“What?” Joanna asks her, as if she misheard. “Do you feel bad for this thing wearing your face?”

  “Don’t you?” Ala tilts her head. “He looks like me, after all. What if we’re wrong, and he’s just a zmora with a skill for illusions? Doesn’t it pain you to hurt someone who looks just like your grandson?”

  “It doesn’t,” she says, and Ala believes her. “Other Knights will tell you that zmoras are benign, that a strzyga is a much more impressive kill—but those Knights are fools. The first zmora I hunted made me see visions of my father burning alive. The second zmora I hunted made me feel insects burrowing into my skin. They can make you see things that aren’t there, hear things that never were, feel things that no one should ever have to feel.”

  Her voice has gone low and guttural, like it was in the memory Ala wishes she didn’t have, and for the first time she wonders if Joanna is scarred by the creatures she’s killed, even though she has no right to be. Trauma doesn’t ask whether the person experiencing it is a sympathetic figure or not, after all.

  “Foul things they are, among the most wretched of the monsters we hunt,” Joanna continues. “A curse upon the earth that it is our duty to obliterate. But not to be underestimated.”

  “You hunted them,” Ala says. “You hunted them, and they did what they could to survive you, but you call them ‘foul’?”

  Joanna regards her in silence for a long moment.

  “Who are you?” she asks, casually, as if she’s asking how cold it will be today so she can choose the right jacket.

  Letting go of the illusion feels like unclenching a fist. Ala releases it, becoming herself again, and for the first time, stands face-to-face with the woman who cursed her family.

  She can hear it again, what Joanna said when she passed the book of curses to Dymitr for safekeeping. With this book, I can not only summon stronger weapons to fight my enemies—I can make those fights unnecessary. Joanna’s intention was to avoid this very confrontation—to kill off Ala’s entire family, one by one, without ever having to look Ala in the eye or even become aware of her existence.

  Well, Ala thinks, too damn bad.

  “Someone you cursed,” Ala says, her voice trembling with rage. She drew her knife—more of a short sword, really—without realizing it, and she’s holding it with the blade tilted up, ready.

  Joanna cocks her head, her silver hair catching the moonlight. “Did I, now.”

  “I don’t know how far back it went,” Ala says. “The first person I heard about was my aunt. Then my cousin. Then my mother. Then me.”

  “Then it did its job,” Joanna says passively. “Though it has not, I see, finished that job with you quite yet. Are you here to exact your revenge before you die?”

  “Oh, I’m cured,” Ala says, with a forced grin. “Thanks to your grandson.”

  She smells something sweet as peach nectar. She’s finally succeeded in making Joanna afraid, though she doesn’t know exactly why, or exactly how. She thinks it’s the fear that a person feels when they know something is true but don’t want to admit it to themselves. She thinks it’s something like dread.

  “You’re lying,” Joanna says.

  “Am I?” Ala raises her eyebrows. “Or did you lose your grip on your beloved curse-bearer?”

  Before Joanna can respond, Ala lunges with the knife outstretched. She thought, in this moment, she would be half-hearted—not accustomed to killing, maybe she wouldn’t be able to strike as hard as she needed to. But her body doesn’t hesitate, as she feared it would. She aims for Joanna’s belly, and the movement is strong and committed, the point of the blade about to bury itself in the old woman’s soft abdomen.

  But she realizes right away how badly she miscalculated. Because Joanna may be an old woman, she may be finished with her life of hunting innocent creatures down, but she’s still a Knight.

  In the space of a breath, Joanna draws a dagger from the sheath over her spine, and counters Ala’s blade. At the same time, she elbows Ala hard in the jaw, so hard she sees stars and lurches back, gasping.

  Desperate, Ala projects the darkness illusion that she favors, the one that renders her opponent blind. The problem with her illusions is that she has to see them, too; she’s never figured out how to exempt herself from the projection. But she knows where Joanna was when she saw her last, so she rushes forward with her arms outstretched and collides with the Knight’s legs, shoving her back into the wall.

