When Among Crows

4. A Valuable Ingredient

Nikodem Kostka is startling. Of all the strzygi that Dymitr has seen—and he’s seen more in the last five minutes than he had in his entire life up to this point—Nikodem is the one that most closely resembles a bird of prey. His eyes are a luminous bronze, catching the light like a flame is flickering behind them. He looks at Dymitr like he’s spotted a mouse in the grass to hunt.

“Niko,” Ala says, with a nervous smile. “It’s not you I’m fighting, is it?”

“Not tonight,” Niko says. “Who have you brought with you?”

Dymitr wants to back away. Ala’s nostrils flare, the telltale sign that he’s radiating fear strong enough for her to smell, maybe even taste. He’s glad Niko can’t do the same. Strzygi eat anger, not fear—hence the aggression fostered by the boxing club.

“His name is Dymitr,” Ala says.

“Spoilsport,” Niko says to her, grinning. His dark hair and light brown skin suggest that his father, unlike his mother, was not Polish—not uncommon among strzygi in America, where people from all different places have sought refuge… even if not all of them found it.

“I don’t have time for a protracted argument about names,” Ala snaps. “I have to prepare for this.” She gestures to the boxing ring behind them. “Thank you for getting me in on such short notice.”

“Of course,” Niko says. “Though I notice you’re still not telling me why.”

“After.” Ala runs her tongue along her bottom lip, obviously a nervous habit. “If I survive.”

“Your opponent may be a strzyga, but she’s also an idiot. You’ll be fine,” Niko says. “I’ll take care of your guest.”

He lays a long-fingered hand on the back of Dymitr’s neck, curling his fingertips so Dymitr feels the edge of his thick, sharp fingernails—worn unpainted, so they’re as black as claws.

Dymitr tenses. His instinct is to throw Niko off him with as much force as he can muster, but the whole reason Ala is fighting is to get him into a place he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to go—so that he can talk to people he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to find, let alone engage. He needs to choose his battles.

“Come on,” Niko says. “If you sit by me, you’ll have a better view.”

He presses Dymitr forward, and Dymitr concedes, walking at Nikodem Kostka’s side around the edge of the boxing ring to the first row of seats on the other side. He notices, as they pass a crowd of strzygi, that they withdraw from Niko as if he has a plague they don’t want to catch. His spare mouth curls into a sharp little smile, scorn and amusement tangled together.

“Sit,” Niko says to Dymitr, and he pushes him down.

Dymitr glares at him, but he sits.

Niko grins. “You’re so easy to irritate.”

“Only by you, it seems.”

“Lucky me.” Niko sits beside him. “What did you come here looking for, Dymitr?”

“I came to see Ala,” Dymitr says.

“Liar.” Niko stretches an arm across the back of Dymitr’s chair. “Magic is humming around you like an aura. It’s making my fingertips prickle.” He snaps his fingers, as if to prove it. “But you still seem painfully ordinary.”

“I don’t find it painful to be ordinary.”

This startles a laugh from Niko. Dymitr notices that though most of the crowd in the room has settled into the chairs arranged around the boxing ring, the seat to his right, the seat to Niko’s left, and the seats behind them are all empty.

“I have a question for you,” Dymitr says, in a low voice, leaning closer to Niko’s ear.

Niko stills, staring at him with his eyes like lit embers.

“Why do your own people fear you?” Dymitr asks.

Niko smiles, but Dymitr doesn’t know how he would have answered, because a woman is walking into the center of the boxing ring. She’s freckled, with big, sad eyes, and wears a black gown that makes her look like a soprano in an opera. A moment later, when she clasps her hands over her belly and begins to sing, he thinks that effect was deliberate.

She’s a banshee—that’s the most frequently used terminology, at least. Her voice makes that obvious enough, but he isn’t sure what purpose she serves here. As far as he knows, banshees feast on sorrow the way the zmory feast on fear, and they have the power to provoke sorrow, too, drawing it from the deepest parts of a person at will. These three types of creatures—the zmora, the strzyga, and the llorona, or banshee—represent a trifecta, each consuming one of the primary negative emotions. The picture his Chicago informant painted was one of a kind of underground network of emotion farming, of which the Crow Theater, the boxing ring, and the banshees’ small franchise of hospice facilities was just a fraction. The families at the head of those “farms” are the Dryjas, the Kostkas, and the O’Connor-Vasquezes, respectively. This particular banshee has auburn hair and freckles he assumes come from the O’Connors, but the women across the boxing ring, with their dark eyes and shiny black hair, seem to favor the Vasquezes.

