1Kosara
It was just after midnight, and the chimes of the clock tower still echoed in the empty streets as Kosara rushed down a dark alleyway. The air smelled of coal fire and coming snow, and if she hadn’t known it was the last week of spring, she could have believed it was December. The tips of her ears burned from the cold.
Finally, she reached her destination, an imposing salon on the main street. Kosara was used to seeing its large windows bright and inviting, with their velvet curtains pulled back to reveal the cosy inside. Tonight, the place was dark. The sign above the door swung on its squeaky chains: “The Witch’s Rest.”
The salon wasn’t named after its clientele. In fact, no self-respecting witch patronised it. It was named after its owner, Sofiya Karajova. Sofiya’s shtick was summoning long-suffering spirits back from the dead, so their relatives could ask them all sorts of stupid and invasive questions.
Kosara firmly believed death should excuse you from family reunions, but that wasn’t the main reason she disliked the other witch’s business model. Sofiya made a fortune during the Foul Days, when the realms of the dead and the living were closest. Most other witches were too busy protecting the city from the monsters—Sofiya was more concerned with her profit margins.
Kosara knocked on the door of the salon. When it opened, Vila was on the other side, which wasn’t a surprise. It had been the old witch who’d summoned Kosara there in the middle of the night.
What was surprising was how tired Vila looked. Her skin had lost its glow. Her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with purple.
“Come in,” Vila said. “Quickly. It’s not good news, I’m afraid.”
Kosara followed her down the salon’s corridor. Their steps were muffled by the deep pile of the carpet. The scent of incense filled the space, but beneath it, Kosara detected a smell that made her nauseous. Blood.
“What’s happening?” she whispered. She wasn’t entirely sure why. The salon was so quiet, it felt inappropriate to raise her voice. “When you told me it was urgent—”
“It is. Once the coppers sniff out something’s wrong, they’ll turn up with their little bags and little tweezers and little vials, and they’ll scrub the place clean. I need you to see it before that.”
“See what?”
Vila turned around so suddenly, Kosara nearly bumped into her. The crystal chandelier illuminated her face, causing the bags beneath her eyes to appear even deeper. “Sofiya’s dead. Murdered.”
It took Kosara a second of standing there, blinking with her mouth hanging slightly open, before Vila’s words fully sank in. “How?”
“Beheaded.” Kosara flinched, but Vila’s tone remained even. “Her shadows are gone.”
“Both of them?”
“Both.”
Kosara’s hand instinctively found the necklace of shadows around her neck. She’d tried leaving them behind in the house, but no matter how many protective spells she drew around them, they never felt safe alone. They’d told her as much.
Sofiya’s two shadows weren’t like Kosara’s twelve. Kosara’s own shadow was the only one she knew how to control. The rest had minds of their own. And no wonder—they hadn’t been given to Kosara by their owners. She’d convinced them to help her defeat the Zmey, but that didn’t make them hers.
Sofiya, on the other hand, had perfect control over her shadows. That made her murder even scarier.
“You see why I called you,” Vila said. “Someone’s on the hunt for witches’ shadows. Again.”
“How is this possible?” Kosara asked. “If they’re gone, Sofiya must have given them away willingly. And then…”
“And then, she’d been beheaded like a common upir.”
“Why would they behead her? Unless they were worried she might turn?”
Even then, a pair of silver coins on her eyes would have sufficed. Or an aspen stake through her heart. Or, hell, burying her with a sack of rice, so she got too distracted counting the grains to crawl out.
Beheading her seemed like overkill.
Kosara bit her lower lip. It had started to peel from the cold. “Show me.”
Vila took a deep breath before she opened the door. A second later, Kosara understood why. The stench rushed her, thick and putrid.
The room was warm. Bright fire burned in the hearth, painting the walls in yellow and orange, reflecting off the pools of dried blood caked on the parquet floor. The body was naked, save for the vial hanging between her breasts, where Sofiya had kept her second shadow. It was shattered. Above that was the stump of her neck, bloody and messy.
Kosara’s stomach churned. Vila’s gaze was fixed on her, waiting, and all Kosara wanted to do was rush back outside and take in a breath that didn’t smell like death.
“What do you expect me to do?” she snapped.
“You have experience with things like this. Look for clues.”
Kosara scoffed. She’d hardly call her frantic search of Irnik Ivanov’s room back in Belograd “experience.” It wasn’t like she had Asen’s years of practice. Still, she tried her best. First, she kneeled next to the body and examined it quickly, pushing down the bile climbing in her throat.
