NIKO AND LUKA WERE THERE BY MORNING; THEY MUST have driven all night, set out as soon as we called them. Dunja had picked them up in town with the trundling van so we wouldn’t have two cars to conceal; as they piled out nearly on top of each other, I clasped my hands behind my back so they wouldn’t shake.
Niko flung herself at Lina like something propelled from a slingshot, the chestnut pennant of her hair flying in her rush. I nearly thought she’d knock Lina over, but my sister swept her up easily as if this was something they’d done many times before, spinning her in a little circle before setting her down and tucking her close, her cheek resting on the shining crown of Niko’s head.
“You fucking asshole, Lina,” I could hear her rasp against my sister’s chest. “You do not ever, ever do this to me again. Hear me?”
“Hear you, princess,” Lina whispered, drawing back so she could tip up Niko’s chin. “Do you think you’re going to punch me this time, too, or can we maybe get on with it?”
Niko glowered for a moment, then melted into a smile like sunrise, reaching up with both hands to pull my sister’s face down to hers. Blushing a little, I turned away from the private fervor of their kiss.
In the meantime, Luka waited for me by the van, his eyes hooded. His face was pale beneath its olive tint, his hair tousled from lack of sleep, jaw tight the way it was when he hoarded words like a living vault. I approached him slowly, penitent, wondering if he would keep me locked out—but as soon as I lifted a hand to touch his shoulder, he circled my wrist with his long fingers and pulled me to him, crushing me against him so tight he lifted me off the ground. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing, dangling in his arms with my toes just barely brushing the grass, but I’d have let him hold me like that until I died.
“Thank you for coming,” I whispered. “Thank you so much.”
“I’ll always come for you, Missy.” I felt his heart beating steady against my chest. “Always, anytime, anywhere. Though I’d rather just be there to begin with. You should really know at least that much by now.”
I’M NOT SURE what I’d expected from this spell. A cauldron, maybe, bubbling over a low flame. Pickled nightmare nuggets bobbing in glass jars. Fingernails, teeth, black candles, and bloody runes. And nighttime, at the very least.
What I hadn’t expected was to be standing at a lapping lakeshore in broad daylight, staring at the glint of my glasswork bougainvillea, which perched like a diadem on top of the unlikely pile of things we were about to burn.
“So how, exactly, are these bits and bobs supposed to work?” I asked Niko, sweeping my hand at the pile.
“We know Mara bound Death to her through a love ritual, though we can’t know exactly how it worked, and we aren’t her, anyway,” Niko said.
We’d spent over an hour explaining everything to her and Luka. I’d expected more pushback, more incredulity. But then there was Dunja beside us, gazing narrowly at the pile. She should have looked absurd, barefoot in the forest with her snow-fox hair and harem pants, sunlight sparking off the sequined band that covered her breasts above the bare expanse of navel. But she didn’t. Instead, she looked like something precious from another world, too queer and beautiful to be human. Like something that had been born in a realm a sideways step from our own.
“This gathering should act as a reversal,” Niko continued, ticking them off on her fine fingers. “The tapestry from Our Lady of the Rocks is a symbol of boundless love, the willing sacrifice Jacinta made for her husband—her labor and eyesight, in exchange for the hope that she might bring him home. The opposite of Mara’s forced-labor love.”
“Not only that,” Dunja broke in. “That island was meant to be consecrated to Mara, a gift in her name. The brothers who discovered her figurine on that first stone kept it; and Jacinta sought it out, ground it to bits, wove the fragments into the tapestry. Her will—a mortal’s will, but still, not to be dismissed—was that Mara’s power of love help save her husband, the chosen of her heart. It therefore connects directly to our witch mother, but with a purpose equal and opposite to the spell that she wrought. Subverted by one woman’s choice.”
“And Malina’s violin and Iris’s sculpture,” Niko continued. “They represent you, the gifts you inherited as Mara’s daughters so you could be fun and pretty for Death like the spell demands. And Mara’s hair, and Dunja’s, link this ritual to them, specifically.”
“They used to call her Black Mara when she was truly young,” Dunja said, her eyes distant. “She was always proud of her hair. That was how they caught me in the first place; I had to risk getting close enough to her to steal some for this, and they swarmed me, trapped me before I could take it.”
“What about the bones?” Malina asked, choking a little over the last word.
