“You can open them now!” Niko says. “And I’d recommend an illusion in—Well, now.”

  Ala’s vision is crowded with dark patches from her brief glimpse of the fingernail, but when she looks over her shoulder, she sees a few strzygi toppling out of the room where they just were, squinting. She doesn’t have time to refine an illusion, to master its details. She just creates an image of three moving shadows climbing the stairs, and another three shadows running down the hallway to their left. Niko leads them down the hallway on the right.

  She gets brief glimpses of the rooms they pass: another sitting room; a smaller boxing ring stacked with pads, for practice; an office with a padded chair and a closed laptop; a supply closet full of liquor bottles; a wine cellar. The creaky wood beneath her shoes gives way to plain concrete again, and she smells rot as well as mildew—the lake. She heard once that they closed the beaches because the E. coli levels of the lake got too high, causing her to wonder just how high they were on an average weekend, and why anyone would ever swim in Lake Michigan while that information was readily available—

  Dymitr holds his bloody hand against his chest, and his guitar case bumps against his shoulders with each running footstep. He looks pale and clammy, but more focused than Ala feels, than she thinks she could ever be with a pack of strzygi on her heels.

  Niko hits a door at the end of the hallway shoulder first, and it opens to a set of cracked and mossy stairs, and the taste of the night air, which Ala picks apart without even thinking about it: mud, garbage, exhaust, grass, gravel. Without even knowing if there’s anyone behind them, she sends illusory figures tumbling in every direction, like ants spilling out of a ruined anthill. Dymitr blinks at them, and she grabs his elbow, dragging him along.

  “Don’t get distracted,” she snaps, and they both chase Niko across the parking lot.

  Where a group of strzygi wait for them.

  * * *

  The first time Ala’s mother ever talked to her about the curse, she had been afflicted by it for a year already, seeing phantoms every morning where there were none, rambling about snow getting in her boots even though it was August, and making Ala’s aunt—not really her aunt, but her mother’s closest friend—fuss over her until her mind cleared, typically sometime around noon.

  Her mother sat at the kitchen table, which was rickety and round and salvaged from an alley a few blocks away from them. Ala had wedged a piece of cardboard under one of the legs to keep it from wobbling, but it wobbled anyway. Her mother stirred honey into her tea—chamomile, to relax her—with a dazed expression. Ala cradled a mug of coffee to her chest and worked on that day’s crossword.

  “I know how it seems,” her mother said, still stirring her tea. Her eyes were focused on the center of the table. “Like I am going mad.”

  “Mom, that isn’t—”

  “You are very careful not to say so.” Her mother’s eyes were a dull blue. Almost gray, sometimes, in certain lights. “You are too careful of me, I think. Do you think I can’t tell that you are afraid of me now?”

  She sniffed, as if to make her point.

  “You smell like a fucking bakery,” she said, and Ala’s face warmed. She went on: “So. Let us get the truth out there. They are not delusions. I know they aren’t real, when I’m inside them.”

  “Oh,” Ala said, setting her pencil down. “What … what is it you see, exactly?”

  Her mother shrugged. Her nightgown slipped off her shoulder, exposing a freckled collarbone and the little round scar on her upper arm from the smallpox vaccine.

  She swept her palm across the center of the table, and a scene appeared. Ala’s mother was gifted with small, detailed illusions that reminded her of dioramas or model train sets. She couldn’t immerse you in them, but she could show the whole picture at once, something that always made Ala a little envious.

  On the table before them was what looked like a Christmas landscape: a little house on a snow-covered hill that poked up from a dark forest. It was nighttime, and the moonlight turned the snow blue-white.

  As Ala watched, two men on horseback rode through the trees toward the house. Only one light was on inside it, a warm and unsteady glow that reminded Ala of a lantern or a hearth fire. She could see one of the riders by its light when he passed in front of the house.

  Even though he was small, no larger than a china doll, she could still see that his palms were stained the deep red of the Holy Order.

  The Knight dismounted and drew his sword, which was fascinating to watch from this distance. The hilt was buried in his flesh, like his spine was bulging from his body. He had to dig into his skin to loosen it, which he did with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times before. But she could see the agony of it nonetheless, his red-stained hands shuddering, his tiny teeth gritted.

