Page 20 of When Among Crows
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 thefern 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 andagain 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 fuckingmurderof 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.
