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.
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.