  He drew it, then dragged it across his arm hard enough to draw blood, and said something in Polish that Ala didn’t understand.

  Then the birds came. They were crows, but larger and fiercer than their natural brethren, cursed to serve the will of the one who summoned them. In miniature as they were, they reminded Ala of a swarm of flies, black and clustered together. The other Knight broke a window with an axe, and the birds flew into the open space he created, filling the house with wings and beaks.

  Ala saw a face in the window. A woman’s face, her hair bedraggled from sleep. She pounded on the glass, and Ala couldn’t understand what she said, but she assumed it was a plea for help. A moment later, her face disappeared beneath the windowsill.

  Ala lifted her gaze to her mother’s. The tiny illusion disappeared.

  “I see only the Holy Order,” her mother said. “Again and again, as they kill our kind, our strzygi brethren, our wraith cousins, everyone. It’s like watching a horror movie I can’t look away from. Those swords. Their empty eyes. Their unnatural magic. Half-souled beasts.”

  She bowed her head. Her cheeks looked sunken.

  “It is killing me,” she said. “Just as it killed my mother. Just as it will kill you, one day. This curse lives in our blood, Ala, and it cannot be stopped.”

  Ala sometimes wished her mother could soften things for her, just a little. But she wouldn’t—or more accurately, she couldn’t. She didn’t know how to live in a world that wasn’t straightforward. She had, for all her zmora talents, no patience for illusions.

  Ala stopped doing the crossword after that.

  * * *

  There’s a breath of stillness as Niko spots the strzygi who are waiting for them. He slows, keeping Ala and Dymitr behind him.

  “Now, now,” he says. “Let’s all be reasonable.”

  Ala sees something out of the corner of her eye that looks almost like one of her illusions. But she sent them running toward the river, the lake, the nearby road. This shadow is stationary, standing too far away to be more than a dark shape even to Ala’s sharp eyes.

  “Reasonable?” one of the strzygi spits. “You just attacked—”

  “I did no such thing,” Niko argues.

  “He has the fern flower,” one of the others says. “Take it from him and dispose of him!”

  Niko tilts his head as if he’s considering this. Ala sees movement again, this time from the shadow by the water. The shine of a knife. A sharp jerking movement, both familiar and sinister in its familiarity.

  “No, I don’t think I will,” Niko says, but Ala barely hears him over the distant flutter, the croaking call that coasts over the sound of the waves, the cars, the low music of the boxing ring.

  She knows that sound.

  She raises her head to see a dark cloud of movement above her. And then she tastes it in the back of her throat, feather and blood, one of the visions that haunts her again and again thanks to the curse that courses through her veins. In it, a flock of enchanted crows summoned by Knights of the Holy Order descend on the house in the country. They surround a woman in her living room as she pounds on her window.

  They peck out her eyes.

  Ala drops to her knees on the pavement right as the birds descend. It’s instinct more than analysis that creates the illusion: she sends dozens of shimmering lights across the parking lot, little glinting things that will draw the birds’ attention. She hears screams, and something clatters to the ground beside her: the needle-nose pliers that Niko used to pull out Dymitr’s fingernail.

  She grabs them, maintaining the illusions, and stabs upward as a bird dives at her head. Dymitr is nowhere to be seen—probably ran at the first sign of danger, not that she can blame him. Beside her, Niko has shifted, huge black wings dappled with white stretching wide to lift him from the ground, his bronze eyes unchanged, though his face is now that of a stygian owl, horned and fierce.

  Ala swats at a bird that flaps too close to her ear, and hits another one with the side of the pliers, hard enough to knock it off course. Everywhere is the croak and caw of crows, and the glint of sleek black feathers in the moonlight.

  Across the parking lot she hears a clang as the bouncer disappears inside the factory, slamming the door behind her. The other strzygi have either gone inside or scattered, leaving only Niko and Ala to fend off the flock—the fucking murder of enchanted, bloodthirsty crows.