But they wouldn’t have invited a banshee to sing as a prelude to a boxing match if all she could do was make everyone feel sad. As her unearthly voice climbs to a piercing high, he grits his teeth, unsure what to expect. She soars over the highest note, and it vibrates in Dymitr’s skull, as if it’s turned him into glass that’s about to break. And break he does, silently, the walls he’s placed around his emotions crumbling all at once. Feeling spills through him, rage and sorrow and terror, frustration and regret and dread. The singing banshee fixes her stare on him, and he closes his eyes, his hands in fists against his knees.

“Well,” Niko says, as the song comes to a gentle close. “That was interesting.”

He sounds sluggish, almost like he’s drunk. Dymitr doesn’t answer. He’s too busy reconstructing what the banshee destroyed. By the time he gathers himself, the fight is starting.

“Almost no one bet on her, you know,” Niko says, nodding toward Ala, now ducking under the ropes and looking even more wan than usual. “Zmory aren’t known for being good fighters. Good at escaping, more like. Or fucking with you.”

Ala peels off her zip-up and hangs it over the ropes. Under it, she wears the plain gray T-shirt from Toil and Trouble, the one with the sleeves sawed off. She looks broader here than she did there, the bright light showcasing definition in her shoulders. She takes off the rings she wears and tucks them in her pocket.

Her opponent is a Kostka strzyga with a nose that looks like it’s been broken more than once. Her long, dark hair is in a braid, and she has a faint overbite that makes her mouth look like a beak.

“What do you actually know about Ala, beyond the fact that she’s a zmora?” Niko asks.

“What do you know?”

“I know a person isn’t a species.”

Dymitr frowns. “Do you think I’m not aware of that?”

“You might try to be,” Niko says. “But the truth is, you’ve met too few of her kind to know what about her is zmora and what about her is just her.” He tilts his head. “Am I wrong?”

Ala faces the strzyga—who’s fighting under the name “Teresa,” though Dymitr is sure that’s a pseudonym, given how paranoid everyone seems to be about giving their name—and somewhere in the warehouse, a bell goes off. Teresa launches herself at Ala with enthusiasm, all the speed and strength of her kind evident in the sure, fast movement.

Ala, in response, simply… shrinks.

Of course, she can’t actually shrink—zmory aren’t shapeshifters—but the illusion is so perfect that she appears to. A child stands in her place, small and thin with scabby knees.

“Pretty please,” the child says, her voice reedy. “Don’t hurt me, please!”

The strzyga falters, blinking at the child, who steps toward her with arms outstretched. The momentary hesitation costs her, because as the child moves, it seems to grow, stretching grotesquely until Ala is standing in front of her again, punching her in the face.

The crowd gasps as one, and Ala slips away.

“You’re not wrong. I haven’t met many zmory,” Dymitr says, then. “So tell me about her.”

“Well, most zmory aren’t quite that good at illusions,” Niko says with a laugh.

Teresa stumbles back, the velvet ropes catching her, and licks blood from the corner of her mouth. Ala grins at her, and Teresa lunges, her face shifting into that of a bird.

Every strzyga has a sowa form, an owl-like shape that they can move into at will. Teresa’s is a snowy owl, the rim of her yellow eyes stark, only a hint of black dappling the top of her head. Wings explode from her back, wide and white, and her fingernails grow into true talons. With a screech, she launches herself into the air, lands on Ala, and bites down at the juncture between Ala’s neck and shoulder.

“Ala helped a friend of mine once,” Niko says casually, like they aren’t both watching Ala’s shirt turn bright red with blood. “He was fighting off some Holy Order scum, defending a young zmora—one of the Dryja cousins, I think—and though Aleksja was young at the time, she had this skill—”

Ala screams, and grabs Teresa’s wing, wrenching it to the side hard enough to make Teresa release her. Then she disappears.

