When Among Crows

3. A Red Line

Every train station has magic in it, not that Ala can feel it. Some of her kind swear they can smell it, and maybe they can; all zmory have good noses, but hers is average at best.

It’s because of how they were built—the train stations, that is, not the noses. They were hoisted above Chicago’s brick buildings in the mid-1910s, with the city refusing to close down cross streets for their construction, so the builders had to get creative. It took them over a decade to complete just the Red Line.

There’s always sacrifice in building something that’s never been built before, and sacrifice creates a debt, and debts create a space for magic to rush in. So if the Thorndale Red Line stop hums with it, well—that makes sense to her.

The station is empty at this hour, with the trains running every fifteen minutes or so, depending. She pays for a single-ride pass and pushes through the barrier. As she climbs the steps to the platform, the Purple Line Express rushes past in a smear of greenish light and chattering college students on their way to Evanston.

Slumped on one of the benches under the awning is an old woman with a battered suitcase between her feet—not who Ala is looking for. But at the end of the concrete, leaning against a pillar, is a young man, probably in his late twenties, his hair a dusty shade of brown and his hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket.

Bingo.

She recognizes him from the bar. He ordered red wine—no, beer, after she told him about the chalice she was required to serve the former in. He had an accent and a nice smile, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Ala isn’t.

She’s tempted to just take the fern flower from his pocket. Tom told her which one it was in—right, not left, and wrapped in paper, so she could probably get away with touching it, even though quasi-mortals aren’t supposed to be able to. She could distract him with an illusion and pick his pocket, no problem. She’s done it before.

And maybe she still will, she thinks. But first she has questions.

He pulls away from the pillar as she approaches. He still has that guitar case on his back, soft and definitely not shaped like a guitar is inside it.

“You’re Dymitr?” she demands.

He smiles a little. “She gave you my name?”

“I asked for it. I’m not interested in cursing you,” Ala says.

“And you are…?”

She hesitates. But there’s little danger in giving out her own name. She’s already cursed, after all.

“Aleksja,” she says. “But everyone calls me Ala.”

There’s a chill in the air here, from the wind off the lake. She’s glad she borrowed Tom’s zip-up for the walk, even though it smells like pipe tobacco and men’s deodorant.

“So you’re a bartender,” he says. “Not every zmora could work in a customer service job without scaring off the customers.”

His accent reminds Ala of her mother. The way she lisped a little and consonants fell heavy from her lips. It’s been many years since she died, more than Ala cares to count, but she can still hear the woman’s voice, exhorting her to sit up straight or to run a comb through her hair.

“Who says I don’t scare them?” she says. “The Crow is a feeding ground. It’s not exactly dependent on liquor sales from Toil and Trouble.” She looks toward the lake, where two white apartment buildings stand right next to the water, just barely visible now in the moonlight. “I don’t believe in angels, you know.”

“Come again?”

“You show up out of nowhere with this remedy to my little condition,” she says. “And it’s like you expect me to think you only mean well, only… I don’t believe in angels.”

If she had to guess, she would say he looks… sad. But the expression is fleeting.

“Do you believe in a simple exchange?” he says. “I was clear about my motives. I’ll give you the fern flower if you help me get to Baba Jaga. Simple as that.”

Ala laughs.

“Why the hell do you want to meet with Baba Jaga?” she says. “I’m given to understand that most mortals leave her presence owing more than they received.”

For the first time, he seems at a loss for words. He holds the guitar case against his stomach, pinching it in such a way that makes her think something much slimmer takes up space inside it.

“My reasons are my own,” he says. “But I suspect you’re desperate enough to agree even if you don’t know them.”

“Fuck you,” Ala says automatically, but he’s right, and she can’t pretend that he isn’t.

The curse found her a few years ago, constricting her chest like a gasp and prickling behind her eyes. At first, it showed her brief visions, easily banished. But then it crept across her days, taking up minutes, and then hours. Tormenting her.

Killing her, just as it killed her mother—by inches.

“I know what haunts you,” he begins.

“You have no idea what haunts me. How could you possibly?”

