Kate Quinn - The Huntress

They lay gasping on opposite sides of the ice hole. Her father clutched his hand, which Nina had sliced nearly to the bone, sending curling ribbons of scarlet across the frozen lake. Nina huddled on her side, racked by bone-deep shudders of cold and terror, ice crystals already forming on her lashes and through her hair, a similar ribbon of blood winding down the side of her throat from the ice cut. She still held the razor extended toward her father.

“If you touch me again,” she said through chattering teeth, “I’ll kill you.”

“You’re a rusalka ,” he mumbled, looking bewildered at her fury. “The lake won’t hurt you.”

A violent shudder racked her. I am no rusalka, she wanted to scream. I’ll die before I ever let water close over my head again. But all she said was, “I’ll kill you, Papa. Believe it.” And she managed to stumble back to the hut, where she bolted the door, peeled away her ice-crusted clothes, built up the fire, and crawled naked and shuddering under a pile of silver-gray seal pelts. Had it been deep winter the shock of the cold would have killed her, she realized later, but winter’s bite was easing toward spring, and she managed not to die. Her father slept it off in the hunting shack while Nina lay shivering under her furs, still gripping the razor, breaking into hiccuping little sobs whenever she thought of the water lapping over her face, filling her mouth and nose with its iron tang.

I have my one fear , she thought. From that day forward, as far as Nina Markova was concerned, if it wasn’t death by drowning it wasn’t worth being afraid of. Get away from here, she thought, unpeeling from the furs long enough to find her father’s vodka and take several enormous gulps of the oily, peppery stuff. Get out. The thought pounded. Go where? What is the opposite of a lake? What is the opposite of drowning? What lies all the way west? Nonsensical questions. Nina realized she was half drunk. She crawled under the furs again, slept like the dead, and woke with a crust of blood on her throat where the lake’s icy fingers had tried to kill her, and that one clear, cold thought.

Get out.

April 1946

Boston

Aaaaand it gets away! Line drive past the diving Johnny Pesky—”

“Garrett,” Jordan told her boyfriend as groans rose around them across the stands of Fenway Park, “I know the line drive got past Johnny Pesky. I’m right here, watching the line drive get past Johnny Pesky. You don’t need to give me the play-by-play.”

It was a perfect spring day: the smell of outfield grass, the murmur and rush of the crowd, the scratch of pencils on scorecards. Garrett grinned. “Admit it, you missed our baseball dates when I was in training. Even my play-by-play.” Jordan couldn’t resist raising the Leica for a snap. With his dimples, his broad shoulders, and his Red Sox cap tipped down over short brown hair, Garrett looked about as all-American cute as a Coca-Cola ad. Or a recruitment poster: he’d enlisted at the end of his senior year, giving Jordan his class ring, but a badly broken leg during pilot training and the abrupt end of the war with Japan not long afterward had cut his stint in the army air force very short. She knew Garrett regretted that—he’d been dreaming of dogfights over the Pacific when he signed up, not of being cut loose on a medical discharge before even making it overseas.

“Sure, I missed our baseball dates,” Jordan said playfully. “Maybe not as much as I missed having Ted Williams batting in the three-spot during the war, but—”

Garrett flicked a peanut shell into her ponytail. “Bet I looked better in an army air force uniform than Ted Williams.”

“I’m sure you did, because Ted Williams was a marine.”

“The marines were only invented so the army has someone to take to the prom.”

“I wouldn’t tell any marines that.”

“Too dumb to get the joke.”

The next Yankee came to bat, and Jordan raised the Leica. Only in the darkroom would she know if she missed the high point of the bat’s swing. Flawless timing; every great photographer needed it.

“Come to lunch this Sunday?” Garrett rooted through his bag of peanuts. “My parents are dying to see you.”

“Aren’t they hoping you’ll start dating some Boston University sorority girl in the fall?”

“Come on, you know they love you.”

They did, and so did Garrett, which surprised Jordan. They’d been together since she was a junior, and from the start she’d been determined not to get her heart broken once he moved on. High school seniors went off to college or war, but either way they moved on. And that was just fine, because this business of getting married right after graduation to your high school sweetheart was ridiculous as far as Jordan was concerned (no matter what her dad said about it working perfectly well for him ). No, Garrett Byrne would move on to a new girl at some point, and Jordan’s heart was going to be a little bit broken but then she’d toss her head back, sling her Leica around her neck, and go work in European war zones and have affairs with Frenchmen.

But Garrett hadn’t moved on. He’d come back from his medical discharge, still on crutches, and picked up their afternoon baseball dates and Sunday lunches with his parents, who beamed at Jordan as much as her dad beamed at Garrett. The knee-buckling weight of all that parental expectation made everything seem so firm, so settled , that a trip around European war zones taking pictures for LIFE seemed about as likely as a trip to the moon.