Page 14 of When Among Crows
“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 strzygiin 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 mewhy.”
“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 withdrawfrom 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. “Butyoustill 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 sopranoin 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 ofcreatures—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 aroundhis 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.
