One for My Enemy

by Olivie Blake

Many things are not what they appear to be. Some things, though, try harder.

If Dimitri was the Fedorov sun, Roman was the moon in orbit, his dark eyes carving a perimeter of warning around his elder brother.

If his brothers were planetary bodies, Lev was an ocean wave. He was in constant motion, a tide that pulsed and waned.

No one was ever serious for Galya; the whole sequence of dating was more recreational, as far as Sasha could tell.

think I should just get used to it. We can’t curse all the men in the world, can we?” “Not in a single day, at least,” Marya replied, “much as I try.”

The Witches’ Boroughs were the governing body of magical New York and therefore ideologically sovereign.

“Write me a tragedy, Lev Fedorov,” she whispered to him. “Write me a litany of sins. Write me a plague of devastation. Write me lonely, write me wanting, write me shattered and fearful and lost. Then write me finding myself in your arms, if only for a night, and then write it again. Write it over and over, Lev, until we both know the pages by heart. Isn’t that a story, too?”

“This isn’t the story I wanted for us.”

“If your love is dead along with my daughter, Stas, then bury it,”

Is it too soon to love you, Sasha?

Absolutely too soon,

for better or worse, he had brought her down with him.

I’m your enemy in the morning.

If she had been in his place, would one kiss, one collision, have been enough to rearrange her stars?

at the last second he tossed it aside, favoring the game over the player.

He had betrayed Marya Antonova despite the minor possibility that he had loved her.

I’m simply going to make us some tea and remind you how best to kill a witch,”

certainly don’t love me. You’ll only make fools of us both.”

Marya Antonova’s heart had started a war. Somehow, it would end one, too.

“Everyone will always ask you for something,” she told them, “and ghosts are no exception.

“Why can’t Masha see them?” Irina couldn’t help asking. “Masha’s the oldest—” “Because Masha was born to live Masha’s life,” Yaga cut in firmly, “and you were each born to live yours. Some days this will be a blessing. Some days it will be a curse. But every day you are my daughters,”

“There’s a reason we were born in Masha’s shadow, Mama,” Katya said slowly. “Because what we do, we can’t do in the light.”

“You were right when you said we’d always be hungry,” Irina added. “It’s why the dead come to us. Because they know we won’t turn them away.”

She was twice as lovely as she’d been in life, Bryn thought, and twice as still. Dead things were always so perfect. So very, very difficult to move.

she agreed, and then stepped coolly from Marya’s grip—not to create distance between them, but rather to stand on her own, without prompting. To exist on a plane of her own agency.

“Because nobody will deny you anything the moment you stop denying yourself. Who could possibly have sovereignty greater than yours?” she asked, insistent. “Who on earth could have the right to refuse you, if you do not permit them to? If this isn’t the way, Sasha, then find another one.”

“you are not incomplete because a piece of your heart is gone. You are you, an entire whole, all on your own. If you have loved and been loved, then you can only be richer for it—you don’t become a smaller version of yourself simply because what you once had is gone.”

She’d become a mutant of herself in her grief.

“Strength comes from struggle,”

“Each time we bid farewell to a piece of ourselves we become different than we were. But each time we rise again ...

“Keep your memories. Keep your emotions. Keep your...

“So how will you threaten me, Dima? Gently, I hope,”

power is knowing what you’re capable of and choosing if and when you give it to the world. Power is knowing when to be delicate and soft, like my sister, and when to make foolish, small-minded people think beauty and goodness are the same.