He reaches for her, and she’s too unused to this—a mortal who doesn’t fear her, a mortal who would dare to touch her cold skin—to pull away. His fingers close around her wrist, so gently she could break his grip without even trying. Just enough to get her attention.

“Show me, then.” His eyes are gray-brown, like a military jacket, like a tree trunk in winter. “Make sure I understand.”

Ala needs no further invitation. She tugs her wrist free from his grasp, and makes the world fall away.

Not every zmora is equally good at illusions, just like not every zmora has an equally good nose. Ala has a talent for the former, if not the latter.

The Thorndale platform disappears: the awning, the heaters (switched off now that it’s no longer winter), the old woman and her suitcase, the benches, the screens that predict the arrival of the next train, and the tall buildings near the lake.

In its place is a forest. The trees that surround them are dense, with narrow white trunks and branches that tangle together just above their heads, untrimmed and untamed. The layer of leaves beneath their feet is wet and soft, as if from a recent melting. Ala can almost smell the rot.

The sun has set, but it’s still light enough to see by. A tall, hulking man with a shaved head stands between her and Dymitr, his scalp shining with sweat. He stands over a long-haired woman with a greenish cast to her skin. She kneels on the ground in a white nightgown. She’s a rusalka—a water maiden.

Dirt streaks the fabric right over her knees, and blood. Blood on her sleeves, on her back. Stripes of it, soaking through the white.

Ala tries to meet Dymitr’s eyes, but he’s staring, rapt, at the man with the shaved head. The man reaches behind him and digs his fingers into the skin at the back of his neck. Then he yanks both hands up in one strong motion, and a bone-white blade pulls free of his flesh, his blood still running down the hilt. He may have split his soul to make the weapon, but he still has to pay for it in pain every time he wants to fight with it.

A purple-red color, like a port-wine birthmark, spills into his fingers and palms, all the way over his wrists, like he’s plunged his hands in a vat of red dye. His eyes, too, glint red, bloodshot all the way through.

He’s a Knight of the Holy Order, and he’s here to perform an execution.

The rusalka wraps her too-long, too-thin arms around herself, and hunches over her bloodied knees, sobbing.

“Please,” she says softly. “Please—”

The man’s sword drips blood onto the wet leaves. He swings it. Dymitr and Ala both jerk back at the same time. As the rusalka’s head rolls toward Ala, the man, the leaves, and the birch trees all disappear. The Thorndale platform takes their place just as a train pulls into the station.

Ala watches the late-night commuters step out of the cars—just two of them, a woman in blue scrubs and a man still wearing his warmest coat, unzipped over a worn sweater. The old woman with the suitcase waddles onto the train. The doors close; the commuters descend to the street; the train pulls away from the platform.

They’re alone.

Dymitr’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, hard.

“You see memories,” he says roughly.

He doesn’t ask who the man was, and how he managed to draw a sword from his spine as if it were a sheath. That means he must already know who the Holy Order are. She tastes something sour. He seems friendly enough—certainly none of them, or anyone aligned with them, would ever speak to someone like her as if she’s an equal, as he does—but maybe he’s called on them before, just to rid his neighborhood of something pesky. It wouldn’t surprise her. Humans are always talking out of both sides of their mouths.

“Maybe they’re memories,” she says, shrugging. “Maybe they’re hallucinations. I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. What matters is, they’re bloody, and they fill my every waking moment. So take a moment to consider whether you’re toying with me or not, because if you are, I’ll kill you.”

“I’m not.” She’s not sure a mortal has ever spoken to her that gently before.

“Well, I don’t know how to find Baba Jaga, let alone how to get her to meet with some random human,” she says. “So now what? You have a fern flower and no leads.”

“You don’t know anyone who might be able to help us?” He raises his eyebrows. “Can’t get me into a place I could never otherwise go?”

Ala sighs.

As it happens, she can.

“How long will that thing live?” she says, nodding toward his right pocket.

“Thirty-six hours before it’s no longer useful to us,” he says. “Why?”

“I have an idea,” she says. “And it’s five hours until sunrise, so we might still be able to pull it off if we get moving.”

