“Fucking—zmora—bitch!” Teresa chokes.

  “My friend didn’t survive much longer than that—the Knights are too relentless,” Niko goes on. “But Ala gave him a few weeks he wouldn’t otherwise have had. Bravery and kindness create a debt, and I repay debts, even if they belonged to my fallen friend.”

  Teresa falls back, Ala still wrapped around her like a squid. She falls in such a way that Ala is trapped beneath her; her hold breaks from the force of the fall, and Teresa elbows her hard in the side. Ala rolls away, and everything goes dark.

  This trick, Dymitr recognizes. Klara pulled it on him at the Crow. It seems simple compared to what Ala did last, but then, she just caught an elbow to the ribs. He hears scuffling, a groan, and then the illusion of blackness disappears, like the trip of a light switch. He sees Teresa pinned to the mat in the middle of the boxing ring, with her arm wrenched behind her and Ala’s knee in her back.

  Teresa’s owl face shifts back into her human one, and she slaps the mat, yielding. Ala releases her. Blood streaks her shoulder, but there’s a satisfied look on her face.

  Niko smiles, with teeth.

  “I just made a disgusting amount of money,” he says to Dymitr. “I bet on her.”

  * * *

  Dymitr’s stated purpose in being at the fight is to clean up Ala afterward, so that’s what he does. He asks Niko for a first aid kit, and though Niko doesn’t respond, he turns up with one a few minutes later, setting it down next to Ala on the bench where she sits, recovering. He says something about getting her a beer, and strides away.

  Everywhere he goes, the crowd parts for him.

  “I can handle it,” Ala says to Dymitr as he crouches beside her to bandage her wound.

  “I’m sure you can,” he replies. “But we’re still keeping up appearances, cousin.”

  Rolling her eyes, she tugs the collar of her T-shirt aside to bare the strzyga’s bite. He’s familiar with this procedure: he sanitizes his hands, pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and rips open an antiseptic wipe.

  Ala raises her eyebrows at him.

  “You tend to a lot of bite wounds in your line of work?” she says. “Come to think of it, what is your line of work?”

  “I’m unemployed at the moment,” he answers. “But as it happens, I grew up with a half-wild dog and a sister who couldn’t help but provoke it to bite her.”

  He thinks of Elza sitting on the kitchen counter with her arm stuck out, her legs swinging. She didn’t understand, even after the third incident, that she shouldn’t try to take Borys’s bone away.

  “German shepherd?” Ala guesses.

  “Pomeranian,” he says, dabbing her wound with the antiseptic. She laughs, and for just a moment, she’s Elza in the yellow-tiled kitchen, laughing at one of his horrible jokes.

  “If you’d ever met a Pomeranian, you wouldn’t think it was so funny,” he says, and he presses a clean square of gauze to the juncture of her shoulder and neck. She holds it there while he fastens it with tape.

  She seems tired, sweaty, and bruised, but otherwise unharmed. He comes to his feet just as the Pitmaster approaches them.

  “You’ve been summoned,” the strzyga says, tossing her curly black hair over one shoulder to gesture to the back corner. Dymitr can’t see what she’s trying to show them, but zmora eyes must be sharper, because Ala nods.

  “You and the human both,” the strzyga adds, without looking at Dymitr.

  “Fantastic,” Ala says under her breath, once the Pitmaster is out of hearing distance.

  “What is it?” he says.

  “Good news for you, I think,” Ala says. “The head of the Kostka family wants to meet you.”

  * * *

  Lidia Kostka looks middle-aged, which for a strzyga means she must be very old indeed. Her hair is copper in color and styled in a finger-waved bob straight from the 1920s—and she may have been wearing it that way since then. Her face is a sickly color, and her eyebrows are so fine and pale she almost seems to lack them entirely. If not for her eyes, she would resemble a wealthy woman from another time—but her eyes. They’re bright yellow and piercing as a shriek. They focus on him from the moment he steps into the room, and he feels them like heat.

  Without thinking, he slides a hand into his pocket to touch the fern flower, safely wrapped in paper. They have one day before it’s no longer useful, and not to use it would be a criminal waste of magic—a waste of the pain that Dymitr gave to attain it.

