“I proposed a mission based on information I collected in the field,” Dymitr says, and he can hear how his voice changes when he uses official language, pitched lower and without inflection. “Grandmother approved it. So I’m sure Father didn’t tell you it was a fool’s errand—”

  “No, I decided that all by myself,” Elza says, scowling right back at him.

  She’s dressed for a fight, her black boots laced tight and her black canvas pants loose enough to allow movement. When she’s not anticipating danger, Elza loves ruffles and bows, airy fabric that floats around her body like gossamer, bright lipstick and pointed shoes. Fragile, impractical things that fill her closet with color.

  “Baba Jaga is your target?” she says. “Really?”

  “I’m not discussing this with you.”

  “Funny, I thought that’s what we were doing right now.” She rolls her eyes. “If you’re going to do this, you’ll need backup—”

  “Backup will get me killed,” he replies. “I need to be as unobtrusive as possible, I can’t charge in with the entire Order at my back—”

  “I didn’t realize you thought of me as an entire army unto myself.” She folds her arms, and he can see a knife sheathed along her forearm, the handle peeking out from her jacket sleeve. “I’m not stupid, Dymek. I know you didn’t propose a mission in America just because, what? You stumbled across some random tip—”

  “A thread connects this place and ours, and it has for almost two hundred years,” he says. “Today I ordered golabki at a diner and didn’t even have to speak a word of English.”

  “Yes, the wonders of Polonia never cease.” She reaches for his arm, pinches the sleeve right over his elbow. “I know you. You’re acting strange. Tell me why.”

  “I,” he says, stepping toward her, “am doing what’s necessary. And if Grandmother thought I needed you here, she would have sent you.” He lowers his voice, hardens it. “If I wanted you here, I would have asked you.”

  He tugs his arm from her grasp, and steps back.

  “Go home, Elza,” he says, and he leaves his sister standing in the circle of light, a crease between her eyebrows.

  3

  A RED LINE

  Every train station has magic in it, not that Ala can feel it. Some of her kind swear they can smell it, and maybe they can; all zmory have good noses, but hers is average at best.

  It’s because of how they were built—the train stations, that is, not the noses. They were hoisted above Chicago’s brick buildings in the mid-1910s, with the city refusing to close down cross streets for their construction, so the builders had to get creative. It took them over a decade to complete just the Red Line.

  There’s always sacrifice in building something that’s never been built before, and sacrifice creates a debt, and debts create a space for magic to rush in. So if the Thorndale Red Line stop hums with it, well—that makes sense to her.

  The station is empty at this hour, with the trains running every fifteen minutes or so, depending. She pays for a single-ride pass and pushes through the barrier. As she climbs the steps to the platform, the Purple Line Express rushes past in a smear of greenish light and chattering college students on their way to Evanston.

  Slumped on one of the benches under the awning is an old woman with a battered suitcase between her feet—not who Ala is looking for. But at the end of the concrete, leaning against a pillar, is a young man, probably in his late twenties, his hair a dusty shade of brown and his hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket.

  Bingo.

  She recognizes him from the bar. He ordered red wine—no, beer, after she told him about the chalice she was required to serve the former in. He had an accent and a nice smile, if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Ala isn’t.

  She’s tempted to just take the fern flower from his pocket. Tom told her which one it was in—right, not left, and wrapped in paper, so she could probably get away with touching it, even though quasi-mortals aren’t supposed to be able to. She could distract him with an illusion and pick his pocket, no problem. She’s done it before.

  And maybe she still will, she thinks. But first she has questions.

  He pulls away from the pillar as she approaches. He still has that guitar case on his back, soft and definitely not shaped like a guitar is inside it.

  “You’re Dymitr?” she demands.

  He smiles a little. “She gave you my name?”

  “I asked for it. I’m not interested in cursing you,” Ala says.

  “And you are…?”

  She hesitates. But there’s little danger in giving out her own name. She’s already cursed, after all.

  “Aleksja,” she says. “But everyone calls me Ala.”

