Through the haze of pain, he looks down at Ala’s feet. She’s wearing the socks he mended.

  He thinks of her standing in front of the pot of ramen, asking him what he smells. He thinks of her kneeling on the floor in Baba Jaga’s apartment, begging him to try.

  Ala saved his soul. But his grandmother only ever split it in half.

  He forces himself to move. One foot and then another, digging into the earth for a foothold. He wraps his hands around stinging nettles and pulls himself to his hands and knees. His grandmother and Ala are swinging at each other, and then—

  And then his grandmother stabs Ala low in her abdomen, right next to her hip. Ala’s scream rattles in his head, and he’s on his feet—just barely, but he’s upright. Both Ala and his grandmother are facing away from him, like they’ve forgotten he’s even there.

  He has no weapons. His hands twitch, the instinct to draw the bone sword that’s no longer buried in his body aborted at the last second. When he raises his head to look at the statue of Saint Michael, though, he remembers the little knife fixed to the statue’s back, only a little sturdier than a letter opener.

  He limps toward it, each step reawakening new pain, and grabs the handle of the small knife with his trembling hand. His grandmother has her hand around Ala’s throat, forcing her to her knees with a gurgle. Dymitr’s vision goes dark at the edges.

  He lets the Knight in him surface—he has plenty of pain to feed the transformation, even if he doesn’t have his sword to urge it along. Red creeps over his palms and heat surges into his eyes.

  He can see the shadow in Ala, the restless thing, and he thinks, Maybe it’s her soul I’m seeing, maybe that’s all we could ever see—

  The transformation gives him strength, even if it doesn’t take away the pain. He crosses the courtyard in two big strides.

  He slides the knife between his grandmother’s ribs.

  She gasps—wheezes—but she’s already moving, even as she’s reacting to the pain. She whirls around to face him, stabbing down with her knife.

  He brings his left arm up to block her. Her mouth falls open a little as she looks into his eyes.

  His eyes, which are red to match hers.

  “Dymek?” she says weakly.

  “Babcia,” he replies.

  Her blood runs hot over his fingers. Ala is face down in the dirt behind her, bleeding and stinking of terror.

  “What has…” His grandmother gasps. “Become of you?”

  He has no words to explain it, and she wouldn’t understand it if he did. He’s a zmora; he’s a Knight. He’s the same Dymitr he always was; he’s brand new. Magic is crooked, Baba Jaga said, and he can see it more clearly now than ever before, how magic embraces paradox. But his grandmother’s mind doesn’t work that way.

  Blood bubbles up over her lips as she says, “Monster.”

  She yanks her hand back and stabs again, and after all this—after the accusations and the torture and the curses, after all the evidence of what she is laid out before him—he’s still surprised by it. He’s still surprised by the fervor in her eyes and her gritted teeth and the powerful swing of her arm.

  But before she can cut into him, she falls. She drops to her knees, one leg stretched out behind her. Ala’s pale hand is wrapped around her ankle.

  Dymitr catches his grandmother by instinct, just to ease her to the ground. The red in her eyes and hands recedes. Her breaths rattle and wheeze. The scent of mustard and dirt and peach nectar and candy-apple soap fills his nose.

  Followed by the faintest hint of his grandmother’s floral perfume.

  20

  A PARTING SHOT

  Niko is pretty sure he’s about to die, but he’s not one to give up in the middle of a fight. He swings the saber at Marzena’s head, and she bats him aside harder than is necessary, which wrenches his broken finger. Her smile sharpens by a fraction and then she comes at him.

  Whatever she was doing before was just a warm-up. This is the real thing: Marzena hacking at him with all the force of her muscled, magically strengthened body. It’s all he can do to counter each blow, his shoulder aching with the effort of holding the saber aloft.

  He should transform again, but it would take a split second he doesn’t have, because she’s putting so much pressure on him he can hardly breathe. She’s herding him back toward the wall, so he’ll have no room to evade her; he knows that, but he also can’t stop it.

