Dreaming Anastasia Read Online Free PDF

in my throat because suddenly they were too big, too monumental, too important to say. Or maybe it was because, in truth, there is no way to prepare her for a destiny about which she knows nothing—and a task I’m fairly certain she will reject as impossible or crazy or both.
    Maybe I’ve always been the wrong one to tell her, but it’s far, far too late to do anything about that. I can only keep walking to the car that I’ve parked a fair distance from the school because it’s the Mercedes sedan I’ve always favored, and I figured it would stick out in the student parking lot. Only I’ve clearly underestimated the conspicuous consumption of the North Shore Chicago suburbs and have realized with one glance around the lot that the Mercedes is actually a lot less flashy than I thought.
    Now it’s occurring to me that smashing her to the floor in between classes in order to inform her that she is the girl who alone has the power to save the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov from the hands of the witch Baba Yaga is just possibly not the best plan I’ve ever had.
    Like I keep saying: zalupa.
    I slip the Mercedes key out of my pocket as I cross the tree-lined street, flick the remains of the Marlboro to the pavement, and click the remote to open the door. Then I strip off my jacket, toss it in the back seat, and lean against the car while I roll up my sleeve.
    My breath hitches a little as I see it.
    The mark—round and red—sits on my forearm, just where it brushed against Anne. It throbs as I run my fingers over it, the pain radiating up my arm. But it is there, this physical marking that connects her to me—the sign for which we have all been waiting for so very long.
    Ever since that day in 1918, when I truly was the person I still appear to be. Since the time even before that, when Brother Viktor pulled me aside in the small stone chapel and told me what was coming.
    â€œThere will be blood, Brother,” Viktor had said. “Blood and suffering and destruction. The Romanovs are on the brink of destruction.”
    His words did not surprise me. The troubles in Russia had been brewing for a long while. The scandal with that crazy bastard they called Rasputin—who died of poison or bullets or drowning or maybe even the darkest of magic, depending on whom you chose to believe. The obsessions of the tsarina and the weakness of the tsar. All of them had led to this moment.
    But what he had said next—well, that was a different story.
    I did not have to understand, he said. I simply had to do what I was told. The Romanovs must survive. They were believers, like us. That is why the Brotherhood existed. To protect them from those who wished them destroyed.
    Still, what he had proposed shocked me. I had seen many things in the years I’d spent in the Brotherhood, learned many spells. But always there had been one rule: the natural order of life could not—must not—be disrupted.
    Until now.
    When I was a child, my sister Masha and I had loved the old Russian folktales—tales of the gigantic witch, Baba Yaga, who would eat us if we strayed too far from home. Of the pure and innocent Vasilisa, who traveled through the forest to the witch’s hut and who alone knew how to outwit the hag. But until that day, they had just been stories. Nothing more.
    Only I was wrong.
    And I think now as I roll down my sleeve, climb into the Mercedes, and turn the key in the ignition that perhaps there’s another reason for why I behaved so ridiculously with Anne. Because how do you tell someone that a fairy tale is real? That Viktor found magic old enough and powerful enough to hold back death? That Baba Yaga, the witch from those childhood stories I loved, truly existed? Our magic had compelled her to save a Romanov. And until Anne, like Vasilisa the Brave, could find a way to reach Baba Yaga’s hut, that same Romanov would remain trapped.
    In truth—and it is