  There’s a chill in the air here, from the wind off the lake. She’s glad she borrowed Tom’s zip-up for the walk, even though it smells like pipe tobacco and men’s deodorant.

  “So you’re a bartender,” he says. “Not every zmora could work in a customer service job without scaring off the customers.”

  His accent reminds Ala of her mother. The way she lisped a little and consonants fell heavy from her lips. It’s been many years since she died, more than Ala cares to count, but she can still hear the woman’s voice, exhorting her to sit up straight or to run a comb through her hair.

  “Who says I don’t scare them?” she says. “The Crow is a feeding ground. It’s not exactly dependent on liquor sales from Toil and Trouble.” She looks toward the lake, where two white apartment buildings stand right next to the water, just barely visible now in the moonlight. “I don’t believe in angels, you know.”

  “Come again?”

  “You show up out of nowhere with this remedy to my little condition,” she says. “And it’s like you expect me to think you only mean well, only … I don’t believe in angels.”

  If she had to guess, she would say he looks … sad. But the expression is fleeting.

  “Do you believe in a simple exchange?” he says. “I was clear about my motives. I’ll give you the fern flower if you help me get to Baba Jaga. Simple as that.”

  Ala laughs.

  “Why the hell do you want to meet with Baba Jaga?” she says. “I’m given to understand that most mortals leave her presence owing more than they received.”

  For the first time, he seems at a loss for words. He holds the guitar case against his stomach, pinching it in such a way that makes her think something much slimmer takes up space inside it.

  “My reasons are my own,” he says. “But I suspect you’re desperate enough to agree even if you don’t know them.”

  “Fuck you,” Ala says automatically, but he’s right, and she can’t pretend that he isn’t.

  The curse found her a few years ago, constricting her chest like a gasp and prickling behind her eyes. At first, it showed her brief visions, easily banished. But then it crept across her days, taking up minutes, and then hours. Tormenting her.

  Killing her, just as it killed her mother—by inches.

  “I know what haunts you,” he begins.

  “You have no idea what haunts me. How could you possibly?”

  He reaches for her, and she’s too unused to this—a mortal who doesn’t fear her, a mortal who would dare to touch her cold skin—to pull away. His fingers close around her wrist, so gently she could break his grip without even trying. Just enough to get her attention.

  “Show me, then.” His eyes are gray-brown, like a military jacket, like a tree trunk in winter. “Make sure I understand.”

  Ala needs no further invitation. She tugs her wrist free from his grasp, and makes the world fall away.

  Not every zmora is equally good at illusions, just like not every zmora has an equally good nose. Ala has a talent for the former, if not the latter.

  The Thorndale platform disappears: the awning, the heaters (switched off now that it’s no longer winter), the old woman and her suitcase, the benches, the screens that predict the arrival of the next train, and the tall buildings near the lake.

  In its place is a forest. The trees that surround them are dense, with narrow white trunks and branches that tangle together just above their heads, untrimmed and untamed. The layer of leaves beneath their feet is wet and soft, as if from a recent melting. Ala can almost smell the rot.

  The sun has set, but it’s still light enough to see by. A tall, hulking man with a shaved head stands between her and Dymitr, his scalp shining with sweat. He stands over a long-haired woman with a greenish cast to her skin. She kneels on the ground in a white nightgown. She’s a rusalka—a water maiden.

  Dirt streaks the fabric right over her knees, and blood. Blood on her sleeves, on her back. Stripes of it, soaking through the white.

  Ala tries to meet Dymitr’s eyes, but he’s staring, rapt, at the man with the shaved head. The man reaches behind him and digs his fingers into the skin at the back of his neck. Then he yanks both hands up in one strong motion, and a bone-white blade pulls free of his flesh, his blood still running down the hilt. He may have split his soul to make the weapon, but he still has to pay for it in pain every time he wants to fight with it.

