Page 37 of Spring's Arcana
Soft footsteps, glass grinding finer and finer. The steps circled her, and she drew in huge, shuddering breaths. Knowing who it was didn’t help.
“Oh,zaika,” Dmitri said, and under the fresh scratches on her left arm the older ones from his hurtful grasp throbbed. “What you do to yourself?” There was a click, and Nat peeked between her bare, bleeding arms to see Dmitri, his suit rumpled and covered with strange burns and spatters, scratching at his forehead with the muzzle of a big, dull black gun. The weapon had a strange elongated snout she recognized from movies as a silencer.
His other hand, dangling at his side, held a bright cutthroat razor, its worn black handle almost slipping from his fingertips. Despite the precarity of its position, it still held a bright, evil gleam, and something told her his loose grip wasn’t ornamental or thoughtless.
“Oh,” she said, blankly. “It’s you.”State the fucking obvious, Nat.
“Or was it him?” Dima made a swift movement, gesturing with the gun as if it was welded to his palm, though by some curious circumstance it never pointed at her.
The scarecrow-thin sorcerer lay amid whorls of broken glass, but not nearly enough for the labyrinth Nat had been caught in. The wreckage amounted to only a couple medium-sized windows; the shards spread outwards, an exploding flower with reflective petals. Two smoking holes in the scarecrow’s chest matched a tidy one in the very middle of his forehead, and under his chin his throat gaped in a great smiling slice that showed the raw edge of meat and a chip of white bone, but no blood.
In fact, he wasn’t bleeding at all, though Nat’s arms were covered with oozing, shallow slices. The sorcerer’s fingers twitched, and a horrid dusty wheeze rattled from his collapsing lungs through the clean cut in his throat.
“I hurt him again,” Dmitri announced, turning on his heel. His boot-toes twinkled just as much as ever, but they were suddenly much less funny when the razor answered. And the bright metal on the shoe-caps looked just as sharp as the blade itself.
He stalked to the sorcerer, who kept making that wheezing noise. The scarecrow’s long fingers twitched, and his thin dry lips were moving. Of course there wasn’t any breath to make his vocal folds resonate, but Nat could decipher one or two of the words.
Looked like he was cussing Dmitri out.
Shaking went through Nat in waves, muscles quivering between the urge to run and the absolute knowledge it was impossible, that if she attracted the direct attention of the murderous gangster stalking the undead sorcerer-thing on the floor something even worse might happen.
“Eh, old man.” Dmitri bent over the sorcerer. “You’re a mess. How you gonna fix this one?”
Koschei’s lips twitched with renewed speed. Incredibly, his hands were moving, smoothing his pullover, exploring the twin holes in his chest. He glared at Dmitri, those terrible, vital dark eyes all but shooting invisible hate-rays.
“What’s that?” Dmitri grinned, the wide white smile of an utter lunatic. “I can’thearyou,” he chanted, and the gun spoke again and again, making soft little coughing noises as the scarecrow’s body jerked.
Nat cried out, unable to stop herself, and Dmitri glanced at her. His snarl smoothed so swiftly she might have doubted ever seeing it, and he administered a final kick to Koschei’s midsection. His boot-toe sank in with a sound like an axe biting well-seasoned wood, and Nat’s stomach revolved again.
“You worried about him?” The razor flickered once, twice, before snapping closed and disappearing, whether into sleeve or pocket she couldn’t tell. “It would take more than that,zaika,though I do admit, sometimes I’m tempted to keep going. Just to see.” He strolled toward her, and she couldn’t help staring at the gun. He carried it like a mechanic would a tool when called to answer some kind of customer question, like Leo wandering into the kitchen with a ratchet on a bright summer day wanting lemonade, his fingers black with engine grease and Mama muttering about the marks he’d never dare leave on the yarrow-washed floor.
The thought of Leo made her flinch again. Dmitri’s free hand flashed out; his fingers, warm and hard, circled her right wrist. “Easy,” he said, much more softly. “Let’s see what we got, eh?” His dark head cocked, and he inhaled, shuddering slightly. “All’s well. Dima’s here.”
“M-my mother.” Nat’s lips felt at once too large and too small for the words. “The m-mirrors.”
“See some things, did you? Come, we take care of this.”
Even if she was capable of objecting, she might not have. Because he made another quick movement, the gun disappearing, and bent to pick her up like an overtired toddler at a late party. He was wiry but strong, and his footsteps made no more noise against the scattered, crunching glass than they had before.
“You’re lucky,” he said over his shoulder, a diagonal cord of muscle on his neck standing out. “Next time I see you, Koschei, we find out how long it takes the parts of you to crawl back together when I’m done scattering them.”
There was a deep groaning wheeze. Nat wished she could bury her face in the convenient black-clad shoulder, but the stains there were fresh and smelled truly awful. Besides, Dmitri’s hands were a little too tight, as if he expected her to start struggling and screaming at any moment—and would clamp down without a second thought.
So she just closed her eyes and tried to breathe.
“Drozzzzzzdovaaaaaaa.” A thick, rasping chuckle. The image of Koschei cradling his own head in his bloodless hands, pressing the edges of his sliced throat together, were sick-making, and she almost choked on bile. “You know where the Kniiiiiiife iiiiis.”
Dmitri halted, and his eyelids dropped halfway. He had turned to stone.
“Let’s just go,” she whispered, with no real hope he’d agree.
But he started moving again. Nat finally sagged against him, trying not to look at anything but his dark-stubbled chin. Whispering laughter, brittle as old caramel dried to a crackglaze, filled the shattered room behind them. There were no plants, no fireplace, no glass pyramid. Just a corpse, some broken glass, and the high dusty cavern of a warehouse with its walls running like smoky oil on dark water through veils of visual static.
“Don’t look,” Dmitri said. “Give you a headache,zaika. Close your eyes.”
So, like the good little girl she once was, Nat did.
MAMA’S IN
