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.
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.