Juniper & Thorn(94)
A sob tore from my throat and Sevas fitted his arm snugly around my waist, pulling me against him as I wept the most bewildering tears.
The Grand Inspector gave a manic, warbling laugh as his men nudged at Dr. Bakay’s body with the toes of their boots. “You brilliant woman,” he said. “You wonderful witch.”
Rose was breathing hard, hands on her knees. “I don’t have any more of the potion.”
Even the Grand Inspector’s mustache seemed to droop as we listened to Papa masticating Derkach’s flesh. “Can’t you make more?”
“It requires the feathers of a bird that has made its nest in the branches of a willow tree and must be aged with elderberry juice for seven and a quarter hours. Unless you can hold off the monster for that long, I think we must find another weapon.”
Papa was now devouring Derkach’s liver, the bones of his rib cage nearly stripped of all their meat and gristle and gleaming like the antlers of some dead stag. A red hunk of muscle hung from his jaws, and with an awful slurping sound he sucked it into his mouth and swallowed it whole. I watched the shape of it as it traveled down his throat, and then Papa pushed off the floor with his clawed hands, black wings beating.
“No!” the Grand Inspector cried as Papa lumbered toward the open door. “Don’t let it escape into the city!”
One of the men bolted forward and slammed the door shut right before Papa managed to slip through. The monster that was my father hissed, forked tongue lashing. Quick as a breath, he snatched up the man and then lifted them both into the air, sailing up toward the second-floor landing.
He perched there on the railing, and the Grand Inspector’s man screamed and screamed until Papa silenced him by tearing out his heart. He ate it as if it were a piece of very sweet fruit, blood staining his lips and teeth like juice.
A few more useless bullets flew, piercing Papa’s chest but leaving behind only wisps of purple smoke, as if the metal turned to mist when it touched his skin. He dropped the man’s limp body over the railing and it thudded to the ground before us, his chest a gaping cavity, an abyss that held only the absence of his organs.
I knew at once what we were doing wrong, because I knew how all the stories in his codex ended. Though I had made him a monster, underneath those scales and wings he was still a wizard, with Old World power seething in his blood. It was the same power that had protected him from the banality of the world for so long, the hereditary magic that insulated us all from the wrath of cotton looms and day laborers, from tobacco smoke and lecherous sailors. I thought the Grand Inspector would have enough power to overcome it, but I was wrong.
If Papa was going to die, it would not be by men and their guns. He would have to die a wizard’s death.
Our house was suffused with Old World magic, but we did not have any weapons. Papa was a wizard, after all, not a bogatyr or even a king. But as Papa hissed and beat his wings, I was overcome suddenly with a fierce and unthinking determination.
I tore away from Sevas and ran through the sitting room and into the kitchen, where I collapsed against the butcher block, breathing hard. I grasped the longest, largest knife we owned, the one that I had used to kill and carve the spiny-tailed monster.
Sevas was there with me in the kitchen before I could race back into the foyer, and he planted himself in the threshold, blocking my way.
“You have the look on your face of someone who’s about to do something very brave and very stupid,” he said.
“Please, Sevas,” I said, looking at his beautiful face and feeling my chest swell with terrible and aching affection. “I made my father into a monster. I must be the one to kill him.”
Sevas grasped my wrists in his hands and held them tightly, so tightly that the knife nearly slipped from my fingers. “He’ll eat you.”
“He won’t. If his heart can still beat and his mind can still think, he won’t. He loves me.” It was a wretched love, and nothing like what I felt when Sevas had wept into my breast, but I knew it was love because it was powerful. It had turned me into a monster, too, transfigured me through its cunning magic. What else, then, could it be?
“Marlinchen.” Sevas’s voice had the sound of someone tearing apart a dress at the seams. “I couldn’t bear to wage war with this awful world alone.”
I almost faltered when I saw his blue eyes turn bright with water, but I drew a breath and gently wrenched myself free from his grasp instead. Without letting him see the tears prickling at my own eyes, I pushed past him and fled into the foyer, just as Papa winged down from the railing and closed his clawed fist around one of the men’s throats.
The Grand Inspector had thrown himself behind Rose, weeping. The whole house stank of blood and gun smoke, and when I inhaled I could taste the coppery tang of these men’s deaths, all through my own orchestration.
I had become a very powerful witch indeed.
“Papa!” I cried, holding the kitchen knife behind my back. “You must let him go!”
My father’s monstrous head turned on an impossible angle, and he dropped the Grand Inspector’s man. Just like I had hoped, he lurched toward me instead, and as he drew closer I tried to discern something of Papa in those depthless black eyes; I searched for a flicker of mundane humanity. With my last desperate, mangled bit of hope, I searched for love. I searched for the love that I had believed in for so long, the love that had made Papa’s black juice so easy to swallow.