Fifty-three years had passed between the time Izolda sacrificed her magic to cast the spell of forgetting and when she drew her last breath. The spell unravelled, what was done was undone. In the city far away, Michael Anton, formerly Mikhail Antonovich, woke with a start. Something was wrong, something . . .
Carefully, so as not to disturb his wife, he slipped out of bed and went downstairs to pour himself a drink. There were thoughts, memories he had forgotten, crowding his mind. An overload of information that he wasn’t sure how to deal with.
“Michael?” His wife’s voice came from the doorway. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s nothing. Go back to bed Sophie.”
She sat down beside him on the sofa. “It must be something to have you sitting in the dark, in the middle of the night, drinking vodka.”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” he mumbled. “Hell, I think I’m crazy.”
“Try me.”
“All right. Fine.” He tossed back the rest of his drink. “I had a dream about my mother.”
“You mean your Aunt Anya?”
“No, I mean my real mother. I always thought I’d been sent to live with Aleksander as a punishment, that my real parents hated me. But now . . .” He paused and poured himself another drink.
“My mother came to me in a dream,” he said abruptly. “She told me she loved me, that it broke her heart to send me away but she was trying to protect me.”
“Protect you? Protect you from what?”
“My family is under a curse. We are being stalked by a being of great evil.”
Sophie kept silent as he paused to take another drink.
“I once had a brother and a sister,” he added.
“I didn’t know that, why have you never mentioned them to me before?”
“This evil – thing – killed them and my mother was afraid she hadn’t sent me far enough away to protect me, so she cast a spell to make everyone forget I was her son. And to make me forget I had another family.”
“Wait a minute,” Sophie said. “Are you saying your mother was some kind of a witch? That’s crazy!”
“Crazy, perhaps, but true nonetheless. My mother was a powerful ved’ma. But she is dead now, and came to me in a dream to warn me that with her death the spell she cast was broken, and that the evil would be coming for me.”
Sophie was quiet for a moment. “That was some dream, Michael. No wonder you were spooked. But it was just a dream. Come back to bed now.”
“You go ahead,” he said with a sigh. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
Though he did join his wife back in bed, Michael did not get any more sleep that night. And three weeks later his wife found him in his armchair in the living room, quite dead. Because it was so unexpected, an autopsy was performed. No one could explain why Michael’s lungs were filled with water.
Their son, Peter, came to stay with his mother and help her get Michael’s affairs in order. The home office was a mess, stacks of paper everywhere, but Peter went through them page by page. He picked up a sheaf of papers and skimmed them over with a frown.
“Mother,” he called out. “What do you know about this property Dad owned?”
“I know that it’s cursed,” she claimed, taking the papers from him. “We will have nothing to do with it.”
No matter how much he pressed her, she would say no more about it. The matter was dropped until her passing, two years later, and he came across the papers again. He scoffed at the idea of a curse and went to investigate it for himself.
He was gone for three days, and when he returned he began acting peculiar, muttering about water spirits and making sacrifices. He was sent to Sunshine Acres, a high class sanitarium, where he began drafting papers that would turn the Antonovich property into a wild life preserve. Unfortunately, he was found face down in the reflecting pond before the papers could be filed.
The land was passed on to his son, James, the last of the Antonovich family. He’d been estranged from his father for years, and had no idea they had owned such a large chunk of prime real estate.
The first thing he did was put a stop to the proceedings to turn it into a sanctuary. Then he decided to visit it himself. The towering trees of the old growth forest were impressive, as was the amount of acreage that bordered the river. The old mill had seen better days, but he had a friend who was an architect, and another who was a structural engineer. The building would make an impressive inn, if it was feasible.
Visions of an exclusive resort filled James’ head as he continued to explore. He found the pond by accident. It was badly overgrown, but he could see the potential for an attractive water feature.
There was a ripple in the water and he squinted to get a closer look. It looked like . . . it couldn’t possibly be a woman out there, could it?
“Are you all right?” he called out.
Turning to face him, she said, “I’m fine. The water is lovely, why don’t you join me?”
She was beautiful. She was slender and curvy, and the sun filtering through the trees gave her long dark hair a greenish cast. The water was clear enough he could see she was naked. James was not one to let an opportunity pass him by. He quickly stripped down to his shorts and waded into the warm water.
“My name is Katrinka,” she told him, wrapping her arms around him. “And I’ve been waiting for you.”
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