  A purple-red color, like a port-wine birthmark, spills into his fingers and palms, all the way over his wrists, like he’s plunged his hands in a vat of red dye. His eyes, too, glint red, bloodshot all the way through.

  He’s a Knight of the Holy Order, and he’s here to perform an execution.

  The rusalka wraps her too-long, too-thin arms around herself, and hunches over her bloodied knees, sobbing.

  “Please,” she says softly. “Please—”

  The man’s sword drips blood onto the wet leaves. He swings it. Dymitr and Ala both jerk back at the same time. As the rusalka’s head rolls toward Ala, the man, the leaves, and the birch trees all disappear. The Thorndale platform takes their place just as a train pulls into the station.

  Ala watches the late-night commuters step out of the cars—just two of them, a woman in blue scrubs and a man still wearing his warmest coat, unzipped over a worn sweater. The old woman with the suitcase waddles onto the train. The doors close; the commuters descend to the street; the train pulls away from the platform.

  They’re alone.

  Dymitr’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, hard.

  “You see memories,” he says roughly.

  He doesn’t ask who the man was, and how he managed to draw a sword from his spine as if it were a sheath. That means he must already know who the Holy Order are. She tastes something sour. He seems friendly enough—certainly none of them, or anyone aligned with them, would ever speak to someone like her as if she’s an equal, as he does—but maybe he’s called on them before, just to rid his neighborhood of something pesky. It wouldn’t surprise her. Humans are always talking out of both sides of their mouths.

  “Maybe they’re memories,” she says, shrugging. “Maybe they’re hallucinations. I don’t know, and I don’t particularly care. What matters is, they’re bloody, and they fill my every waking moment. So take a moment to consider whether you’re toying with me or not, because if you are, I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m not.” She’s not sure a mortal has ever spoken to her that gently before.

  “Well, I don’t know how to find Baba Jaga, let alone how to get her to meet with some random human,” she says. “So now what? You have a fern flower and no leads.”

  “You don’t know anyone who might be able to help us?” He raises his eyebrows. “Can’t get me into a place I could never otherwise go?”

  Ala sighs.

  As it happens, she can.

  “How long will that thing live?” she says, nodding toward his right pocket.

  “Thirty-six hours before it’s no longer useful to us,” he says. “Why?”

  “I have an idea,” she says. “And it’s five hours until sunrise, so we might still be able to pull it off if we get moving.”

  * * *

  She sends a series of texts as Dymitr summons a ride with his several-generations-old iPhone. She doesn’t know how he can even read anything on a screen that cracked. But there’s an air of carelessness about him in general: the stretched, misshapen collar of his T-shirt, the fraying ends of his shoelaces, his rumpled hair, his bitten fingernails. As if he hasn’t looked in a mirror in quite some time—or perhaps he has, and he doesn’t care about what he sees.

  “Why is it called the ‘Crow Theater’?” Dymitr asks her. “Some Poe reference?”

  Ala shakes her head. “It’s from that saying. ‘When among crows, you must caw as they do.’ Because we’re supposed to fit in among mortals. Mimic them.”

  “Cheeky,” Dymitr says. “Considering they’re the ones who compare you to crows. And ravens. And—”

  “Stoats, yeah,” Ala says. “Klara thinks it’s funny.”

  Her phone buzzes, and she glances at the new message. You’re in. But hurry up.

  Luckily, at that moment a puttering Honda pulls up to the curb in front of Dymitr, and he ducks his head in to check that it’s theirs. Ala slides in after him, and sneezes. It smells like old cigarettes, stale french fries, and a pine-scented air freshener, so potently that when she meets the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, she can hardly smell the sugary nervousness he emits. She gives him a broad smile, the kind that tends to make mortals uneasy, and the sweet smell of his fear surges into her nose. Her mouth waters.

  She glances at Dymitr, who’s watching her like he knows exactly what she’s doing. He rolls his eyes.

  “You’re going all the way to … uh, Ninety-Second?” the driver says, frowning at the phone fixed to his dashboard. “Didn’t even know the streets went up that high.”

