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.
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.