  She lets instinct guide her, and sends shadows sprinting in every direction, like ripples radiating out from the focal point of her. The crows collide as they pursue different versions of her, and she stabs another one with the pliers. Beside her, Niko has his wicked sharp beak buried in the throat of one bird while he snatches another out of the air.

  But there are still dozens more where those came from, and the air is thick with black feathers. Though she doesn’t pause to look at him, she can see Niko in her periphery, a fiercer fighter than she’s ever seen; he dives and claws with ruthless efficiency, felling four birds to her one. She spares a second to wonder about Dymitr, her clawless hands digging into a crow’s inexplicably moist feathers, when an arrow whizzes past her face and buries in a distant bird’s belly.

  She hears another arrow, and another one, and finally looks over her shoulder to see Dymitr with a bow and quiver. Seems she’s finally solved the mystery of what he’s carrying instead of a guitar. He draws from the quiver again and again with the ease of someone who mastered the art a long time ago. She takes note of the focus in his eyes for just a moment before she stoops to yank an arrow out of a fallen bird, then wields it like a knife, slashing at the next one to dive at her.

  A minute or so later—thanks in no small part to Dymitr’s rapid and accurate projectiles—the birds have thinned. Niko lands on light feet and shifts back, wiping his sleeve over his blood-soaked mouth.

  “Come on!” he shouts, and he runs toward one of the cars in the parking lot, an impractical cloth-top Jeep Wrangler with duct tape patching up one of the back windows.

  Ala spares a look at Dymitr, who is now lowering his bow, but there’s no discussion. They both follow.

  6

  AN INTERLUDE

  Niko reaches across Ala, sitting in the passenger seat, to take a pack of cigarettes out of the glove box. One sticky, bloody hand on the wheel, he opens the pack, tucks a cigarette between his lips, and reaches for the lighter in the cup holder. Ala gets there first, rolling her eyes as she sparks the flame to life for him.

  He leaves red fingerprints on the edge of the cigarette that he tastes every time he takes a drag, but it doesn’t matter. His mouth is full of the remnants of bird anyway. It’s disgusting, but he’s good at redirecting his thoughts. He has to be, doing what he does with his time.

  The car isn’t his. He’s borrowing it from his mortal cousin, Janek, who doesn’t appear to realize that he lives in one of the chillier cities in America. He also installed an aboveground pool in his backyard a few years back. Niko has an assortment of stupid cousins like Janek—when a strzyga has a son, he usually comes out human, which is why there are so few like Niko in existence. So on the fringes of the Kostka family, there are always a handful of men, relegated to less central roles such as “bouncer” and “bodyguard” and “maintenance worker.”

  The window on his side of the monstrosity is unzipped, letting in cool air and the sound of cars rushing past them, traveling in the opposite direction. There are always people out, even when night is turning to morning, as it’s now doing.

  “Well,” he says, once he feels calm. “That was a lot of birds.”

  Ala and Dymitr both make the same sound: a little grunt of assent.

  “Anyone care to explain how we were just attacked by that many birds?” Niko asks, with the tone of a kindergarten teacher nagging a classroom of unfocused students.

  “They were summoned,” Ala says. “I saw the one who did it.”

  “You saw them?” Dymitr replies.

  “Not … in detail,” Ala says. “But I saw someone standing near the river, and they…” She frowns, and makes a jerking motion with her arm. “I’m not sure what they were doing.”

  “Blood ritual,” Dymitr says.

  Niko considers this for a moment, then guides the car into a gas station. The gas tank is full, but he believes in safe driving, and what he’s about to do doesn’t qualify.

  He flicks his cigarette out the window and fumbles under his seat for the knife he keeps there. Once it’s secure in his hand, he reaches back and holds the blade to Dymitr’s throat.

  “What the fuck?” Ala says.

  Dymitr goes still.

  “How do you know that?” Niko says.

  Dymitr knows a flock of enchanted birds was summoned by a blood ritual, which means he possesses more than basic knowledge about the Holy Order, the only ones who do such rituals. Bloody, masochistic rituals that force the sacrifice that magic requires.

