A promise sometimes has the feeling of magic. This one certainly does. She lets the black cloth fall, holding the white sword in her hands.

  “Do we have a deal?”

  “Thirty-two broken curses, and you’ll give me back the sword?”

  “Thirty-two broken curses, and your soul will be fully healed.”

  “Zgadzam się,” he says. Agreed.

  “Shirt off, then. And kneel.”

  He gives her a confused look. But it seems he’s beyond defiance. He unbuttons his shirt, and shrugs it from his shoulders. Then he stands from his chair, and kneels in front of her, as he did before she changed him the first time.

  Baba Jaga walks around him, bone sword in hand. His back is covered in deep wounds—harsh red lines from the drag of a blade. It’s as if he was beaten, only the wounds are too intentional for that. Each one of these was cut into him by a deliberate hand.

  She turns the sword so that it’s upright, then holds it over his back, so the hilt will stretch across his shoulders, and the blade will follow his spine.

  “Ready?” she says.

  The Knight nods, and she presses the sword to his back. For a moment it hovers in place right over his skin. Then it shimmers, like the bone is turning to glass. The bright light pricks at her eyes, making them water.

  But the bone doesn’t turn to glass—it turns to gold. Then the bright wounds on the Knight’s back start to pull open like hungry mouths, seeking, undulating with hunger. The Knight screams a horrible scream, but Baba Jaga hardly notices it; she’s too busy trying to peer through the glare of the magic to see what will happen next.

  The sword presses to the wounds, as if to cauterize them. It sizzles against his skin, and he screams again, falling forward onto his hands. The metal sword sinks into him, but only barely; it stays at the surface of his skin, the perfect impression of a longsword now flush with his back.

  The light of the magic fades. The Knight’s back shifts with his breaths, the sword flexible enough to accommodate him.

  He straightens, and reaches over his shoulder to touch the sword. He looks up at her, eyes full of wonder.

  “It’s still there?” he says. “But—”

  “I told you that complete transformations are nearly impossible,” she says. “When you’re finished with this task I’ve given you, you’ll have done the impossible, and the sword will be gone. Curse by curse, it will disappear.”

  He no longer looks sick, she thinks. His cheeks are bright, his eyes lively. She feels … better.

  “Thank you,” he says.

  She shrugs, and as she shrugs, her skin tightens, and her gray hair turns dark brown, and buoyancy returns to her joints.

  “I want to ask you a favor,” she says. “You can count it among your broken curses.”

  “What is it?” he asks.

  She walks away, but pauses before stepping into the next room—the one that’s in Hyde Park.

  “Protect my grandson,” she says. “The Kostkas are trying to get him killed, and I’ve grown rather fond of him.”

  A soft reply: “I would have done that anyway.”

  “I am an excellent negotiator,” she says. “So you can assume that when I’m not, it’s intentional. Show yourself out.”

  24

  A LAST DEMAND

  The zmora Dryjas have the Crow Theater, and the strzyga Kostkas have the boxing club, but on the south side of the city where the streets have numbers instead of names, there’s a cluster of warehouses and a big, empty house that the llorona Vasquez family has transformed into … a nightclub.

  “I don’t understand,” Ala says, as she eases her cousin’s beat-up station wagon into a parking spot nearby. “What does a nightclub have to do with sorrow?”

  Ala got her voice back from the wiła that morning, and they borrowed the station wagon that afternoon to look for a new apartment. The loss of Ala’s voice turned out to be good for both of them—Ala could ask him in writing if he wanted to be her roommate indefinitely, which meant she didn’t have to say it out loud, and Dymitr could pick her up and swing her around without her pretending to be upset about it.

  They found a crappy two-bedroom basement unit in Irving Park that suited them both, and Ala signed the lease, since Dymitr—or Dawid Myśliwiec, as Ala insisted on calling him—is technically still on a temporary visa forged by the Holy Order. Niko said he knew a guy who could get him some convincing fake paperwork, though, so there’s that.