We knew now what Dunja had taken: the remnants of the saint’s right hand, wrapped in a torn-off bit of the velvet raiment. She’d called it his “righteous hand,” and I hadn’t been able to tell if she was being sincere or sarcastic. I wondered with a shudder if there’d still been scraps of tendon attached to it, if it had come loose at the lightest tug, or if she’d had to snap it free like chicken bone.
“From what you’ve said, the Christian canon doesn’t agree with Mara, not if she’s bound to much older gods,” Niko said. “Christianity doesn’t exactly play well with others, particularly witches. That’s probably why you had that reaction at the Ostrog monastery, Iris. Those bones are holy, and they rebel against Mara and her blood. Their burning should release that aversion, and that’ll be our fuel.”
Luka spoke up for the first time. He sat with his back against a pine trunk, the color finally returned to his face now that he was sure I wasn’t going to vanish on him again. “So, basically, you’re just doing what the legends in Mama’s book say. You’re trying to burn her—and then drown her, I assume, since we’re by the water.”
Niko raised her eyebrows at him. “That’s right. Do you object?”
“I don’t object, gnat,” he tossed back. “I’m just not sure we’re going about this the right way.”
“And why not?”
“Because you’re acting as though it’s an algorithm, and all you have to do is plug in the proper values for it to spit out the result you want. That’s not how spellwork goes. A collection of symbols isn’t enough by itself. There has to be something—something more. Active intention, maybe. Even I know that much from Mama’s stories.”
“How would you know? You hated her stories.”
“I didn’t hate them,” he forced out. “And I always listened. And I’m just . . . I think something here doesn’t add up properly.”
Dunja moved so quickly I barely had time to gasp. One moment she’d been facing the lake, and in the next she’d streaked over to Luka, where she crouched balanced on the balls of her feet, violence radiating off her like a wildcat with a swishing tail.
“Maybe that’s true,” she said through gritted teeth, “and maybe it’s not. Either way, I don’t remember asking for a critical analysis from doubting Thomas. And unless you can present us with another solution, why don’t you consider not undermining your sister before she even begins?”
He met her gaze, his hazel eyes even. All of us held our breath as she considered him for a moment longer, eyes dangerously narrowed, then sprang up and spun on her heel.
“Um . . .” Niko turned to Dunja, warily. “It has to be you who does it, actually. You’re the one trying to move the spell, right, shift it from Mara and onto you? So the intention behind it has to be yours. You should be the one who sings, too.”
Silence settled over the four of us as Dunja stalked off to fetch the jug of gasoline that had been bumping in the back of the van beside the pots and pans. She doused it over the objects and the bristle of kindling that surrounded them. I felt a piercing pang for what would be lost. That singular tapestry; the bougainvillea, the gift I’d given my mother made with my own breath; the violin that my sister had used to play me everything I’d ever felt but couldn’t say, since she was barely old enough to hold it properly. Even the idea of burning the saint’s hand felt like sacrilege.
Still, there was a quivering sense of expectation in the warm, early-summer air, the sunlight dense as amber as it fell over us and broke itself into the ripples of the lake. The world beyond us and the lake seemed to have receded entirely. The van was tucked into a secluded campsite about a mile away, far from where tourists usually gathered, and it was still too early in the season for hikers and wildlife enthusiasts to be making their pilgrimages to the Black Lake.
I wondered if the name was why Dunja had chosen this place—yet another connection to Mara, besides its obvious and staggering beauty. A perfect ring of pines surrounded the water, reflected in its sky-blue surface; one of the pines had died, and stood white and bare next to its green neighbors like a lingering ghost.
Dunja stood still in front of the assemblage, gathering herself. She splayed and flexed her fingers a few times, the only sign of nervousness I’d seen her show so far. When she began singing, her voice was clear and lovely as a lyre. Probably all of them were taught to sing, along with everything else. Just in case that was something that he liked.
Her bones are of nightmares, her face cut from dreams,
Her eyes are twinned ice chips, cold glimmering things,
Her hair is the scent that will drive you to death,
Her lips are the kiss that will steal your last breath.
Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.
Reaching into her deep pocket, Dunja withdrew a plastic lighter, small and orange, the kind you could get at any gas station. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that could set us free from an ancient magical binding, but then again, what did I know.
