Into the Ether - Complete

The Winter of Our Discontent: Part 1

It was Thursday, and I bounced into afternoon practice in a great mood! It was finally December, which meant the end of year holidays were almost upon us. I was holding my own again in classes, thanks to all the extra studying I'd been doing, and I was close to topping our combat modules again, thanks to Dimitri.

Dimitri, aka Guardian Belikov, was the one who'd been assigned to retrieve Lissa and me from Portland where we'd been living in the human world. When I first met the twenty-four-year-old six-foot-seven-inch Guardian I'd hated him. He represented the Academy and the Moroi establishment. Everything I'd fought to get Lissa away from. But fate has a sense of irony. Within days of returning to St. Vladimir's Academy in Montana, Guardian Belikov had become my combat mentor, and over time so much more.

I'd started crushing on him quite early on, but with his stiff Guardian mask he'd never let on that he liked me, too. Although following the time he'd seen me in my bra when he'd caught me making out with Jesse Zeklos, I'd caught the occasional appreciative look when we sparred or while we were working out.

Things had taken a dramatic turn the night of the Academy's Equinox Dance. I'd noticed his admiring gaze when he'd seen me with Mason, and just for a moment, I'd let myself imagine it was Dimitri taking me to the dance; that I'd be pressed hard up against his body dancing. In my mind I could almost feel his huge hands encircling my waist, his full soft lips whispering in his heavy accent into my ear. Of course, that hadn't been the way it worked out. I'd ended up breaking Mia's nose after she was a bitch to Lissa, then Lissa had been kidnapped. I'd gone to Dimitri's dorm room to get his help, and then something unexpected had happened. Dimitri and I nearly made love!

Lissa's abductor had put a lust spell on the necklace he'd given me, and when I saw Dimitri, it activated. We'd made out, and I'd ended up naked on his bed. I came so close to giving him my virginity, but just in time Dimitri had taken off the necklace and thrown it out the window. We'd saved Lissa, and her kidnapper Victor Dashkov was detained, and then Dimitri told me that the whole thing was just a spell and that he didn't like me in that way.

Two days later I'd visited Victor, and he'd told me about being shadow-kissed, the term for people like me. People brought back from the dead by spirit. And he'd told me lust charms didn't create an attraction, just encouraged what was already there. I nearly died again before I had the chance to find out whether that was true. Victor's daughter willingly turned Strigoi to try and break her father out of the Academy's jail. She'd attacked while I was visiting and I tried to take her down but faltered. Dimitri found us and had to finish what I couldn't, but as he was carrying me to the infirmary, he finally admitted that he did want me and that he wished we could be together. He also told me all the reasons that couldn't happen.

Since then we'd gone back to mentor and student and didn't mention what had happened. But the feelings within me were growing, and I knew they were within him, too. He was still professional, but more and more he was opening up to me. He'd tell me stories from his youth, or we'd chat and joke as we'd do our morning laps. Sometimes he'd talk to me about issues with his work, or he'd listen while I talked about the research I'd done into being shadow-kissed.

More and more often, these days, we'd discuss the distressing news coming from Court. The growing Strigoi problem. Not really public news, yet, Dimitri was privy to information about larger and larger nests that were being discovered in Europe and Russia. For years Strigoi had been solitary creatures, hunting individually or in packs of two or three at the most. But that was changing. Somehow Strigoi were starting to organize themselves, banding into larger groups and using their strength to make bolder and more daring attacks. It was truly frightening, but thankfully nothing too bad like that was happening here yet.