She sends a series of texts as Dymitr summons a ride with his several-generations-old iPhone. She doesn’t know how he can even read anything on a screen that cracked. But there’s an air of carelessness about him in general: the stretched, misshapen collar of his T-shirt, the fraying ends of his shoelaces, his rumpled hair, his bitten fingernails. As if he hasn’t looked in a mirror in quite some time—or perhaps he has, and he doesn’t care about what he sees.

“Why is it called the ‘Crow Theater’?” Dymitr asks her. “Some Poe reference?”

Ala shakes her head. “It’s from that saying. ‘When among crows, you must caw as they do.’ Because we’re supposed to fit in among mortals. Mimic them.”

“Cheeky,” Dymitr says. “Considering they’re the ones who compare you to crows. And ravens. And—”

“Stoats, yeah,” Ala says. “Klara thinks it’s funny.”

Her phone buzzes, and she glances at the new message. You’re in. But hurry up.

Luckily, at that moment a puttering Honda pulls up to the curb in front of Dymitr, and he ducks his head in to check that it’s theirs. Ala slides in after him, and sneezes. It smells like old cigarettes, stale french fries, and a pine-scented air freshener, so potently that when she meets the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, she can hardly smell the sugary nervousness he emits. She gives him a broad smile, the kind that tends to make mortals uneasy, and the sweet smell of his fear surges into her nose. Her mouth waters.

She glances at Dymitr, who’s watching her like he knows exactly what she’s doing. He rolls his eyes.

“You’re going all the way to… uh, Ninety-Second?” the driver says, frowning at the phone fixed to his dashboard. “Didn’t even know the streets went up that high.”

“Well,” Ala says. “You should get out more.”

The driver pulls onto Lake Shore Drive, which will take them south all the way past downtown, past Hyde Park, and right up to the invisible line that divides Illinois from Indiana. On the Illinois side of the line is an old warehouse that makes containers—bottles, cans, jars, and the like—during the day. At night, though, it’s something different.

“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Dymitr asks.

“South Chicago,” she says. “Where the old steel mill used to be. There’s still a factory there.”

“And we’re going there… why?”

She glances at the rearview mirror to see if the driver is paying attention. He is, but when he meets her eyes, he turns up the radio. Music pulses so loud it rattles the car windows.

“You’ll see,” she says, loud enough for Dymitr to hear her.

They coast along the lakefront with the road to themselves. Moonlight reflects off the water, jagged from the waves. In the distance, the band of light around the top of the Sears Tower glows blue in honor of Father’s Day.

“Do you speak Polish?” Dymitr asks her.

“Do you know what a strzyga is?” she asks in return.

Dymitr hesitates, likely for the sake of the driver—but Ala isn’t concerned about the driver thinking they’re mad, or even less likely, believing whatever they say about monsters in the streets of Chicago. Dymitr seems to make the same calculation, because he answers:

“Like a vampire, right?” He grins, and she can’t tell whether he’s messing with her or not.

“No,” she says. “And if that’s what you think, we should call this whole thing off right the fuck now—”

“Relax,” he says. “Yes, I know what they are. Not vampires. Much worse than vampires.” He taps the guitar case held between his knees with one finger. “And there’s no guitar in here.”

That’s no surprise, though she wonders what is in there.

“Good.” She sits back, and chews her thumbnail. A few minutes pass before she remembers that he asked her a question.

“No,” she says. “I never learned to speak Polish.”

“Your mother didn’t teach you?”

Most zmora are women, so it’s a safe assumption that her mother would have been the one to teach her. But Ala’s mother had resented being forced to learn it by her own mother, who used to slap her knuckles with a ruler if she didn’t use the Polish words for things, and she hadn’t wanted to inflict the same hardship on her daughter. Ala had grown up with the ache of not knowing it—not knowing where she was from, or what she was, really, as a result.

There are, of course, zmory from other places. They go by other names: lamia in Greek, pesanta in Spanish, dab tsog in Hmong. Even some of her Dryja cousins wear features from other places, their skin umber and russet and sable instead of pale and freckled like her own. But most of them still know how their family came here, and why, and how to speak to the Dryja leaders in their own language. Among them, Ala still feels twinges of loneliness that she tries to ignore. She feels it now, with Dymitr, though he’s no zmora.

