Page 20 of Fate and Fury

“You need a healer,” he said. “Don’t try to argue. And don’t try to walk. Maybe you can ride home like that, Katya, but you’re not stumbling on that leg all the way to Drezna. I can’t believe I let the bastards close enough to touch you. Grigori scum,” he growled, and spat on the body that lay at their feet.

Katerina forced a smile. “What’s the alternative? Our horses are gone. And I don’t intend to camp on the road amongst the corpses of our enemies.”

Niko didn’t smile back. He glared at her, scanning every inch of her body, and she fought not to quail beneath the uncharacteristic wrath in his gaze. “I don’t intend for that to happen either, Katya. I’m going to pick you up. Tell me if I hurt you.”

“I’m fine,” Katerina insisted, gritting her teeth against the pain in her leg. “Really, Niko, I’m okay. There’s no need for?—”

Ignoring her protests, he swept her up and carried her down the path toward Drezna, his arms tight around her. Despite her discomfort, Katerina couldn’t help but notice how warm his body was, how right it felt to have him hold her this way. Surrendering, she rested her head against his shoulder. She breathed in his familiar scent of mint and the oil he used to feed his blades, blended now with the sickly-sweet aroma of Grigori blood. It was better than the reek of the rowan-fires and the nasty stench of roasting demon.

An overpowering sense of dread at what they might find when they arrived on Drezna’s doorstep simmered inside her.What if the demons had somehow penetrated its defenses? What if they’d hurt the people who called the village home?

She had never seen anything like this army of demons, three nights before the Bone Moon grew full. Why had the Fallen Angel of War, more of a myth than a true threat, set his sights on Drezna? Could Katerina’s feelings for her Shadow have set the prophecy in motion? Could this somehow be her fault?

Niko’s expression was grim, his jaw tight as he strode down the road. His heart thumped against her, as steady as his footfalls on the packed dirt. Closing her eyes, she imagined arriving in Drezna: the warm welcome they’d receive from Baba Volkova, the comforting knowledge that their friends were safe—especially Tanya and Alexandr, who they often spent time with on the way home from delivering the tithe. Soon the apple trees would be blooming in Kalach; farther to the west, Drezna’s trees bloomed even sooner. She imagined wandering in the village orchard as she and Niko had done in Kalach when they were children, picking the red-blushed fruit to make the cinnamon-apple pies that were her Shadow’s favorite.

A decade ago, Katerina had brought Niko a basket of those pies as he sat by his mother’s grave, and kept him company as he ate them one by one, mechanically, as if they were made of sawdust. When he finished, he lay down with his head in her lap, watching the sun set over the stones of Kalach’s small cemetery. “I wish I’d been enough,” he’d said, as she’d run her fingers through his hair. “Enough to make her stay.”

Katerina had lost her mother and father years before, in a demon raid. She knew, better than most, what it was like to feel alone and adrift. The idea of Niko feeling that way had broken her heart.

“You are enough,” she’d told him fiercely. “You will always be enough for me.”

He was enough, still. He had saved them both, tonight. That awful moment when she thought she’d lost him forever…her first thought had not been worry for herself, or fear of what might come boiling out of the woods to attack her in the Dark. But terror of losing him—not because he was her Shadow, but because of all he meant to her.

In almost every memory she had, Niko was by her side. It was a wondrous and terrible thing.

“Katerina,” her Shadow said, breaking the silence. “Look.”

She lifted her head from his shoulder and opened her eyes. And then she sucked in her breath.

So close to the spring solstice, they wouldn’t see another frost until the coming year. Yet the earth was blanched. The tender shoots of grass that grew along the path and the leaves of the evergreens that flanked it were lined with crystals of ice. It shone in the glow of the moon, reflecting the light with an eerie, unnatural glint.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. As far as they could see, the bodies of deer and wolves and squirrels were strewn across the road toward Drezna. Blood seeped from them, frozen into icy pools.

Katerina had seen a lot of things in her twenty-one years. But she’d never seen anything like this.

She looked for their horses among the fallen—Mika, who’d carried her uncomplainingly for miles, and Troitze, as fierce and wild as Niko himself. She didn’t see them, thank the Saints. They had escaped whatever scourge came this way.

But the corpses were fresh, not even stiffening.

A chill ran through Katerina, and she looked back the way they’d come. In one direction, the fallen Grigori lined the road. In the other, these beasts lay dead.

The frost, on this part of the road only. The road that led to Drezna.

The dead animals.

The demons, more powerful and numerous than any she’d seen before, emerging from the woods.

A sudden, awful thought struck her. “Niko,” she said, “I don’t smell the fires.” Normally, at this distance, the scent of the omnipresent rowan-fires that burned at the perimeter of every village would fill the air. But there was nothing here other than the lingering scent of Grigori venom and the faint hint of animal blood.

He raised his face, inhaling. “Nor do I. But I smell Grigori, Katerina.”

“That’s us,” she said, trying to strike a desperate bargain with the Fates. “We were just surrounded by a horde of them.”

“No.” Niko’s nostrils flared as he breathed deeply once again, making sure there could be no mistake. “This is airborne scent, not the scent we carry. They were here before us. They came this way.”

His words echoed her worst fears. “Then?—”

“We didn’t outpace the demons,” he said, horror clear in each syllable. “We’re retracing their steps.”

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