Chapter Eleven

" M ay I please come in?"

It's three in the morning and some posh old dude with my half-naked girlfriend in his arms is standing at my door.

"Shit, what happened, baby?" I pluck Marina out of the old dude's arms and she clings to me like a latex glove.

"If I may enter, perhaps I can help explain? I am Jakob Minegold, a friend of Marina's."

"Let him in, he's wonderful," Marina half-sobs.

"Come in." I get Marina to the couch, then pull my shirt off and wrap it around her. "Baby, you're soaking wet and ice cold. I thought you were going to be working at a committee meeting until late, then going back to your place?"

"Koshchei."

One mumbled word opens up a floodgate of possibilities, none of them good. My mouth dries out as I look at her. Scrapes. Bites? She's got blood and bruises, and her brand-new shirt is gone...

Bile rises in my throat, and I look at Minegold. "He... Did he hurt her?" I should ask Marina. I'll have to listen eventually, but I can't at this second. I can't ask her that in case she looks me in the eyes and tells me what he did, because I will die. Or I will kill. And I don't want to leave this planet because Marina is still on it, and I don't want to rot in some jail while I should be at her side.

"Oh, no, not Koshchei himself. I'm afraid one of his ‘ambassadors' found Marina near her home and attacked her."

"What the fuck? Why?"

"She wanted Marina to return to his... organization. Koshchei has chosen her as his bride and will arrive to claim her in a few weeks. On the seventeenth of October, we believe."

I want to hit Jakob Minegold, "wonderful" or not. He sounds way too calm.

"Well, he can't fucking have my girlfriend. She doesn't love him. It doesn't sound like he loves her, either!"

"Do you love her?" The graying man asks, searching in the pockets of his long black coat, the expensive brushed wool kind with big lapels. He hands me Marina's shirt and phone.

Marina's voice emerges from her huddled ball, a steel flint. "Shut up, Jakob. You can't ask that."

"I am sorry, my dear. I will leave you two alone if you wish. But please tell Kev about our...research."

I grunt and take the shirt, glaring at the other man. "Yeah, you tell me about that, honey, and Jakob can tell me about why he was carrying you around without your damn top if it was in his pocket!"

"I'm covered in tannis root and arnica salve. I love my new shirt. I didn't want to get it dirty."

"And I carried her because she has a large cut on the bottom of her foot from the rocks in the river."

"Some bastard threw you into the river?" I pace. I air punch. Oooh, God I am not the sane one right now. "Where is this punk?"

"She's deceased. The police are handling it," Mr. Minegold explains, still too damn calm.

I whip my head around so hard that I hear something pop in my neck. "What? She killed— Marina, baby, what did you—"

"Drowning. Accidental. I'll be going now." Minegold leaves with a swift bow, eyes sweeping over Marina, whose head remains slumped on her chest.

When the door closes after him, I pace. I sit with Marina. I pace again. "That dude just lied to me. Like, not about everything, but about a couple things."

"He's protecting me. He wants to protect me. Everyone wants to help and no one can."

There's a weird hesitancy in Marina's voice. I've heard hints of it before, but this is a big fat obvious hiccup, not a lie, maybe, but something she is holding back.

"I'll help you." The words come out fast, without thinking.

I don't know if she needs me to lie in court and say I was with her on the houseboat, or get her bail money, or leave the state in the dead of night. I don't know. Don't care. I would do it.

"You have a wonderful heart. You try to help people and fix things. I think... I think I am a broken thing from a broken people, and you cannot fix this." Her ribs heave up and down as she talks.

When I rest my hand on her bare back, it comes away yellowish and sticky. That root stuff, I guess. "You got family drama? Lay it on me. My grandpa came to ask out my meemaw's sister and ended up taking meemaw out instead. They were married fifty-two years—but Aunt Laverne didn't speak to Meemaw until she got married herself, ten years later."

"Oh, darling," Marina looks at me, hollow-eyed but smiling, her accent much thicker—and to me, so damn hot. I love the way it sounds like "Dah-link," and I can imagine her in little black lacey things, long black gloves, and covered in diamonds.

Mmmhmm!

Focus, Kevin. This is so not the time to be turned on.

"The Koshchei—"

"Big K?"

"Yes, Big K. Let's call him that. It sounds less horrible," Marina's smile struggles to life with a hint of genuine laughter. "He is... He owns women like me."

"The fuck you say? Owns ? Like slavery?" Pardon me while I prepare to break some bones.

"I suppose. We give half of our earnings to him."

