He’s just considering whether he wants to stick his finger into the cup to get the last bits of foam from the bottom when he looks up … and sees Dymitr walking down the street.

  Niko stops, the cup still in hand. Dymitr stops. Beside him, Ala stops.

  For a moment, they’re all still. Niko’s mind is flooded with questions. But he can’t ask any of them, not here, not in full view of the street. He stands, leaving his coffee cup behind, and nods toward the nearest side street. It’s almost as tight as an alley, hemmed in on either side by white stucco buildings with rust-colored metal fences. Somewhere nearby, a dog is barking.

  Niko takes off his sunglasses and hooks them over his shirt collar. Dymitr is there in front of him, with the same air of mild neglect that he usually has, his clothes creased and his hair disheveled. As ever, Niko has the urge to smooth down his edges and piece him back together. But he keeps his hands to himself.

  Ala lingers a few steps behind him, looking uncertain. Uneven.

  “What are you doing here?” Dymitr says quietly, in English. Demands, really, because there’s urgency in his voice, in his eyes.

  “What are you doing here?” Niko says. “Did you guys follow me here, or something?”

  “Oh, come on,” Ala says, arms folded. “You both know why the other is here.”

  And he does, doesn’t he? Because why would Dymitr be here, in this little town in northwest Poland … unless he was from here?

  “Myśliwiec,” Niko says. “Your name is Dymitr Myśliwiec.”

  People are named for so many things—where they’re from, or some paternal name, or some quirk of their appearance, like red hair or always wearing green. But they’re also named for their trade, and Myśliwiec means hunter. It’s almost funny. Niko almost laughs.

  He’s here to kill a member of Dymitr’s family.

  “Yes,” Dymitr says softly. And then: “Who is your … quarry?”

  Niko meets Ala’s eyes, as if she can offer him some guidance—but he knows there’s none to be had. They’re breaking new ground here. A real fucked-up Romeo and Juliet scenario, only the Capulets didn’t hunt down and brutally murder every single Montague they could get their hands on.

  Niko says, “Again, I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that question.”

  It’s after sunset now, and everything has a blue tint to it, even the faultless gray of Dymitr’s eyes. A group of teenagers walks along the main street, talking too loud; a bell rings; a car drives by.

  “I’m gonna … go be the lookout,” Ala says, stepping away from them. “I’ll let you know if anyone’s coming.”

  She walks to the end of the street and faces away from them.

  A tingle creeps across Niko’s shoulders, and it’s the feeling of Dymitr’s frustration. If it wasn’t directed at him, he would enjoy it more.

  “Tell me,” Dymitr says.

  “I can’t do that. If it turns out to be someone you care about…”

  The tingling sensation turns into something deeper, heavier. It prickles in Niko’s bones. Goose bumps rise up on his arms; he shivers, even as Dymitr puts a finger on his chest and pushes him—carefully, but not quite gently—up against the metal fence behind him.

  Niko stares down at him, bewitched for a moment.

  “Tell me,” Dymitr says, and now it sounds like he’s begging.

  Niko says quietly, “Do you understand that if I tell you who it is and you warn them, you could get me killed?”

  Dymitr closes his eyes. His hand presses flat to Niko’s chest. “I won’t warn them. I would never put you at risk like that.”

  Niko believes him, even though that’s absurd. He’s absurd.

  “The locals call her ‘the Razor,’” Niko says. Even his fluent tongue tripped over the word in Polish—brzytwa. Not all Knights are well known; this one’s address fell immediately from the mouths of the local strzygas, like a curse.

  Dymitr laughs, and turns away, his hand coming up to cover his mouth. He paces into the middle of the street, where weeds have begun growing between the cobblestones.

  Niko says, “You know her, I take it.”

  “Whoever gave you this mission wants you dead,” Dymitr says. “You should leave. Go home, refuse this, don’t get anywhere near her—”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “I don’t care how it works.” Dymitr turns on him, crowds him up against the fence again. “If you try to do this, you’ll die.”