As if she’d caught my thought, Dunja hesitated, dancing the lighter through her fingers like a magician’s coin. Then she strode over to the leftover pile of kindling and found a slim little branch, rolling it between her palms as she strode back over to the pile. She dropped to her knees and angled the stripling against a central hank of wood. It whirled between her palms into a blur; one moment there was a bright ruby glint of sparking and a single thread of smoke, and in the next, flames raced over the pile like a conquering army. Dunja leaped neatly away as they whooshed together into a massive, roaring fire.
I bit my lip as my fractal bougainvillea charred and then melted, wilting in on itself like a true flower. Below it, Malina’s violin and the tapestry threw off a shower of sparks.
We watched it burn for a while, the smoke and fire smelling uncannily of winter against the sunlit day. Dunja’s eyes were closed and her face intense with concentration as she sang the next stanza.
To chase out the winter, build her to burn her,
Make her a body, the better to spurn her,
Build her of twigs, and of scraps, and of sticks,
Then build up the fire, and sing loud as it licks,
Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.
Once the fire settled into a steady, almost homey crackle, Dunja reached for the pots and pans she’d filled with lake water earlier, and began tossing them over the conflagration. The flames hissed like a tangle of snakes, and the stink of wet wood rose and filled the air.
Strip her arms bare of glitter or silver,
Choke her and flay her, force her to deliver,
Drown her in lakebeds, or quick-running streams,
Dunk her in pond scum to smother her screams,
Kill her in winter, so she can birth spring.
As soon as the fire subsided, Dunja began picking up the objects and flinging them into the lake. Some still smoldered, and they’d have burned me to the bone if I’d tried to do it, but her movements were so deft and quick that once she was done, the few streaks of soot on her silk pants were the only signs that she’d even been close to the flames.
Then, under the water, the remnants of the objects all caught on fire again, as if they’d never even stopped burning. As if the water was made of alcohol.
I caught my breath, and beside me, I could hear Malina’s gasp. It reminded me of images I’d seen of oil fires raging unchecked on ocean surfaces, but these continued blazing as they sank, like the ruins of some catastrophic shipwreck. Smoke from them funneled through the water, and spat up black and oily, spinning into the sky like a sooty tornado wreathed with veins of flame.
“Oh shit,” Niko whispered. “Is that what it’s supposed to look like?”
“Would we know?” Malina asked. “Would we feel it if it was?”
“Well, something has certainly transpired,” Dunja said, so dryly I nearly laughed. She swiped the back of one hand over her cheekbone, leaving a trail of char. “In either case, we cannot stay here. This will hardly have escaped her notice, whatever its effect. I need to get you all away from here immediately, back to our camp.”
“Why camp?” Luka argued. “Why can’t we leave, right now?”
“Because if this isn’t over, we will need some other way to finish it,” Dunja said. “And there is nowhere in the world for these two to go, where she would not eventually flush them out like prey leaving a bloodied trail.”
WE ATE WHAT we could forage from the back of the van. I wrestled open a jar of cocktail hot dogs that had seen better days, or possibly years, and we roasted them over a little fire banked with stones. Luka had lit this one; Dunja had been oddly willing to let him take the reins, and now she perched on a massive stump across from us, huddled in a tasseled black pashmina that had also come from the van. She looked like a bird that had drawn a sheet over its own cage. Maybe she was finally tiring, I thought. Or maybe she just missed him.
Malina sat with Niko on a log a little ways away from us, far enough that we couldn’t hear their conversation. Her head rested on Niko’s shoulder and her arm draped across Niko’s legs. Even exhausted, and with all the danger we were still in, my sister looked happier than I’d ever seen her.
I teased a baby hot dog off its stick with a pair of cheese crackers, and offered the makeshift sandwich to Luka. He took it without looking at me, making sure our fingers didn’t even brush, muscles twitching madly along his jaw in the firelight. He’d barely spoken a word to me since we got back here, and I could almost see the fury simmering inside him. It scared me. We’d been friends for almost ten years, and in all that time, I didn’t think I’d ever seen him fully angry. At least not like this, with it boiling so close beneath the surface.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered to him. “Why are you being like this?”
He gave a tight shake of his head, then stood. “I’m going to take a walk.”
I looked down at my hands as he left, picking at my fingers, my insides raw with pain.
“It’s not you he’s angry at, sweetness,” Dunja said. The firelight painted flickering shadows across her face, until she looked like a jungle cat peering through foliage. “He’s furious with himself. You can see it from a mile away.”