  A line of heat along her arm; Joanna cut her, but not very deep. Or maybe Ala is just choking on adrenaline and can no longer feel pain. She stabs, and the illusion fails just in time for her to see her knife buried in Joanna’s leg. The old woman roars and kicks Ala off her, sending her sprawling on the dirt.

  Ala is ready with another illusion, this one inspired by her memory of the zmora. She makes herself look like a bear

  and then a snake

  and then a fox.

  She’s hoping the reminder of the zmora Joanna once killed will destabilize her. And it seems to—the Knight’s steps falter, though she keeps coming, and Ala tries to roll out of the way, but Joanna is too fast. She’s already grabbing Ala by the ankle and punching her in the gut by the time Ala registers movement.

  As Joanna’s fingers close over Ala’s throat, she thinks, It was a mistake to come here. She thought she knew how fast Knights are, how strong, she thought she understood—

  But as Dymitr said, there’s knowing and there’s knowing.

  “Tell me, zmora,” Joanna asks her, as she chokes Ala. “How many of your kind have you watched die?”

  This time, Ala isn’t interested in joining in the banter. She’s busy imagining the courtyard from Joanna’s perspective. The tangle of greenery and the bits of gravel; the side of the house lit blue by the moon. She imagines it without Ala there to interrupt the flow of space. And then, like she’s tearing out a piece of fabric, she twists away and stitches herself a few feet to the right, so Joanna will think she’s somewhere she isn’t.

  It’s a trap, and Joanna falls into it, swinging at the illusory Ala and ignoring the one right in front of her. Her dagger hits nothing but air.

  Ala is already moving toward her when she realizes she made another critical error:

  Joanna’s last swing was a feint.

  Her weight has already shifted, and she’s stabbing low and fast at Ala’s undefended side. She buries the blade in Ala’s gut. Ala screams.

  18

  A RAZOR’S EDGE

  The first time Niko killed a Knight, he was ready to die. Statistically speaking, that was the most likely outcome for a strzygoń who had just taken the zemsta oath. Most of them rushed in too fast and got skewered by a bone sword and then the next strzygoń in the database, some cousin creature, a Greek strix or a Jewish estrie or even the rare Japanese tatarimokke—who could fully shift into owls, something Niko can’t even imagine—would be called forward for the job.

  So Niko didn’t rush in too fast the first time. He got a tip from a double-crosser in Boston that a Knight had come calling about a suspected changeling, and he flew out there a few days after taking his oath. The oath made it so he could do simple tracking spells, so he used them to sniff the Knight out, to plant a few rumors, to lure them to the place of his choosing, and so on.

  In the end, though, it came down to sword against sword. And you couldn’t really prepare for what it was like to cross blades with a Knight. They were all good at it—every single one Niko had come across. They trained from childhood. And more than that, they were driven by the deep conviction that anyone they drew their sword against was a soulless, life-sucking, humanity-torturing being that needed to die. No matter how much Niko hated Knights, he could never believe that of them in return … because he simply didn’t believe that anyone was beyond redemption.

  Which is how he’d ended up in this pickle to begin with.

  But his first Knight—

  His first Knight was American, not Polish. There were chapters of the Holy Order, after all, in almost every country in the world. And the Knight was a boy, too—only eighteen. Acne dusted his cheeks and he was still gangly with youth and Niko desperately didn’t want to kill him. So Niko almost got himself killed, instead. Because when that child drew his bone sword, and his eyes turned bloodred, and he came at Niko with all the strength and fervor in his body, it was damn hard to survive him.

  But one thing Knights usually weren’t was tricky, and Niko was born with a superabundance of trickiness. So some clever footwork and some well-timed light spells—always his favorite—caught the Knight off guard. The boy ended up bleeding out in a little alley next to some trash cans. To be disposed of the following day by the local family of banshees.

  One thing Niko never told anyone is that he requested a mass for the Knight. The boy was young, after all, even if he was on a mission to murder a changeling, which was really just a child—albeit a child of a very different nature.

