When Among Crows

6. An Interlude

Niko reaches across Ala, sitting in the passenger seat, to take a pack of cigarettes out of the glove box. One sticky, bloody hand on the wheel, he opens the pack, tucks a cigarette between his lips, and reaches for the lighter in the cup holder. Ala gets there first, rolling her eyes as she sparks the flame to life for him.

He leaves red fingerprints on the edge of the cigarette that he tastes every time he takes a drag, but it doesn’t matter. His mouth is full of the remnants of bird anyway. It’s disgusting, but he’s good at redirecting his thoughts. He has to be, doing what he does with his time.

The car isn’t his. He’s borrowing it from his mortal cousin, Janek, who doesn’t appear to realize that he lives in one of the chillier cities in America. He also installed an aboveground pool in his backyard a few years back. Niko has an assortment of stupid cousins like Janek—when a strzyga has a son, he usually comes out human, which is why there are so few like Niko in existence. So on the fringes of the Kostka family, there are always a handful of men, relegated to less central roles such as “bouncer” and “bodyguard” and “maintenance worker.”

The window on his side of the monstrosity is unzipped, letting in cool air and the sound of cars rushing past them, traveling in the opposite direction. There are always people out, even when night is turning to morning, as it’s now doing.

“Well,” he says, once he feels calm. “That was a lot of birds.”

Ala and Dymitr both make the same sound: a little grunt of assent.

“Anyone care to explain how we were just attacked by that many birds?” Niko asks, with the tone of a kindergarten teacher nagging a classroom of unfocused students.

“They were summoned,” Ala says. “I saw the one who did it.”

“You saw them?” Dymitr replies.

“Not… in detail,” Ala says. “But I saw someone standing near the river, and they…” She frowns, and makes a jerking motion with her arm. “I’m not sure what they were doing.”

“Blood ritual,” Dymitr says.

Niko considers this for a moment, then guides the car into a gas station. The gas tank is full, but he believes in safe driving, and what he’s about to do doesn’t qualify.

He flicks his cigarette out the window and fumbles under his seat for the knife he keeps there. Once it’s secure in his hand, he reaches back and holds the blade to Dymitr’s throat.

“What the fuck?” Ala says.

Dymitr goes still.

“How do you know that?” Niko says.

Dymitr knows a flock of enchanted birds was summoned by a blood ritual, which means he possesses more than basic knowledge about the Holy Order, the only ones who do such rituals. Bloody, masochistic rituals that force the sacrifice that magic requires.

He can feel Dymitr’s skin burning into the backs of his fingers where they’re curled around the knife handle. The unsteady movement of his swallow.

“You know a great deal about the Holy Order,” Niko says, when Dymitr doesn’t respond. “There’s no point in denying it.”

“I’m not denying it,” Dymitr says. “I’m just not sure why it’s any of your business what I know.”

“Considering I just saved your life from a pack of strzygi that would have murdered you for the flower you’re keeping in your pocket, I’d say it’s a little bit my business.”

“I don’t recall asking you to do that.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Ala says, slamming her hand down on the dashboard. She twists around to look at Dymitr. “Do you really think that you can get an audience with Baba Jaga without answering anyone’s questions about you?”

Dymitr stares back at her, steady.

“The only way mortal men know that much about the Holy Order is because they’ve summoned them to kill one of us,” Ala says, her voice going uncharacteristically soft. “Please tell me that’s not how you know them.”

“Of course not,” Dymitr says, and Ala relaxes a fraction.

Niko’s arm is starting to ache from holding the knife to Dymitr’s throat, so he lets it drop, but doesn’t put it away.

Dymitr chews on his lower lip. He still has a handkerchief tied around his right pinkie. His bow and arrows are back in his guitar case, leaning against his knee.

“I want an audience with Baba Jaga,” Dymitr says, “because I want to destroy a member of the Holy Order, and I lack the ability to do it on my own.”

Niko wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he didn’t expect… that.

“Why?” Ala says, quiet.

“You can choose to believe me, or you can choose not to believe me,” Dymitr says. “But that’s all I’m going to tell you, regardless.”