For a desperate moment, she hoped the dead woman wasn’t Sofiya, after all. In the dim light of the salon, her skin seemed too dark.
It had been a foolish thought. A rich woman like Sofiya could afford an exotic holiday somewhere sunny. Everything about the body made it obvious Kosara was looking at her dead colleague, starting from her signature bright-red nail varnish and ending with the small tattoo on her wrist: three spirals intersecting in a complicated pattern.
Next, Kosara searched the room. The murderer had been careful not to leave any obvious fingerprints. The floor was spotless, except for the blood: there were no marks, no footprints, and no stray hairs. Kosara checked the ashtray and found it full of the thin filters of Sofiya’s cigarettes, all stained with her red lipstick. A single wine glass rested on a shelf. Its rim was marked with the same red.
All clues pointed to Sofiya having been alone tonight. At the same time, the person who’d taken her shadows must have been someone she’d known. You couldn’t steal a witch’s shadow—it had to be given willingly.
But then, why would they murder her once they’d got what they wanted? What could justify this senseless death?
Kosara took in a deep breath to calm her heartbeat and immediately regretted it when the room’s smell took up permanent residence in her nostrils.
“Anything?” Vila asked.
“Nothing, except…” Kosara’s eyes fell on Sofiya’s chest again. Under the broken vial, Sofiya’s skin was marred by a mark: old and long faded to grey. Karaivanov’s two crossed Ks.
“I noticed it, too,” Vila said. “He does make for a pretty compelling suspect, doesn’t he?”
“I suppose.”
This wasn’t the first murder in Chernograd over the last couple of months. Kosara had attended numerous overnight vigils, watching over the bodies of the recently deceased. A murdered person was twice as likely to turn into an upir after their death, or worse, a kikimora. There were many precautions that had to be observed: all the mirrors in the house had to be covered; the candles couldn’t be allowed to burn out; the household cats had to be kept away so they wouldn’t jump over the body.
Kosara suspected the dramatic increase in murders was related to her spell to weaken the Wall. The relatives hadn’t been too willing to talk, but she’d spotted Karaivanov’s symbol on several of the victims.
She refused to feel guilty for it—they’d known what they were getting into when they’d agreed to work for Karaivanov. They’d been aware of the risk.
And yet, sometimes, in the middle of the night, while watching over the cold, dead body of another young person, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d made a mistake. If Malamir had been right, and the Wall had been the only thing maintaining Chernograd’s fragile social structure.
Kosara sighed, glancing again at the symbol carved in Sofiya’s chest. “I didn’t know she’d worked for him.”
“Me neither,” Vila said. “I’m surprised, to tell you the truth.”
“Why? Sofiya has always been all too ready to sell her morals for the right price.”
“You’re judging her too harshly.”
“I know, I know, we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”
“It’s not that. I’ve known Sofiya for years. She had no qualms about making a quick profit off rich fools, that much is true, but I’d never have expected her to mix up with the smugglers. She had class.”
Kosara snorted, then felt guilty. The woman was dead. It certainly wasn’t an appropriate time or place to laugh.
“She didn’t have class,” Kosara said. “She had the money to buy herself enough fine clothes and jewellery to appear classy.”
“Even that’s a good enough reason to believe she’d avoid the smugglers. She didn’t need the money.”
“But maybe when she was younger, before she got her second shadow—”
“Maybe. God knows we’ve all done stupid things when we were young.”
Kosara shuffled from foot to foot, but she didn’t reply. Vila knew exactly what stupid decisions Kosara had made in her youth. All of Chernograd did. She wished her relationship with the Zmey was as easy to hide as an ugly tattoo on her chest would have been.
Vila was silent for a moment, and then she said, casually, “I see you still have the shadows.”
Kosara played with her necklace. The shadow beads were warm beneath her fingertips. “I do.”
“You were going to find their owners.”
“I did. All dead.”
“Shadow sickness?”
“The Zmey.”
“Oh,” Vila said flatly. “Did they tell you?”
“In their own way.”
Kosara had painstakingly interrogated each of the shadows until they’d revealed the truth. It hadn’t been easy. A shadow wasn’t a person, and she couldn’t converse with them like they were. Instead, each was stuck on a different fragment of its past, and each communicated it in a mixture of visions and whispers.
Kosara was worried a few of them had gone mad during their time with the Zmey. Their mutterings made little sense.
Still, the truth hadn’t surprised her. She’d suspected it as soon as she’d noticed all eleven shadows had belonged to young women. The Zmey had forced the shadows, patiently, over many years and many trips to Chernograd, out of his brides.