"Like a pimp? A slave-holding pimp? Jesus H. Christ, let this bastard come to town, I will put him on his back so fast, I—"

Marina cuts me off with a sharp swipe of her hand slicing through the air. "Kevin! He is starving the women to death by taking all they earn so that he... So that he can come to America and take me back with him to his homeland. He wants... He wants heirs. Daughters. So that he can use them. Sell them? Take what they earn. Like he's done to all the others before them." Marina spreads her hands after her stumbling speech, palms up and open, empty, like she's got nothing. "Like he used to do with me."

I need a forklift to pick my jaw up off the ground. "Excuse me? He's a pimp who wants to breed daughters so he can turn them out, too?"

"Yes."

One word.

"That is some of the most seriously fucked up shit I have ever heard in my entire existence, and I'm in the medical profession, which is where all the fucked up shit ends up!" I shout, rising with my hands clasped to my head. "Well... Tell him no!"

"I will. It's just... He'll kill me. He's killing the others. The woman who came tonight was my sister. Once."

My ass hits the floor. You know when they say someone's knees gave out? I get that now. "Your own sister tried to kill you?" I ask, trying to get back up.

"Yes. And she told me how she and my other sisters killed Gregor so that I would return to Koshchei. So I attacked her. She died."

"Oh. Ohhh, man. I... Baby, this is a lot to process. Uh. You need a priest? Maybe a therapist? Your mom?"

Marina shakes her head, expression bleak and bereft. "She is gone. I never met her."

I need answers. I always have the answers. I fix things. I need to fix this . "What do I do?" I don't know how to help, and it's gutting me.

"You can shower with me. Or maybe I will have a bath."

"I'll get you a bath with lots of bubbles." That's something practical I can do. I race to start filling the tub, and then I race to put on a pot of boiling water for tea before realizing that I don't own any tea.

Well, I can make hot water with lemon and honey. That'll have to work. Chocolate. I have chocolate. Stressed people need chocolate. I break the bar of Hershey's in half and stuff one chunk in my mouth and give the rest to Marina.

What? I'm stressed, too!

Marina takes the chocolate but doesn't eat it yet. "This is very bad."

My girl just won first prize for understatement of the year.

"The press will probably be all over this, huh?"

"Not so much. Not here," Marina nibbles the chocolate and smiles. "Thank you, Kevin."

"Sure. Of course. Let's get you in that tub." I help her up, and when I see that she is hobbling along, trying not to let her right foot touch the ground, I scoop her up. "Just remember, no matter what, I love you."

Marina goes stiff in my arms, turning wide, startled eyes to me. "What?"

"Oh. I..." You don't tell a girl that you love her after two weeks, idiot.

But I ain't taking it back, either. "I just want you to remember that I'm on your side. I love you."

There's a long, long pause (several eternities, honestly) while Marina looks at me, stroking fingers across my cheek, her smile finally spreading up to her eyes. "I love you."

Her head flops on my shoulder, and I squeeze her tight, not caring if sticky yellow sap-like stuff is all over my chest now. "Want me to come in and scrub your back? Give you a massage?" I wiggle my fingers in front of her nose. "These babies are certified healers."

"Hmm hmm." Marina laughs, lips pressed shut, eyes shining up at me. "No. Not just yet. I think I need to be alone."

I TOLD KEV I NEEDED to be alone, but what nonsense. I will never be alone again. I will be haunted by Darya's screams and Todd's once-handsome face with its dead, staring eyes, by Gregor's still, soaking form...

My mind replays the night's events in slow, tortuous detail.

When everything happened, Ardy, the local policeman who is also a Pooka, came to deal with the situation. Todd's death will make the news. The Night Watch failed to keep someone safe for the first time in months, and it's all my fault. Fortunately, the wounds look like a wild animal attack, and people will avoid the woods for a while. Good.

My statement of self-defense was recorded by Ardy, but Jakob knows why I stopped trying to reason with my attacker and ended her fading life instead. Leo, Robbie, and Ardy dealt with the "crime," and I was whisked away in Minegold's arms, up to his big house to the north of the river. The whole time he was fussing like a mother hen over my wounds and wrapping me in towels, he was also pulling out books from his impressive collection.

"You told me once that this beast owns your soul."

"He made me. He feeds from my kind."

"Yes, he spawns with his offspring. I know there are no true genetics in his case, but still. He's an abomination that rises and falls in cycles of regeneration. How do we end the cycle?" Jakob flung a thick red leather-bound book open in front of me.

"By keeping him starved, too weak and too empty to live again," I said. "With hundreds of rusalka feeding him, he rises every few hundred years. With fewer feeding him, it should take longer. Only Darya said that there are hardly any of my kind left, so Koshchei is desperate. He's feeding without restraint, pulling their energy into his being to force his resurrection early."

"How soon?"

