“I didn’t realize it was planted there in reverence. I’m … aware,” he says carefully, “that the Holy Order uses religion as a kind of cudgel, as so many others have before them. Their name, even. Knights. I just assumed that would turn others away.”

  “I’m sure it has.” Ala shrugs. “But not everyone.” She doesn’t want to think about it anymore, her mother’s creaky voice singing in Polish, the multicolored bulbs on the Christmas tree, so hot they burned her fingers. The times that are lost, now. She changes the subject. “You know, even if you give that flower to me, we still need Baba Jaga to tell us how to cure me. So I’m not getting my hopes up.”

  “But that’s what the song is about,” Dymitr says. “The wild hope for … restitution. Healing. Despite a total lack of understanding. We could basically just sing it to Baba Jaga, minus the ‘gloria’s.” Dymitr turns toward the window to watch the tall buildings of Chicago’s downtown pass them by. “You shouldn’t lose hope, Ala. Our people never do. We’re foolish that way.”

  “Are you saying I inherited this foolishness?” she says. “That’s sort of a relief, actually. I thought it was a condition unique to me.”

  His smile fades a little, and he nods.

  “Keep your hopes up, Aleksja,” he says. “Disappointed hopes won’t be any worse than what awaits you now.”

  He has a point.

  * * *

  The driver leaves them in the dark, right off Lake Shore Drive where it follows the bend in the Calumet River and then merges with Harbor Avenue. He gave them both an uneasy look before driving away, and no wonder. The only thing between them and the wasteland of the old steel mill buildings is a newer, redbrick structure. The container factory, still operational.

  The only sign that all is not as it should be is the parking lot, packed with cars, and the faint music playing inside.

  “What is this place?” Dymitr asks.

  “This whole area used to be the steel mill,” she says. “For a long time, when immigrants came here, this is where they worked. Now it’s all empty except for this factory. Factory by day, anyway—at night, a boxing club run by the Kostkas.”

  “The Kostkas,” Dymitr says. “That’s the big strzygi family, right?”

  She nods.

  “And they come here, why? They love the atmosphere?”

  “The city owes this place a debt,” she says. “These workers—not just our people, people from all over the world—made the beams that hold up the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building. They poured their sweat into the mill, and none of them got much in return. Derision, mostly, for their trouble. Then when the mill closed, they had nothing.”

  “Ah,” Dymitr says. “So there’s a lot of space for magic here.”

  She nods. “I need you to play along with whatever I say. Even if you don’t like it. Can you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go, then, or we’ll be late,” she says. “Listen—there’s going to be a lot of … different sorts in there. You’ll be one of the only humans. If you fuck around, they’ll kill you, and I’ll let it happen. Got it?”

  “Ala,” he says, his eyes locking on hers. “Yes.”

  They walk along the first row of cars, which are finer and more polished the closer they get to the door. Ala runs her finger along the hood of an old, well-kept Mercedes—a boxy E-class from the early ’90s. Then she shoves her hands in her pockets and walks up to the bouncer.

  The bouncer is a Kostka cousin—at least, Ala thinks so. Tall and sturdy in a hot-pink puffer jacket. She snaps bubble gum between her teeth as she eyes Ala.

  “It’s creature night,” she says. “So you should leave your little pet in the car.”

  She crooks a finger at Dymitr, still not really looking at him. Her fingernail is long and acid green. Strzygi fingernails are matte black, like bird talons, so most strzygi paint them.

  “He’s oświecony,” Ala says. “A cousin.”

  “We’re almost at capacity.”

  “Well, I was told to hurry, and I’m fighting,” Ala says. “Which, last time I checked, means I can bring somebody in to mop up my blood.”

  The strzyga narrows her eyes at Dymitr. They’re inky black. Owl eyes.

  “What’s in the case?” she asks him.

  “A banjo,” he replies. “Do you know how to dance the Krakowiak? I could play for you.”

  The strzyga purses her lips, obviously not amused. But she waves them both toward the door. It’s patchy with rust, and it feels hollow when Ala opens it, lighter than it should be.

  “Please tell me you don’t actually know that dance,” Ala says to Dymitr.