“What are you going to do with them?” Vila asked, a bit too quietly. If Kosara didn’t know her better, she’d think the realisation had rattled her.
That was impossible, of course. Nothing rattled Vila.
“I don’t know,” Kosara said. “I’ll have to hold on to them for now. I can’t figure out a strong enough spell to keep them safe when they’re away from me.”
“They will make you a target.”
“They also mean I can protect myself.”
Vila’s eyes darted towards Sofiya’s dead body. “Be careful. As far as I’m aware, no witch has ever collected this much power. Don’t let it get to your head.”
Kosara looked down at her boots. She’d never admit it to Vila, but she sometimes thought she heard the shadows’ whispers still, even when they were all folded into beads around her neck. Occasionally, she was sure she spotted a familiar figure in the corner of her vision, plucked straight from the shadows’ memories.
His hair was gold, and his eyes were flame blue.
She thought she had rid herself of the Zmey once and for all when she’d trapped him in the Wall. She was starting to suspect she’d been wrong.
2Asen
The blood was everywhere. Rusty red, it splattered the golden wallpaper and the stucco ceiling. A few drops had landed on the crystal chandelier and hung there, suspended in midair, like flies in amber.
“Mondays, eh?” said Lila. The magic detector in her back pocket quietly beeped. She took her notebook out. “What did you say her name was?”
“Natalia,” Asen said without looking up from the victim. “Natalia Ruseva. She owned the Witch’s Cauldron boutique.”
Lila raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that the shop you suspected of dealing with illegally smuggled magical objects?”
“That’s the one.”
Natalia’s body was sprawled on the blood-soaked sheets—pale, bloated, completely naked. A depression in the pillow indicated where her head would have lain. Except, all that remained was the bloody stump of her neck.
That was what almost pushed Asen over the edge. He rushed to the open window and breathed in deeply. The spring breeze carried the smell of blossoming linden trees. It made a putrid cocktail, mixed with the stench of death.
“She looks like she’s been dead for a while,” Lila observed, turning over the victim’s arm to look at the small tattoo at her wrist: three spirals interconnecting in a complicated pattern. “Certainly more than a few hours. What do you think?”
“We’d better leave the precise estimates to the pathologists.”
Lila harrumphed, making it obvious what she thought about their colleagues from the pathology department. She quickly dotted all the visible marks on the body in her notebook. “She gave them a good fight.”
Asen muttered something in agreement, though his eyes weren’t on the bruises dotting the victim’s skin. They were on the symbol carved on her chest.
Two crossed Ks. Konstantin Karaivanov’s sign.
“What do you think?” Lila asked. “Konstantin? Or an imposter?” Without giving Asen the chance to reply, she continued, “I suppose it would be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it? If it was Konstantin, I mean. For him to leave her like that. Your eyes are instantly drawn to that symbol.”
“What does he care?” Asen tried to keep his tone casual. “What’s one more murder on top of everything else he’s done?”
“But still, what would be the point of stripping the body naked?”
“Maybe it’s a warning.”
“For who?”
For me. Asen didn’t say it out loud. He licked his lips. They were trembling.
Get a grip, he thought sternly. He couldn’t let Lila see how much this murder had rattled him, because then she’d start asking questions, and before long, she’d find out the truth. She was like a bulldog: once she’d sunk her teeth into a clue, she never let it go.
Lila’s eyes narrowed as she kept inspecting the victim. “Her shadow is missing.”
“I know.”
That had been one of the first things Asen had noticed. It made him shudder, the thought that someone was on the hunt for witches’ shadows again. He hoped Kosara was safe. “We’d better get a team in here.”
“Yes, boss.” Lila flicked her radio open, extended the antenna, and frowned at the crackling coming from the speaker. Asen had known she wouldn’t get signal this deep in the house.
She left the room, her blocky heels clicking against the marble floor, but he lingered.
His fingers found the velvet pouch hidden in his pocket. At first glance, it appeared to be nothing but a simple, good-dreams charm. It was stuffed with herbs—a handful of lavender, valerian root, and lemon balm—but it also held a note. An invitation to an illegal auction held in a secret location, penned in Karaivanov’s own hand.
The day before, Asen had paid an informant handsomely to retrieve the pouch from under Natalia Ruseva’s pillow. He’d been just in time.
“Are you coming?” Lila shouted from the hallway.
“I’m coming.” Asen made sure the pouch was safely buttoned inside his pocket and left the room.
Copyright © 2024 by Genoveva Dimova
