Haunted Read Free

notice her, they don’t show it. Neither does Tess.
    Lifeguard Ben—who also happens to be my boyfriend and is thus sensibly ignoring the flirtations of the girl in the lime green bikini—doesn’t see her either. Although unlike Tess, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t believe me if I told him.
    Lime bikini girl, having failed to get Ben’s attention, climbs the diving board steps, walks to the edge of the board, then executes a double flip and cuts neatly into the water. She barely misses a head-on collision with the woman in lilac, who’s now settled on the bottom of the pool, her dress fanning out in waves around her as she opens my envelope, slides out the paper inside, and nods her head over my semester grades. She grins at me, baring her teeth in a way that’s even more unsettling than any of the rest of it. This time only a fish tail peeks out from the tattered hem of her lilac dress.
    Tess sighs. “Spill.”
    She’s said that to me before. Back last fall, when Ethan and a not-so-dead Russian princess named Anastasia and a crazy witch named Baba Yaga turned my pretty ordinary world into a crazy mess.
    Tess was there when it all happened. When I discovered that I had power. And a destiny. And a really nutty great-great-whatever-grandfather named Viktor who also happened to be the illegitimate son of Tsar Nicholas and had found a way to live forever. He’d recruited Ethan to his mystical Brotherhood and convinced him that they were saving the Romanov family. But after he had used ancient magic to compel Baba Yaga to save and hold Anastasia, the only one Viktor was really interested in helping was himself: eternal life for the Brotherhood guys as long as Anastasia remained in the witch’s forest. Only Viktor never counted on Ethan finding me, the girl the prophecies said would be able to free Anastasia.
    Somehow after all of that, school didn’t quite do it for me.
    “Coach Wicker’s world history final,” I explain to Tess. “I couldn’t answer the essay.”
    “Oh?”
    “Let me quote.” In the deep end, the woman perusing my grades shakes her head. If I’m not mistaken, she even wags one long, pale finger at me. “Discuss the series of events that led to the assassination of the Romanov family in 1918.”
    “I see your point. But weren’t there other choices? I helped Neal study for that one.” Neal Patterson is Tess’s boyfriend—the same Neal she’s broken things off with two different times now. Tess is persistent in every area of her life. “He said there were two other questions to pick from. You didn’t have to answer that one.”
    I shrug. She’s right. I didn’t have to answer it. I could have answered the question about the downfall of the Roman Empire instead. But by then, everything had sort of dribbled out of my brain.
    In the deep end, the woman holding what is most likely my failing grade on the world history final—disappears.
    I flick my gaze over to Ben, sitting in all his lifeguardy goodness on the stand, his red life preserver board slung over his shoulders. This is a new thing, Ben and me. About two months new, to be exact. He’s smart and sweet and on the cute side of handsome. Sandy blond hair that’s cut short but not buzzed, brown eyes a little darker than mine. He just graduated a few weeks ago and is headed to U of I in the fall to major in economics: Ben Logan, who’s eighteen years old for his first time. Who, unlike a certain mysterious Russian, isn’t actually closer to one hundred. And who has never been part of a mystical Russian Brotherhood that was supposed to protect the Romanovs. Ben has never been whammied by ancient magic to stay young and hot-looking until I finish his mission for him, rescue Anastasia and let him become mortal again and start over from where he’d stopped. Tess has both questioned and applauded my motives for going out with Ben. As she so delicately put it, You know, if you’d only give in and hook up with water stud instead of