Juniper & Thorn(92)
Dr. Bakay fell out of the chaise and onto his knees, retching. Papa lunged for me again, but I rolled away just in time, and he slammed against the wall instead, shaking down the portraits of many dead Vashchenkos.
He let out a growl of frustration, hands clenched into tight pink fists. Magic was steaming off him like mist down a mountainside, rolling in great waves of white. When it feathered onto my skin I felt myself chill, blood turning cold and feet rooting to the ground as if I were myself a great stolid oak.
My chest compressed with fear. But before Papa could move toward me, or utter the words of a spell, there was a loud knock from the foyer.
A voice carried through the front door. “Open up right now, Mr. Vashchenko. This is the Grand Inspector.”
My head turned slowly toward the window. Standing outside was indeed the Grand Inspector, with his fastidiously waxed mustache, and five men with him all clad in black, wearing the signet of the gradonalchik pinned to their chests and sleek silver pistols sheathed at their hips. Rose and Sevas were standing a bit farther away, under the shadow of the flowering pear tree. When I managed to peer over the men’s top hats I saw Derkach there, too, his face angry and red, and looking right at Sevas with a buzzard’s snapping eyes.
Papa was as still as a marble bust, arm raised halfway over his head.
The Grand Inspector’s voice had momentarily broken Papa’s spell, and I rushed to the door and flung it open. I stood there panting in the threshold, so many bewildered gazes taking in my wild hair and my nightgown, and Papa frozen in the sitting room, and Dr. Bakay retching on the floor. The Grand Inspector blinked furiously and said, “Are you Ms. Vashchenko?”
“Marlinchen,” I said. “Please, come in.”
And so they did. They walked neatly into our foyer like a line of marching ants, and Derkach followed after, grumbling some half-intelligible curses.
In the sitting room, Papa had unfrozen and lowered his hand, but there was an odd sheen to his face, like he’d been gripped quite suddenly by a very bad fever. Even his lips had turned white and chapped.
“I have heard rumors, Mr. Vashchenko,” the Grand Inspector said, “and I’ve seen the flyers myself. You have been keeping fifteen of the city’s day laborers here, against their will, under the guise of some wizard’s competition. Well, you may be a wizard, but you are not exempt from the gradonalchik’s laws against kidnapping and extortion. You must let the men go free at once, and—”
“I don’t give a damn about a dozen hapless day laborers!” Derkach snarled, wheeling on the Grand Inspector. “He’s been keeping my charge here as well, Sevastyan Rezkin. You must make him return Sevas to me.”
Sevas edged into the threshold of the front door as he spoke, Rose at his back. His cheeks were flushed and he said, “No one is keeping me here against my will, Mr. Derkach. I am twenty-one years old and have no need of being tended to. Leave here now. I will not come with you.”
“I’ve no interest in mediating a lovers’ quarrel,” the Grand Inspector said, quite coldly, turning back to Papa. “But if there is truth to the rumor that you have kidnapped these men, then you must face the gradonalchik’s justice. And I should tell you, it is not a propitious time to be a criminal in Oblya, not when I have three mutilated men and a missing stockbroker on my hands. Half the city is convinced there is a monster afoot, and they will seize on any evidence they can of such a thing.”
“You foolish vulture of a man.” Papa’s voice was a seething whisper; there was a bit of spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth. “The men are gone, all of them. My snake-fence has been destroyed, and they have fled, the way that the steppe foxes fled when your predecessors tore up the grass for your dachas and factories. If you are looking for something to satisfy Oblya’s stupid masses, look elsewhere. I am a great wizard, and I will not be fixed like a hog for the slaughter.”
It was a good speech, and Papa’s magic made it even better, spreading its cool mist through the sitting room and the foyer. The Grand Inspector’s mustache twitched. It might even have worked, if Dr. Bakay hadn’t suddenly given a roar of anguish, of rage, breaking the hold that Papa’s spell had cast over us all.
The Grand Inspector pushed past Papa and me and ran toward Dr. Bakay in the sitting room. The doctor’s shoulders were heaving, the veins in his throat pressed up blue and fat against his skin. The Grand Inspector crouched beside him and asked, “Are you all right, sir?”
Dr. Bakay gurgled a reply. And then his shirt tore open and a pair of enormous black wings unfolded from his back.
The Grand Inspector uttered a scream that I didn’t think possible of a grown man, something that more befit a little girl, and trailed off at last into a whimper. He stumbled away as Dr. Bakay staggered to his feet, his gurgles turning to growls as a stunning metamorphosis took place right there in our sitting room.
Obsidian scales crawled over his chest and hands and face, glittering iridescent in the slant of sunlight that beamed in from the open window. His teeth lengthened and jutted out over his lip, sharp as icicles on eaves. The flesh of his hands peeled back and shining silver claws burst from the gashed skin; the whites of his eyes were dyed black, as if with ink. A forked tongue spilled from his mouth, curling and uncurling, viperous and luridly red.
The Grand Inspector tripped as he tried to flee back into the foyer and scrabbled along the floor as his men drew their pistols, and I had the sudden, unbidden urge to laugh. For so many years I had shaken in terror when Dr. Bakay touched me, had let his face constellate the darkness of my bedroom at night, and now even the Grand Inspector was quaking before him.