  The whole debacle was an important lesson in preparation: its importance, and also its insufficiency.

  * * *

  Marzena paces the edge of the weapons room, and Niko listens to her footsteps. Sometimes he learns things from listening that he doesn’t learn from watching, though his kind have both good vision and good hearing, as a rule. From Marzena, he learns that she’s favoring her right leg. She must have injured herself on her recent hunt.

  The weapons room is hexagonal, though the exterior of this part of the house is round. A bench that must have been taken from an old church is leaning against the wall near the door, and all along the walls are cabinets that Niko assumes hold weapons. They’re locked, so they’re of no use to him, but they’re made of dusty, rough wood, like an old ship. And above him, etched into the vaulted wood ceiling, are protective symbols—some of them are Catholic, some not, like a six-pointed rosette, or a triquetra, or an Auseklis cross.

  Niko puzzles over them. He knows the Knights’ belief system has no real depth to it—every culture has Knights, and Knights always use the religious rhetoric of whatever place they come from to justify killing monsters—but he thought there was at least the appearance of consistency. It seems he was wrong.

  “Do they trouble you?” Marzena asks him, and she sounds polite, if detached. He’s not surprised she hasn’t attacked him yet. From what he’s heard of Marzena, she loves to play with her food before she eats it.

  “I can look at them without bursting into flames, if that’s what you mean.” Maybe he should attack her right now, before she’s ready for it—but there may also be value in learning as much as he can about her before he does.

  “When I was young, I believed in them.” She wiggles her tattooed fingers at Niko. “But now I’m aware they have no true power. There’s nothing otherworldly about you.”

  “Oh really?” Niko laughs a little. “The fact that I can make you see things that aren’t there, that seems completely ordinary to you?”

  “A hallucinogenic mushroom can also make me see things that aren’t there. I don’t call them supernatural, either.”

  Niko raises his eyebrows. “That’s a good point, actually. And here I was thinking all Knights were mindless brutes.”

  Marzena stops in front of him and folds her arms. She’s wiry, her body all sinews and tendons.

  “The wieszczy was your doing, wasn’t it?” she says. “How did you get it to cooperate? I found it to be … rather stubborn, myself.”

  “Let me tell you the secret to getting any creature to do your bidding,” Niko says, and he leans closer, theatrical. “You have to realize they’re people and treat them accordingly.”

  Marzena smiles.

  “Let me tell you a secret, zmora,” she says. “I have never been under the impression that you and your kind are soulless monsters, or whatever the usual Knight sermons are these days. I believe what my eyes see, which is that you have feelings, you have families, you have all the same shit we have.” She rolls her eyes, like families and feelings are just inconveniences—and to her, perhaps they are. She doesn’t strike Niko as particularly maternal, whatever that really means.

  She goes on: “We’re all just meat, I know that. Animals, eating whatever food we find, and trying to keep other creatures from killing us. But your kind feeds on my kind—you’re our only natural predator. You’re fast and strong and long-lived, and you have strange abilities we don’t fully comprehend. The way I see it, our only advantage is that we outnumber you. And it’s my job—my duty, as a member of the human race—to make sure it stays that way.” She shrugs. “I take no particular joy in killing a harmless little zmora. It’s nothing personal.”

  “Can’t really say the same. For me, it’s definitely a little bit personal.” Niko smiles. “And I’m not a zmora, you idiot.”

  And then he lets the ropes that Ala pretended to bind his hands with fall away … and he transforms, shrugging off the temporary body Ala loaned him like it’s a suit that he’s grown out of, and relaxing into his sowa form, the owl version of himself that shifts beneath the surface of him, always waiting to emerge.

  It’s painful to change—it always is—but it feels like wiggling a loose tooth, the way the beak grows out of his mouth, the way the fine hairs all over his skin turn into feathers, the way his eyeballs elongate, pulled backward into his skull like taffy. Wings grow from the bones of his spine, so rapidly they’re just a white-hot burst of agony before they explode from his back, and talons split open his fingertips. All of it happens in a flurry of sensation, and he’s already launching himself into the air to collide with Marzena Myśliwiec, the Razor, with all the force he can muster.