Niko stares at Dymitr, aware of the tight feeling of blood dried on his hands, of the smell of sweat emanating from his skin, of the particular sensations of Dymitr’s anger—subtle, too subtle for most strzygi to be interested in, but present nonetheless. He considers, again, why he bothered to stop the others from killing this man. As a rule, Niko doesn’t involve himself in Kostka affairs. His own role is clearly defined. He was set apart before he took his oath, and he’s set apart even further now—one of them, but not one of them.

But there’s something about him, Dymitr. A kind of clarity that most mortals—hell, most people—don’t possess. He didn’t hesitate for a moment before volunteering himself for pain in Ala’s place. Didn’t seem afraid while standing in Lidia’s private lounge, going head-to-head with the leader of a centuries-old strzyga family. He feels, in short, like someone who’s on a mission, and Niko finds himself wanting to know what that mission is.

Without a word, Niko drops his knife in the cup holder and shifts the car into drive.

“As it happens,” Niko says, “I know where we should go next.”

“We?”Ala says. “You’re helping us now?”

“I thought that was implied.” Niko pulls back onto the street. “How did you get so good with a bow, Dymitr?”

“My grandmother taught me,” Dymitr says, which startles a laugh out of Niko.

“Quite a mental image,” he says. “Some old babushka at target practice.”

“If you met her,” Dymitr says, looking out the window, “you wouldn’t dare call her that.”

Niko smiles. “I’m sure.”

“I have to go,” Ala says suddenly. Her voice is hard and urgent. “Right now.” Her eyes are on the dashboard clock, and then on the rearview mirror, where the glow around the horizon suggests sunrise. “The curse. It surges at dawn. I’ll take a taxi back—”

“To the north side?” Dymitr says. “You can’t make it all the way back there before dawn.”

“Well, great, then I guess I’m fucked!”

“I’ll take us to a safe place,” Niko says, in what he hopes is a reassuring tone. “Just… hold on, okay?”

The Peaceful Journeys Hospice Care Center stands in the southwest side of the city, between a budget grocery store with rogue shopping carts rolling through the parking lot and a Denny’s that was obviously retrofitted into an old White Castle. The logo on the hospice center sign is that of a woman in a long dress, her hair streaming behind her, which is a nod to the center’s owners: the O’Connor-Vasquez family. Banshees. Well, the Irish O’Connors would say ben síde, and the Mexican Vasquezes would prefer llorona—weepers—but it amounts to the same thing.

They own a small chain of hospice care facilities, actually. And a handful of funeral homes. The O’Connor-Vasquezes seem to know a truth that the Kostkas and the Dryjas don’t, which is that there’s plenty of food to go around. They eat sorrow, and the harvest is always plentiful. They simply position themselves where they’re most likely to remain sated without effort.

Some of them seek out variation, of course. He’s seen some of their number at rehabilitation facilities, cemeteries, and even poetry readings at college open mic nights. But they always return to places like these, where death is close at hand. Maybe that’s why they got the reputation they did, as portents of doom, or even prophets in their own right. As far as Niko knows, that’s nonsense, but mortals are always devising nonsense.

The building is straightforward. White and rectangular, with a circle drive large enough to accommodate an ambulance—or a hearse. Concrete planters by the automatic doors hold clumps of purple and yellow pansies. When they step inside, the first thing he hears is gentle elevator music. A saxophone. A chime.

“Welcome to—Oh,” the young woman at the front desk says, her eyes dropping to Niko’s bloodstained shirt, his streaked hands. If she were mortal, she would call the police. But her wide, round eyes skip from Niko to Dymitr, and her mouth drifts open. Niko thinks of the banshee gaping at Dymitr in Lidia’s private lounge, and spares a moment to wonder.

“Wow,” she says softly.

“Hello. Hi?” Niko waves a hand in front of her face. “Bloody man here? Can you tell Sha there’s a strzygoń here to see her, please?”

Each of the O’Connor-Vasquez hospice care centers employs someone who doesn’t feast on human emotion, just to make sure no one is relishing the sorrow too much; for this one, it’s Sha.

“A—Whoa.” She must be young. One of the newest ones. She blinks at Niko, and he drums his fingers on the desk in front of her, drawing attention to his hard, sharp fingernails. She picks up the phone in front of her, and turns away from him as she makes the call.

