“You’re afraid,” she says, and she sniffs the air, like she’s trying to determine exactly what kind of fear he’s feeling.

  “Bad dream,” he manages to reply. “You went out?”

  She’s carrying a long, thin box, too big to hold a necklace but too small for anything else he can think of. She lifts the lid and shows him a knife with a sturdy handle.

  “There are zmoras here, too. Klara gave me a name,” she says. “They were helpful.”

  Dymitr’s stomach turns. “And what do you intend to do with a knife?”

  “We’re close to a lot of Knights. I’m not going to stay here unarmed.” She doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “What’s our plan?”

  “We’ll drive out to their house at dusk,” he says, “and then … I have an idea. It’ll keep you out of harm’s way.”

  “Let me guess: it puts you directly into harm’s way, instead.”

  Dymitr holds up his hands in surrender. “It allows us both to keep the other safe. Okay? I just need to work out some of the details.”

  She doesn’t look convinced. In fact, he catches a whiff of powdered-sugar sweetness—she’s nervous. Well, of course she’s nervous. But there’s something different about this scent. He closes his eyes as he breathes it in. It’s darker than pure anticipation. Deeper.

  He’s not a fool. He knows Ala is struggling with something. She smells like terror every morning, and apprehension at bedtime. But if she doesn’t trust him enough to talk to him about it, it’s not his place to ask.

  She sighs, and looks at the wall clock. “Can we get caffeine?”

  “I know a place.”

  Dymitr trips into the bathroom to stick his head under the faucet.

  * * *

  The first time Dymitr went to Basia’s Cafe was after scouting.

  Every prospective Knight had a mentor. On the day of the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year, the family gathered and all the young people sat in the kitchen, and if they’d been chosen to begin their Knight education, they were called into the living room to find out who had selected them. Dymitr’s father, Łukasz, chose his older brother when he was just ten years old, claiming he was maturing fast. Elza, despite being younger than Dymitr, came a few years later, picked by their uncle Filip. And Dymitr kept sitting in the kitchen with all the cousins far younger than he was—doomed, he thought, to learn to cook and never to fight.

  That was before he knew that his grandmother had chosen him years before, when he was still just a child. She had her reasons for delaying in telling him. I wanted to make you patient, she said to him once, almost as an apology. I wanted to test your resolve. She had a way of making suffering feel almost like heroism.

  For the first few years of his apprenticeship to her, she took him out to the countryside to scout. Scouting was as important as fighting, according to his grandmother. She taught him simple things first, like tracking. He could identify a particular set of boot prints on a forest trail; he could find the places where they broke sticks or bent grass with their movements. Then, because monsters had folded themselves into the modern world, she taught him how to find people using modern means. Everyone leaves a trail, my boy.

  He had just located a strzyga for her, finding first the alias she was using and the apartment where she was staying, and then identifying her boot prints in a nearby field. His grandmother ordered him to stay put while she took care of the rest. She returned fifteen minutes later with blood under her fingernails and a smile on her face, and she took him to Basia’s to celebrate. While she washed her hands in the cafe’s bathroom, Dymitr looked over the menu and chose a coffee and a pastry, rewards for a job well done.

  Now, as he walks toward the cafe with Ala, he thinks there was another reason his grandmother delayed his education: she wanted him to be starved for approval and desperate to please. She believed it would make him a better student. And she was right.

  “All right, I can’t take it anymore,” Ala says, after they’ve been walking for ten minutes. They’re passing an Orange store with rows of phone cases hanging on the wall, and a discount supermarket with a big ladybug on the sign. She turns to him, a little unsteady on the cobblestones.

  “What are you afraid of, exactly?” she says to him. “We’re not likely to run into your family here, are we?”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it? You smell like a patisserie. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind having the consistent food source—”

  “Everything is the same,” Dymitr says, cutting her off mid-sentence. He gestures vaguely to the street ahead of them. “The stores, the streets. All the same as when I was…” As when I thought you weren’t a person, he thinks. As when I thought it was my duty to kill you. “But nothing’s the same. The more I remember, the more I realize that every memory I have here is a horror, even the good ones.”

