Page 103 of Foul Days

She felt her tongue loosen.

Oh no. She looked down at her glass of wine—untouched, except for a drop of red, smeared on the rim. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d pretended to be taking a drink.

Good job, Kosara. You were supposed to drug him, not yourself.

She couldn’t linger on the thought any longer. Her lips were already shaping the words. “I saw Nevena.”

Goddamnit.

“What happened to her?”

Kosara took a deep breath. And the words poured out of her, as if they’d been waiting to come out for years. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t stop them. “It was the Foul Days. We were sixteen. We were walking home after a gig at some seedy bar—they wouldn’t serve us alcohol in the classy ones—and I thought it was just the best idea ever to go into the graveyard. I was going to be a witch, and she was going to be the best monster hunter in all of Chernograd. Nothing could go wrong, right?” Kosara laughed, too loud and throaty. “We jumped over the fence. We started walking around, reading the tombstones, laughing at the tacky statues and the old-fashioned names. We were very quiet and careful at first, but then we got sloppy. The flask of homebrewed rakia we gulped surely didn’t help. We must have got too loud. A pack of wolves found us. Varkolaks.”

“Oh no,” Asen said.

“It gets worse. I’d trained as a witch for a while at that point. I knew we could calm them down with singing. So, I told Nevena to just keep singing that awful song the band had played earlier. I honestly thought we’d get away.…”

Kosara paused. This was where her memory had faded for years. She’d always wondered what had happened for things to end the way they did.

She prepared to say as much, but her tongue had a mind of its own. “The Zmey was there.”

“What?” Asen asked.

What? Kosara echoed him in her thoughts. Of course the Zmey hadn’t been there. What was she saying?

But then she remembered what she’d seen the previous day in the graveyard, when the upirs had dragged her memories out of her mind against her will. The pack leader, with his golden hair and blue eyes. The same hair she’d run her fingers through countless times. The same eyes that still haunted her nightmares.

For years, she’d inserted some other, vague face in his place. She’d imagined a nondescript Chernogradean man, with the sort of face you couldn’t pick out in a crowd—because, she realised now, it didn’t exist.

The pack leader had been the Zmey.

“Yes,” she said, slightly giddy. Even though she knew it was the serum talking, she was still relieved to finally be sharing the story with someone. “The Zmey arrived. I’d completely forgotten about that, can you believe it? The Zmey was there.”

“Oh no,” Asen repeated.

“He was pissed off with me for escaping him.… Actually, no, he was furious. I’ve never seen him that angry—until this New Year’s Eve, that is.”

Kosara inhaled deeply. How could she have ever forgotten this part? Had the Zmey enchanted her somehow? Had her own mind erased it, in some botched attempt to protect her psyche?

“He set his varkolaks on us,” she continued. “I remember it so clearly now. I managed to run away, God knows how, but Nevena … In the last moment, as we were climbing the fence, one of them bit her ankle.”

“And she turned into a varkolak? Did she attack you?”

“That’s not how it works. You remain human until the next full moon. I hoped right until that point that she wasn’t infected. That the bite wasn’t deep enough. She begged me to just kill her if she ever turned. I told her she was being stupid. I was a witch. I’d been trained to deal with situations like that. We never told our parents so they wouldn’t worry, which I now realise was a mistake. Instead, once the next full moon came, I convinced them to go visit my dad’s cousin for a few days on the other end of town. I locked Nevena in the basement with a couple of tins of boiled pork and enough water. She should have survived the three days.”

“But?”

“But it turned out varkolaks are stronger than I thought. She broke down the door. I woke up with something wet and hot dripping on my face. When I opened my eyes, I saw her looming over me, with her mouth open and saliva running down. Her breath smelled like a wet dog. She slapped me across the face.” Kosara ran her fingers down the scar on her cheek. Three raised scrapes. “I stabbed her right before she bit me. I’d been smart enough to hide a knife under my pillow. And you know the worst part? Her eyes were still hers: brown and warm. I’ll never forget the pain in them as my knife pierced her chest.”

Kosara blinked quickly to chase away her tears. It didn’t help. They rolled down her cheeks, landing heavy on her chest. She didn’t want to look up at Asen and see the accusation in his eyes. If only she’d managed to keep her big mouth shut.…

Asen’s hand landed on hers, and Kosara jumped. What was he going to do? Arrest her?

Instead, he squeezed her hand. “You didn’t have a choice,” he said, his voice gentle. “It wasn’t your fault.”

He’s lying, whispered the Zmey in her head. You’re a murderer. You know it. And now he knows it, too. It’s all your fault.

Kosara squeezed her eyes shut. Shut. Up. She furiously wiped the tears with her sleeve.

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