Juniper & Thorn(95)
He had the front of my nightgown snarled in his claw before I could find it.
We were so close now that our noses almost touched, the noses that had been nearly identical when Papa was still human. I could have been staring right into the mirror that never lies, observing my own monstrous reflection. Magic always implicates its caster; that was the simplest axiom and the most honest. Here, gazing baldly at the truth of it all, I was my father’s daughter.
The thought filled me with such an awful, wrenching grief that I did go limp in Papa’s arms, my knife clattering to the ground, as he wound his clawed fingers around my throat. My breathing slowed under the mounting pressure of his grasp, and my vision rippled darkly at the edges.
And then, through the haze of my near-death, I saw a blade flash. My dropped knife looked as long and lusty as a sword in Sevas’s hand, and when he plunged it into Papa’s scaled belly, for a moment, I thought that I had receded from the waking world and was merely watching the memory of Ivan and the Dragon-Tsar play on the insides of my eyelids. Sevas twisted the knife cruelly and then jerked it out again, and my father gave such a plaintive, miserable cry that I knew what I had seen was true.
His grip on my throat slackened and I fell to the ground among the ruined silk of my nightgown. Papa collapsed before me, his scales fading to gray and vanishing, his wings shrinking and then flaking away like the husks of dead insects.
Sevas stood above him, holding a knife slicked with blood. I watched his own transformation occur then, withering and blooming and withering again in the span of seconds, Sevas and then Ivan and then the scarred man, all the moments between them compressed into one flat circle.
When I blinked again, though, he was Sevas, just Sevas, and I began to weep for how utterly and helplessly I loved him.
He let the knife slip to the floor, his whole hand gloved in my father’s blood. The Grand Inspector peered out from behind Rose’s back and blinked furiously. Papa lay in the shadow of the grandfather clock, fetal and naked, curling around himself like a snake whose large flat rock had just been turned up.
Rose started weeping then, too, but there was a smile burning under the rheum of her tears. The surviving men picked up their pistols and winced at their wounds. I looked down and very gently took Sevas’s blood-spoiled hand.
The grandfather clock gonged, but I did not hear the hour. I was resting my head against Sevas’s shoulder, and he was kissing it with plain and familiar tenderness, and the moment stretched on and on, as if time itself held no more power here.
Chapter Fifteen
And so, in the end, here is what happened to us all.
The Grand Inspector dusted himself off and wiped the sick from his chin. He said in a gruff and reluctant voice that perhaps there had been a monster after all. Two, in fact. He would have liked to take daguerreotypes of them while they were still alive to prove it, but all that was left now was a great amount of blood and pale coils of shed skin scattered around our foyer like blown wheat chaff.
I showed him the rib bone that I had found in the sink, and Rose led him to the place in the garden where my father had buried what remained of poor Sobaka. I showed him the broker’s card that I had kept hidden in my bodice, and when he and his men went upstairs to the third floor, they found the broker’s desiccated corpse tucked into one of the closets, maggot-ridden and glutted with black flies. His heart and liver were, of course, gone.
The Grand Inspector retched again, and one of his men offered him a handkerchief for his chin.
He gave me the reward for leading him to the monster, three hundred rubles, and I split it three ways, between myself and Rose and Sevas. In my hands, the coins felt as light as white feathers.
The Grand Inspector brought back more men to bundle up all the bodies, and when they were gone, I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed the blood from the floor, from the grandfather clock, from long kitchen knife. The shadows were vast and black when I was done, and the windows were grids of blue light.
The next day, all of the penny presses printed some variation of the same story: there were two monsters in the house of Zmiy Vashchenko, and one of them was him. It said nothing of juniper berries or black juice or suspicious varenyky. It mentioned his witch-daughters, who had lived with him all this time and finally helped to put an end to his murderous ways—so brave and so strong, those versions of Rose and me were!
It did not mention that those two daughters had once been three, and I had a small thrill of pleasure—then a long bout of guilt—knowing how much Undine would have hated being ignored, even in death.
Oblyans began leaving bouquets of chrysanthemums and blushing protea flowers at our door, along with bars of pressed lavender soap, enameled snuffboxes, ostrich eggs hollowed out and painted blue. Rose took the flowers to her storeroom and cut them to bits. Sevas washed himself with the lavender soap. I put my new rubles in the snuffboxes, and we all had great fun tossing the ostrich eggs from the second-floor landing onto the ground below, seeing whose broke the most spectacularly.
At last there came the brokers and the petty buyers, the land surveyors and the real estate agents, all of them with capitalist schemes behind their eyes. We showed them around the house and let them fondle whatever they liked: the portraits of dead Vashchenkos on the walls and the last of Papa’s cat-lamps and the mirror that never lies. We got a lot of good money for that, and the brokers from Fisherovich & Symyrenko did not seem to mind that one of their affiliates had been decaying in the third-floor closet not more than a week prior.