  It feels like finding a spot on an apple, he thinks. You hope that you can just slice it away and still eat the rest of the fruit. But then you discover the flesh is brown all the way to the wormy core.

  “I’m afraid of what I’m going to find here,” he says.

  Ala’s hand twitches, like she’s going to reach for him, and then she seems to think better of it. She’s not a demonstrative person, and he prefers it that way. If she tried to offer comfort, it would crush him. Better, then, to just see her nod, and to fall into step beside her as they cross the street.

  Basia’s Cafe is just around the bend. He sees the familiar blue letters fixed to the side of the building, a little crooked. The grid of blue-glass windows. And the small blue tables in front where he used to sit with his grandmother.

  He half expects to see her there, sipping her espresso, her eyes narrowed at the passersby because she’s nearsighted but never wants to wear her glasses.

  Instead, though, he sees a man. He has dark hair and light brown skin and despite the cloud cover, he’s wearing a pair of sunglasses. When he lifts his coffee cup to his lips, Dymitr sees that his fingernails are black.

  Nikodem Kostka is sitting at Basia’s Cafe.

  8

  A BARGAIN STRUCK

  Anywhere there are Knights, Niko knows, there are informants. After centuries of being hunted, most quasi-mortals—as Ala would call them—are pretty good at evading the Holy Order. So even the most rigid Knight knows they need a little bit of hypocrisy to keep the whole operation running. In other words, they need help from the quasi-mortals themselves. The vulnerable and the desperate will go to great lengths to save their own skin … or the skin of their loved ones.

  Niko is sympathetic, to a point. He’s never been in a position to make that kind of choice. He’s pretty sure he knows what he would do if he was—or what he wouldn’t do—but then, strzygas are stronger and fiercer than most, and it’s harder for them to hide what they are, what with the fingernails and the owl eyes, so they’ve had to learn to be smart, too.

  It’s the harmless ones who have more limited options. Czarts. Zmoras. Kikimoras. Banshees. Anyone who isn’t strong enough to rely on force. If they’re clever, they don’t have to turn on their own people to protect themselves … but not everyone is born clever.

  So he’s careful of everyone he passes when he’s hunting, even the ones he’s pretty sure aren’t human.

  He has a contact in the city nearest to his hunting ground—the brother of a zmora Feliks avenged a few years back—who points him toward the wieszczy.

  A known traitor, but perhaps a sympathetic one, given the circumstances. The wieszczy lives in a town with cobblestone streets and an old church at its center. The church is all red: red brick with a terracotta tile roof, red trim around its heavy wooden doors. The bell tower is the tallest point for miles. And tucked away in an alley, still close enough to be in the bell tower’s shadow, is a little apartment where the wieszczy lives.

  Niko goes to its door at dusk, still wearing his sunglasses. It’s too warm to get away with wearing gloves at this time of year, so he painted his fingernails black, instead. He doesn’t like nail polish much, but his kind don’t get to pick the color of their talons, so to speak, and his are dark, like the face of the owl he wears when he transforms. He raises his fist and knocks on the apartment door.

  There aren’t many creatures who begin their lives as human, but the wieszczy is one. Born with cauls on their heads. Born with pink cheeks and an eager, busy nature. Born with spots of blood under their fingernails. Or so the legends say.

  There aren’t many of them, so Niko doesn’t know fact from fiction. He only knows that after they die, they rise again with a craving for human flesh, even if it’s their own. And they remain that way, dead but not dead, hungry but not sated, until they eat enough of their own bodies to crumble into dust, or until someone kills them. The most pitiful of all the pitiful creatures that walk the earth, his mother used to say, and they don’t deserve our scorn.

  The woman who answers the door is shrouded in darkness. She wears all black, her garments overlarge, so they cover her hands and any shape she has. She looks up at him through a curtain of dark hair. What little of her skin he can see is pale and sickly as a frog’s belly.

