Juniper & Thorn(93)
The bitterest satisfaction welled up in my throat. I had done this; I had made him a monster that ordinary men knew how to fear.
The monster that was Dr. Bakay lurched forward, unsteady on its new feet. It beat its wings, filling the air with dust and the smell of ash. Sevas grasped my arm and hauled me back into the foyer, pressing toward the door where Rose was standing, blank-faced and horrified. But as we all turned and began to clamber away, even the Grand Inspector’s men, we found ourselves running into another monster, black-scaled and black-winged and black-eyed.
I thought at first that someone had erected a large mirror, and that we were seeing only the reflection of Dr. Bakay. But then I saw Papa’s robe hanging in tatters from its long spiny tail and my breath caught so painfully in my throat that I doubled over, Sevas’s hand still on my back. The Grand Inspector screamed, and his men fired off their pistols, but the bullets only made small holes in Papa’s wings and he kept staggering toward us while Dr. Bakay advanced from behind.
“Reload and fire!” the Grand Inspector cried. “We must strike these unholy creatures from the Earth!”
I felt another thrill of satisfaction at watching all these men tremble as they raised their pistols again, raised them at the monsters I had made. I was no great wizard, just a simple flesh diviner, a witch without the defunct Council’s blessing, but I had performed the most spectacular transformation of them all. I had outdone even Papa. And perhaps my magic was only for showing, not for doing or changing or making, but I had shown everyone the truth.
I imagined what the penny presses would say. I imagined how many Oblyans would thumb them open and put their hands to their mouths, horrified. I imagined each one giving my arm a gentle squeeze, telling me that I had been brave, so brave and strong, to have lived in the same house as these monsters all my life.
More bullets burst through the air, and one of them lodged itself in Papa’s shoulder. He gave a mindless, animal twitch, black eyes narrowing. I didn’t look back until I heard an arrested scream: Dr. Bakay had lashed his claws at one of the Grand Inspector’s men and now there were three long, bloody wounds scored down the front of the man’s jacket. His pistol tumbled out of his hand and skidded across the floor.
Derkach surprised me by leaping toward it and grabbing it. When he rose, his carefully gelled blond hair was rumpled like an unmade bed, and he was panting.
“What do you even carry these pistols for, you useless buffoons?” he spat. “I will teach you how to fire a killing shot.”
He raised the pistol at Papa and cocked it, but just as his finger brushed over the trigger, Papa reached out and snatched him up, claws piercing his chest and his soft belly.
A scream boiled somewhere deep in my throat, though it never made it past my lips. The pistol slipped from Derkach’s grasp. He looked around wildly as Papa lifted his body into the air, breathing in shallow gasps, blood flowering on his white shirt.
“Sevas, help me!” he wailed. “Please—”
But Papa had already taken his other hand and ripped out Derkach’s throat. The sound of it was awful, like silk being cut with a great pair of shears. The wound on his neck was so wide, so open that it resembled a second mouth, red with still-throbbing muscles and sinew that trembled like gusli strings.
One of the Grand Inspector’s men bent at the waist, retching. I turned to Sevas, but he had frozen stiff at my side, pupils grown so vast and black. It took me a moment to recognize the look on his face as arousal, the same way he had looked at me while I lay naked beneath him, the same way I had looked at him when he struck down the Dragon-Tsar.
Papa dropped Derkach’s limp body to the ground, the obscene wound of his throat spasming once more before going utterly still.
The Grand Inspector was weeping plainly now, tears turning his mustache damp. He grasped me firmly by the shoulders and said, “You—you are a witch, are you not? You must know of some way to kill these hideous creatures!”
I had thought that bullets and guns would kill them; I had never imagined that even the power of the Grand Inspector and his men might not be enough. Perhaps even the shiniest and sharpest ax could not fell an oak that had grown a hundred years strong.
I looked helplessly between Sevas and Rose as Papa crouched over Derkach’s body and began to tear into his chest with long, sharp teeth. Blood spurted in thick ropes across the floor, falling in the shadow of the grandfather clock.
And then Rose surged forward, uncapping the vial in her hands. There was a finger of silvery liquid left, and as Dr. Bakay advanced, she hurled the vial at him. Droplets of the potion landed on him like rainwater, and he gave an anguished howl. At once his black scales began to pale and turn gray, and his terrible, monstrous body went limp.
As his shoulders slumped and his chest bowed, five pistols cocked and fired. There was an extraordinary blossoming of gun smoke as nearly half a dozen bullets struck his heart. Steel and shrapnel fissured outward like a nexus of black veins, and Dr. Bakay folded to the ground.
I felt as though I had just seen a great stone pillar shatter; I felt as though I were staring at the colossal wreckage of something too huge to comprehend, like watching an enormous warship be taken under by a storm and sinking irretrievably under the waves. Tears squeezed out of my eyes. The wings on Dr. Bakay’s back shrank like withered tulips. When the scales faded back into skin I could see his naked, hairy chest, the buds of his nipples, and the blood that welled up between them, the color of an overripe plum.