  Dymitr waits for Ala to straighten out the station wagon in the space—it turns out she’s a bit of a parking perfectionist—and then unbuckles his seat belt and gets out.

  “The peculiar wisdom of Keeners,” he says, using the slang term that refers generally to llorona and banshees and all other sorrow-eating beings from around the world, “is that sorrow is so plentiful, they don’t need to hunt for it at all.”

  “I don’t know how you’re explaining this to me,” she grumbles. “Mister ‘I became a creature of legend ten minutes ago.’”

  He slides his hands into his pockets and walks next to her on the sidewalk. He doesn’t need to ask where they’re going: their destination is obvious.

  The house stands between an empty, fenced-off lot and a foreclosed building with a collapsed porch. The building itself is gray, with a gabled roof and blacked-out windows, the kind of place Dymitr would have avoided if he hadn’t already known what it was. A group of greenish rusałkas stand outside, passing around a single cigarette, each of them with hair down to their waists. They’re dressed for a good time, in skin-baring tops with glittery eye makeup.

  The house is a split-level, and upon entering, Dymitr lets Ala lead them down to the basement instead of upstairs. It’s dark inside, and hot, from the crowd of bodies that greets them. Purple and blue lights hang in strips along the walls and above them. The ceiling is high—Dymitr thinks they hollowed out the first floor to make the place taller—and there are glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to it.

  “My highest priority is beer,” Ala announces. “If I’m going to dance, I need to be a little drunk. Do you dance?”

  Dymitr shakes his head. He’s already scanning the crowd for Niko.

  “Oh my God, just go find him already,” she says. “Text me when you’re done with whatever errand you guys are running.”

  Dymitr waves goodbye, and steps into the crowd.

  He had a feeling this would happen—that every sorrow-eating thing in the vicinity would turn to look at him, their wide eyes shining in the darkness. He knows what he must look like to them, every part of him still aching with grief. They brush him as he passes through the crowd, their fingers on his arms, his shoulders. He shies away from their touches, still looking for Niko.

  There’s a stage at the back of the room where people are setting up music equipment. A DJ rig, microphones. Someone else is hoisting a disco ball high above the crowd, as if they need more dizzying light than what they already have.

  He’s just spotted Niko leaning up against a pillar, red cup in hand, when the stage lights turn on and everyone starts clapping and cheering. There’s no fear in the air, nothing he can sink his teeth into, but there’s an energy all the same.

  All the lights go off at once, and then a wordless note pierces the darkness, quiet at first and then louder, higher, filling the entire room with sound. He feels it settling deep inside him, cold and heavy as water. A Keener sound, a banshee wail. Tears prickle behind his eyes as the note claws into him, forcing emotion he doesn’t want to feel. Instinctively, he searches for the door, for a path to escape, but he doesn’t flee.

  The stage lights go on again, and someone standing at the DJ rig taps something in front of him. A beat plays beneath the Keener note, breaking it up into fragments. The woman stops singing and picks up an electric violin, wrapped in glowing tape that lights up her fingers as she raises it to her chin and starts to play.

  All around him, people start to dance. And there’s a woman sidling up to Niko, smiling invitingly, her mouth painted bright red. She’s standing too close, smiling too wide. There’s a flare of heat in Dymitr’s chest, harsh and unfamiliar.

  Niko’s eyes snap to his.

  Dymitr doesn’t say anything. He just slides his hand into Niko’s, nods to the woman—it’s not her fault he feels like he might burst into flames, after all—and pulls Niko across the dance floor with a little more force than is necessary.

  Niko, for his part, lets himself be pulled, weaving through the crowd of dancers and then tripping up the concrete stairs behind Dymitr. They leave the thump of the music behind. Outside, on the sidewalk, the rusałkas are done with their cigarette, and all the other stragglers have gone inside to listen to the music and let the banshee’s song crack them open. Some people like to feel more, like to feel too much, but Dymitr doesn’t see the appeal. He feels too much already.

  He puts a hand on the back of Niko’s neck and kisses him hard, tasting beer on his lips and feeling the scratch of day-old facial hair against his chin. Niko’s arm wraps around his waist and tugs him closer.