It’s a far more advanced illusion than it appears, Dymitr thinks. It requires Ala to re-create the details of the boxing ring exactly, but without her body inside of it, and to project those details not just to Teresa, but to everyone in the room.

He’s never seen anything like it.

“She produces extremely detailed illusions,” Niko continues. “In this case, she made the Knight think he was covered in something—spiders, I think—and he was so distracted he gave my friend a chance to run away, young Dryja cousin in tow. She saved his life.”

Teresa, her face still an owl’s, looks around the arena, confused by the sudden disappearance of her opponent. Dymitr only has time to observe a faint depression in the boxing ring floor and a shadow Ala didn’t quite manage to hide when Ala reappears midair, jumping on Teresa’s back and wrapping one strong arm around her neck.

Teresa chokes and thrashes, but Ala locks her arms and clamps her knees around Teresa’s ribs. Teresa rams her back into one of the posts at the corner of the arena, and Ala grunts with pain, but doesn’t release her.

“Fucking—zmora—bitch!” Teresa chokes.

“My friend didn’t survive much longer than that—the Knights are too relentless,” Niko goes on. “But Ala gave him a few weeks he wouldn’t otherwise have had. Bravery and kindness create a debt, and I repay debts, even if they belonged to my fallen friend.”

Teresa falls back, Ala still wrapped around her like a squid. She falls in such a way that Ala is trapped beneath her; her hold breaks from the force of the fall, and Teresa elbows her hard in the side. Ala rolls away, and everything goes dark.

This trick, Dymitr recognizes. Klara pulled it on him at the Crow. It seems simple compared to what Ala did last, but then, she just caught an elbow to the ribs. He hears scuffling, a groan, and then the illusion of blackness disappears, like the trip of a light switch. He sees Teresa pinned to the mat in the middle of the boxing ring, with her arm wrenched behind her and Ala’s knee in her back.

Teresa’s owl face shifts back into her human one, and she slaps the mat, yielding. Ala releases her. Blood streaks her shoulder, but there’s a satisfied look on her face.

Niko smiles, with teeth.

“I just made a disgusting amount of money,” he says to Dymitr. “I bet on her.”

Dymitr’s stated purpose in being at the fight is to clean up Ala afterward, so that’s what he does. He asks Niko for a first aid kit, and though Niko doesn’t respond, he turns up with one a few minutes later, setting it down next to Ala on the bench where she sits, recovering. He says something about getting her a beer, and strides away.

Everywhere he goes, the crowd parts for him.

“I can handle it,” Ala says to Dymitr as he crouches beside her to bandage her wound.

“I’m sure you can,” he replies. “But we’re still keeping up appearances, cousin.”

Rolling her eyes, she tugs the collar of her T-shirt aside to bare the strzyga’s bite. He’s familiar with this procedure: he sanitizes his hands, pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and rips open an antiseptic wipe.

Ala raises her eyebrows at him.

“You tend to a lot of bite wounds in your line of work?” she says. “Come to think of it, what is your line of work?”

“I’m unemployed at the moment,” he answers. “But as it happens, I grew up with a half-wild dog and a sister who couldn’t help but provoke it to bite her.”

He thinks of Elza sitting on the kitchen counter with her arm stuck out, her legs swinging. She didn’t understand, even after the third incident, that she shouldn’t try to take Borys’s bone away.

“German shepherd?” Ala guesses.

“Pomeranian,” he says, dabbing her wound with the antiseptic. She laughs, and for just a moment, she’s Elza in the yellow-tiled kitchen, laughing at one of his horrible jokes.

“If you’d ever met a Pomeranian, you wouldn’t think it was so funny,” he says, and he presses a clean square of gauze to the juncture of her shoulder and neck. She holds it there while he fastens it with tape.

She seems tired, sweaty, and bruised, but otherwise unharmed. He comes to his feet just as the Pitmaster approaches them.

“You’ve been summoned,” the strzyga says, tossing her curly black hair over one shoulder to gesture to the back corner. Dymitr can’t see what she’s trying to show them, but zmora eyes must be sharper, because Ala nods.

“You and the human both,” the strzyga adds, without looking at Dymitr.

“Fantastic,” Ala says under her breath, once the Pitmaster is out of hearing distance.

“What is it?” he says.

