“We’ll see” is the zmora’s response.

  “Last night.” Grief rises up in Elza’s throat like vomit. She swallows it down. “That was really him?”

  The zmora doesn’t respond, at first. It sniffs the air, looking thoughtful.

  “Do you know,” it says, “a zmora can tell the difference between dread and fear. A person fears what’s unknown, but they dread what’s known. What you’re feeling right now smells very much like dread. So I can tell that you already know the answer to your own question.”

  “A yes would have sufficed.”

  “I’m not sure it would have, actually. Because if you’re going to have a zmora for a brother, you should really understand more about our kind than ‘monster bad, monster needs to die.’”

  “I do not have a … a monster for a brother. If that thing is what my brother is now, then my brother is dead.”

  “Your brother, who is not a ‘thing,’ killed the person he loves most to save my life yesterday,” the zmora replies. “So you’ll talk about him with respect, or you can fuck right off.”

  Elza only notices that her cheeks are wet with tears when a breeze blows cool against her skin. She wipes them with the heel of her hand.

  “Who cursed him with this?” Elza asks. “And how? Can it be undone?”

  “It probably can. But since he’s the one who asked for it to begin with, I’m pretty sure it won’t be.”

  “Don’t lie to me. He would never ask for this.”

  The zmora tilts her head. “Are you sure about that? Are we talking about the brother who doesn’t like when you call us ‘monsters’?”

  Elza opens her mouth to argue further, but she can’t help remembering. Dymitr, sobbing after his first kill instead of celebrating. Dymitr, calling the strzyga who killed their uncle “she” instead of “it.” Dymitr, sparring with Elza in the street to keep her from killing the strzygoń.

  If she thinks back to everything he said to her in Chicago, and everything she said to him, it makes a certain amount of sense. He chose his words so carefully. She asked him if Baba Jaga was his target; he said he wouldn’t discuss it with her. She told him he was acting strange; he said, I am doing what’s necessary.

  What’s necessary.

  “Why?” Her voice breaks over the word. “Why would he ever want this?”

  “Because he wanted to stop being a murderer,” the zmora says. “Which is really all a Knight is, once you strip away the rhetoric.”

  Elza’s face burns hot as a fever. “We’re fighting for humanity—”

  The zmora holds up the book of curses. “If you really believe that, why did you hide this here?”

  Elza went looking for a secret message from Dymitr right after he left for America. She assumed he would leave one in the bathroom cabinet, explaining why he was going on this mission alone. Instead, she found the book of curses. She remembers kneeling on the bath mat and flipping through it, her skin crawling. She knows the methods for killing most things—what needs a blade through the heart, what needs its head chopped off, what needs to be burned or salted or buried at a full moon. But the torments written on those pages made her feel sick.

  So she brought the book here. She still doesn’t understand why, not fully.

  “The book scared me,” Elza says. “I didn’t want anyone else to find it.”

  “It scared you because it’s a handbook for creative torture,” the zmora says. “And deep down, you know that it’s horrible to do those things to a living creature. You know that you don’t like what it says about your people, that they’ve done those things so many times they decided to write them down. And now, hopefully, you know that if this book falls into the wrong hands, those horrors can be inflicted on your brother.”

  The zmora steps closer, but only a little.

  “And he is still your brother, Elza,” the zmora says. “He’s kind, and quiet, and he’ll mend your socks without being asked, and he leaves orange peels everywhere, and he’s got incredible aim. He’s Dymitr.”

  Elza is crying again. She tells herself it’s because she’s mourning the loss of him. That the creature that now wears his face is just an echo of him. It can do the things he used to do, but it’s no longer him, it no longer has his soul or his heart or his mind.

  The zmora says, “Let me take the book so no one can use it against him. Please.”

  A tear rolls off the end of Elza’s chin. She looks away, into the brightening woods. “If I cross paths with you again, I won’t be merciful.”

  The zmora smiles a little too wide—like the Cheshire cat from the old cartoon, just teeth aglow in the dark woods.