Ala is starting to look twitchy. She twists the toe of her sneaker into the carpet, which is a mélange of gray, blue, and green. The walls all around them are purple-taupe, and the chairs by the mock fireplace are dusty rose. Sea colors, he thinks, if sea colors were first ingested and then vomited up again later.

Sha strides toward them, her lips quirked in a smile. She’s cut her curly hair into a chin-length bob since he last saw her, and her trousers and blouse are perfectly tailored and pressed, in jewel tones that bring warmth to her skin. There’s a deliberate “ordinariness” to her choices that’s designed, he thinks, to mitigate just how out of the ordinary she really is.

The hair on his arms stands on end at the sight of her—a typical reaction, he’s given to understand. Sha isn’t a Vasquez or an O’Connor or even a banshee. She walks on careful feet, with no shadow in her wake, and sometimes when the angle is right, he glimpses a wing over her shoulder, like a coin catching sunlight on a city sidewalk.

Not for the first time, he wonders how the rumor that shedim could turn into goats got started. They’re the furthest thing from goats he can imagine.

She has a takeout box in hand from the Indian place down the street. As she looks them all over—with equanimity, as if this isn’t the strangest thing she’s seen tonight—she sticks a fork into her curry and sets it down on the counter, right next to a potted plant.

“Nicky,” she says to him. “I thought this place gave you the creeps.”

“Don’t act surprised,” he says. “I know you heard me coming.”

She laughs, but doesn’t deny it. “I’m allowed the niceties of normalcy, you know.”

She tilts her head toward Dymitr, as if straining to hear a whisper, and a small crease appears between her eyes, and Niko wishes he knew what it meant. What she hears about Dymitr’s future, minutes or hours from now.

“You’re not a banshee,” Dymitr says to her quietly.

“Is that a question?”

“No.” His gaze shifts to the ground just beside her, where her shadow should have been. He seems to reconsider. “Yes.”

“The word you’re looking for is sheid,” she says.

His next words seem to fall out of him like something tumbling out of a loose pocket. “A demon?”

Niko cringes. Sha gives Dymitr a cold smile.

“Demon,” she says, “is not our preferred terminology. We eat, sleep, breathe, live, and die just as you do. We simply know more.” She tilts her head a little as she acknowledges, “Some of my kind are more… troublesome than others. But that is true of all of us, including your own people.”

Dymitr’s cheeks go pink in a way that Niko refuses to find charming. “My apologies. It’s not often I encounter… someone new.”

Niko knows he means something new—but he’s aware, at least, that he should never call a creature a “something.”

“No, you wouldn’t have encountered my kind, would you.” Her voice is soft. There’s nothing menacing about Sha, exactly—but there’s something unsettling about a person who knows as much as she does, who hears whispers of what’s next. Her quiet is like the sky reflecting on still water: it obscures the depth and the dark of what lies beneath it. “They fled your country during the war along with all the other Jewish people. Or—the fortunate ones did.”

People say there are two different worlds, Niko thinks. Human and not-so-human. But there aren’t, really—not when it counts.

Dymitr looks at his shoes, and then back up at Sha.

“I’m sorry,” Dymitr says again, and if he had something to add, he swallows it instead.

Sha frowns at him for a moment longer, and then seems to come out of a daze, the crease in her brow disappearing as she focuses her attention on Niko again. “What do you need?”

This is why he loves her—because she really means it. He doesn’t explain the situation to her: the flower wilting in Dymitr’s pocket, the strzygi who have likely deemed him expendable, the quest to stand before Baba Jaga, the pursuit of the Holy Order. He tells her only that they need a safe haven until sundown, that Ala needs a private room that locks from the outside, per her request, and that he’ll owe her a favor—something he doesn’t offer lightly, given its rich potential for magic.

“No, you won’t,” Sha replies, patting his cheek. “You’ve already paid.”

Niko looks away. He doesn’t need the reminder—of what he is, and of what it means, and of why it makes her want to be kind to him. So he ignores it.