  “Can I help you?” she asks him—in Polish, of course, and he understands it well, even though his accent is—as Dymitr says—hard on the ears.

  He takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are just a little too orange to be normal—just enough for attentive humans to comment on when he’s checking out at the grocery store. And just enough for the wieszczy to understand, not what he is exactly, but that he’s something other than human.

  “What do you want?” she asks, her tone harsh. She’s starting to shut the door, even as she asks the question.

  Niko puts his foot in the doorjamb, and leans closer.

  “I mean you no harm,” he says, “but I won’t let you push me out, either. Not until I’ve spoken to you.”

  The wieszczy doesn’t quite meet his eyes. She steps away from the door, though, and he slips inside the apartment.

  The door leads right into the kitchen, where there are dishes piled high in the sink and stacks of newspapers covering the little table. Empty paper bags smeared with fruit jam litter the countertop along with cartons of maślanka. All the windows are covered with cardboard. It smells like sour milk.

  The wieszczy fidgets and shifts. There’s a kettle of water on the stove with steam pouring from its spout. She turns the burner off. As her hand emerges from beneath the drape of her sleeve, he sees she only has three fingers—thumb, index, and middle. For a moment he wonders how she lost them, and then he thinks of her clawing her way out of the grave, desperately hungry for flesh no matter whose it is, and his mouth goes dry.

  “Didn’t think I’d ever see a strzygoń in this town again,” she says. She speaks with a lisp.

  “I’m only visiting.”

  “Visiting.” She laughs. “Flirting with death is what you’re doing. Do you know who lives near here?”

  “I’m well aware.” Niko hooks his foot around a chair leg and tugs it back from the table, then sits, though he wasn’t invited to.

  The wieszczy hooks two fingers around the handle of a cabinet door and takes down a box of cherry tea. She fumbles with the box for a while before she gets a bag out of it. She drops the bag in a mug waiting on the counter. Her other hand stays hidden in her sleeve.

  “Then what is the purpose of your visit?”

  “I was sent here as part of my vengeance oath.”

  At that, her hands falter. She leans into the counter, her shoulders bunching up around her ears.

  “Do it, then,” she snaps.

  She’s braced in anticipation of a blow, he realizes. She expects him to kill her.

  A zemsta’s job must have been easier in the time when you could carry weapons without causing alarm, Niko thinks. As it is, he has a knife hidden in his boot and another one strapped to his forearm, which means he has to wear long sleeves no matter how warm it is. Not ideal, for being so close to the Holy Order he can practically taste their magic in the air, but he can’t really walk around town with a sword at his hip.

  “I’m not taking vengeance against you,” he says. “But I did come for your help.”

  She relaxes by a fraction, and pours water over the tea bag. Then she turns toward him. The light from the stove shines across her scarred cheek, and he realizes why she has a lisp—her lower lip is gone, and only scar tissue remains.

  “I’m hunting one of them,” Niko says. “Someone who’s notoriously difficult to pin down, but they’re here, now, for a funeral. Along with … quite a few others.”

  He’s still certain that Lidia sent him here to die, but she doesn’t know Niko. He’s cleverer than his predecessor, and he knows that if he’s going to hold his own against the Razor, he’ll need help, and he’ll need to use the circumstances—a house full of Knights, all gathered to put one of their number into the ground—to his advantage.

  “The bees are swarming the hive, and you want to stick your hand in it?” The wieszczy laughs, and sips her cherry tea. The red liquid dribbles down her chin like blood. She doesn’t bother to wipe it away. “You must be new.”

  “I’m not, as a matter of fact.” Niko is getting annoyed. “Anyway, it’s not your concern, whether I’m likely to succeed or not. You’re either going to do what I ask, or you’re not, regardless of the outcome.”

  “And why would I consider doing what you ask?”

  “Because of the czart, Maja,” Niko says harshly, and when he speaks her name the air seems to crackle as if charged with electricity. Niko closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. There’s no sense in wasting magic—not here, not now.

