Page 26
I studied him. This was the mystery man who had helped Felicia bring me back to life.
This was the man whose voice she had recognized after so many months.
This was the man who had somehow impressed her so strongly that she gave only the slightest attention to the several other men who wanted to marry her.
Men who were richer, handsomer, and… not involved in sneaky stuff.
Men who didn’t pop up in the middle of an attack in Segundo Mexia, Texoma, and then vanish.
Whatever it was Felicia saw in him, I didn’t.
I shook my head. I didn’t understand.
Hans took that headshake for dismissal. His face fell. But after just a split second, Hans’s back stiffened. Determination filled his face. “We must talk, please, Princess Savarova.”
I sighed, up from my toes through my heart. Talking. Never my best thing. Lately, this seemed to be all anyone wanted to do. I took a seat on the bench, patted the wood beside me. “So talk.”
Hans sat beside me, keeping a respectful distance. He was angled toward me. He was stretched tighter than a Japanese bow.
I wondered if I had enough money to catch a cab to the train station. I discarded the idea. I had to stick this out.
“Princess, I know you love your sister, and she loves you. That was evident in Segundo Mexia.”
Felicia had been right. He was the grigori who had helped her.
“Why were you there?” That was the big question, as I saw it.
Hans drew a deep breath. “I had been tracking your sister.”
My hands tightened into fists. I could draw my gun and kill him now. I broke down the movements I needed to do that.
“I admit this with reluctance. I am not supposed to tell you or anyone.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Keep on talking, fella.”
“We had heard of Felicia.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The Jewish magicians organizing to fight back. Hitler intends to kill us all.”
I nodded. I knew that already. I knew some things he would hate to hear, assuming he hadn’t been at the sitting with the grigori seer.
I thought Eli would have mentioned Hans’s presence.
Maybe not, the way things were going between us.
Maybe he just told Felicia , I thought. I pressed my lips together.
“What does my sister have to do with that? She’s not Jewish. She’s not German. She’s sixteen years old.”
“This is all true. But she has the power, and she is not afraid to use it. Most magically gifted people have—constraints. Drilled into them by society and their instructors. She does not.”
“So what do you want her for? To kill your enemies? Why is this her fight?”
“Because—you have to forgive me, if I offend you—”
No, I don’t .
“Felicia enjoys using her skill and power. She grows every time she does. There is no one like her, with the possible exception of her aunt, Isabella.”
“So ask Isabella. At least she’s a grown-up woman.”
“As you could tell that night in Segundo Mexia, Isabella was willing to kill you to have Felicia for herself. Isabella didn’t understand that if she killed you, Felicia would never agree to be her… anything. Isabella cares only about Isabella.”
I didn’t believe that was completely true. But right now, that was beside the point. “You’re willing to ruin Felicia’s life—in fact, you’re willing to put her in extreme danger in a war that isn’t hers.”
Hans closed his eyes, really squinched them tight.
He gave a great impression of a man in a lot of anguish.
“This was the mission I was given. I am truly Ahren’s cousin, and I love the boy.
But me escorting him? That is my pretend reason to be in San Diego.
I am here to try to add people to my cause. Even Tsar Alexei I have talked to.”
“What did the tsar say?”
“He said he would talk to his advisers about it. There are Jews in his court, though as everywhere, there are others who think any Jew is scum.”
There are always people who will look down on you, because they have to be better than someone . I had experience with that firsthand. Hans was bitter about it. I was not. “Why did you want to meet with me?”
“Because you love your sister, and she loves you. In the middle of a skirmish, she had to hold off her aunt, an experienced witch, to make sure you were alive. When she should have been running for cover.”
“You said you were there following her?”
“Yes.”
“You helped her hold Isabella, so Isabella couldn’t try to kill me again.”
“I couldn’t stop myself. It wasn’t smart. But I did it. I was supposed to have a look at Isabella, too. I did not like what I saw.”
Hans was not asking for my gratitude. He hadn’t done it on my account. He had done it because he admired my sister.
“What do you want from me?”
“A chance to explain all this to Felicia.”
“What do you need to explain? She’s already on your side. She already told the Germans and the Japanese she didn’t want to hear any offers from them. Putting a big target smack-dab on her back.”
“She did?” Hans looked stunned. With happiness. “There are things I have to tell her, things I can’t talk about at parties with people all around trying to hear what we say to each other.”
“So you’re asking to talk to her privately.”
“Yes. I know it’s not… proper.”
I had no idea if it was or not. Hans believed it wasn’t, which was the big thing. “Felicia can easily defend herself if you behave in a way she does not like.”
For the first time, he smiled. “I certainly believe that.”
“All right,” I said, and stood.
Hans stood, too, but looked at me with some confusion. “When can this be done?” he said finally.
“Right now. Let’s go.”
Hans’s eyes went wide. He was thunderstruck.
We walked to the Savarov house together. Hans didn’t say anything the whole way. He kept darting glances at me, as if he expected me to change my mind.
There was no point putting this off. The sooner the better.
Hans would talk to Felicia. Felicia would make up her mind for good, assuming she hadn’t already.
I thought she had. I could not keep this from happening.
Next time Hans wouldn’t ask. He would make an opportunity for this important talk. He would not back down or give up.
I went in the front door without knocking. I was part of the household.
So I startled my mother-in-law, and I surprised Eli, and I shocked Felicia. They were all standing in the foyer in an intense little group.