Sha takes Ala to one of the vacant hospice rooms, where Ala declines a sedative but accepts a clean T-shirt. Ala pulls all the curtains closed, takes off her shoes, and sits on the bed to wait for the curse to hit her. For a moment, Dymitr and Niko stand there, staring at her.

“What are you waiting for?” she says. “Lock me in and leave me alone.”

Niko pulls Dymitr out of the room to do as she says.

Niko nudges the bathroom door open with his toe, and watches Dymitr at the sink. The water is running, and Dymitr’s jacket hangs on a hook on the opposite wall, where it would be so easy, so simple to take the fern flower from his pocket and sell it to Lidia Kostka, or whoever wanted to pay the most for it. But Niko doesn’t.

Instead, he watches Dymitr peel the blood-soaked handkerchief from his right hand with trembling fingers and examine his exposed nail bed with a grimace. Under the fluorescent lights he looks ghostly. He eases his hand under the stream of water and hisses with pain.

“What are you, a masochist?” Niko says, setting down the first aid kit, bundle of clean clothes, and—thank God—toothbrushes that he scavenged from Sha’s supply closets. He closes the bathroom door behind him and reaches around Dymitr to put his hand under the faucet. He creates a kind of shelf with his fingers to slow the flow of water. It dribbles over Dymitr’s wounded finger gently.

“Thanks,” Dymitr mumbles, and Niko is aware of him, aware of himself. Dymitr’s shirt is white cotton, pulled up to his elbows, and there are scars across his knuckles, and he’s warm. Niko thinks of him lifting the bow to fire an arrow.

“I brought bandages,” he says. “So we can have our Florence Nightingale moment, if you’d like.”

Dymitr snorts. “I can handle it, thanks.”

“Hmm.” He turns off the faucet and takes a paper towel from the dispenser. He doesn’t ask for permission, exactly, but he moves slowly enough for Dymitr to pull away as he wraps the paper towel around Dymitr’s wounded hand and squeezes, gently, to dry it. Their eyes meet and Niko sees them in the mirror in his periphery, Dymitr an inch or two shorter, their shoulders almost touching, Dymitr’s sudden intake of breath. And then Dymitr stepping away.

“You’ve stopped trying to provoke me,” Dymitr says. He flips the toilet seat lid down so he can sit on it. Niko passes him the first aid kit, and then faces the sink himself with a toothbrush in hand. He needs to get the taste of crow blood out of his mouth.

“As a general rule, I don’t feel the need to antagonize people,” Niko says. “There’s plenty of anger in the world already. But it can be interesting to see how people react.”

He sticks the toothbrush in his mouth to stop himself from saying more. Dymitr opens the first aid kit on his lap and starts an assembly line of wound-tending: antiseptic, gauze, tape. He binds his third finger and pinkie together, like a splint.

Niko spits pinkish toothpaste into the sink and rinses out his mouth. Then he tugs his shirt over his head and tosses it into the trash can beside him. It’s a lost cause.

He can feel Dymitr’s eyes on him, but he pretends not to notice. This intimacy is flowing too fast, too much, and if Niko doesn’t stop himself, he’ll drink it all down at once until there’s nothing left.

“Why do your own people fear you?” Dymitr asks, and it’s not the first time he’s asked, but it’s different now. They’re alone.

Niko scrubs his hands using the lavender-scented hand soap.

“Male strzygi are rare, and they’re sterile,” Niko says. “I don’t know why that matters, but it seems to. Their sterility makes our leadership feel they’re expendable.” He digs his fingernails into the lines of his hand. “So at any given time, my people designate one strzygoń to serve as zemsta.”

“Zemsta,” Dymitr says, with more ease than Niko himself says it. “Retribution?”

Niko nods. He stays focused on his task, cleaning the dried blood from his cuticle beds.

“Bound to pursue vengeance against the Holy Order on behalf of all strzygi,” Niko explains. “I’d call it a job, but that word implies choice. My predecessor—my cousin Feliks—died a few years ago. Struck down by a Knight, as we all are, eventually. And then the duty fell to me.”

“You hunt the Holy Order, only?”