  “Neither will I,” it says.

  22

  AN AIRPLANE MOVIE

  Niko pays for their tickets home. They sit together on the plane, all three of them in a row, with Dymitr in the middle seat. Ala waits until after the meal has come and gone and Niko has fallen asleep against the window to take the book of curses out of her bag. She sets it on Dymitr’s tray table like it’s an old magazine.

  He stares down at it, gray eyes wide.

  He’s bruised. On his jaw, around his eye, on his cheek. His lip is split, too. She hates to look at those wounds, knowing he endured all of that because he refused to give her up to his grandmother and his mother. When she thinks about that, she gets an uncomfortable feeling in her throat like she swallowed a grapefruit whole.

  “How did you…” He looks up at her. “Where—”

  “You were very insistent that only you and Elza knew about the bathroom hiding place, so when the book wasn’t there, I figured she had found it and moved it,” Ala says. “And last night, when we were dragging our broken selves through the woods, I saw the fort and I felt…” She taps her temple. “That Knight magic thing.”

  “Brilliant,” he says breathlessly.

  “Your sister found me there.”

  That startles him. His head jerks up.

  “She knew it was really you, last night,” Ala says. “I asked her to let me keep the book so it couldn’t be used to hurt you.”

  “And?” he asks, his voice soft.

  “And she let me go. I think … there’s hope for her. Just a little sliver of it, but … some.”

  Dymitr’s eyes are bright. He takes the book and slides it into his backpack. He’s zipping it back up and pushing it under the seat in front of him when Ala finally works up the courage to say, “There’s some things I need to say to you before I lose my voice to that wiła for a few days. The first is that I misled you. I told you I came here to help you, and that was mostly a lie—I came here to kill her. Joanna.”

  Dymitr doesn’t react. Doesn’t move at all, in fact—just stares at her, waiting.

  “I’ve been having nightmares that replay everything the curse showed me. Especially about her. I thought if she was dead, I would get some peace. And I thought, because I’d seen so many memories of Knights, I knew how to fight them.” She closes her eyes. Swallows hard. “But none of that was true.”

  She dreamed about Joanna last night, in fact. The same memory, playing again. She woke with the same trembling in her hands, and realized she’d been thinking of the aftermath of the curse as a puzzle to be solved. If she could just get the letters in the right place, she would be free from it. But there’s no puzzle. Only a tangle. A knot that will take a lifetime to untie.

  “The second thing I want to say is,” she says, “I—I’m sorry. I know how much you loved your grandmother, and that you only had to do that to her because I couldn’t manage to do it myself. And now I’ll always be the one you did that for, and … I’m sorry.”

  Dymitr seizes her hand. His grip is warm and strong.

  “Never … never say that to me again,” he says, quiet but insistent.

  Ala wipes her tears away with her fingers.

  “What you will always be to me now,” he says, “is my sister, who I love and want to be safe. Understand?”

  Their hands are clasped over the narrow metal armrest.

  Ala nods. A garbled voice speaks over the intercom, warning them about upcoming turbulence. A man in a hooded sweatshirt squeezes past Ala’s seat in the aisle. The intensity between them passes, though Ala still feels unsteady, like she’s about to scream or sob or laugh out loud.

  “Want a chip?” Dymitr says, and it should be strange that he’s still holding her hand, but it isn’t. It feels nice, instead.

  “Are you referring to the hardened, salted paste of your preferred airport snack?” she says. “Because I don’t really think they qualify as ‘chips.’”

  He grins at her—as much as he can, anyway, without reopening the split in his lip.

  She leans her head on his shoulder, and he turns on a movie, and she thinks that if she’s going to spend her life untangling all this pain, at least she has someone she cares about to do it with.

  At least she has him.

