And I was afraid. I was afraid that if I went down that road, I would be confronted by even darker recollections. Better to keep my distance and keep those things buried, where they couldn’t touch me.

Yet not several hundred paces from the body, Mikhail spoke my name.

I looked over.

“Did Aleksey become like your family?” Even though his voice remained level, I caught a dark trace of grief lingering in his gaze. “An upyr, I mean.”

“Not how they are now, but how they once were, maybe.” I felt as if I was treading on thin ice. Anything might lurk beneath. “I think that once you die, you have to find your way back, and sometimes by the time you do, your body has already run off without you.”

“So that wasn’t actually him,” Mikhail said after giving it some thought. “It was just the animal part of us. Like a mad dog.”

I couldn’t know for sure, but I nodded.

“And I put him out of his misery.”

“Yes,” I said, because I knew he needed it. But it relieved me once he turned away. It meant that I didn’t have to speak up and really, physically, acknowledge the one absolute truth here—if Aleksey had transformed into an upyr, and Mikhail had managed to kill him, that meant there was a limit to the amount of damage one could take. Several hard blows to the head, or even just a stake to tether her to the earth, might be enough to take Galina from this world for good. And those men wouldn’t treat her gently.

As Mikhail walked on ahead, I scuffed the ground with the toe of my boot, deep in thought. Maybe the reason I never came across other upyri was because they fell apart and had no one to sew them back together.

My earliest memories of Papa were of him as he was now—a soul smothered beneath layer after layer of cloth and leather, his wasted limbs tethered to rusty splints like vines to an arbor. And Mama wasn’t much better; her wrists and ankles were garlanded with my embroidery, and the left side of her rib cage had collapsed inward.

I wondered what would have happened if I had never found my family. Probably, I would have died. And they would have, too. Everyone knew that the dead could not return twice, or if they did, it was as something even darker than their original resurrection. I was still haunted by the folktales my birth father told me of old gods, decrepit and corrupted, who had been born from the blood and bone of monsters. Long after my father’s own face had been reduced to a shadow in my memory, his stories remained.

Beyond the forest, we reached a grassy span of land pocked with craters and trenches. The izbas here were just piles of rubble, so destroyed that Galina and I had seldom bothered to root through them.

No sooner had I stepped from the tree line than Mikhail seized my shoulder. “Wait.”