“It’s not in my best interest to kill humans, given that they’re my food source,” Niko says with a sly smile. A testing smile, to see if Dymitr will be alarmed—smiling tends to bring out what’s strange about him. But Dymitr meets his eyes without apparent difficulty. “When someone targets innocents among my people, then yes. I hunt them. And I think the world is better for it.”

“I’m not inclined to disagree,” Dymitr replies. “Is that why Sha said you’d ‘already paid’?”

“Yes,” Niko says. “Sha feels I’ve given enough for creaturekind, and can expect… what does she call it? ‘Basic kindness.’” He tries to say it like it’s a joke, but it makes his throat ache a little, and it doesn’t come out right.

But Dymitr only nods, and says, “How do you know who to pursue?”

“People come to me with names,” Niko says. “I investigate. And then…” He draws the tip of his thumb across his throat. “I’m better at it than Feliks was. Better than most, I think. And the debt that all strzygi owe me, at all times, means I can always do magic. Which means I will always be more powerful than they are. And that makes them nervous.” He shrugs. “Though to be honest, I didn’t fit in with them that well before I became their vengeance, either.”

“Why not?”

“A story for another time,” Niko says. He bends at the waist to splash water on his face, to scrub crow blood out from the corners of his mouth and the underside of his chin. When he straightens, Dymitr is hovering behind him, his hand now bandaged, holding a paper towel.

“If you can always do magic, you could have stopped them before they demanded my fingernail,” Dymitr says, a hint of accusation in his voice.

“I could have.” Niko suppresses a smile. “But I was interested to see if you would give it. Someone who would do that to help one of us…” He shrugs. “Says a lot about you.”

Rolling his eyes, Dymitr reaches for Niko—to dab a smear of blood on the side of his neck with the paper towel he’s holding.

“You missed a spot,” Dymitr says. “Sorry.”

Niko turns and perches on the edge of the sink, looking up at Dymitr. He’s standing a little too close, and Niko feels it again, the temptation to take, and take, and take.

“You don’t know me,” Dymitr says quietly. Apropos of nothing, Niko thinks, except what they aren’t saying. “Why are you helping me?”

“I know more than you think,” Niko says. Powerless to stop himself, he hooks his fingers through Dymitr’s belt loops and tugs him a few inches closer.

“I know you’re not afraid,” Niko says. “Which is strange, for a mortal, given that I’m actually rather dangerous.” He expects this to compel another roll of Dymitr’s eyes, but Dymitr receives it with complete solemnity. And perhaps that’s fitting. Niko really is dangerous.

He taps Dymitr’s sternum with his free hand. “And I know there’s a deep well of rage in you. I can feel it, like a prickle down my spine.”

Dymitr doesn’t contradict him. His gray eyes are intent on Niko’s, and his breaths are coming faster.

“Is that why you’re helping me?” Dymitr says.

“I’m helping Ala because she deserves it,” Niko says. “I’m helping you because you’re beautiful.”

Niko isn’t shy. He never has been. He sees no reason to waste time with his life being as dangerous as it is. If Dymitr finds that off-putting, better to know now, really.

But Dymitr only laughs, as if the idea of him being beautiful is an obvious joke. “Oh really.”

“Are there better reasons?” Niko shrugs. “People fight for honor, for love, why not for beauty?”

Niko stands, so their bodies are just barely touching, so his mouth is poised over Dymitr’s. He watches Dymitr’s Adam’s apple bob in a nervous swallow, but still, he doesn’t pull away.

“You only know what I’ve showed you,” Dymitr says.

“That…” Niko touches his lips to Dymitr’s cheek, right beside his mouth. “… is true of everyone, all the time.”

Dymitr hesitates for just a moment, his warm breaths against Niko’s face. He smells like sweat and antiseptic, but it doesn’t matter; Niko is still prickling everywhere they aren’t quite touching, and warm everywhere they are. Then Dymitr relaxes a little, and turns his face so their lips meet. Despite his initial hesitance, it’s a firm, decisive kind of kiss that ends in the hard slide of teeth against Niko’s skin. He swallows down a helpless sound.

“I have to go,” Dymitr says, his voice rough. Then he’s gone, and Niko is alone with the scent of hand soap and chemical cleaner and toothpaste.