  He listens to the shuffle of their feet, the clang of their swords colliding, the heaving of his own breaths. But all he can see is her, eyes bright, jaw clenched, body in constant motion.

  He feels the wood against his back, and brings the saber up at an awkward angle to catch her blade close to his abdomen. She slides bone against metal all the way down to the hilt of his sword, and grins crookedly at him.

  “How would you like to die?” she asks him, roughly. “Bleeding, or suffocation?”

  He wishes he had some kind of clever answer. She whispers the spell to break his bones again, and he hears something deep inside him cracking, and a sharp agony in his rib cage. Suddenly it’s even harder to breathe than before; he sees spots as she presses him down even harder, trying to force him to his knees.

  “Złam,” she spits, and another one of his ribs pops. He screams into gritted teeth.

  The wood against his back reminds him of the warm metal of the fence earlier that day, Dymitr’s hands in his shirt, the prickling of his frustration over Niko’s skin. It’s not a bad memory to go out with, really. Dymitr is beautiful like a Rembrandt painting, the only focal point in a room of darkness, expressive and significant somehow. And he can see Dymitr in Marzena’s face, just a hint of him, so if he tries, he can pretend—

  He goes to his knees, but he keeps pressing up against Marzena’s sword. Then he sees, as if for the first time, her boots. Knee-high. Leather. Scuffed everywhere, like she’s never bothered to polish them, with the laces all frayed. The same aura of carelessness that Dymitr carries around; he must have learned it from her. Her weight is off her left foot; it’s the one she injured—and there’s something else about it, something at the very edge of his thoughts—

  She keeps a knife in her left boot, Dymitr said to him, right before they parted ways. Niko sees the knife handle poking out of the top of it. He’s reaching for it before he even decides to. He yanks it free and then stabs up, not at her belly but at her arm.

  The knife goes between the bones of her forearm, slicing through tendons and arteries and muscle. Marzena’s grip on her bone sword falters, and he wrenches away from her, still on his knees. Her sword clatters to the ground, and he twists, kicking her in the left knee.

  She sprawls, falling to the stone, and he grabs her bone sword in his left hand, leaving her with the knife stuck through her arm. He’s on his feet in an instant, holding the blade she made from half her soul right up against her throat.

  She looks up at him. Her forehead is sweaty and her breathing is labored.

  Her eyes are gray.

  “Do it,” she spits at him.

  Niko curses himself. He curses the wieszczy who agreed to help him and Ala with her nerves of steel, and Dymitr with his fucking gray eyes. But mostly … he curses himself, for letting himself be softened by all those things.

  “You’re lucky your son is so beautiful,” he says.

  And because he’s not a saint, he kicks her in the side before limping out of the room, her bone sword still in his hand.

  * * *

  When Niko steps out of the weapons room, Ala and Dymitr are in the hallway, bloody and pale as death. Dymitr’s gaze fixes over Niko’s shoulder at the still-writhing—still living—form of his mother on the floor behind him. He doesn’t seem to understand what he’s looking at; Ala has to snap her fingers in front of his face to remind him they need to get moving.

  And when Niko moves to put the bone sword down on a side table, Dymitr’s eyes bear down on his with startling intensity.

  “Take it,” he says roughly.

  So Niko does.

  They go out the back and into the woods, though the woods aren’t much of a comfort out here, not when Knights are well trained in tracking. At a certain point, when they’re far enough from the house that the pressure of the Knights’ magic eases a little and Ala says she can no longer smell copper, they stop so that Niko can heal the worst of their injuries: the wound in Ala’s hip, Niko’s broken bones, and some of the deeper gashes on Dymitr’s back.

  Niko’s hands shake when he lays them on Dymitr’s bloody shoulders, and he tries not to think about what it must have felt like for his own mother to cut into him like that, over and over again, with the pain magnified by ten.

  When Niko asks about that particular curse, though, Dymitr just shakes his head. “Gone now,” he says, and he doesn’t elaborate. Niko puts the pieces together himself: the curse ended when Joanna’s life did.

