“What are you doing, Marlinchen?”
I looked my beautiful sister up and down, and for the first time I saw her the way the men had: like a velvet carpet laid over a hole in the ground, something that could fall out from under your feet. She was a good witch, and a clever woman, and she was a liar.
Papa isn’t even an herbalist, Undine had said. Every time I had drunk that black juice it had tasted of nothing. It had left behind no sign of being poison. Only an herbalist could have made a thing like that.
“You helped him,” I said. “Papa asked you for a potion that would turn me into a monster, and you went into this storeroom and crafted it for him.”
My words pinned her to the wall like a volley of arrows. Her mouth slackened; her face went pale. After a moment, my not-so-clever sister said, “It must have been Undine who told you.”
“Is it so unbelievable that I could have figured it out myself? Kindhearted but plain-faced Marlinchen, who knows nothing of the world, who fixes Papa’s dinner with dull eyes while her shrewder sisters have their little rebellions right under her nose.” My heart was pounding. “I know Papa could not have made a potion like that on his own. That black juice. It was good magic, Rose. It made me forget that I’d ever had scales on my belly and blood under my nails.”
Rose put a hand to her lips. Silence stretched between us, an impassable gulf. Once I had swallowed whatever my sister had given me too; once I had wept into her hair and let her comfort me the way I imagined a mother would. Now I let my fury pour into that chasm until it teemed like a black tide and then spilled over.
“You were as cruel to me as Undine,” I said. “You let me eat up all of Papa’s anger so it wouldn’t poison you. You didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe. If you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”
“Marlinchen, please.” There were tears in her eyes. “We were all of us trapped like kvass in a jar, frothing and bubbling so hard we cracked the glass. I’m sorry Papa held you tighter and closer. But I never relished your pain. Please don’t say such terrible things to me.”
“They are not terrible. They are just the truth. And you’re still picking your way around the rotted heart of it. I’ve killed four men now for Papa, and Undine too. Because of you.”
Rose’s hand curled into a fist. Her knuckle slid into her mouth, tears slipping out. “He said he would punish me if I didn’t help.”
“But you didn’t mind all this time, the way he punished me for nothing at all?” My voice was shaking. “Did I kill that sweet day laborer, too, Rose? We let fifteen men into our house and now only fourteen are asleep in the garden. Did I serve him up for Papa’s supper?”
“No,” Rose said with vehemence. “Not him—that was the night you left. Papa was furious, and he was so hungry. He slit the man’s throat himself, and then . . .” She trailed off, meek as a wood mouse. “That’s why he brought the men here at all. But I suppose you know that now too.”
I nodded. I let my memory stretch back, as far back as it would go, like a spool of thread nearly to the point of snapping. There were the two men on the boardwalk, and that was how the black sand had gotten into my hair. There was the broker who had bought Mama’s charm bracelet and that’s how it had ended up back in my drawer. There was poor, sweet Sobaka, whose death had not been my fault at all. And then there was the man at the ballet theater, strung up like a turkey that had been trussed.
“But why those men?” I asked around the lump in my throat. “I could have killed any man who walked down Rybakov Street; it would have been easier. But I went all the way to the boardwalk instead, I chased down the broker, and I flew up into the rafters of the ballet theater.”
Rose looked at me with her damp violet eyes. “Think of a potion like a sprinkling of rainwater: it can sprout a seed, but it cannot coax up a plant from a tract of barren land.”
Her words were terrible, but they were true. My monstrous form had still thrummed with all my human desires. I’d gone to the boardwalk because I wanted to see the ocean. I’d killed the broker because I wanted Mama’s charm bracelet back. I’d gone to the ballet theater because I wanted to see Sevas again.
And I’d killed Undine because she had nearly imperiled the one thing I wanted most in the world.
The mirror that never lies had already told me as much: the seed of Papa’s monster had been living inside me, at risk of blooming, long before he had even begun feeding me the black juice. Perhaps it had been born with me, a fetal twin. Perhaps so many of Papa’s furious words had made it calcify in me like a pearl. Perhaps eating my mother’s meat had made it swell like a growth of rot. Perhaps it had blossomed under Dr. Bakay’s hands the way a skilled wizard could raise the dead from their graves.