“Where have you been?” Veronika said. She was loaded for bear.
“Back down,” I told her. “I got other fish to fry.” Her mouth fell open.
“Felicia, here’s Hans,” I said.
My sister had the strangest expression on her face. I couldn’t tell if she was happy or sad. She was something big, though. “Hans wants to talk to you alone, and I agreed. But Eli and I will be right outside the door.”
Eli had a quick recovery. He nodded.
“If Veronika doesn’t mind… the living room would be best.”
Veronika was still staring at me as if I’d grown another head. Finally, she nodded.
“Great,” I said. “You two, in you go. Hans, you got half an hour. Then we’re coming in.”
Felicia kept glancing at Hans as if she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. I swear my sister looked shy. That was a new emotion for her. She started for the doorway and Hans followed, like she was a magnet and he was a nail. Would they even manage to talk to each other?
Veronika went upstairs slowly. I expected any minute she’d come back to ream me out. But she kept on going, and she murmured a few words to Alice, who’d opened her bedroom door when she heard voices.
Alice looked disappointed when she saw Eli and me. Maybe she’d been hoping for Konstantin. Sorry, Alice. Just us.
That left Eli and me alone in the hall. To say the situation was very uneasy was to give it a mild name. He’d look at me, then away.
We had thirty minutes, too.
I should have made it fifteen.
“How did you come to meet with Hans?” Eli said, when the silence had gotten even more painful.
“He wrote me a note. Leah brought it to me. I sneaked out and talked to him. Nothing left to do but let them talk to each other. That’s what people do when they’re in love.” I tried very hard not to put a foot down on those words.
Eli flinched. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I should have.”
“And you didn’t because?”
“I knew you were on edge. You don’t like being here, you don’t like doing the things we had to do, you don’t like going to the events we have to attend.”
And I’d thought I was being so strong and calm about it all.
“After the Japanese Friendship Garden incident—I don’t know if it was the day after or two days—I was approached by a German man, Fritz Weber, and a Japanese man, Hikaru Nakamura.
Instead of taking the opportunity to meet Felicia themselves, they wanted to ask my permission first, which seemed odd.
After all, this whole event is designed to allow young people to meet each other in a natural way.
They were both older than I’d like, older than me.
Closer to thirty.” Eli paused to pick his words.
“It seemed peculiar enough to make me uneasy,” he continued.
“I decided to talk to Felicia about it. She’d heard a little about the upcoming trouble in Europe, and she wanted no part of being on the side of the Germans or the Japanese.
The men were both too old to interest her, anyway.
She did not want to meet them. I wrote them each a note, couched in as polite terms as I could. ”
“After she’d gotten shot at with Japanese arrows. After a German came to stab her at the opening ceremony. With acid in his pocket as a backup.”
Eli nodded. “I’m not sure Felicia put that all together, but I did.”
“And you didn’t tell me? Though I killed the man at the reception?”
“I didn’t tell you.”
“Why? Am I not here to protect my sister?”
“You are, as am I. And Felix.”
“You thought it was safe for me to be ignorant?”
“I thought… I don’t know what I thought.
I thought it was a complicated situation.
I thought they would leave Felicia alone, after two failed attempts to kill her.
I thought maybe if she publicly favored some suitor who didn’t threaten them, like Mateo or Clayton, they would see Felicia was not likely to enter the war at all.
I didn’t know about Hans, though I could tell when she met Ahren and Hans she was touched by Ahren’s story.
I didn’t know it was Hans that had made an impression on her.
He hardly said anything. How did you know Felicia favored him? ”
“She told me in confidence that she thought she had met him before. He just confirmed that, by the way. He impressed her then, though they didn’t exchange names.
He was in Segundo Mexia that night.” I didn’t need to specify which night.
The night Peter died. “Hans tells me he was there tracking her down, to see if she was everything she was reported to be. And he saw her up against Isabella, winning, which is important, since Isabella was also on his list of grigoris to… test, or something. Hans was just as smitten as she was, but he also figured she was the right woman to recruit. I got no objection to him, though it makes me feel tired… and useless… that we went to all this effort, and she was already taken.”
“You didn’t tell me Felicia knew him.”
“It was a confidence. I couldn’t. I hoped she would tell you herself. And she didn’t say anything else about him, not a word. It was all about other men. I see now that was just a cover.”
“I can see how she would not want to tell us she was actually interested in a man whose name she didn’t know, whose face she hadn’t seen. Felicia can be very practical.”
We still weren’t looking at each other too directly. I could feel the tension in the air slacken a bit, like a string with a certain amount of give in it.
I said, very carefully, “Hans seems like a good man. But Felicia would be drawn into this war that’s brewing. Felix told me about the seer. I wish you had told me.”
Eli looked both depressed and exhausted.
He looked at me directly. It felt like a long time since he’d done that.
“It made me sick with horror to think of this thing coming. All those people dying, not only the slaughter of the Jews, but all the soldiers on both sides. To think we may all have to choose a side. As young as Felicia is, the mere fact that people are trying to make her choose a side, to fight in a war for them…”
I gave up the hopes I had held for Felicia’s future: that she’d be safe, that she would never be hungry or desperate again.
“I hardly think there’s anything she’d like better than to fight in a war,” I said.
Finally, I’d made my husband laugh.
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