  “Only if you tell me you aren’t actually going to require me to mop up your blood,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

  She keeps walking. She can’t tell him that.

  Beyond the door is a cramped entryway, blocked off from the factory floor by flimsy temporary walls and a cluttered desk stacked with paper. Ala walks past it, toward the thrum of the music.

  “You can’t be serious,” Dymitr says. “You’re really going to fight?”

  “How else did you think we were going to get in here?” she says, scowling back at him. “I’m a zmora, and an unimportant one at that. I don’t get regular invitations to this place.”

  Past the temporary walls is a wide-open floor. The equipment—to make the containers, Ala assumes—is pushed up against the walls, a tangle of metal ducts and plates and platforms. She assumes this was done by magic, because there are no outlines on the floor to show where the huge pieces of machinery used to go, and not a scrap of material litters the concrete.

  In the middle of the floor where the machinery used to be is a boxing ring, square and blue with black ropes, with a cluster of lights hanging overhead to illuminate it. The rest of the room is dim, with rows of seats arranged around the ring and a wet bar along the far wall.

  The room is full of creatures. Ala and Dymitr walk past a cluster of strzygi, recognizable by their yellow, glinting eyes; an alkonost, with her wings tucked against her back and her long, straight hair in a braid; a row of banshees, their big, dark eyes alighting on Dymitr right away, like he called them by name; a handful of czorts, their short, stubby horns uncovered. Ala shivers as they walk past a wraith in the form of a ghostly boy with one skeletal hand.

  She spots the chalkboard where the fights are listed, and she’s startled to find the word “zmora” at the top. She’s the first fight of the night.

  “Shit,” she says. “I have to find the Pitmaster.”

  Dymitr is clutching the straps of his guitar case and emitting a faintly sweet smell, like a dusting of powdered sugar. She thinks it’s wariness rather than true fear, and again she wonders at it. She’s never met a mortal who could be in a room of strzygi without swallowing his heartbeat.

  She leads the way to a tall woman standing next to the boxing ring. She has dark hair, umber skin, and eyes set a little too close together. Her look of appraisal makes Ala stand up a little straighter.

  “I’m the zmora,” she says, nodding toward the board. “First match.”

  “Niko said you would surprise me,” the woman says, in the hoarse, dry voice common to strzygi. She narrows her eyes. “He had better be right.”

  The woman picks up a clipboard resting on the bench behind her and checks off the square next to the word “zmora”—everyone knows not to give their names here. Ala stares at the word scribbled next to it, the one for her opponent:

  STRZYGA (1).

  “Shit,” Ala says under her breath, as she steps away from the Pitmaster. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Niko?” Dymitr says, in a low voice. “Did she mean Nikodem Kostka?”

  “I see my reputation precedes me,” a low, amused voice says from behind them.

  4

  A VALUABLE INGREDIENT

  Nikodem Kostka is startling. Of all the strzygi that Dymitr has seen—and he’s seen more in the last five minutes than he had in his entire life up to this point—Nikodem is the one that most closely resembles a bird of prey. His eyes are a luminous bronze, catching the light like a flame is flickering behind them. He looks at Dymitr like he’s spotted a mouse in the grass to hunt.

  “Niko,” Ala says, with a nervous smile. “It’s not you I’m fighting, is it?”

  “Not tonight,” Niko says. “Who have you brought with you?”

  Dymitr wants to back away. Ala’s nostrils flare, the telltale sign that he’s radiating fear strong enough for her to smell, maybe even taste. He’s glad Niko can’t do the same. Strzygi eat anger, not fear—hence the aggression fostered by the boxing club.

  “His name is Dymitr,” Ala says.

  “Spoilsport,” Niko says to her, grinning. His dark hair and light brown skin suggest that his father, unlike his mother, was not Polish—not uncommon among strzygi in America, where people from all different places have sought refuge … even if not all of them found it.

  “I don’t have time for a protracted argument about names,” Ala snaps. “I have to prepare for this.” She gestures to the boxing ring behind them. “Thank you for getting me in on such short notice.”

