her soaked, shaking body. Got lost in the rain. Ren covered her face with her hands. They transformed into lynx paws. She raked her claws through her hair.
When Lukasz finally spoke again, his voice was low and hollow.
“I let go.”
The monsters swarming like ants over her older brother, her wildest brother, the brother who had followed her and who had loved her and who had hated her plan but who had defended her to the death.
“No.” She swallowed against the pain in her throat. “He let go. He knew.” She swallowed again, hard. “He knew he couldn’t get away.”
Like Koszmar. They had both known.
Ren let out a ragged sob. Clamped her half-lynx hands tight over her mouth. Wished he wasn’t there to see her cry. She hadn’t always been like this. So on the edge that she feared the moments when anyone asked her how she was holding it together, because she knew that one day she wouldn’t, that everything would fall apart.
“I . . .” Lukasz’s voice cracked. “I don’t know what you need me to tell you.”
The water, now dancing with rain, began to roil. Ren watched, somehow distant, as the river came to life. Long silver bodies, long silver hair. Long beautiful fingers and sleek beautiful faces, nimfy twisting in every direction.
Lukasz stiffened beside her.
To him, water meant monsters. To her . . .
Deceptively human, with those lithe bodies. But beneath the river algae clinging to their scales, they were anything but: all magical bones and sparkling organs and hearts and minds that changed on a whim and picked favorites. Loved and lived and drowned with the same reckless abandon. There was nothing human at all under that sparsely scaled, silver skin. Quiet creatures. Simple creatures. Magical, only playing at humanity, in love with this dark, murderous world.
Creatures like her.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” she whispered.
His voice didn’t crack again. It was hollow, deep. It echoed in her soul.
“I can’t.” Then: “I don’t know if it’s going to be okay.”
The uniform put an arm around the shoulders of the wraith.
And Ren, who had never been comforted by a human in her life, let him pull her in. Leaned against his shoulder, rested her cheek against the rough angle of his jaw.
“I know,” she whispered, feeling selfish. “I know.”
They didn’t speak again. Instead they watched as the nimfy shivered and twisted and undulated through the rain and the darkness and the sorrow of an evil forest.
29
WATER ABOVE THEM, WATER ENVELOPING them, the strzygi long gone and Lukasz shoulder to shoulder with the creature he admired, the creature he loved, the creature he feared he might devour.
In the end, Koszmar had been the braver man. He’d seen what was waiting for him: an eternity of slow transformation, of gradually forgetting, of peeling skin and yellowed teeth. It could have ended in monstrosity or humanity, and Koszmar had done the brave thing. He’d chosen how to die. He hadn’t relied on the Dragon to kill him. He hadn’t left anything to chance.
He’d pressed the gun into the underside of his jaw, squeezed the trigger, and chosen death.
He’d chosen humanity.
Lukasz wrapped his arm tighter around Ren.
Now was not the time to tell her what was happening to him. Not when she was hurting like this. She didn’t need to know about the monsters he imagined were under his skin, seething. Writhing. Clamoring to get out. She didn’t need to know that he was afraid: afraid he was not as brave as Koszmar. Afraid that when the moment came, he didn’t know how he would choose. Didn’t know if he could end it, choose death as a man. Wondered, instead, if he would hang on until his dying breath—whatever throat it tore itself from. Maybe he’d cling to those last heartbeats, caught up in the universal, obsessive instinct to survive. Maybe, oh God, probably, he’d go out sputtering and slobbering, a monster desperate to live.
Lukasz shuddered. He hoped she didn’t feel it.
Or—he let that last bit of hope have a moment—or maybe he’d survive. Maybe this was just a passing fever. Maybe the Leszy was wrong, maybe mavka were nothing like strzygi, maybe he’d laugh about this in a week, in a month—
She wept. She placed her hands flat against her cheeks, spreading them out over her eyes.
“I don’t know what you need me to tell you,” he said at last.
“Tell me it’s going to be okay,” she whispered. And her voice cracked.