  The ache in Dymitr’s chest feels distant, now; he’s awash in other sensations. His ears are ringing from the loud music; his ears are ringing from the blood thundering through his body. He tastes beer; he tastes Niko’s lemon-flavored lip balm. He leans closer, runs his hands over Niko’s shoulders, and thinks about what it would be like to peel away each layer of his clothing, one by one.

  Niko’s teeth graze Dymitr’s lower lip, and he makes—a sound, raw and desperate. Niko’s hand has come up to Dymitr’s chest. Dymitr remembers how Niko’s hands look when he transforms, fingernails turning into talons, and a thrill of something that isn’t quite fear travels down his spine, his instincts screaming danger and the rest of him calling it nonsense. Niko would never hurt him.

  He proved that days ago, in the weapons room with Dymitr’s mother.

  Dymitr leans closer, and Niko’s hand shifts, his thumb, with its sharp strzygoń nail, pressing lightly into the hollow at the base of Dymitr’s throat. Niko tries to withdraw it, and Dymitr holds him there with a hand on his wrist.

  “I’m not afraid of you, you know,” Dymitr says.

  “Well, that makes sense, since I find myself incapable of hurting you on purpose,” Niko says, in a whisper, right up against Dymitr’s mouth. “But I still am what I am. You should remember that before you become … attached to me.”

  “It’s far too late for that.”

  “Is it, now.”

  Dymitr swallows hard. He nods.

  “Is that why you were jealous of that woman?” Niko says, grinning. “The sensation was—quite forceful.”

  His smile is a half-feral thing. Dymitr likes it.

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “What happened to not being jealous because you’re not entitled to me?”

  “I’d like to be entitled to you,” Dymitr replies. “Is that all right?”

  Niko’s eyes are bright as lit coals. His fingers brush over the metal now buried in Dymitr’s shoulder. Frowning, he follows the smoothness to the center of Dymitr’s back, and then down his spine in a slow, curious creep of his fingers. Dymitr shudders, and it’s not from the cold, and it’s not from the memory of the sword melting into his body again.

  “Yeah,” Niko says to him. “It is.”

  25

  A STONE FOR TWO BIRDS

  It’s not a long drive to the harbor south of the Loop. They go in Niko’s car, where the wind rattles the cloth top, and there’s an R.E.M. song—“Drive”—playing over the speakers. The only other car in the parking lot has two teenagers in it, probably about to make out; Niko doesn’t linger long enough to find out.

  The Razor’s sword is in the back seat, wrapped up in cloth. It took some creative magic to smuggle it here on the plane, but Niko’s done it before. He’s eager to get rid of it. He doesn’t like the way he feels in its presence, like his head is stuffed up. It’s stifling, somehow.

  Niko had to make a plan on the fly, since he never planned to take the sword to begin with—and he doesn’t even know why Dymitr told him to. They’ll take out the boat that Niko rented from some creature-friendly company—owned by nixies, naturally—and drop the sword in the middle of Lake Michigan. He intended to do it alone, but Dymitr offered to go with him, with a hard look in his eyes that Niko was desperate to understand. So he agreed.

  He gets out of the car and reaches into the back seat to pick up the sword. He winces when he touches it, his ears muffled and his head pulsing like a headache without pain. He doesn’t bother to lock his door—anyone who wants to break into a cloth-top Jeep just needs a knife and a can-do attitude.

  Dymitr is standing at the front of the car, staring at the water. It looks more like an ocean than a lake, here, with the waves rippling in the moonlight, the repetitive sound of them crashing against the rocks. He turns to Niko.

  “Can I…?” he asks, and he holds out a hand for the sword.

  It means something, Niko thinks, that he doesn’t hesitate to hand the weapon over to Dymitr. And he might have, last week. But that was before he saw the lengths to which Dymitr would go to protect Ala, to protect someone who wasn’t human.

