Vanya chuckled. “Lucky for that draft, huh? He almost caught you, Tsarushka.”

Before I could break the news to him, Pelin gave a jerk of her hand, smacking Vanya with a burst of condensed air so forceful, he stumbled back a step.

Vanya’s jaw fell in disbelief. “You’re a bogatyr?”

“How else do you think I could stay in that tank so long?” Her lips quirked in a smirk. “With enough concentration, I can draw air from the water.”

She looked at Mikhail like she expected him to say something. He was still staring at the stairway, his shoulders tensed and hands fisted at his sides. Slowly, her smile faded, and she blew the hair out of her eyes with an annoyed huff.

“Best be careful around Mikhail then,” Vanya said, earning a disgruntled look from him.

Pelin’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

“He’ll call you a koldunia.”

I followed the others downstairs, my fingers aching to curl around my knife’s antler handle. My nerves sparked with tension. Each step I took, those men were getting a step farther and I was just letting them.

But the others were right. The moment I tried to stop Dima and Stanislav, I would be endangering everyone around me, including Vanya and Mikhail. At the very least, I owed them some self-control.

Downstairs, the museum was in shambles. Shattered specimen jars encrusted the floor, the boards slickened with formaldehyde and worse. One bookshelf lay upturned, while another had been stripped of its artifacts.

“They even took the two-headed pig,” Vanya said in disbelief. “What did they think it was? A drekavac?”

“No, the rat-faced blond one wanted it as a souvenir,” Emre said dryly, rubbing his swollen cheek. He opened the door to the foyer. “Pelin will show you three to the train station. It sounds as though you too have a train to catch.”

The main railway station was located in the city’s old town, resting in the shadow of an ancient stone wall. I stopped to gawk. Though the train station was several stories tall, only its twin cupolas managed to reach beyond the wall’s notched battlements. Over the centuries, the wall had crumbled, so that only a few short, coiling passages remained, limestone structures that rose between buildings and roads like the severed spinal column of some vast serpent.

“What’s that?” I asked Pelin, who had changed hastily into a dress and overcoat.

She blinked. “The wall.”

“Yes, but why is it so big?”

“In the time before the bogatyri, it was all Detskaya had to protect its citizens from monsters,” Pelin said, turning her attention back to the road ahead. “The bogatyri were the ones who broke it down, as a reminder that we’d never have to live in fear again.”

As she spoke, there was a hint of reverence in her voice, and it became only more apparent as she shifted her gaze to Mikhail. She looked at him the same way I had once watched rusalki maul an elk, with breathless awe at their force and power. It dawned on me that though she too was a bogatyr, he was so much more than that to her. And he didn’t even see it at all.