  The Pitmaster led them here from the boxing ring: away from the factory floor, to the end of a bare hallway where a line of creatures waits for the bathroom, and through a hatch in the floor guarded by a hulking man with a sword who seems to be completely human.

  There was a network of rooms and hallways under the factory, which probably shouldn’t have surprised Dymitr as much as it did. The strzygi wouldn’t have chosen it as a haunt if it were merely a factory.

  The room in which he now finds himself is dim, but elaborately decorated. The far wall is covered in a screen of delicate Art Deco metalwork that he recognizes as distinctly “Chicago” in feeling. Low navy-gray sofas are positioned around the room. A marble-top bar stretches along the right wall. There are little lamps with bright red shades positioned here and there, spots of brightness in the dark. One such lamp stands on a table beside Lidia Kostka, making her hair appear even redder.

  She stays seated as Ala and Dymitr approach her, as do the other Kostka cousins lounging around her. Dymitr notices Niko slipping into the room behind them and sidling up to the bar, casual, as if he were already planning on coming here and the timing is just coincidence.

  Almost all the strzygi in the room are women, and that’s no surprise. Dymitr’s father told him that Chicago was a city ruled by monsters, and all those monsters were women—strzyga, zmora, and llorona, each a legend of wronged women, sinful women, mysterious women. Tragic and powerful figures, all, not to be underestimated.

  Lidia looks Ala up and down, and smiles, faintly.

  “We’ve never had a zmora in our ring before,” Lidia says to her, her voice creaky and weak. The room goes quiet when she speaks, as if everyone is straining to hear her. “I hope you don’t mind my curiosity about you, Aleksja Dryja.”

  “Of course not, proszę pani,” Ala says, stumbling a little over the term of respectful address.

  Lidia laughs, a wheezing little thing.

  “That word falls out of your mouth like you’re spitting out bad food,” she says. “Did your mother tell you anything about your origins?”

  Ala stiffens beside Dymitr.

  “She came here several years after World War Two,” she says. “I don’t know exactly why.”

  “Ah,” Lidia says. “A relatively recent addition to our little community, then.”

  “Not that recent.” Ala sounds terse. She’s taller in reality than she is in Dymitr’s mind. Maybe one seventy-five, or however she says it in feet and inches.

  “The first of us came earlier,” Lidia says. “After the November Uprising. Do you know about the November Uprising?”

  She softens over the words like she’s speaking to a child. Dymitr wonders how old Ala really is. Older than she looks, surely. Zmory age slowly—slower even than strzygi.

  “A little,” Ala says.

  “So, no, then.”

  Ala flushes, and that’s when Dymitr pieces it together: Lidia is making Ala angry on purpose, not simply to embarrass her but also to feed on her emotions. At this point it must be an instinct, so deeply ingrained that she might not even know she’s doing it.

  “Others had taken our country and broken it into pieces,” Lidia says, and all around the room are murmurs of assent, of recollection, or simply echoes of appreciation, it’s hard to say. “They ignored even the smallest bits of our sovereignty that we had carved out for ourselves. This affected our people as much as mortals. And so some of our kind joined the resistance effort. We fought Russian governance, and we lost. So we fled here. We were not the first—or the last—to flee our country to survive. Sometimes it was because we weren’t human, but sometimes it was because we were too human—the wrong religion, during the war, or perhaps the wrong political affiliation, after it. It’s interesting to me that your mother didn’t tell you why she had to leave.”

  Lidia tucks a lock of her red hair behind her ear.

  “She thought of it as a kindness,” Ala says. “She wanted me to have a fresh start in the world. So she didn’t do to me anything that she hated being done to herself. Unfortunately, that included teaching me certain things. Her history. Her language.”

  “I see.” Lidia looks unimpressed, but she doesn’t provoke Ala further. Instead, she asks, “And what became of her?”

  “A curse killed her,” Ala says bluntly. “It then passed to her younger sister, to my cousin, and to me, in turn. I came here in pursuit of a cure.”

  “You came to a strzyga for a cure to a curse?” Lidia smiles. “You are aware, of course, that we can do only small magic, like you?”