  But maybe it wasn’t a waste, because it seems to remind the wieszczy exactly who and what he is. Not just a strzygoń, but someone whose oath provides him with a constant flow of magic. The sacrifice of his safety, his ambitions, his dreams—it’s created a debt that can never be repaid. When he opens his eyes, the wieszczy is holding the teacup in both mangled hands, looking stricken.

  “I didn’t mean to—” she says, and her breath catches.

  “Of course not,” Niko says, his voice soft and soothing. “You only meant to get the czart killed, didn’t you? And no one cares about a czart, do they? It’s not your fault he had friends with him when the Knight came calling. It’s not your fault six people died when you only intended one.”

  The wieszczy bows over the mug of tea, pulling into herself like a bug curling up to die.

  “I was human, once,” she says.

  “So was I.” Niko leans back in his chair. “Ask me how many creatures I got killed when I was still mortal.”

  “Mortal,” she scoffs. “How can a strzygoń be born human?”

  “My long life was bought at a terrible price. Though perhaps not as terrible a price as the six lives your survival cost.”

  The wieszczy’s eyes are dark. They remind him of rain puddles in moonlight, just a sheen of light on black pavement. Her expression is neutral, as if their discussion means nothing to her, but guilt is just anger and shame intermingling, so he can feel it as surely as he felt the prickle of her anger before. He has more sympathy toward her than he lets on. It’s hard not to. Either she lived a normal human life, if her parents didn’t know what signs to look for in their newborn, or she lived a life under the shadow of dread, if they did. To be a wieszczy is to know all your life that after the horror of death, there will be a new horror: a mouthful of grave dirt, a taste for flesh, and an endless un-life.

  It amazes him still, how she was so desperate to preserve even that half life, that horror life, that she offered up someone else’s suffering and destruction. No matter what someone is, the living still want to live, most of the time.

  “What do you want me to do?” she says.

  “A simple task,” he answers. “The Holy Order are performing a ritual to ward off evil spirits. To ensure that their lost brother doesn’t come back as something else.” He smiles a little. “I believe they are mainly concerned that he’ll wake as—”

  “A wieszczy,” the wieszczy says testily. “Yes. This ritual comes from my people, after all.”

  “So I’ve heard. My request, therefore, is that you let them catch sight of you at the cemetery. They’ll scatter to search for you. And I’ll be able to corner my quarry.”

  “You’re so sure you can get them alone?”

  “I know her patterns,” Niko says. “And once she sees me, well. I’m not exactly difficult to identify as a strzygoń.”

  “Bad luck for you.” The wieszczy’s upper lip curls, revealing too much tooth. Her incisors are pointed, a little jagged at the ends. Good for rending flesh, he supposes.

  “I get by,” he says.

  “If I do this, I’ll have to flee,” the wieszczy says. “I can’t live here anymore.”

  “Then I suppose it’s up to you to decide how much you love this place and the life you’ve made here,” Niko says, shrugging. “If you help me, you’ll no longer be shunned by my people. You can seek refuge with them in the city, if you like. And you will attain some small amount of redemption for what you did. Only you can say how much that’s worth to you.”

  Niko watches her for a moment. He knows of magic that can tug her in one direction or another, but he doesn’t think he’ll need it here. He thinks she’ll agree all on her own.

  When she doesn’t respond for a few long seconds, he stands, and pushes his chair in. A newspaper slides off the table and onto the dirty tile floor. The wieszczy sets her mug down on the counter, still mostly full of dark red tea. He nods to her, and makes his way to the door.

  “I’ll do it,” she says, when he turns the knob.

  He smiles to himself.

  * * *

  It takes fifteen minutes of walking to get rid of the smell of old milk from his nose, and even then, he can’t quite lose it. He steps into a cafe to breathe in the scent of coffee and orders a cappuccino, which he drinks at the blue table outside, his sunglasses still on though it’s far too dark for that now.