  “Of course,” Niko says. “Though I notice you’re still not telling me why.”

  “After.” Ala runs her tongue along her bottom lip, obviously a nervous habit. “If I survive.”

  “Your opponent may be a strzyga, but she’s also an idiot. You’ll be fine,” Niko says. “I’ll take care of your guest.”

  He lays a long-fingered hand on the back of Dymitr’s neck, curling his fingertips so Dymitr feels the edge of his thick, sharp fingernails—worn unpainted, so they’re as black as claws.

  Dymitr tenses. His instinct is to throw Niko off him with as much force as he can muster, but the whole reason Ala is fighting is to get him into a place he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to go—so that he can talk to people he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to find, let alone engage. He needs to choose his battles.

  “Come on,” Niko says. “If you sit by me, you’ll have a better view.”

  He presses Dymitr forward, and Dymitr concedes, walking at Nikodem Kostka’s side around the edge of the boxing ring to the first row of seats on the other side. He notices, as they pass a crowd of strzygi, that they withdraw from Niko as if he has a plague they don’t want to catch. His spare mouth curls into a sharp little smile, scorn and amusement tangled together.

  “Sit,” Niko says to Dymitr, and he pushes him down.

  Dymitr glares at him, but he sits.

  Niko grins. “You’re so easy to irritate.”

  “Only by you, it seems.”

  “Lucky me.” Niko sits beside him. “What did you come here looking for, Dymitr?”

  “I came to see Ala,” Dymitr says.

  “Liar.” Niko stretches an arm across the back of Dymitr’s chair. “Magic is humming around you like an aura. It’s making my fingertips prickle.” He snaps his fingers, as if to prove it. “But you still seem painfully ordinary.”

  “I don’t find it painful to be ordinary.”

  This startles a laugh from Niko. Dymitr notices that though most of the crowd in the room has settled into the chairs arranged around the boxing ring, the seat to his right, the seat to Niko’s left, and the seats behind them are all empty.

  “I have a question for you,” Dymitr says, in a low voice, leaning closer to Niko’s ear.

  Niko stills, staring at him with his eyes like lit embers.

  “Why do your own people fear you?” Dymitr asks.

  Niko smiles, but Dymitr doesn’t know how he would have answered, because a woman is walking into the center of the boxing ring. She’s freckled, with big, sad eyes, and wears a black gown that makes her look like a soprano in an opera. A moment later, when she clasps her hands over her belly and begins to sing, he thinks that effect was deliberate.

  She’s a banshee—that’s the most frequently used terminology, at least. Her voice makes that obvious enough, but he isn’t sure what purpose she serves here. As far as he knows, banshees feast on sorrow the way the zmory feast on fear, and they have the power to provoke sorrow, too, drawing it from the deepest parts of a person at will. These three types of creatures—the zmora, the strzyga, and the llorona, or banshee—represent a trifecta, each consuming one of the primary negative emotions. The picture his Chicago informant painted was one of a kind of underground network of emotion farming, of which the Crow Theater, the boxing ring, and the banshees’ small franchise of hospice facilities was just a fraction. The families at the head of those “farms” are the Dryjas, the Kostkas, and the O’Connor-Vasquezes, respectively. This particular banshee has auburn hair and freckles he assumes come from the O’Connors, but the women across the boxing ring, with their dark eyes and shiny black hair, seem to favor the Vasquezes.

  But they wouldn’t have invited a banshee to sing as a prelude to a boxing match if all she could do was make everyone feel sad. As her unearthly voice climbs to a piercing high, he grits his teeth, unsure what to expect. She soars over the highest note, and it vibrates in Dymitr’s skull, as if it’s turned him into glass that’s about to break. And break he does, silently, the walls he’s placed around his emotions crumbling all at once. Feeling spills through him, rage and sorrow and terror, frustration and regret and dread. The singing banshee fixes her stare on him, and he closes his eyes, his hands in fists against his knees.

  “Well,” Niko says, as the song comes to a gentle close. “That was interesting.”

  He sounds sluggish, almost like he’s drunk. Dymitr doesn’t answer. He’s too busy reconstructing what the banshee destroyed. By the time he gathers himself, the fight is starting.