“No,” she says. “She sang to me sometimes, though. One song in particular. A Christmas song—Gdy si? Chrystus… something.”

Dymitr grins.

“‘Gdy si? Chrystus rodzi’?” he says.

“Maybe. Probably. She used to laugh during the third verse, and I don’t know why.”

The driver’s music fades for a moment between songs, with just a late-night DJ chattering through the speakers. She hears Dymitr singing, his voice creaky but mostly on key: “Powiedzcie? wyra?niej co nam czyni? trzeba… bo my nic nie pojmujemy… Ledwo od strachu ?yjemy…”

Ala can’t help but laugh.

“That’s it,” she says. “Can you translate it?”

“I think… ‘Say more clearly what we must do, because we don’t understand anything. We hardly live… from fear.’”

She snorts a little. “Well. She always did have a dark sense of humor.” She glances at him. “She was hardly living because of fear, too.”

His expression is grave for a moment, and then lightens. “I didn’t know your people celebrated Christmas.”

“Not everyone who celebrates Christmas believes in it,” she points out. “But yes, my mother, like many of my people, was Catholic, likely to the horror of the Holy Order. Some of my people are Protestant, or Jewish, or Muslim, too. But why does that surprise you? Didn’t you find that flower in a church?”

“I didn’t realize it was planted there in reverence. I’m… aware,” he says carefully, “that the Holy Order uses religion as a kind of cudgel, as so many others have before them. Their name, even. Knights. I just assumed that would turn others away.”

“I’m sure it has.” Ala shrugs. “But not everyone.” She doesn’t want to think about it anymore, her mother’s creaky voice singing in Polish, the multicolored bulbs on the Christmas tree, so hot they burned her fingers. The times that are lost, now. She changes the subject. “You know, even if you give that flower to me, we still need Baba Jaga to tell us how to cure me. So I’m not getting my hopes up.”

“But that’s what the song is about,” Dymitr says. “The wild hope for… restitution. Healing. Despite a total lack of understanding. We could basically just sing it to Baba Jaga, minus the ‘gloria’s.” Dymitr turns toward the window to watch the tall buildings of Chicago’s downtown pass them by. “You shouldn’t lose hope, Ala. Our people never do. We’re foolish that way.”

“Are you saying I inherited this foolishness?” she says. “That’s sort of a relief, actually. I thought it was a condition unique to me.”

His smile fades a little, and he nods.

“Keep your hopes up, Aleksja,” he says. “Disappointed hopes won’t be any worse than what awaits you now.”

He has a point.

The driver leaves them in the dark, right off Lake Shore Drive where it follows the bend in the Calumet River and then merges with Harbor Avenue. He gave them both an uneasy look before driving away, and no wonder. The only thing between them and the wasteland of the old steel mill buildings is a newer, redbrick structure. The container factory, still operational.

The only sign that all is not as it should be is the parking lot, packed with cars, and the faint music playing inside.

“What is this place?” Dymitr asks.

“This whole area used to be the steel mill,” she says. “For a long time, when immigrants came here, this is where they worked. Now it’s all empty except for this factory. Factory by day, anyway—at night, a boxing club run by the Kostkas.”

“The Kostkas,” Dymitr says. “That’s the big strzygi family, right?”

She nods.

“And they come here, why? They love the atmosphere?”

“The city owes this place a debt,” she says. “These workers—not just our people, people from all over the world—made the beams that hold up the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building. They poured their sweat into the mill, and none of them got much in return. Derision, mostly, for their trouble. Then when the mill closed, they had nothing.”

“Ah,” Dymitr says. “So there’s a lot of space for magic here.”

She nods. “I need you to play along with whatever I say. Even if you don’t like it. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go, then, or we’ll be late,” she says. “Listen—there’s going to be a lot of… different sorts in there. You’ll be one of the only humans. If you fuck around, they’ll kill you, and I’ll let it happen. Got it?”

“Ala,” he says, his eyes locking on hers. “Yes.”