  “Well,” Ala says. “You should get out more.”

  The driver pulls onto Lake Shore Drive, which will take them south all the way past downtown, past Hyde Park, and right up to the invisible line that divides Illinois from Indiana. On the Illinois side of the line is an old warehouse that makes containers—bottles, cans, jars, and the like—during the day. At night, though, it’s something different.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Dymitr asks.

  “South Chicago,” she says. “Where the old steel mill used to be. There’s still a factory there.”

  “And we’re going there … why?”

  She glances at the rearview mirror to see if the driver is paying attention. He is, but when he meets her eyes, he turns up the radio. Music pulses so loud it rattles the car windows.

  “You’ll see,” she says, loud enough for Dymitr to hear her.

  They coast along the lakefront with the road to themselves. Moonlight reflects off the water, jagged from the waves. In the distance, the band of light around the top of the Sears Tower glows blue in honor of Father’s Day.

  “Do you speak Polish?” Dymitr asks her.

  “Do you know what a strzyga is?” she asks in return.

  Dymitr hesitates, likely for the sake of the driver—but Ala isn’t concerned about the driver thinking they’re mad, or even less likely, believing whatever they say about monsters in the streets of Chicago. Dymitr seems to make the same calculation, because he answers:

  “Like a vampire, right?” He grins, and she can’t tell whether he’s messing with her or not.

  “No,” she says. “And if that’s what you think, we should call this whole thing off right the fuck now—”

  “Relax,” he says. “Yes, I know what they are. Not vampires. Much worse than vampires.” He taps the guitar case held between his knees with one finger. “And there’s no guitar in here.”

  That’s no surprise, though she wonders what is in there.

  “Good.” She sits back, and chews her thumbnail. A few minutes pass before she remembers that he asked her a question.

  “No,” she says. “I never learned to speak Polish.”

  “Your mother didn’t teach you?”

  Most zmora are women, so it’s a safe assumption that her mother would have been the one to teach her. But Ala’s mother had resented being forced to learn it by her own mother, who used to slap her knuckles with a ruler if she didn’t use the Polish words for things, and she hadn’t wanted to inflict the same hardship on her daughter. Ala had grown up with the ache of not knowing it—not knowing where she was from, or what she was, really, as a result.

  There are, of course, zmory from other places. They go by other names: lamia in Greek, pesanta in Spanish, dab tsog in Hmong. Even some of her Dryja cousins wear features from other places, their skin umber and russet and sable instead of pale and freckled like her own. But most of them still know how their family came here, and why, and how to speak to the Dryja leaders in their own language. Among them, Ala still feels twinges of loneliness that she tries to ignore. She feels it now, with Dymitr, though he’s no zmora.

  “No,” she says. “She sang to me sometimes, though. One song in particular. A Christmas song—Gdy się Chrystus … something.”

  Dymitr grins.

  “‘Gdy się Chrystus rodzi’?” he says.

  “Maybe. Probably. She used to laugh during the third verse, and I don’t know why.”

  The driver’s music fades for a moment between songs, with just a late-night DJ chattering through the speakers. She hears Dymitr singing, his voice creaky but mostly on key: “Powiedzcież wyraźniej co nam czynić trzeba … bo my nic nie pojmujemy … Ledwo od strachu żyjemy…”

  Ala can’t help but laugh.

  “That’s it,” she says. “Can you translate it?”

  “I think … ‘Say more clearly what we must do, because we don’t understand anything. We hardly live … from fear.’”

  She snorts a little. “Well. She always did have a dark sense of humor.” She glances at him. “She was hardly living because of fear, too.”

  His expression is grave for a moment, and then lightens. “I didn’t know your people celebrated Christmas.”

  “Not everyone who celebrates Christmas believes in it,” she points out. “But yes, my mother, like many of my people, was Catholic, likely to the horror of the Holy Order. Some of my people are Protestant, or Jewish, or Muslim, too. But why does that surprise you? Didn’t you find that flower in a church?”