“I could sense it in you from the moment I saw you,” he hissed, his rancid breath clogging my nostrils. His fingers were moist and clammy, but mercilessly tight, the untrimmed edges of his nails digging into my skin. “You carry the Unclean Force inside you. You are filth.”

Terror seized me in its iron grip, spurring my heartbeat into a wild panic. I felt something rise within me, a scream I thought, but the only sounds to escape my clenched teeth were strained groans and growls, the sound of an upyr gone feral.

“Let go of me,” I snarled as he dragged me forward by the hair and wrist, hauling me over the edge of the door so that my head and shoulders hung over empty space.

Below, the tracks were just a blur of steel and gravel. I felt the air being sucked beneath the wheels, forming a vacuum that I knew would drag me in if I fell, casting me under the crushing weight of the carriages.

“Where is the Tsar?” Dima demanded.

“I said, let go!”

“You really want that?”

Keeping a merciless grip on my arm and scalp, he pushed me even farther through the open door until my chest hung over the edge. If not for the counterweight of his own body, I would certainly fall. My free hand reached back blindly, scraping against his drabcloth trousers. Searching for something, anything, bare skin to gouge or a fallen instrument.

“Tell me where he is!”

“Right here,” a voice said, and I heard the wet squelch of flesh giving way and the crisp snap of bone. Dima’s hand loosened around me in an instant, and he collapsed on the floorboards beside me, blood trickling down his scalp.

I began to tip forward, my fingers scrambling for purchase. Below, the ground whizzed by in a dizzying blur. As I started to fall, a pair of hands seized me and wrenched me onto solid ground.

I rolled onto my back the moment the hands released me, scooting away in a blind panic until my back struck the metal frame of a shelf. Vanya knelt beside me, while Mikhail stood several paces away, gripping an unused bedpan whose porcelain edge dripped with blood.

“Are you okay?” Vanya asked. “Can you walk?”

“I’m fine,” I croaked, pushing my hair out of my face. “Just give me...give me a moment to breathe.”

My scalp burned as if Dima had wrenched out a fistful of hair. As I massaged my side, the pain in my ribs quickly subsided into a low, throbbing ache. But even as I watched a wide ribbon of blood inch down Dima’s face, my heart wouldn’t stop pounding, my mouth so dry it hurt to swallow.

“How did you two get here?” I asked.

“We were able to jump onto a car farther back,” Vanya said, helping me to my feet. The floorboards had already started to splinter at his feet, scales of bark forming on the surface amid the buds of new leaves.