  Niko tries on a half smile. “Why, Dymitr. Should I be offended that you think so little of me?”

  Dymitr doesn’t look amused. “You should be afraid of Marzena Myśliwiec.”

  “You told me, once, that you didn’t keep track of how many of my kind you’d killed,” Niko says, cold now. “Well, I haven’t kept track of how many of yours I’ve killed, either. You shouldn’t underestimate me just because you’ve had your tongue in my mouth.”

  Dymitr flinches a little. “I’m not underestimating you. I’m correctly estimating her.”

  Niko did his research before he came here. He knows the Razor is known for the ease with which she uses magic, and the relentless, methodical way she approaches her kills. No recklessness for Marzena Myśliwiec; she’s like a machine. He can’t imagine her with a family. He can’t imagine she was ever very kind to the one she has.

  So his voice is softer when he asks Dymitr, “Who is she to you?”

  “My mother.”

  Niko receives the word like a blow. This is too much Shakespearean tragedy for him.

  “Your mother is the fucking Razor?” Niko says. “God, how did you turn out so … normal?”

  Dymitr’s eyes are too bright. “I can’t do this.”

  “I have to do my job. She’s a killer, Dymitr.”

  “She’s my mother,” Dymitr says again, fiercer this time. “I love her. I will always love her. No matter what happens here, I’ll lose. If she dies— If you die—”

  “I am not going to die.”

  “Then you’re going to be the one who kills my mother,” Dymitr says. “And I’ll never be able to look at you again. Do you understand that?”

  A tear spills down his cheek and he wipes it away, forcefully, with the heel of his hand. Niko’s chest aches.

  “Shh.” Niko covers Dymitr’s hands—currently knitted in his hair—with his own. “Yes, yes, I understand.”

  He runs his fingers over Dymitr’s knuckles, and then tugs him closer, so Dymitr’s head touches his chest. He’s trembling.

  It’s too much to ask of any heart, Niko thinks. To turn so fully against the ones you love, even once you’ve realized what they really are. It’s just too much.

  Dymitr pulls away, red-eyed and disheveled as ever. He looks up at Niko.

  “She keeps a knife in her left boot,” Dymitr says. Then his face contorts, as if he’s in pain, and he walks away from Niko so fast he’s almost running—past Ala, past the cafe, and into the night.

  9

  A FAMILY REUNION

  Elza is there when they carry Filip’s body in. There’s a cousin at each shoulder, and her brother Kazik at the feet. They carry it through the house and into the living room, where they set it down on a long board that someone brought in from the garden shed for just this purpose. Filip isn’t the first person who’s died from that part of the family, and he won’t be the last.

  Her mother is the one who killed the strzyga that killed Filip, but her father is the one who went to Germany to pick up all the pieces and clean things up. He was always better at that than Marzena, who would have been arrested a dozen times over if not for him.

  Her father cast preservation magic over the body before sending it back. He must have given some real pain to ensure the magic was strong enough to keep the body from decomposing, because Filip looks like he could be sleeping. His skin is powder white, but his eyes are closed and his hands, stained with old blood, are folded over the hilt of his bone sword.

  The killing blow is in his throat. The strzyga’s claw, maybe, or its beak. The wound is wrapped in gauze, so Elza can’t see it.

  Her grandmother walks into the living room, and everyone stiffens all at once. She surveys the body. Filip wasn’t related to her by blood, but he and his brother—Elza’s father—were a package deal, promised to marry two of Joanna’s daughters when they came of age. So her grandmother has known—had known—Filip since he was a child. He was like one of her own sons.

  Yet there’s no feeling in her voice when she says, “Krystyna and I will wash him. Kazik, cover all the mirrors. Elza, set the clocks. He died at five after ten.”

  It’s all so pointless, Elza thinks, as she walks to the wall clock to turn the hands. Covering mirrors and opening windows to clear the way for his soul. Stopping the clocks at Filip’s time of death, to tell him that his time is ended. But she does it, winding the clock back so its hands point at the ten and the one. She moves into the kitchen to change the clock on the microwave, feeling like a ghost.

