing those pitiless blue eyes fly open in shock. The woman clapped a hand to her neck, blood spilling dark between her fingers, but the pistol was coming up again, and Nina’s sprint had carried her past Seb’s body and out of slashing reach. At this distance the bitch couldn’t miss and Nina couldn’t duck, and the decision made itself in an icy drench of terror. Nina kept running, two more sprinting steps, and as the third shot tore into the night, she flung herself into the embrace of the lake.
THE COLD STABBED her through with a thousand tiny silver knives. The iron tang of lake water invaded her eyes, her ears, her nose. Panic clawed Nina almost blind, the sensation of water moving through her hair. She had not sunk herself under the surface of even a bathtub since the day she’d turned sixteen, lying half drowned on the frozen surface of the Old Man as her father slurred, You’re a rusalka, the lake won’t hurt you. Nina opened her mouth to scream—she couldn’t help it—and the lake shoved its way down her throat like a claw of ice.
Panic and you drown, rusalka bitch, her father snarled, and somehow she got her limbs under control even as her mind melted with terror. She could swim—there wasn’t a child who grew up on the Old Man who couldn’t—and she pushed herself forward, wriggling like a lake seal. Up to the surface, lungs bursting, air searing fire-hot as she gulped it in.
The terrifying sound of another shot.
Nina dove under the surface again, not sure if she’d been hit or not—the fear held her in such an electric grip, there was no room for fresh pain to report. Bullet grazed or not, there was a stark choice in the middle of this thicket of horror: struggle out to the deeper lake, out of range, until the water numbed her limbs and she sank into exhaustion and cold, which would not take long . . . or thrash here in utter panic like a U-2 pinioned in the white glare of a searchlight and be shot at every time she surfaced. Or—