“Not you.” A sob choked me as I wiped the blood from his neck with the corner of my rushnyk. “I won’t let them take you.”

Bit by bit, stitch by stitch, I made Vanya whole again. I freed his foot from his shoe. I tugged the leeches off him, their greedy, suckling mouths leaving circular wounds. The needle pricked my fingers, our blood merging. The thread darkened, first to burgundy then to a slick ink-black.

I adorned Vanya’s hips in the twisting, intricate symbols that ran up my mother’s rushnyk—for love, for protection. Time seemed to slow. Spirals, interlocking lines, stars with forked tips. My eyes ached from crying, and tender blisters rose on my index finger and thumb. I fell into a gray haze as I worked on his chest, shivering from the cold. The needle felt as unwieldy as a dagger. Then it slipped from my fingers and fell to the ground.

“No, no, no.” Moaning, I grasped amid the leaves, frantically searching for the needle and its trailing thread. When I found it after several minutes of searching, I sobbed in relief, gripping the sliver of metal so tightly that it dug a divot into my skin.

By the time I tied off the final stitch, my fingertips were blued from the cold and trembling uncontrollably. The sun had begun its slow descent toward the tree line. Hours must have passed since I had first started, but it felt even longer, like a nightmare I couldn’t awake from.

I held Vanya’s body against myself, stroking his burgundy hair, which now more than ever resembled dried blood. Blood like the scabs that crusted my fingers. Blood like the cracked, trickling flows that stained his limbs.

“Come back,” I whispered, pressing my lips against his cold shoulder. “Please, come back to me. I love you. I need you.”

He had endured so much. He didn’t deserve to die. Not like this. Not out here in the mud and the wilderness, where his body would decay and be eaten by animals, and nobody but the rusalki would come to mourn him.

Let his flesh rot if it meant he would become an upyr. Let his teeth grow into fangs. Let the embroidered crevices fissure and scale—even becoming a vodyanoy would be better than dead and cold and never coming back.

“Damn you, come back to me,” I yelled as he slipped from my numb arms. His eyes were closed, his lashes dusted with dirt, lips parted but not in exhalation. His neck fell lifelessly to the side as he collapsed against the ground.

Stricken with shock, I rose to my feet and stared down at him, waiting. Waiting. At last, I picked up my ruined rushnyk and laid it over his body, tenting his face. Even if I’d had a shovel, the ground was too loose to bury him. At the next heavy rain, he might rise to the surface.

Looking at those obscene sutures that the rushnyk failed to conceal, the enormity of what I had done finally dawned on me. How disrespectful and hopeless. How profane. How could I have thought that I’d be able to bring him back to life? That I actually had the power to make a difference?