  She wanders through the house in pursuit of other clocks, and behind her she can hear Krystyna, the new widow, murmuring to the body as she tells it what she’s doing. We’ll start with your neck, okay? Let me just get this gauze off. Elza wonders if she should set all of the watches to 10:05, too, or if that’s too much. She checks her phone to see if Dymitr called; he hasn’t.

  Her cousin Teresa is in the kitchen making cabbage rolls with her son André—his Knight name. Elza can hear him complaining about working in the kitchen like he’s not a proper Knight. “Well, you aren’t,” Teresa says sharply. “So until you do the ritual, you will help your mother!”

  Elza sees her mother standing in the doorway to the living room, watching as Krystyna and her own mother—Joanna, fearsome matriarch of the Polish Holy Order—talk to a corpse. One foot at a time, okay, Filip? Elza’s mother’s fingers twitch at her side, like she’s about to draw her sword or take out a cigarette.

  “Has Father called yet?” Elza asks her.

  “He’ll call when his work is done,” Marzena replies. “And not a moment before.”

  Elza wonders if that’s why Dymitr hasn’t called her back—because his mission isn’t finished yet. But she doesn’t think he has that much in common with their parents, so single-minded they think only of whatever they need to kill next, instead of considering their family. Her cheeks suddenly hot, she steps outside, and leans against the railing.

  It’s after sunset. The outdoor lights are on, and flies are buzzing around them. The air is cooler now, the breeze ruffling her hair. Soon all the cousins and aunts and uncles will pile into their cars and come here, parking on the lawn and crowding into the house. Elza will pass out the sheet music and everyone will start singing. And eating. And singing. And drinking. They’ll fill the house with noise and activity so no one has to be alone with Filip’s body.

  Elza hasn’t fought a strzyga yet. They would never admit it—especially not her grandmother—but they don’t send women who can still bear children out on the risky missions, most of the time. A woman Knight has two responsibilities: hunt monsters and make more Knights. Even Marzena, who doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body, knew that. She had three children when she probably would have preferred none.

  So Elza’s taken down a zmora, a wraith, and two rusałkas. But she’s helped countless others track their own quarry. She’s a better tracker than Dymitr or Kazik, though she couldn’t beat either of them in a fight, much to her mother’s constant disappointment. “You have to work twice as hard as them because you’re weaker,” Marzena said to her once. “But don’t think for a moment that you don’t have the capacity to beat them.”

  It was one of the nicer things Marzena ever said to her.

  Elza sees a shadow along the tree line. Her hand is just going to the back of her neck, ready to draw one of her swords, when the outdoor light stretches across his face.

  “Dymitr!” she says, in a gasp. She runs down the steps and across the gravel to fling her arms around her brother.

  If she’d thought for a moment longer, she might have been more uncertain. He was so strange to her the last time they spoke, so cruel. You are an encumbrance. You are a burden. And then ordering her to go home like she was an annoying kid tagging along with her older brother instead of a Knight, instead of his partner. Go home, Elza, or the next time I see you I will kill you myself.

  But he wraps his arms around her now. He feels different to her, not as sturdy. She holds him at arm’s length, frowning.

  “Did you lose weight?” she asks him. “Is it stress?”

  He’s on an important mission, after all. And he looks so tired.

  “Maybe,” he says, with a weak smile. “How are you?”

  “Oh, you know.” She wants to make a joke of it, but she can’t think of anything. She just lets the phrase hang over them both.

  “I do.”

  Her eyes burn. She looks back at the house.

  “The singing will start soon,” she says. “Do you think he could really turn into something?”

  The old stories said a body left undefended after death could turn into a wraith, or an upiór, or a wieszczy. The Holy Order knows, now, that wraiths are born, not made. But upiórs seem to spring from nothing and nowhere, and wieszczy are too rare, too mysterious, to be certain of them.

  “It seems silly to me, to be so afraid of an impossible transformation that you’d sing all night,” she says.

  “Maybe it’s not so impossible,” Dymitr says. “Or maybe the singing isn’t for him.”