  It’s just a quick look that passes between Ala and Dymitr, but it’s enough to catch Lidia’s attention. Before Ala can answer her, Lidia is coming to her feet and moving toward them.

  Lidia is the same height as Ala, but spare as a wraith, willow-limbed and delicate. She folds her hands together in front of her, and stands before Dymitr, her head tilted up so she can look him in the eye.

  “You are no Dryja cousin,” she says to him.

  “No, I’m not,” he replies.

  “What is it you carry, boy?” she asks. She reaches out and pinches the edge of his jacket pocket, but doesn’t reach in. “I saw you touch it as you came in, and now your hand bears its imprint.” She hooks a finger around his thumb, and lifts his hand, as a hunter might display a kill to a room of peers. Dymitr can’t see what she sees, but one of Lidia’s companions on the sofa stands, blinking wonderingly at Dymitr. She’s the banshee from before, he realizes. The one who sang at the beginning of the fight.

  “I see it,” the banshee says softly. Her speaking voice is as musical as her singing voice was, low and clear as a bell. “He was already incandescent with sorrow, but now—”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Lidia says dryly. She releases his hand. “Let me guess. You have something that can help our friend Aleksja here. But you don’t know how to use it. So you likely went to the oldest zmora first, and when she didn’t help you…” Lidia taps her own chest. “Second-best option.”

  “Actually,” he says, “I’m looking for someone older than any of you.”

  The hint of amusement curling Lidia’s mouth disappears. He didn’t even know it was there until it was gone. She was tickled at the idea that they would come seeking her because of her wisdom, born of age, but instead … he’s revealed that she’s just a means to an end. A severe miscalculation on his part.

  “Baba Jaga,” Lidia says, turning away. She sits down on the sofa again.

  “I thought, if anyone might know how to contact her,” he says, “it would be you, proszę pani.”

  “Take note, Aleksja. That’s how you say it,” Lidia says, sliding an arm along the back of the sofa. “I’m not buying it, boy. If I’m correct in thinking it’s the fern flower that you carry—and given the time of year, it seems likely—then you would have had more luck asking the wraith who guarded it. You came here because you had no idea where else to go.”

  A severe miscalculation indeed.

  Dymitr looks at Ala, as if she’ll know something he doesn’t. She sighs.

  “What gift can we offer you?” Ala says. “To communicate our gratitude for your help, before we even receive it?”

  Lidia taps her fingers on the back of the sofa. Her fingernails are filed into neat ovals and painted deep red. She glances at the strzyga to her left, who leans forward to murmur something in her ear.

  “A fine suggestion,” Lidia says to her. She looks at Ala and Dymitr again. “You have a valuable ingredient you want my help with. So you will supply me with a valuable ingredient, and I will consider helping you.”

  “An ingredient,” Dymitr repeats.

  “A gift born of pain,” Lidia says. “A powerful item to aid in healing, if offered willingly.”

  “A gift born of pain. You mean a fingernail?” Ala says. “You want me to pull out one of my own fingernails?”

  Dymitr remembers, suddenly, the cemetery a few miles outside of the town where he grew up. The graves dug up, the corpses untouched in their coffins except for their absent fingernails and teeth. Witches, his grandmother said. A gift willingly given was twice as powerful, but one unwillingly given would still do.

  “You, him, whichever,” Lidia says, shrugging. “Do this, and your sacrifice will create a substance with strong magic. That’s my price.”

  She looks from Ala to Dymitr with her eyebrows raised, expectant. The strzyga who offered the suggestion is grinning. There’s a narrow gap between her front teeth that would be charming if Dymitr didn’t hate her so much.

  “I’ll need a knife,” Dymitr says. “And some pliers.”

  5

  A MURDER MOST FOUL

  Ala feels as if she ought to object, like someone reaching for their wallet at the end of dinner even if they don’t intend to open it. But Dymitr doesn’t seem to expect it. He meets Lidia’s eyes and waits.

  For some reason, Ala isn’t surprised when Niko steps out of the shadows near the bar and tips his head to Lidia in something like a bow.

  “Babcia,” he says.