  Walking through the hotel where Ala and Dymitr are staying, all of them soaked in blood, is one of the most absurd things Niko has done lately, but he addles the night manager’s senses enough that he’s pretty sure she’ll dismiss it as a dream the following morning. Ala meets Niko’s eyes once they’re in the room, and nods toward the bathroom.

  Niko leads Dymitr in with him and closes the door.

  They’ve had a little Florence Nightingale moment before, in the hospice center, with Dymitr’s lost fingernail. Niko thinks about it all the time, the way something was crackling between them, but Niko wasn’t sure if he was reading it right; the way Dymitr’s eyes went wide when Niko called him beautiful; the ache Niko felt in his chest when they first kissed.

  Well, this isn’t like that.

  There’s nothing sexy-sweet about peeling the blood-soaked shirt from Dymitr’s body, or listening to his harsh breaths, or surveying the damage his own mother did to him. All Niko can do is try not to stare. He crouches in front of Dymitr and takes off his boots for him.

  “You didn’t kill her,” Dymitr says roughly. “Why?”

  And Niko says, “You know why.”

  He straightens. Dymitr reaches for Niko’s hand. His hold a little too tight, he brings their clasped hands to his chest. Niko feels the hard thump of Dymitr’s heart.

  “Dziękuję,” Dymitr says, and it’s as solemn as a vow. Thank you.

  As Dymitr strips down and steps into the shower, Niko splashes water on his face at the sink, and takes off his shirt to examine the magical wound Marzena gave him just by commanding his skin to split. It’s not pretty, and it’s still bleeding. He should probably stitch it; maybe there’s a sewing kit in one of the drawers.

  Then he hears Dymitr sobbing like he’s trying to keep it quiet, and he thinks, Fuck it, and he gets into the shower, too, still half-clothed and determined to ignore the sudden intimacy of Dymitr’s nakedness as he gathers the other man close.

  The water is so warm it’s almost too hot, and the hotel soap smells like a Jolly Rancher. Dymitr tucks his face into the side of Niko’s neck. He holds Niko so tightly they meld together, Dymitr’s shaking body against his, the water drumming against Niko’s back. He runs his fingers through Dymitr’s wet hair, and doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say.

  21

  A MEETING OF SISTERS

  Elza is the best tracker, so while the others deal with the aftermath—with her grandmother’s body, rendered small and frail in death; with the knife speared through her mother’s arm; with the wieszczy who appeared at Filip’s grave and then vanished, seemingly without a trace; with the grave itself, waiting for Filip’s body to fill it; with her young cousin André, who disappeared sometime in the night; with all of it, the whole fucking nightmare of it all—

  While the others deal with the aftermath, Elza follows the trail into town.

  In truth, there’s no need for the best tracker to complete this task. The three intruders who turned everything in her life upside down last night didn’t go to much effort to disguise their tracks. They left bloody, muddy footprints through the forest, then stopped—to heal themselves, she thinks, because the footprints became less bloody after that—and then continued into town, where they walked right into a hotel. All Elza had to do to figure out what room they were in was wait for a light to go on.

  The intruders, that’s how she thinks of them now. Because that man, the one who killed her grandmother, can’t possibly be Dymitr. He has to be some thing wearing Dymitr’s face again, or Dymitr himself has to be cursed, his mind addled by magic—because the alternative is impossible.

  Isn’t it?

  She creeps up to a window, and draws her bone swords, her teeth gritted with fury as she remembers the way her grandmother’s face looked, so pale, her eyes still open but unseeing. She’s here to exact bloody vengeance on all three of them, and she’s going to start by climbing through the bathroom window to ambush them while they’re still hurt and exhausted from their escape. She’s going to start right now.

  She reaches up to see if the window is unlocked, and hears … sobbing.

  She braces herself against the stucco wall. She knows that sound. She’s heard it just a few times before, through the paper-thin walls of their house, through the bathroom door, but it’s not easy to forget the sound of your older brother falling apart.

