Koschei’s head reeled back and I saw him drop. I strained at the cuffs, trying to get free—I could see innumerable vampires swamping Ti, as his gun kept ringing out. “Don’t kill him!” I screamed. “Take my soul! Don’t kill him!”
“Why not? He’s already dead.” Koschei arose from the ground, covered in the ghastly fluids that were still pouring out of the cement pipe, and braced himself on the edge of my operating table. I got to watch the wound the bullet left in his forehead heal as he looked down at Weatherton, who was still laboring to stand. “Deathless, you see?”
“Aren’t we all?” Weatherton said, finally righting himself with a dismissive shake.
“Stop them!” I begged him. Even I could smell the rot in the air, even over the stench of whatever the drainpipe held. “Take it already. Just stop!”
“Zver,” Koschei warned from the end of my bed, and the sounds of violence stopped. Cold drops of whatever it was—I hesitated to think of it as water when it was so repellent—spattered off him and onto me. They felt like shards of ice, and the skin they touched went instantly numb.
I—I had felt like that before.
“Ti!” I cried out, wrenching my hands against the cuffs. A groan answered me. He—part of him, enough of him—was still intact, but much of him was scattered. I saw Sike kneel down and start to shovel things toward his open torso. Intestines.
“Ti, stay there!” I yelled. Technically he didn’t need any of his organs … but how much of him could they remove and he still stay alive? Or whatever it was that he was? He reached the remains of a hand out toward me. He wasn’t whole, but— “Just stay there!”
“Keep him down,” Koschei said to his countrymen, returning to my side. From inside his gown, he brought out a canvas roll, as wet as he was from his dunking, and set it on my table. He untied the laces that wrapped it, and it rolled open with metallic clanks. Implements were held inside by straps, tools with ruined blades, like a Civil War surgeon’s rusted operating set. Fluid drained from the case and ran down to me, bone-chillingly cold.
“Like the Shadows,” I whispered.
“Shadows are what you all call them. We call them Tyeni,” Koschei said, bringing up a curved tool. He set it between my breasts, in the space that his servant had carved out of my sweater, and yanked it down in a straight line, like an autopsy cut, grinding its tip against my sternum, slicing through my bra. I fought not to cry out. “And when we find your soul, we will feed it to our Tyeni here, and it will power them to life. And we will have our own Shadows, that answer to no one else.” I felt the warmth of my own blood flow down me in a line to cup in my collarbone and then spill into my armpit. Angry nerves sang, raw and open. Koschei leaned over me to leer, angling the blade again. “It might take a while. Souls can be difficult to find.” Another spray of wet dripped from his cuff, landing on my throat. I could grit my teeth through the pain so far—but the cold was like a slap and the shock of it made me gasp.
And what did Shadows do? Other than collect pain and suffering, and feed off sorrow? I remembered clutching the baby’s crib after the dragon was gone, as cold then as I was now, and how everyone but me and Shawn were made to forget—
“Anna!” I lifted my head to find her. “Anna! They want you to forget!”
Koschei rammed his gloved fingers into my hair and shoved my head against the mattress. He rubbed a cold thumb on my forehead. “Of course we do.” His grip on my hair tightened, and he brought his tool up again. “Sometimes, souls live in eyes.”
“I’m here because I didn’t forget you, Anna! Yuri didn’t forget you, and I didn’t either!” I wrenched my head to the side, out of Koschei’s grasp, and scrunched up my entire face to close my eyes.
I heard metal hit metal, once, twice, three times—and then I heard a gasp from the surrounding crowd. I waited for a blow that didn’t come. When Koschei let go of my hair, I risked opening my eyes to see Koschei staring over his own shoulder, and I lifted my head to see what it was he was staring at.
Metal hit metal again—and then the table under Anna collapsed in on itself. She brought her bound wrists together, bending the bed frame behind her back until it shattered. She undid her wrists, one at a time, and kicked her foot bindings free. And when she was done, she grabbed hold of the plate riveted over her mouth and pried it off, like she was opening the lid off a can. Draining sores studded with silver circled her mouth. She spun to address the Zverskiye at large. “Did it occur to none of you to put me on a silver bed?” She leaned over and spit blood into the ankle-deep water before turning toward Koschei with a ragged grin. “Little brother. It has been too long.”
She leaped for him.