  He carves ten long, bright gashes into her chest, and she screams—not like she’s afraid, but like she’s enraged. He’s not prepared for how ready she is to make use of the pain he gave her. She spits a spell at him, hurling him backward with a powerful breath of wind, and he slams into the cabinets as she puts both hands behind her head and buries her blunt fingernails in her flesh.

  He hears it, this time. The splitting of skin and the piercing of muscle, the way her bones creak and crack to release the sword. She breathes hard and fast, and red stains her palms, her arms. Red stains her eyes, too, making her look like—of all things—a vampire from an old movie.

  He lands on his feet, his balance aided by his wings. Marzena is already on top of him, swinging her bone sword hard at his head; he just manages to roll away as the blade lands, breaking one of the planks on the cabinet door with its force.

  He twists and kicks at her left leg, the one she’s so careful to take weight away from when she walks, and she howls, grabbing her knee with her free hand.

  He uses her moment of distraction to reach into the cabinet she broke open and grab the first sword he can get his hands on. It’s a szabla—a little old, if the roughness of the blade is any indication, and a little curved. Heavy at the hilt, but he adjusts to it, letting the owl sink back into him as he charges his opponent.

  He’s even-footed and he uses the saber as a cudgel, bashing at Marzena’s head. She blocks him and pushes him back with that startling Knight strength. Light on his feet, he rebounds, but only in time to defend himself against three blows in quick succession. The impact makes his wrist ache; Marzena is stronger than the last Knight he fought, though smaller, and he’s not sure how that’s possible, unless it’s by magic—

  He tries to cut her, but she only laughs, and digs her bloody fingers into one of the gashes he left her at the start of all this.

  “Rozszczep,” she says, in a tone of command, and the skin over his heart simply … splits open, like a burst grape. Blood runs hot down Niko’s torso, and he swallows a scream, but she hasn’t finished.

  “Złam!” she commands, pressing down again with her fingers in her own wound, and one of his fingers twists in the wrong direction and cracks, the bone unmistakably breaking—

  —and in her smile, he sees that no amount of preparation could have aided him in this task. She’s fearless and she’s ready and she has a mouth full of Knight curses and he gave her all the pain she would need to use them.

  He really was sent here to die.

  19

  A WHIFF OF PERFUME

  Dymitr is familiar with pain. Pain is a part of any life, his grandmother used to say. But for a Knight it’s even more essential. Pain was where their magic came from, it was the sacrifice that magic required, but it needed no bargaining, no deal-making, no pleading, as other forms of magic did. Pain magic was control, it was command. Pain is power.

  This pain is not like that.

  This pain is completely out of his control. He feels like a piece of pottery with crazing on its surface; every tiny crack is white-hot agony, and they’re spreading across his skin in a web. He no longer feels right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm—all he feels is the hurt, and all he wants is an escape from it. He wants that escape so badly he would gladly invite any other kind of pain, a blow to the head or a hammer to his hand, if it meant feeling something else for a while.

  He’s so far gone he can’t figure out who’s who. He can’t figure out if it’s Ala he’s in the courtyard with, Ala wearing the illusion of his face, or if it’s Niko, transformed into his likeness by magic. He forces himself to breathe in through his nose, even though all he wants to do is pant like a dog; he tries to focus long enough to smell something, anything.

  He smells—airplane, and wet earth, and the candy-apple soap from the hotel, and the flavorless sweet of powdered sugar.

  Ala.

  He wants to sob. Ala is trapped in a courtyard with his grandmother.

  The two of them are talking, and then the illusion drops and she’s there as herself, the same height as Joanna but nowhere near as strong. Zmoras are built for escaping, for deceiving—not for this, blade against blade, strength against strength, in the confined space of the courtyard. Ala is capable, but she’s not trained, and she’s not a Knight.