  He can feel Dymitr’s skin burning into the backs of his fingers where they’re curled around the knife handle. The unsteady movement of his swallow.

  “You know a great deal about the Holy Order,” Niko says, when Dymitr doesn’t respond. “There’s no point in denying it.”

  “I’m not denying it,” Dymitr says. “I’m just not sure why it’s any of your business what I know.”

  “Considering I just saved your life from a pack of strzygi that would have murdered you for the flower you’re keeping in your pocket, I’d say it’s a little bit my business.”

  “I don’t recall asking you to do that.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Ala says, slamming her hand down on the dashboard. She twists around to look at Dymitr. “Do you really think that you can get an audience with Baba Jaga without answering anyone’s questions about you?”

  Dymitr stares back at her, steady.

  “The only way mortal men know that much about the Holy Order is because they’ve summoned them to kill one of us,” Ala says, her voice going uncharacteristically soft. “Please tell me that’s not how you know them.”

  “Of course not,” Dymitr says, and Ala relaxes a fraction.

  Niko’s arm is starting to ache from holding the knife to Dymitr’s throat, so he lets it drop, but doesn’t put it away.

  Dymitr chews on his lower lip. He still has a handkerchief tied around his right pinkie. His bow and arrows are back in his guitar case, leaning against his knee.

  “I want an audience with Baba Jaga,” Dymitr says, “because I want to destroy a member of the Holy Order, and I lack the ability to do it on my own.”

  Niko wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he didn’t expect … that.

  “Why?” Ala says, quiet.

  “You can choose to believe me, or you can choose not to believe me,” Dymitr says. “But that’s all I’m going to tell you, regardless.”

  Niko stares at Dymitr, aware of the tight feeling of blood dried on his hands, of the smell of sweat emanating from his skin, of the particular sensations of Dymitr’s anger—subtle, too subtle for most strzygi to be interested in, but present nonetheless. He considers, again, why he bothered to stop the others from killing this man. As a rule, Niko doesn’t involve himself in Kostka affairs. His own role is clearly defined. He was set apart before he took his oath, and he’s set apart even further now—one of them, but not one of them.

  But there’s something about him, Dymitr. A kind of clarity that most mortals—hell, most people—don’t possess. He didn’t hesitate for a moment before volunteering himself for pain in Ala’s place. Didn’t seem afraid while standing in Lidia’s private lounge, going head-to-head with the leader of a centuries-old strzyga family. He feels, in short, like someone who’s on a mission, and Niko finds himself wanting to know what that mission is.

  Without a word, Niko drops his knife in the cup holder and shifts the car into drive.

  “As it happens,” Niko says, “I know where we should go next.”

  “We?” Ala says. “You’re helping us now?”

  “I thought that was implied.” Niko pulls back onto the street. “How did you get so good with a bow, Dymitr?”

  “My grandmother taught me,” Dymitr says, which startles a laugh out of Niko.

  “Quite a mental image,” he says. “Some old babushka at target practice.”

  “If you met her,” Dymitr says, looking out the window, “you wouldn’t dare call her that.”

  Niko smiles. “I’m sure.”

  “I have to go,” Ala says suddenly. Her voice is hard and urgent. “Right now.” Her eyes are on the dashboard clock, and then on the rearview mirror, where the glow around the horizon suggests sunrise. “The curse. It surges at dawn. I’ll take a taxi back—”

  “To the north side?” Dymitr says. “You can’t make it all the way back there before dawn.”

  “Well, great, then I guess I’m fucked!”

  “I’ll take us to a safe place,” Niko says, in what he hopes is a reassuring tone. “Just … hold on, okay?”

  * * *

  The Peaceful Journeys Hospice Care Center stands in the southwest side of the city, between a budget grocery store with rogue shopping carts rolling through the parking lot and a Denny’s that was obviously retrofitted into an old White Castle. The logo on the hospice center sign is that of a woman in a long dress, her hair streaming behind her, which is a nod to the center’s owners: the O’Connor-Vasquez family. Banshees. Well, the Irish O’Connors would say ben síde, and the Mexican Vasquezes would prefer llorona—weepers—but it amounts to the same thing.