“Why would he be?”
“Because he doesn’t think it’s working, and he doesn’t know how to protect you. And that’s the one thing he yearns to do.”
I hesitated. “Dunja—I think I know him. Death, I mean. There was a boy I met, right before Mama died. Right before this all started. You haven’t said so much about him, but I think . . . I’m afraid it may have been him.” I took a shuddering breath. “And I wanted to say I’m sorry, for anything that happened with him. I didn’t know he belonged to you. And having known the best of him, even for just a little bit, I know it must hurt so much that he left.”
She unwound the pashmina from her shoulders and rose, stepping neatly over the fire and to me. Her movements were so precise the air barely stirred as she dropped into a crouch in front of me and took my face into her hands, thumbs brushing over my cheekbones. I leaned into her touch.
“He hurt you, didn’t he, sweetness?” she whispered fiercely, her pale eyes holding fast to mine. I could feel the outraged flare of her protection, even beneath all the love she had for him, and it was too much to keep from crying. “We aren’t meant to serve him with beauty outside of the magicked confines of that bubble kingdom; our living bodies are simply too frail to withstand the burden. So he pushed you too hard when he shouldn’t have, didn’t he, because he was eager to see how far you could go? Demanded more than you could give. Am I right?”
A tear slid hot down my cheek. “Yes. I mean, I wanted to do it—I was happy with him—but it just—”
“Let me tell you something your mother wished so desperately she could have told you, little niece.” She cupped my cheek. “Not everything is your fault. And certainly not anything he did. You don’t always need to be so brave.”
Tears stung my eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Go to that boy.” She skimmed her fingers down my throat, hovering them gently above my breastbone. “Tell him what’s in there. Or what would be in there, rather, if you weren’t so hell-bent on keeping it out. There’s no need for that anymore. Not when you could have the true luxury of love.”
I’D NEVER KNOWN such a complete silence. Down by the sea, there was at least the sound of water, and from our apartment, we could always hear the faraway rush of the cars on the Adriatic Highway, the lonely bark of stray dogs, the shuffling and muffled voices of neighbors around us. But here, the hush was nearly perfect, broken only by the high skree-skree of some sole insect in the ferns. Even the birds were settling in for the approaching night.
I followed the path back to the van, my ears full of quiet and the rushing of my own blood.
He wasn’t there. “Luka?” I called out softly, counting my heartbeats in the silence. I was up to seven when he replied.
“Up here.” I followed the sound of his voice until I saw his silhouette above me against the gathering dusk. “Be careful. There’s roots, and loose stones.”
I picked my way gingerly to the incline, hauling myself up the slope toward him. The little hillock overlooked the liquid glimmer of the Black Lake below, and across from us, the great humped summit of Veliki Medjed and the triangle of Savin Kuk hulked against the purpling sky. The cherry of his cigarette flared when I reached him, and my palms tingled again. I knew he only smoked when he was unhappy.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I talk to you?”
Another smoky exhale.
“I don’t know, Iris. Is there anything to say? I’m never sure, with you.”
I placed my palm on the rough trunk of the pine between us, stroking it like a pet. “Maybe I can start, then. I know—I know you’re angry. I’m not sure why, and if you don’t want to tell me, that’s all right. But I don’t know what’s going to happen after tonight.”
Silence, but I could see him nod. I traced his chiseled profile, the well-hewn lines of nose and lips that were so delicate on Niko but fine and strong on him.
“If it didn’t work,” I continued, feeling the well of tears in my throat, “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Mara will keep hunting us, and I think—I’m afraid that she might win, somehow. And if she does, I can’t let Lina go. It has to be me. I’ll go willingly, if I have to.”
“No.” The word sounded so raw it may as well have been ripped from his throat. “Lina will hate you forever if you do it.”
I shrugged, leaning my cheek against the scrape of bark. “And that’s why I’ll do it. Because she might hate me for it, but she’ll get to live. Sometimes that’s what real love takes, I guess. A sacrifice on both sides, doing for the other person what they can’t do for themselves.”
“That’s funny you should say that,” he bit off, swiping the back of his hand over his mouth. “Because I’ve been trying to love you for as long as I can remember, and you’ve never let me give you anything, no matter how much you needed it. That’s what all those flowers were for, you know? I ordered them online from a rare-flower distributor in Belgrade, I may as well tell you now. They were the only thing you’d ever take from me. I thought the price was worth it.”