They walk along the first row of cars, which are finer and more polished the closer they get to the door. Ala runs her finger along the hood of an old, well-kept Mercedes—a boxy E-class from the early ’90s. Then she shoves her hands in her pockets and walks up to the bouncer.

The bouncer is a Kostka cousin—at least, Ala thinks so. Tall and sturdy in a hot-pink puffer jacket. She snaps bubble gum between her teeth as she eyes Ala.

“It’s creature night,” she says. “So you should leave your little pet in the car.”

She crooks a finger at Dymitr, still not really looking at him. Her fingernail is long and acid green. Strzygi fingernails are matte black, like bird talons, so most strzygi paint them.

“He’s o?wiecony,” Ala says. “A cousin.”

“We’re almost at capacity.”

“Well, I was told to hurry, and I’m fighting,” Ala says. “Which, last time I checked, means I can bring somebody in to mop up my blood.”

The strzyga narrows her eyes at Dymitr. They’re inky black. Owl eyes.

“What’s in the case?” she asks him.

“A banjo,” he replies. “Do you know how to dance the Krakowiak? I could play for you.”

The strzyga purses her lips, obviously not amused. But she waves them both toward the door. It’s patchy with rust, and it feels hollow when Ala opens it, lighter than it should be.

“Please tell me you don’t actually know that dance,” Ala says to Dymitr.

“Only if you tell me you aren’t actually going to require me to mop up your blood,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

She keeps walking. She can’t tell him that.

Beyond the door is a cramped entryway, blocked off from the factory floor by flimsy temporary walls and a cluttered desk stacked with paper. Ala walks past it, toward the thrum of the music.

“You can’t be serious,” Dymitr says. “You’re really going to fight?”

“How else did you think we were going to get in here?” she says, scowling back at him. “I’m a zmora, and an unimportant one at that. I don’t get regular invitations to this place.”

Past the temporary walls is a wide-open floor. The equipment—to make the containers, Ala assumes—is pushed up against the walls, a tangle of metal ducts and plates and platforms. She assumes this was done by magic, because there are no outlines on the floor to show where the huge pieces of machinery used to go, and not a scrap of material litters the concrete.

In the middle of the floor where the machinery used to be is a boxing ring, square and blue with black ropes, with a cluster of lights hanging overhead to illuminate it. The rest of the room is dim, with rows of seats arranged around the ring and a wet bar along the far wall.

The room is full of creatures. Ala and Dymitr walk past a cluster of strzygi, recognizable by their yellow, glinting eyes; an alkonost, with her wings tucked against her back and her long, straight hair in a braid; a row of banshees, their big, dark eyes alighting on Dymitr right away, like he called them by name; a handful of czorts, their short, stubby horns uncovered. Ala shivers as they walk past a wraith in the form of a ghostly boy with one skeletal hand.

She spots the chalkboard where the fights are listed, and she’s startled to find the word “zmora” at the top. She’s the first fight of the night.

“Shit,” she says. “I have to find the Pitmaster.”

Dymitr is clutching the straps of his guitar case and emitting a faintly sweet smell, like a dusting of powdered sugar. She thinks it’s wariness rather than true fear, and again she wonders at it. She’s never met a mortal who could be in a room of strzygi without swallowing his heartbeat.

She leads the way to a tall woman standing next to the boxing ring. She has dark hair, umber skin, and eyes set a little too close together. Her look of appraisal makes Ala stand up a little straighter.

“I’m the zmora,” she says, nodding toward the board. “First match.”

“Niko said you would surprise me,” the woman says, in the hoarse, dry voice common to strzygi. She narrows her eyes. “He had better be right.”

The woman picks up a clipboard resting on the bench behind her and checks off the square next to the word “zmora”—everyone knows not to give their names here. Ala stares at the word scribbled next to it, the one for her opponent:

STRZYGA (1).

“Shit,” Ala says under her breath, as she steps away from the Pitmaster. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Niko?” Dymitr says, in a low voice. “Did she mean Nikodem Kostka?”

“I see my reputation precedes me,” a low, amused voice says from behind them.