“Good news for you, I think,” Ala says. “The head of the Kostka family wants to meet you.”

Lidia Kostka looks middle-aged, which for a strzyga means she must be very old indeed. Her hair is copper in color and styled in a finger-waved bob straight from the 1920s—and she may have been wearing it that way since then. Her face is a sickly color, and her eyebrows are so fine and pale she almost seems to lack them entirely. If not for her eyes, she would resemble a wealthy woman from another time—but her eyes. They’re bright yellow and piercing as a shriek. They focus on him from the moment he steps into the room, and he feels them like heat.

Without thinking, he slides a hand into his pocket to touch the fern flower, safely wrapped in paper. They have one day before it’s no longer useful, and not to use it would be a criminal waste of magic—a waste of the pain that Dymitr gave to attain it.

The Pitmaster led them here from the boxing ring: away from the factory floor, to the end of a bare hallway where a line of creatures waits for the bathroom, and through a hatch in the floor guarded by a hulking man with a sword who seems to be completely human.

There was a network of rooms and hallways under the factory, which probably shouldn’t have surprised Dymitr as much as it did. The strzygi wouldn’t have chosen it as a haunt if it were merely a factory.

The room in which he now finds himself is dim, but elaborately decorated. The far wall is covered in a screen of delicate Art Deco metalwork that he recognizes as distinctly “Chicago” in feeling. Low navy-gray sofas are positioned around the room. A marble-top bar stretches along the right wall. There are little lamps with bright red shades positioned here and there, spots of brightness in the dark. One such lamp stands on a table beside Lidia Kostka, making her hair appear even redder.

She stays seated as Ala and Dymitr approach her, as do the other Kostka cousins lounging around her. Dymitr notices Niko slipping into the room behind them and sidling up to the bar, casual, as if he were already planning on coming here and the timing is just coincidence.

Almost all the strzygi in the room are women, and that’s no surprise. Dymitr’s father told him that Chicago was a city ruled by monsters, and all those monsters were women—strzyga, zmora, and llorona, each a legend of wronged women, sinful women, mysterious women. Tragic and powerful figures, all, not to be underestimated.

Lidia looks Ala up and down, and smiles, faintly.

“We’ve never had a zmora in our ring before,” Lidia says to her, her voice creaky and weak. The room goes quiet when she speaks, as if everyone is straining to hear her. “I hope you don’t mind my curiosity about you, Aleksja Dryja.”

“Of course not, prosz? pani,” Ala says, stumbling a little over the term of respectful address.

Lidia laughs, a wheezing little thing.

“That word falls out of your mouth like you’re spitting out bad food,” she says. “Did your mother tell you anything about your origins?”

Ala stiffens beside Dymitr.

“She came here several years after World War Two,” she says. “I don’t know exactly why.”

“Ah,” Lidia says. “A relatively recent addition to our little community, then.”

“Not that recent.” Ala sounds terse. She’s taller in reality than she is in Dymitr’s mind. Maybe one seventy-five, or however she says it in feet and inches.

“The first of us came earlier,” Lidia says. “After the November Uprising. Do you know about the November Uprising?”

She softens over the words like she’s speaking to a child. Dymitr wonders how old Ala really is. Older than she looks, surely. Zmory age slowly—slower even than strzygi.

“A little,” Ala says.

“So, no, then.”

Ala flushes, and that’s when Dymitr pieces it together: Lidia is making Ala angry on purpose, not simply to embarrass her but also to feed on her emotions. At this point it must be an instinct, so deeply ingrained that she might not even know she’s doing it.

“Others had taken our country and broken it into pieces,” Lidia says, and all around the room are murmurs of assent, of recollection, or simply echoes of appreciation, it’s hard to say. “They ignored even the smallest bits of our sovereignty that we had carved out for ourselves. This affected our people as much as mortals. And so some of our kind joined the resistance effort. We fought Russian governance, and we lost. So we fled here. We were not the first—or the last—to flee our country to survive. Sometimes it was because we weren’t human, but sometimes it was because we were too human—the wrong religion, during the war, or perhaps the wrong political affiliation, after it. It’s interesting to me that your mother didn’t tell you why she had to leave.”

Lidia tucks a lock of her red hair behind her ear.

