Aizhana stopped trying to keep up with him. “Sennaya Square is also the sort of place where people know not to look each other in the eyes. The sort of place where a resurrected corpse and a living shadow might survive without too many questions. Because that, in truth, is what we are, my son.”
Nikolai’s stomach turned, and he halted mid-stride. Was that what he’d been reduced to? A shadow no better than the boors in those dark alleys?
But no. He was more than that. Even if his body wasn’t. “I’m going to restore my corporeal self soon,” he said.
Aizhana let out a wheezing whimper. Or a groan. It was difficult to tell. Then she took in a long, quivering breath. “I am your mother. I will be here for you whenever you need me. And when reality catches up to you, you’ll be able to find me at the Black Moth.”
The most squalid of the sordid boardinghouses in Sennaya Square. Of course.
But Nikolai did not belong there. He would not.
“Best of luck to you,” he said with a slight nod. And then he strode away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Vika had run to the window of the tsar’s study as soon as the screaming had begun in Palace Square. She’d watched in horror as the Jack exploded, followed by the boxes, with only the ballerina left behind.
She shook as she surveyed the remains.
“Did you spare the doll, or is she supposed to be dead?” she asked, as if Nikolai could hear.
But what she really meant was, Is this what you intend to do to me? To us?
Vika pressed herself against the windowpane and scanned the square for him. But if Nikolai was still there, she couldn’t feel his magic. Perhaps it was his barrier shield. Or perhaps he was already gone.
Again, her heart contracted, locking itself, just in case. But the fact that Vika had to protect herself like that, that she had to watch as Nikolai turned against not only her and Pasha, but also against himself, hurt just as much as loving him.
Vika shook her head grimly as she surveyed Nikolai’s damage in the now-empty square.
She snapped her fingers, and the lifeless ballerina disappeared in a burst of tiny bubbles. Vika flourished her left hand, and the cobblestones assembled themselves back to their rightful places. But even as she swept magic across Palace Square, there were some things Vika could not do—clear away the people’s lingering fear, and the looming fog of her own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It took much longer than Nikolai anticipated to reach the Zakrevsky house. If he’d been able to walk the streets like an ordinary person, it would have been a relatively short trip. But because a shadow-without-a-person could not simply stroll out in the sunlight—not if he wanted to preserve the illusion that Vika was the only enchanter and therefore to blame for the havoc wreaked upon Saint Petersburg—Nikolai had to skulk under bridges and in the interstices of the canals.
He nearly cried out in joy as he emerged from the darkness onto the boulevard that ran along Ekaterinsky Canal. Never had he been so happy to see Galina’s home, three stories of neo-Baroque excess, against which all the other houses on the street paled.
How would Galina react when she saw him? Probably as if everything were the same, for Galina’s heart was made of lead and was therefore unsusceptible to any emotion, surprise or otherwise. But that would be a good thing. He needed a place from which he could plan his course of attack against Pasha, and unlike Aizhana, Galina wouldn’t constantly meddle in his affairs. Galina wouldn’t care enough to exert the effort.
Nikolai climbed the front steps and listened through the door. It did not seem as if anyone was inside, at least not in the entry. He charmed the lock open and slipped inside. Then he glanced quickly around him, and hearing the servants in the dining room, he tiptoed down the hall, up the curved staircase, and straight to his bedroom.
It had been redecorated as a library.
Nikolai stood immobile in the doorway. “Where are all my things?” He hadn’t meant to say it so loudly, but, well . . . Where in the devil were his desk and his bed and the armoire full of clothes he’d painstakingly tailored? He’d only been gone for two weeks.
Galina glided down the hall behind him. “I thought you were dead.” As Nikolai had expected, she was not rattled at all by his presence.
He turned to face her. She didn’t draw back.
“I’m clearly not dead,” he said.
“You look a little dead.”
“That’s actually impossible for you to judge, for you can’t even see me.”
“I amend my earlier statement. You don’t look particularly alive.”
Nikolai sighed and rested his forehead on the door frame. “Well, I am. And I have nowhere else to go, because it’s not exactly easy for a shadow to walk into an inn and ask for a room. Can I stay here?”
“It’s a library, Nikolai. And the Game is over. I am no longer your mentor, nor am I required to house you.”
He pressed his head into the doorway for another moment before he stood up straight. “Right. Of course you’d say that. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He turned back to the stairs. He would go down to the kitchen in the basement to Renata.
“I’m sorry,” Galina said.
Nikolai paused.
“After my brother passed away,” she said, “I couldn’t bear to have your things right here, inside my house, reminding me that you were gone as well. So I got rid of them. I did not expect you to come back.”
Nikolai tilted his head at her. “Galina, do I detect a sentimental spot—”
She cut him off with a scowl. “You still can’t stay. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror? You’d frighten the servants to death.”
Nikolai nearly laughed. He’d forgotten how stridently forthright Galina could be.
But then he walked past his former mentor to the mirror that hung between paintings of proud Zakrevskys from the past. The mirror in which he’d always made one last check of his appearance before he left the house.
Nikolai gasped at his reflection.
He touched his face. He was all blur, his edges not quite defined, and the rest of him, a haze of charcoal gray. Like a storm cloud in boy form, he was just there enough that his finger did not pass straight through his cheek, but not quite there enough to be solid.
Galina was reflected behind him, her lips curled in what might have been an amused grin, if her mouth had known what to do with such an expression. But smiles were foreign to it, so she merely looked like a wolf surveying her supper. “It’s not as if you haven’t been a shadow before,” she said.
True. But before, his silhouette had only been a shroud, a deception created for the oath at Bolshebnoie Duplo so that his opponent in the Game—so that Vika—couldn’t see him. But Nikolai had been himself beneath the shroud then. Now he was shadow through and through.
He dragged his finger along his jaw, as if that would make the line clear and sharp again, like it used to be. It didn’t.
“I need to see Renata,” he said, his voice as faint as his appearance. Renata would console and ground him.
Galina turned up her nose. “She’s not here. I fired her.”