  She held back the tears in the car with their mother, and she tries to hold them back again now, but it’s hard around Dymitr. They’ve always been each other’s refuge in vulnerable moments. When Dymitr came back from his first kill, inconsolable, she was the one who calmed him down. When she lost her first sparring match against their cousin Agnieszka and their grandmother called Elza’s performance “pathetic,” Dymitr dragged her out to the woods to sit in their childhood fort so she could cry in peace. They let each other see the things they don’t reveal to anyone else. But she doesn’t want to do that now.

  She blinks the tears away.

  “I take it you didn’t finish your mission,” she says coolly.

  “No, I had to … change my plan.”

  “Because of me?”

  He doesn’t answer for a little too long. Well, of course it was because of her. She revealed to those things he was with—the strzygoń and the zmora—that he was a Knight. He was probably using them to get into Baba Jaga’s apartment, and she ruined it for him.

  “Come on, let’s go inside,” she says. “Mother’s in a foul mood, but I’m sure she’ll be nicer to you than she was to me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We both know it’s Kazik she really loves.”

  It’s an old joke. Kazik is as cold and unsentimental as Marzena is.

  “I’m sorry, Elza,” he says, taking her by the elbow so she doesn’t walk away from him.

  He’s always looked like her twin. Ash-brown hair. Gray eyes. Big lips—like a fish, Kazik used to tease them, sucking his cheeks in to imitate one. The resemblance weakened as Dymitr got older and started filling out and growing facial hair, but still, there’s no mistaking that he’s her brother. Only now … there’s something different about his eyes. A kind of wildness she doesn’t understand. It makes her feel uneasy.

  “For what?” she says, even though she knows what he’s apologizing for. She’d rather not hear the specifics, though it does relieve some of the tension in her, to hear that he’s sorry.

  “For all of it,” he answers.

  “It’s good you’re here” is all she says, and they walk together toward the house.

  10

  A FEAST FOR THE DEAD

  He steps into the living room, and the scents of the house overwhelm him. Cooked cabbage in the kitchen. Rose perfume clinging to his aunt Krystyna’s clothes. Nalewka and cigarettes on someone’s breath. Dirt. Blood.

  Death.

  And those are just the smells that any person with a decent nose could detect. There’s also the peach-sweet aroma of anticipation, the dark-chocolate richness of dread, the powdered sugar of anxiety. All the fear-scents of his cousins, his siblings, his mother—

  But he can’t think about the smell, or about Nikodem Kostka, zemsta, prowling the woods outside the house in pursuit of Knight blood. He can’t think about whether he’s more afraid that Niko will fail, or that he’ll succeed. He has to focus.

  He murmurs condolences in his aunt’s ear. Krystyna’s cloying perfume is in his nose, and beneath it, a peculiar vanilla smell that he thinks might be grief. No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear, isn’t that a quote from C. S. Lewis? Only a zmora could confirm it, it seems.

  Krystyna’s hand, when she pats his cheek, is cold and a little damp, and he realizes she was just washing the body. It’s as if she left a handprint of death on his face. He can smell it even when she pulls away.

  “So here you are,” a familiar voice says from behind him, flinty. Marzena. His mother.

  She smells like copper and leather. Not a small woman, but not a tall one, either. Her dark brown hair is limp and loose over her shoulders, and her gray eyes are exactly like his.

  Will they be the last thing Niko sees before she dies? Before he dies?

  “I thought you were on an important mission,” Marzena says. “You failed?”

  “No,” Dymitr replies. “I’m still in the middle of it.”

  He considered his story carefully as he walked through the woods on his way to the house, Ala at his side. He couldn’t tell them he’d failed, because failing a mission to kill Baba Jaga would mean his death. He also couldn’t tell them he’d succeeded. And though it pained him to admit it, the best excuse he could give for leaving in the middle of his mission was to imply that Elza derailed him. That it was a good time to leave and regroup, because he would have to start all over again, thanks to his sister’s ill-timed interventions.