  23

  A BONE SWORD

  Baba Jaga likes to go for walks on summer nights in Chicago. Even she isn’t immune to the charms of this time of year. She wraps herself in a younger woman’s skin and walks the hot sidewalks with people coming in from the beach, still covered in sand. She lets panting dogs trot alongside her and nudge her with their wet noses. She listens to the screeching of the cicadas and the lapping of Lake Michigan against the rocks that hold it at bay. She swats at mosquitos and spots robins plucking fireflies out of the air and teenagers hiding their beers when they hear her approach.

  The Knight is sitting on her steps when she returns to her house that evening. His face is spotted black-and-blue, and he sits like that’s not the worst of it, but it’s his aura that concerns her most. He wears his sorrow like a very heavy crown, indeed. The banshees and lloronas of the neighborhood could all feast on him at once and still leave sated.

  He looks up at her, and sniffs—such a zmora greeting, they’re like a pack of dogs that way, only trusting their noses. He seems to recognize who she really is, but he doesn’t move out of her way, or come to his feet to let her pass. He’s here to be an obstruction.

  She sighs. “You’ve piqued my curiosity, Knight. You can come in.”

  He stands up, then. Stiff as an old man in his movements, and she wonders if she should offer to heal him just so she doesn’t have to see him wince like that. But not until she knows where the pain came from—not until she knows what it’s teaching him.

  She climbs the creaky steps with their worn carpet, the smell of fried chicken following her all the way to the third-floor landing. The door opens for her, and the apartment lights up at her approach, every lamp at once. The lava lamp in the corner over the table of bones; the pink art deco lamp with the fringe shade; the lamp with the Tiffany-style shade covered in blue flowers; the fairy lights strung over one of the archways that wink on and off every second. She unwraps the shawl that makes her look like a younger, lighter-haired woman, and hangs it on a hook on the wall.

  Beneath it, she’s old and weathered, which suits her mood. There’s gray mixed with the black of her long, thick hair. She beckons for the Knight to follow her deeper into the apartment, and stands before the apothecary table where she once mixed the cure for what ailed him.

  Now, she arranges the ingredients for a healing potion, just in case she decides to give it to him. A thin slice of dried starfish, a tiny spoonful of salamander eyes, a pinch of yarrow root, three drops of aloe vera, a preserved calendula petal. She puts them in the huge mortar, but doesn’t crush them with the pestle yet.

  “And so?” she says to the Knight.

  “I’ve come to make a deal with you,” he replies.

  She laughs, and takes up the pestle. It’s so big it only just fits in her hand; hardly necessary for this particular blend, but she grinds the eyes and the petal and the yarrow and the starfish slice into a paste with the aloe vera.

  “You came here before as a supplicant, and now you’re here as a businessman,” she says. “What changed?”

  He hesitates, and she hears a murmur in that hesitation that interests her. She cocks her head, and then looks over her shoulder at his bruised face.

  “You killed her,” she says softly.

  His expression is answer enough, but when he opens his mouth to speak he seems unable to produce any sound at all. He closes his mouth.

  She sets the pestle down and presses her palm to the paste she’s made of all the healing ingredients. She drags her fingers around the edge of the mortar to smear the sticky substance over her fingers. It’s yellow-brown and grainy.

  “Hold still,” she says to the Knight, and she touches her thumb to the bruise on his cheek. He pulls away.

  “I’m going to heal you, child,” she says. “It’s disconcerting to see you this way.”

  She dabs his cheek with her thumb, and uses her index finger for the delicate skin around his eye, her pinkie finger for the cut on his lip, her middle finger for the stained skin on his forehead. The paste shines for just a moment before sinking into him, and it takes each wound with it.

  By the time she’s finished, he looks just as he did a week ago, when he pleaded for his sword. She wipes her hand on the handkerchief she retrieves from her pocket, and then tosses it behind her. It disappears into thin air.

  “Better,” she says, and then she gestures—a request—and the house, ever-generous, provides. Two chairs appear in front of her, facing each other. She takes one, and she glares at the Knight until he takes the other, sitting on the very edge of it.