  “Call me your grandmother again and I’ll cut off your head, zemsta,” Lidia says, but she’s smiling a little. Ala doesn’t recognize the word “zemsta,” but it makes the room smell like warm honey, like wariness. All the strzygi at once, reacting.

  “My apologies,” Niko says. “But I wanted to offer to do the honors myself. It can be a nasty business, this … fingernail pulling. You shouldn’t lower yourself to it.”

  Lidia appears to consider this for a moment.

  “Please,” she says. Niko smiles, and walks out of the room, presumably to fetch a pair of pliers.

  Dymitr, for his part, seems unfazed. Ala can’t detect much more than a faint whiff of sugar-sweet anticipation from him. He stands near the bar as the bartender—a czort with blunt black horns poking out of his hair—sterilizes a penknife using a cigarette lighter. Niko turns up a few minutes later with needle-nose pliers in hand and carries both pliers and penknife over to Dymitr.

  “May I sit?” Dymitr says to Lidia, gesturing to the empty chair across from her. It’s tucked under one of the low tables. At her nod, he pulls it out and sits, holding his hand beneath the red lamp.

  Lidia slides down the sofa, closer to the banshee, and points at the place she just occupied, her eyes on Niko. She looks like she’s getting ready to watch a movie or a dance performance, her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands folded over her belly. Casual.

  “Why the knife?” Niko asks Dymitr, as the latter presses his hand flat on the table and positions the blade over his pinkie finger.

  “If you just yank out a fingernail with pliers, you can damage the nail bed permanently,” Dymitr says. “I’m going to … loosen it.”

  “Wait,” Niko says, before Dymitr can dig in. He gets up and reaches over the bar for a bottle of amber liquor. Whiskey. He pours a shot of it and carries it over to the table. When he sets it down in front of Dymitr, he bends low, close to his ear. “Some mercy for you.”

  “How good of you,” Dymitr says, a hint of sourness in his voice. But he takes the shot, and picks up the knife again.

  Ala considers turning away, but as Dymitr presses the blade steadily into his own fingernail, she finds she can’t. Bright red blood bubbles up around his fingernail as he traces its outline. His hand, his breaths, his eyes—they’re all steady.

  “I feel like you have more than a passing familiarity with this procedure,” Niko comments.

  “My little sister slammed her fingernail in a door once,” Dymitr says. “It was half on, half off. We were in the middle of nowhere and she needed it gone … so my father did exactly this. My job was … to hold her still.”

  He sounds tense, his words punctuated by bursts of breath, but he seems to have a high pain tolerance for a human.

  “Sounds traumatic,” Niko says.

  “She bit me.” Dymitr sets down the penknife to tap a silvery scar on his left forearm. It’s jagged but curved, like teeth. “Time for the pliers.”

  He smells nervous now, like peaches, like strawberries. Ala moves closer without meaning to, drawn in by his fear.

  Niko positions the pliers over the tip of Dymitr’s bloody finger. Their eyes meet.

  Dymitr nods, and Niko pulls.

  Ala can’t stand to look, then. She flinches and turns away at the sound of Dymitr’s yell, muffled by his wrist. She wonders if he’ll leave a bite there to match his little sister’s.

  She turns back in time to see Niko holding Dymitr’s fingernail aloft, still pinched in the pliers. Dymitr, meanwhile, is hunched over, trembling. Blood spatters the floor beneath him.

  Niko offers him a handkerchief, but his eyes are on Ala’s.

  “Cover your eyes,” he says to her. “Now.”

  Ala has just enough time to bring her arm up to her head when Niko flicks his wrist, sending the fingernail flying. It’s just reached its apex when he says, in his rough, deep voice, “Promienny.”

  A brilliant light explodes from the fingernail, and Ala shuts her eyes. A moment later she feels a hand on her wrist.

  “Keep them shut,” Niko’s voice says, and he yanks her toward the door.

  She knows only by her nose that Dymitr is with them, the scent of his fear more potent than she’s detected so far. She smells mildew, too, and she knows she’s in the hallway just outside. She stumbles after Niko, her wrist still captive to his stern grip and her shoulder aching from the strzyga bite she got during the fight.