  “Almost no one bet on her, you know,” Niko says, nodding toward Ala, now ducking under the ropes and looking even more wan than usual. “Zmory aren’t known for being good fighters. Good at escaping, more like. Or fucking with you.”

  Ala peels off her zip-up and hangs it over the ropes. Under it, she wears the plain gray T-shirt from Toil and Trouble, the one with the sleeves sawed off. She looks broader here than she did there, the bright light showcasing definition in her shoulders. She takes off the rings she wears and tucks them in her pocket.

  Her opponent is a Kostka strzyga with a nose that looks like it’s been broken more than once. Her long, dark hair is in a braid, and she has a faint overbite that makes her mouth look like a beak.

  “What do you actually know about Ala, beyond the fact that she’s a zmora?” Niko asks.

  “What do you know?”

  “I know a person isn’t a species.”

  Dymitr frowns. “Do you think I’m not aware of that?”

  “You might try to be,” Niko says. “But the truth is, you’ve met too few of her kind to know what about her is zmora and what about her is just her.” He tilts his head. “Am I wrong?”

  Ala faces the strzyga—who’s fighting under the name “Teresa,” though Dymitr is sure that’s a pseudonym, given how paranoid everyone seems to be about giving their name—and somewhere in the warehouse, a bell goes off. Teresa launches herself at Ala with enthusiasm, all the speed and strength of her kind evident in the sure, fast movement.

  Ala, in response, simply … shrinks.

  Of course, she can’t actually shrink—zmory aren’t shapeshifters—but the illusion is so perfect that she appears to. A child stands in her place, small and thin with scabby knees.

  “Pretty please,” the child says, her voice reedy. “Don’t hurt me, please!”

  The strzyga falters, blinking at the child, who steps toward her with arms outstretched. The momentary hesitation costs her, because as the child moves, it seems to grow, stretching grotesquely until Ala is standing in front of her again, punching her in the face.

  The crowd gasps as one, and Ala slips away.

  “You’re not wrong. I haven’t met many zmory,” Dymitr says, then. “So tell me about her.”

  “Well, most zmory aren’t quite that good at illusions,” Niko says with a laugh.

  Teresa stumbles back, the velvet ropes catching her, and licks blood from the corner of her mouth. Ala grins at her, and Teresa lunges, her face shifting into that of a bird.

  Every strzyga has a sowa form, an owl-like shape that they can move into at will. Teresa’s is a snowy owl, the rim of her yellow eyes stark, only a hint of black dappling the top of her head. Wings explode from her back, wide and white, and her fingernails grow into true talons. With a screech, she launches herself into the air, lands on Ala, and bites down at the juncture between Ala’s neck and shoulder.

  “Ala helped a friend of mine once,” Niko says casually, like they aren’t both watching Ala’s shirt turn bright red with blood. “He was fighting off some Holy Order scum, defending a young zmora—one of the Dryja cousins, I think—and though Aleksja was young at the time, she had this skill—”

  Ala screams, and grabs Teresa’s wing, wrenching it to the side hard enough to make Teresa release her. Then she disappears.

  It’s a far more advanced illusion than it appears, Dymitr thinks. It requires Ala to re-create the details of the boxing ring exactly, but without her body inside of it, and to project those details not just to Teresa, but to everyone in the room.

  He’s never seen anything like it.

  “She produces extremely detailed illusions,” Niko continues. “In this case, she made the Knight think he was covered in something—spiders, I think—and he was so distracted he gave my friend a chance to run away, young Dryja cousin in tow. She saved his life.”

  Teresa, her face still an owl’s, looks around the arena, confused by the sudden disappearance of her opponent. Dymitr only has time to observe a faint depression in the boxing ring floor and a shadow Ala didn’t quite manage to hide when Ala reappears midair, jumping on Teresa’s back and wrapping one strong arm around her neck.

  Teresa chokes and thrashes, but Ala locks her arms and clamps her knees around Teresa’s ribs. Teresa rams her back into one of the posts at the corner of the arena, and Ala grunts with pain, but doesn’t release her.