  That’s him.

  That’s really him.

  She goes still, her body gripped with fear as she realizes the Dymitr she spent dinner trading knowing looks with was not, in fact, some zmora skilled with illusions and mimicry, or some strzygoń wearing a magical skin, but the real him.

  And somehow, the real him … is now a monster.

  Baba Jaga must have cursed him. That’s the only explanation she can think of. Baba Jaga cursed him, and he was too afraid to tell anyone what happened because he thought they would kill him, and—and he was right to fear that, because her mother would have spent the night torturing him for information and then, whether he gave it or not, slit his throat at sunrise.

  But that doesn’t explain why he lied to protect the zmora. Or why there’s a murmur just audible through the glass—the strzygoń, its voice deep and rumbling as an engine, trying to soothe him.

  She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand, and she needs to, or this bloody night will haunt her for the rest of her life. So she sheathes her swords and decides to wait.

  * * *

  It takes hours for anything to happen. Elza knows she should go home, if she’s not going to act—go home, and change into her funeral clothes, so she can be there when they bury Filip. But she can’t make herself move. Not until she understands what happened to her brother.

  Around sunrise, the zmora steps out of the hotel and walks down the road. Elza follows it all the way to the forest again.

  The light is weak and pale, and there’s dew clinging to all the spiderwebs. When Elza finds herself getting too close to the zmora, she stops to examine one, a symmetrical orb weaver’s web with the spider herself perched in the middle, her legs curled up around her.

  The zmora isn’t making much effort to move quietly. It ducks under branches and hops over logs and swats at the little flies that are already out in force. It keeps pausing to sniff the air, like a hunting dog. Whatever scent it’s following, it follows all the way to the fort where Elza, Kazik, and Dymitr used to play as children.

  Elza grits her teeth. No, she thinks. It can’t be.

  The zmora can’t possibly know.

  The fort is in a small clearing. The structure itself is built between two tall trees at the edge of the space, and it’s made of thin branches lined up next to each other like slats. Elza and Kazik spent days searching the forest floor for the right ones, then they brought them to Dymitr, who was the only one patient enough to saw off the ends to make them all even. The top of the fort is neat and tidy, as a result.

  The zmora slips through the opening to the fort, and Elza thinks about killing it right here. It would be simple enough to draw her bone swords again and corner the zmora in the fort; it would happen too quickly for the monster to devise some clever illusion to get away. But then she wouldn’t be any closer to answers.

  Through the fort’s uneven branches, Elza can see the zmora kneeling beside the metal lunch pail that’s nestled in the corner of the structure. Elza is the one who put it there, the one who nestled the book of curses inside it to keep it safe.

  The zmora does know.

  It lifts its head, and through the gap between the branches, Elza meets its eyes.

  “How did you know the book was here?” Elza says.

  The zmora draws a knife. Elza can see the metal glinting through the branches.

  “I’m not here to kill you,” Elza says. “Not today, anyway.”

  She holds her hands out in front of her, so the zmora can see that she’s not armed. She could become armed in a matter of seconds, of course, but she’s not eager to draw her swords right now. The zmora goes to the door of the fort, a knife in one hand and the blue book of curses in the other.

  “I saw this place last night,” the zmora says. “Thought I’d take a look.”

  Last night. It sounds so casual to Elza, like last night wasn’t a series of horrors. But then, as a creature who’s named after the nightmare itself, maybe it doesn’t think of betrayal and deception and murder as a series of horrors.

  Last night—the empty night.

  Remember the last things, the singers sang. The clock is ticking, death is cutting down the tree of life.

  “What are you here for, if not to kill me?” the zmora asks Elza, and Elza can’t think of the last time she spoke to a monster like this. It has such a human face. High cheekbones, sharp, almost wild eyes. It could be someone Elza went to school with, someone Elza passed on the street. Ordinary. Pretty, even.

  “Answers,” Elza says. “If I get them, I won’t kill you. Provided you leave that book behind.”