“She thought of it as a kindness,” Ala says. “She wanted me to have a fresh start in the world. So she didn’t do to me anything that she hated being done to herself. Unfortunately, that included teaching me certain things. Her history. Her language.”

“I see.” Lidia looks unimpressed, but she doesn’t provoke Ala further. Instead, she asks, “And what became of her?”

“A curse killed her,” Ala says bluntly. “It then passed to her younger sister, to my cousin, and to me, in turn. I came here in pursuit of a cure.”

“You came to a strzyga for a cure to a curse?” Lidia smiles. “You are aware, of course, that we can do only small magic, like you?”

It’s just a quick look that passes between Ala and Dymitr, but it’s enough to catch Lidia’s attention. Before Ala can answer her, Lidia is coming to her feet and moving toward them.

Lidia is the same height as Ala, but spare as a wraith, willow-limbed and delicate. She folds her hands together in front of her, and stands before Dymitr, her head tilted up so she can look him in the eye.

“You are no Dryja cousin,” she says to him.

“No, I’m not,” he replies.

“What is it you carry, boy?” she asks. She reaches out and pinches the edge of his jacket pocket, but doesn’t reach in. “I saw you touch it as you came in, and now your hand bears its imprint.” She hooks a finger around his thumb, and lifts his hand, as a hunter might display a kill to a room of peers. Dymitr can’t see what she sees, but one of Lidia’s companions on the sofa stands, blinking wonderingly at Dymitr. She’s the banshee from before, he realizes. The one who sang at the beginning of the fight.

“I see it,” the banshee says softly. Her speaking voice is as musical as her singing voice was, low and clear as a bell. “He was already incandescent with sorrow, but now—”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Lidia says dryly. She releases his hand. “Let me guess. You have something that can help our friend Aleksja here. But you don’t know how to use it. So you likely went to the oldest zmora first, and when she didn’t help you…” Lidia taps her own chest. “Second-best option.”

“Actually,” he says, “I’m looking for someone older than any of you.”

The hint of amusement curling Lidia’s mouth disappears. He didn’t even know it was there until it was gone. She was tickled at the idea that they would come seeking her because of her wisdom, born of age, but instead… he’s revealed that she’s just a means to an end. A severe miscalculation on his part.

“Baba Jaga,” Lidia says, turning away. She sits down on the sofa again.

“I thought, if anyone might know how to contact her,” he says, “it would be you, prosz? pani.”

“Take note, Aleksja. That’s how you say it,” Lidia says, sliding an arm along the back of the sofa. “I’m not buying it, boy. If I’m correct in thinking it’s the fern flower that you carry—and given the time of year, it seems likely—then you would have had more luck asking the wraith who guarded it. You came here because you had no idea where else to go.”

A severe miscalculation indeed.

Dymitr looks at Ala, as if she’ll know something he doesn’t. She sighs.

“What gift can we offer you?” Ala says. “To communicate our gratitude for your help, before we even receive it?”

Lidia taps her fingers on the back of the sofa. Her fingernails are filed into neat ovals and painted deep red. She glances at the strzyga to her left, who leans forward to murmur something in her ear.

“A fine suggestion,” Lidia says to her. She looks at Ala and Dymitr again. “You have a valuable ingredient you want my help with. So you will supply me with a valuable ingredient, and I will consider helping you.”

“An ingredient,” Dymitr repeats.

“A gift born of pain,” Lidia says. “A powerful item to aid in healing, if offered willingly.”

“A gift born of pain. You mean a fingernail?” Ala says. “You want me to pull out one of my own fingernails?”

Dymitr remembers, suddenly, the cemetery a few miles outside of the town where he grew up. The graves dug up, the corpses untouched in their coffins except for their absent fingernails and teeth. Witches, his grandmother said. A gift willingly given was twice as powerful, but one unwillingly given would still do.

“You, him, whichever,” Lidia says, shrugging. “Do this, and your sacrifice will create a substance with strong magic. That’s my price.”

She looks from Ala to Dymitr with her eyebrows raised, expectant. The strzyga who offered the suggestion is grinning. There’s a narrow gap between her front teeth that would be charming if Dymitr didn’t hate her so much.

“I’ll need a knife,” Dymitr says. “And some pliers.”