  “Do you know that a complete transformation is almost impossible?” she asks. “Something of the old version usually remains. My grandson, for example, will probably never live as long or age as slowly as most of his kind. I warned him of this before I made him what he is. It didn’t seem to trouble him, but then, he did always have a thread of cheerful nihilism in him.”

  She smiles at the memory of little Nikodem Kostka, dragged into her apartment by his terrified mother who couldn’t stomach the eventuality of death. She shooed the woman for the actual transformation, and sat with Niko on the floor, old bones be damned, to tell him it would hurt to become a strzygoń. Niko only shrugged. Already understanding, perhaps, that pain was as meaningless as its lack, and as inevitable.

  “I have known of only a few occasions on which a change was comprehensive and unalterable,” she says. “One of those occasions, I lived through. I was born human, you see, with no particular aptitude for magic. I made great sacrifices to acquire that aptitude, which I will not enumerate for you now. But in order to make it permanent, I had to endure the unthinkable.”

  She looks into the Knight’s stormy eyes.

  “I had to kill the one I loved most in all the world,” she says. “It was for the good of all, but that isn’t the reason I did it. I did it because I was desperate to change, fully and completely, and I was willing to do anything to accomplish it. Even rip out my own heart.”

  She says it without emotion. Long ago, she locked her memories of that day in a box and buried them—literally, with a shovel and a lantern in the dead of night, at a place no one else knows. So she can’t see the man’s face at the moment he realized she betrayed him; she can’t remember how it sounded when he breathed his last. It’s better that way.

  Even though the Knight has every reason to despise her for what she told him to do, he looks a little sad at her recollection. What a soft heart he has, she thinks, and it’s as great an impossibility as she has ever seen, for a boy raised as a Knight to have a soft heart.

  “Your grandmother had to give her blood to you so that you could split your soul, did she not?” she asks.

  The Knight raises his eyebrows. “How did you know that?”

  “Your sword sang a little song,” Baba Jaga replies. “And I heard it.”

  The Knight looks down at his hands. “The curse she put me under, when I was there. It ended when she died.”

  “Another curse born of her blood.” Baba Jaga nods.

  “So the magic that split my soul.” He scratches at the back of his neck, like he’s remembering drawing the sword from his spine. “I couldn’t be rid of it until she died. That’s why you told me to kill her.”

  She reaches out and touches his knee. “I am often cruel. But I am not usually cruel without reason. This was the crucial first step in making your transformation real and lasting.”

  His head bobs. Baba Jaga takes her hand away.

  “You came here to make me an offer. I think it’s time you make it.”

  The Knight straightens in his chair. “I have in my possession a book of Knights’ magic. It’s one of the only ones in existence. If you return my sword to me, I’ll give it to you.”

  Baba Jaga smiles. She stands, and walks over to the little bookcase in the corner. The books arranged on it are old and leather-bound, their spines cracked and their pages worn and musty. Sometimes she takes one out just to stick her nose between the pages and breathe in the scent of it.

  She takes a slim green volume from the shelf, and offers it to him.

  He opens it, and his face falls. It’s written in Cyrillic, so he likely can’t read the letters, but he seems to recognize the diagram of the bone sword on the first page.

  “You mean a book like this?” she says. “I have several. Each one is in a different language. They have significant overlap, but there’s always one spell or another that’s distinct in each one. I collect them.”

  The Knight sags in his chair, staring at the drawing of the bone sword. Baba Jaga curls her fingers over the back of her own chair, her dark fingernails drumming against the wood.

  “So you see, you still come to me with almost nothing. But all is not lost.”

  She snaps her fingers—a request—and the cloth-wrapped bone sword floats toward her from its place on the wall, landing gently in her hands. The Knight looks at it like it’s a flagon of water and he’s dying of thirst.

  “I asked you for thirty-three deaths. I will settle for the death of your grandmother in addition to thirty-two broken curses, instead.” She starts to unwrap the bone sword, unwinding the black cloth that covers the hilt. “Use that book you stole. Undo some of the harm your people have done. Unravel their magic, and you will earn your full transformation.”