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.