I pressed my lips together. “I loved those, Luka. But they weren’t the only thing you ever gave me, please believe that. You were always there. It meant so much. It meant everything.”
“And what about now? I can’t give you anything. I can’t even put myself between you and her.”
“It’s not your fault,” I said softly, laying my palms lightly on his chest. He jerked beneath my touch, and I could feel the fire-heat of his skin beneath his shirt, and a matching, incremental melting inside me. “Just the fact that you want to is so wonderful to me. I feel like I’ve spent my whole life fighting, sometimes maybe even when I didn’t need to. But even still, why did you never try to tell me? Anything about what you felt?”
It was so hard to look at him like this, full-on and unblinking, with nowhere to hide. I’d spent so much of our time together with him by my side that I wasn’t remotely prepared for how facing him would make me quake.
“Because I didn’t want to push you into anything,” he said, eyes steady on mine. “I didn’t want you to feel like—like you owed me anything. Like you were supposed to love me just because I loved you. That’s not how it should be. That, and I deserved more, Riss, than to keep banging on the door of someone who refused to ever let me in.”
My fingers trembled against his chest, and I swallowed before I went on. “I didn’t let you in, you’re right. Not just because Mama told us both not to; obviously that never stopped Lina. It also felt safer keeping you right next to my heart, so close. Because if I let you inside, I knew the only way to ever get you out again would be to crack it all the way open. And that’s not . . .” My voice broke clean through. “That’s not something I’d survive.”
His hands crept over mine, and his palms were so warm that I couldn’t stop the tears. He gave the deepest sigh—as if he’d held that single breath for years, a genie stoppered in a bottle. His eyes glittering in the dark, he took my hands and brought them up to his face, pressed a soft kiss into the center of each of my palms. Then he cupped them over his own cheeks, so that I held his face with his hands above my hands. “So why now?” he whispered, low and rough, tilting his forehead until it met mine. “Why tell me now?”
“Because if it turns out I have to be the one to go, I can’t”—I choked back a barbed sob—“I can’t do it unless you know I do love you, too.”
I hadn’t been prepared for the fierceness, either. Over the years, I’d thought about how this might go—of course I had—but the scenarios I’d played out had been tender, coaxing, and cautious.
Instead, Luka slid his hands up my arms and spun us around, pressing my back hard against the trunk. I opened my mouth to gasp and he covered it with his own, lips warm and expert as they caught mine. He tasted so good, sweetness and salt with that slight, smoky underlay of tobacco. I sighed into his mouth, hands sliding up his chest to wind around his neck. He caught them and pinned them above my head, one hand wrapped around my wrists. I pressed against his grip despite myself.
“Let go, Missy,” he murmured, tipping my chin up with his free hand. “Just let go, for once. Let me.”
I did, melting fully against the trunk, the bark rasping against my head as I tipped it back. Whatever I gave him would be the right thing. I could trust him with not just the best, but with all of me.
He trailed kisses down my neck until my entire body burst with tingles. Everywhere he skimmed his fingers, the inside of my skin ignited. I remembered how sometimes, in mining cities, the coal beneath the earth caught fire and burned for years without ever going out, because it couldn’t be extinguished. That was what I felt like when his hands ran over me, as if he were drawing out veins of ore I’d never known I had. Even my cheeks felt like they might glow with heat as he brushed his lips where my tears had dried.
He set his teeth delicately into my neck, and I shuddered against him, shock waves spreading from the suck and flutter of his lips and tongue in the hollow of my throat.
“Oh, that’s going to leave a mark, my Missy,” he breathed against me, ringing one of my wrists with his fingers so he could feel my racing pulse. “How do you feel about that?”
I licked my lips, trying to gather myself. “Um, I feel very yes about it.”
“Good,” he purred. “Because if I’m going to be yours, I want the whole world to see.”
He drew back for a moment as I tried to catch my breath. Strands of my hair had gotten caught between my lips, and he gently smoothed them free. “There,” he said, leaning in for a kiss that startled me even further with its softness. “Now you’re perfect again.”
“Perfect?” I challenged. “Or uncanny?”
He let me go to smile into my face, teeth glinting in the dark as he slid his hands over my waist. “Both, of course. Exactly the way I love you.”
Nothing Mara had ever done could have touched what we had then.