"This Hunter's Moon."

Jakob's face slackened and he ran his finger down the wall calendar in his library. "October the seventeenth. That's in three weeks' time, Marina!"

"I know!" Anger sparked and faded. Hopelessness took over. "He'll drain the others to death or the point of death to rise, and then he'll spawn with the only healthy rusalka left, the only one strong enough to breed. Me."

"You will refuse!"

"And he won't listen. He owns my soul . Once he's on this plane, he can bind me to him without my consent, force me to bear his spawn over and over until I die and he has a new fleet of handmaids."

"Because... He owns your soul?" Jakob repeated slowly.

"Yes. That's what gives him power."

"What if your soul was given to another?" Jakob plopped a different book in front of me, small and deep blue.

Marriages, Bonds, and Unions of the Supernatural.

"Jakob, I... Who would do this for me? How could I ask them to? Don't you realize that if Koshchei knows I belong to another, he'll simply kill that person to reclaim my soul as his own?"

Fingers flipped faster and faster. "Eternal vows for the immortal soul. Look." Minegold tapped his finger on one page that was blistered with tears.

My fingers traced along the final line of the short stanzas on the page, following his finger. "‘In life and death, to you I bind myself, heart and soul. Ever tethered and never to part, I name thee keeper of soul and heart.'"

My host cleared his throat several times. "Had I known... Had I known I would end up like this and Magda would survive, I would have had these vows said in our wedding, but I did not. Come to think of it, I do not think the rabbi would have deviated from the traditional words back in the 1920s. But you... You have a shot. This would prevent him from owning your soul, no matter what. If he doesn't own you, he cannot command you?"

"Maybe, but... This is a lifetime commitment. An afterlife time commitment!" My eyes searched his. "Who would do this for me, Jakob? Not even you. You are gallant and loving, a gentleman knight in a vampire's body—but your soul belongs to Magda, doesn't it? You wouldn't trade your hopes of reuniting with her to save me."

He swallows several times before sitting down across from me. "I would. Magda would not wish me to see a woman enslaved so that one day we might—"

"No. No, thank you. This bond wouldn't hold between us anyway," I whispered, pressing one hand to his cheek. "My heart already belongs to someone else."

"WHAT'S IT GONNA TAKE for Big K to leave you alone? And how tall is he, by the way?"

"Oh. Uh. I haven't seen him in so long. Very tall."

"I'm serious. Restraining order? Barbed wire? You could stay with my parents for a couple of weeks."

Marina gapes at me. "Your parents?"

"Yeah. I told ‘em about you tonight—man, technically last night. My mom asked if there were any nice girls around here—she's dying from lack of information and the ability to interfere in my life." I join Marina in my bed, wondering what the hell they put in tansie-whatever because her bruises and scrapes have faded to almost nothing. I look at the slender foot that's poking out from the sheets and see that the reddened cut across the sole is already scabbing over.

That's... odd.

But we have bigger things to deal with.

Marina puts her hand on my chest, nestling up to me in a way that makes me feel like I could conquer the world.

Damn, if I could be her hero... Her real hero...

I wouldn't just be someone's knight. I'd be her king, and she'd be my queen.

"You told her I was a nice girl? Oh, sweetie. I'm not."

"Hush. You're nice to me . I don't mind if you're a badass bitch to trash like Rich Boy Todd."

She blinks up at me. "You don't?"

"No." I realize I don't. I know I wanted a lack of crazy in my life, and so far, Marina's not delivering. But—it's not her. It's things that come with her. "I think what you've dealt with has made you strong. Sexy, and strong."

"And you like that?"

I'm surprised when my fragile little thing suddenly puts me flat on the mattress and straddles me, her hands kneading my shoulders, her hot crotch pressing into my cock through my sleep shorts.

This girl could absolutely pin me to the mat and have her way with me—and judging by the way my cock just leapt up to meet the soft, warm indent between her legs—I'd say I'm okay with that.

"I love that."

"You want me to show you why he wants me? It's because I'm strong. Stronger than the others. I fought his control, and I've kept myself alive." Her hand fishes into the slit in front of my shorts and closes around my cock.

"You need to rest," I caution.

"I need to make love to you. You love me. I love you. He will take me away if he gets the chance—and honestly, the only thing that might stop him is if he thinks I already belong to someone. Someone who would fight to keep me. Believe me, if you knew my past... You wouldn't."

I groan when her pussy swallows me whole, down to the balls, and she rocks on me, letting those divine, textured muscles corkscrew around me. She leans back and positions me so that I'm in that special, secret pocket inside of her pussy. With the lights on and her leaning back, I can see her muscles jumping, juicing me, like a tiny, tight mouth enveloping my crown. I swipe my tongue over my thumb and press my hand against the pronounced pink pearl of her clit, earning instant moans.

