“Shoot me,” he croaked as I paused at the brink. “I’m begging you. Just shoot me.”

I glanced back. “Tickling is a pleasant death, if you ask me.”

36

Long after Dronov’s laughter faded behind me, I found myself freezing at every rustle, gripping the pistol so tightly that my knuckles blanched white. The cackling of crows and grackles scraped at my nerves, spurring me into a panic that verged on delirium. I blundered through the woods, searching for a path, I thought, or Vanya, or my mother—we were far from the Edge, but maybe I’d find her after all these years, with ivy reaching through her rib cage and her jawbone bulging with a crust of dead moss and monkshood.

With time, I reached the road and followed the wagon tracks—not toward the camp, but in the direction of the bridge, until the sun exposed a sprinkling of dried blood left in the dirt.

I entered the woods with my pistol bared in front of me, my teeth clenched to stifle my ragged breathing. My legs trembled uncontrollably beneath me. Two hundred paces from the road, I came to a devastated stand of pines whose malformed trunks curled over me like a cage. Roots emerged from the soil in a tangled net.

Standing on the soil, still loose and mucky from a recent disturbance, I stared at the congealed gore marbling the mud. Who knew whether it had spilled from a human or even an animal? The wilderness was alive with all manner of beasts.

In my own mouth, I tasted blood. I snared my inner cheek between my incisors and bit down until the taste became real. Unpeeling my gaze from the ground with some difficulty, I looked across the glade, drawn by another smear of red.

A body lay sprawled against one of the trees.

No, not him. It couldn’t be him. As I stumbled toward the corpse, a low groan squirmed up my throat. No sooner had I taken five steps than I froze.

The man’s head lolled crookedly against the tree trunk, bark and pine needles growing into his cheek, his eye socket. His brown hair obscured the worst of the damage Vanya’s power had wrought to his face but failed to hide the devastation below. Branches emerged like grasping fingers from his chest.

I searched the glade. Another Fraktsiya soldier lay entangled in roots, his glazed eyes rolled up as if to track the blister of a sun that rose in the maroon sky.

The brutality of their deaths took my breath away. It spoke to Vanya’s desperation in these moments, and his terror.

So where was he? And hadn’t there been a third soldier?

My gaze returned to the puddle of blood. Streaks led across the glade, where the dark gash of the river glimmered through the trees. Bearing Dronov’s pistol in front of me, I followed the trail of blood. As the river’s low murmur filled my ears, I envisioned Vanya injured and terrified but alive, dragging himself toward the water. The rusalki would protect him, I knew they would, just as the upyri had protected me all these years. The monsters in this world were more than what they seemed.