Page 49 of Sanctuary

The woman fled and vanished.

Andora faced the gathering. “I don’t care what you foresaw. This is America. We do not punish people because they might do something. You are presumed innocent until you’re proven guilty. I’m telling you right now, if anyone touches a hair on that child’s head, I will come back and make you regret it. Do not test me.”

Magic and snow swirled. A field of corpses filled the Glade. They slumped on the ground in contorted poses, their lips gone, their teeth exposed. Holes peppered their faces as if something had taken bites out of their flesh. Sores filled with pus split the remaining skin.

In the center of it all, a child sat on a heap of bodies. He had grown. He was maybe five or six now. His hair had turned lighter and more blond, and he had lost the chubby cheeks, but the eyes were the same, round and blue. He saw Andora and cackled.

“Do you like it?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I couldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for you. Oooh, poor baby me. So cute and adorable. And you, so fierce. ‘Nobody will touch the child, or I will come back and punish you.’ You stupid, stupid bitch.”

He grinned and kicked the nearest corpse, whose symbol of Troyan was still visible despite the pus and bodily fluids.

“Thirty-seven. That’s how many I killed. Thirty-seven. And you will be the thirty-eighth. But I’ll kill your soul first. Thank you so much for all your help.”

The boy raised his hand. A larger phantom hand overlaid his, its fingers long and bony, its claws dripping grayish slime. Lihoradka’s hand.

Behind him, bodies shifted. Corpses rose, their eyes glowing with greenish fire, like foul swamp lights.

Andora plunged her sword into the ground. He didn’t hear the incantation, but he knew whom she reached out to for help. Before you eradicated disease you had to contain it, and who better than a goddess who already held a grudge against the culprit?

Finn gaped at the iceberg sheathing the clearing. The ice was clear as glass, and within it, the boy hung unmoving, caught in mid-leap as he’d tried to escape. His frozen blue eyes brimmed with fear.

“This is how to do it properly,” Roman told Finn. “See, she freezes and holds. You need to work on the holding part.”

The iceberg melted, and fire spun through the glade, turning bodies into candles.

Andora returned. Her eyes were red. She didn’t say anything. She just stared straight ahead.

The tiny magic whirlwinds danced across the snow.

Roman unbuckled his harness and stepped away from the tree.

“Don’t,” Andora said. “Maybe she will let you pass.”

“She won’t. Might as well get it over with.”

He walked into the snow and waited.

The snowflakes swirled. He was seeing it for the fifth time, and he caught the precise moment they snapped into the familiar shape. He walked across the snow, tall, slender, his face grim, his dark hair expertly cut. He was exactly as Roman remembered, down to his black robes with its embroidered hem. Roman had a set just like it, except his embroidery was silver, not glowing with deep, raging purple.

“Why can’t I get away from you?” Rodion asked. “You came into this world screaming, a loud, obnoxious thing, smelling of piss and shit. Everyone was showing you off, and I looked at you and thought, ‘It would only take a pinch to smother you.’ I could just reach out and squeeze. I should’ve drowned you when you were a baby.”

This was the part when he would ask, “Why didn’t you?” and Rodion would say, “I would get caught, stupid.” Except, for some odd reason, Roman didn’t feel compelled to follow the script.

“What going on?” Finn asked behind him.

“Roman’s brother was a psychopath,” Andora said. “He only cared about power, and when he became the Black Volhv, the dark magic seduced him. There are things in Nav and on the border with the Void that feed on human desires. If you let them, they will claim you.”

“You are the reason Mom and Dad separated,” Rodion said. “I never chose sides. I let them handle their own problems, but you, no, you had to wedge your way between them with your opinions on what was fair and not fair.”

The words just didn’t have that vicious bite they’d always had. The tone was the same, the hatred on Rodion’s face was the same, but somehow it didn’t hurt like it used to.

The evil thing that was Rodion waited for him to respond.

“What happened?” Finn asked.

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