  Dymitr is careful as he unwraps the blade. He closes his hand around the golden handle, and red spills into his palm, red pools in his eyes. Niko steps back, all his instincts screaming at him to transform and attack before he gets attacked himself. But instead of turning away, he forces himself to look. He needs to be honest with himself about what Dymitr is, just as he needs Dymitr to be honest with himself about what Niko is.

  “Do you know what will happen to her without it?” Dymitr asks, and it’s absurd, to talk to an armed Knight like this.

  “I know it’ll hurt her, like being separated from your sword hurt you,” Niko says. “But beyond that … no.”

  “She’ll go mad.” Dymitr turns the blade over, studying it. “She’ll be haunted by all the creatures she’s killed, and then she’ll lose her mind.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to be the one who killed your mother, but I’m not going to weep for her.”

  “I know.”

  Dymitr sounds strange. Detached. Then he wraps the sword in cloth again, the red receding from his hands, from his eyes. He balances the weapon on his palms, and looks up at Niko, with that same hard expression Niko saw when he insisted on coming along.

  “Don’t throw it in the water,” Dymitr says.

  “I’m not going to spare her—”

  Dymitr holds up a hand to silence him. “I mean, there’s a better use for it.”

  Niko raises his eyebrows. “And that is…?”

  “She’ll be able to track it using magic,” Dymitr says. “She’ll come here, with another Knight, since they almost always travel in pairs. And she’ll go wherever the sword is. To a place of your choosing.”

  Niko catches on, suddenly. “You want me to set a trap.”

  “Set a trap,” Dymitr says. “Use Lidia Kostka as bait so you can save her life. Put her in your debt, so she stops trying to get you killed.”

  The wind blows the smell of lake water toward them. It shivers through the leaves of nearby trees, and scatters debris across the parking lot. The teenagers in the car at the other end of the lot are leaving now, the bass in their SUV thumping as they pull out onto the street.

  Niko stares at Dymitr, who looks steely-eyed and certain. It occurs to him that he’s talking not to Dymitr with the soft heart, who wears rumpled shirts and carried Niko’s duffel bag through O’Hare Airport because he was tired from the flight … but to Dymitr the Knight, who knows his way around a bow and can track any supernatural creature that walks the earth.

  “If my trap worked, I would have to kill your mother,” Niko says. “Which is the thing you didn’t want me to do before.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “And you’re okay with it, suddenly?”

  Dymitr looks out at the water again.

  “In the weapons room, before you came,” he says softly, “she cut into me twelve times. Each time, I begged her for mercy. It only made her cut deeper.”

  Niko can feel Dymitr’s rage, like swallowing a mouthful of high-proof brandy. It burns all the way down, and settles in Niko’s stomach like a warm meal.

  “I thought I knew what she was. But I didn’t.” Dymitr swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing painfully. “That was my mistake. But I won’t make it again.”

  Niko considers this. Dymitr looks … decided. It’s the way he looked when he knelt before Baba Jaga and asked her to destroy him. Niko may not know Dymitr that well, but he knows that he’s not careless with his words. If he says something has changed … it’s changed.

  As for the idea of using the sword to lure Marzena in, well, it’s Niko’s preferred strategy. To choose the place where he faces the Knight. To set a trap. To control the surroundings, to watch his quarry’s approach. And using Lidia Kostka as bait would certainly solve the problem of her trying to get him killed.

  But there’s also the small matter of Marzena Myśliwiec being the Razor.

  “When I fought her before,” Niko says slowly, “I barely survived it. I’ll be honest—I’m not eager to do it again.”

  “This time will be different.” Dymitr looks him in the eye. “This time, you’ll have me.”

  Niko takes the sword from Dymitr, and sets it down on the hood of the Jeep. He steps in close, grabs Dymitr by the chin, and kisses him hard.

  The moon glimmers on the lake. The night is just beginning.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It was such a joy to return to these characters and their world. Thank you to everyone who read and loved (and talked about!) When Among Crows. As I’ve no doubt said before, it takes a village to make a book, and I’d like to thank as many people in mine as I can. So thank you …