"Tell me. Tell me what I can't love," I hiss between clenched teeth, eyes trying to resist closing so I can watch my girl working.

"I've killed."

Well, my brain isn't wired right. "Why?"

"Koshchei made me... I was... When I served him."

I picture my girl forced into some nightmare of pimps and drugs, forced to "serve" this bastard and his customers. I picture Marina backed into a corner and having to fight for her life.

It should matter to me, that the woman above me says she's a murderer.

But suddenly it doesn't. In my head, I only hear, "It was him or her. I choose her." Self-defense. Survival. All I know is she did what she had to.

"I choose you. I don't choose your past."

"I have never harmed again—" her breathing is labored, hips a blur. She surges forward and kisses me, long, snaking tongue capturing mine and tangling with it like a snake charmer's best dancer.

No tongue should do that. No pussy should have some magic mouth-like pocket.

I wonder if this "Worse-than-Russian-mafia" asshole operated on his girls, too. You hear all kinds of crazy body modifications occurring in overseas less-than-legal clinics.

People make themselves into walking fashion toys.

I'm getting lightheaded from the strangling nature of Marina's kiss, with black fluttering at the edges of my mind—and fuck if that isn't sexy when it's her that's making me dance on the knife edge of unconscious, too. I see myself swept under waves, waiting to ride them back to oxygen...

The wave breaks.

We gasp as one, her head flung back as she comes on me, shaking as her hand scrabbles over mine and we rub her clit together, hard and fast.

I come right after, chasing her pleasure down with my own, spurting deep inside, and amazed when her greedy pussy muscles don't give up a single drop.

"Kevin. Look at me. Look hard. Really hard, my darling."

"Ooh, baby, when you say dah-link like that..." I roll onto Marina as we uncouple, slippery bodies tangling the sheets.

"Please. Look at my face. You should see what you love. Can't you see... Can't you see that I'm—"

"So beautiful it makes the stars jealous? Yeah, I said it." I'm not poetic, but for her, I'll try.

"My teeth."

"Shiny white."

"Sharp!" She bites my finger gently, but all I feel is a prickle before her tongue curls around my finger and strokes. "My tongue..."

"I would pay a million dollars for my wife to have a tongue like yours."

Marina groans, but in a moment, she slides below my waist, capturing my cock with that talented mouth. "Mmm. I love when I taste my pussy on your cock," she purrs.

I bite my lip. "What do you want me to do, woman? Propose on the spot? There's nothing hotter than a sweet girl with a dirty mind." Unless that sweet, dirty-minded woman is her. She's the hottest of them all.

Marina says nothing. Her mouth is full.

My mouth is wide open—and words are still flowing, some post-orgasmic stream-of-consciousness stuff happening. "I love you. Maybe I don't know you well enough to marry you." Yet.

She squeaks, the sound muffled by my cock.

"But if Big K knew you were engaged, maybe he—"

"He would kill you." Her head pops up, and she glares at me. "He would kill you and take me. I'm not worth that."

"Worth can only truly be measured by the possessor," I recite an old maxim of my grandfather's. "To some random john that K throws at you? You might not be worth much. To me? Worth a fortune. Worth loving. Get out whatever nonsense he told you about your worth. He said whatever he needed to in order to control you."

"It's not like that. Not exactly," Marina resumes her thorough adoration of my body, tongue doing things no human mouth should be capable of.

"What is it like?"

"You, not understanding."

Ugh. I hate to fight dirty and probably ruin my epic oral lovefest, but I do. "Did Gregor know?"

Marina lays her head on my thigh and says nothing for a long moment. When she speaks, her voice is soft and sad. "No. If he did, maybe he would have left. He might have lived a long, happy life. That's what I want for you, Kev."

"Well, I want that for both of us. Let me tell you something. I won't have a happy life without you in it. And if Koshchei takes you away? You think I would just forget you and learn to be happy again? No! I'd hunt him down to the ends of the earth and get you back. What's more—if that bastard laid a hand on me, I think you'd go Bruce Lee on his ass and put him in the dirt. Mm. I cannot wait to see that."

"Oh, Kevin. You just want to fix things!" Marina gives me puppy dog eyes as if I've done something wrong.

"And that's bad?"

"No. I think it's just impossible."

I think about the way Marina and I met. The way she makes me feel, how she derailed my plans, threw me into a new kind of crazy, and how unbelievably happy I am when she's around me.

But if you'd asked me just three weeks ago—I would have said falling in love with someone in under six months was impossible.

"Seeing is believing, sweetheart."