Page 32 of When Among Crows
He rolls out from under the Jeep, this time on the sidewalk, and then heaves himself onto the hood of the car. In the street, Niko is bringing his blade down on two upiór at once in an elegant, deadly arc; seven versions of Ala lash out with a short sword at once. Only one of them strikes true, but the other six create chaos, turning the vampires against each other in a tangle of pale limbs.
And then Dymitr sees her. Elza. His sister.
She stands at the end of the alley, dressed in black tactical clothing, her hair tied back. Her palms are the color of a port-wine stain, and her eyes glint red. She has a bone sword in each hand, one short and one long. Niko is right in her path, his back to her.
Dymitr told her to go home. Apparently she didn’t listen.
“Niko!” Dymitr screams as an upiór’s cold fingers tighten around Dymitr’s ankle.
The upiór yanks, and Dymitr falls on the windshield, hard. He kicks as hard as he can at the vampire, but its grip is too strong. It clambers up onto the hood of the Jeep, and Dymitr punches it in the jaw, which startles it but doesn’t stop it. He twists his free hand behind his back to reach for his quiver, but the angle is wrong, and the upiór opens its mouth wide, its mismatched needle teeth drawing close to Dymitr’s throat. Its breath smells like copper and rotting meat.
In the light of the last remaining streetlight, he sees Niko’s sword flashing silver as he spars with Elza. Dymitr spits in the upiór’s face, twisting his body to break its grip, but he’s pinned, he’s aching, he’s out of options—
Then it screams as Ala grabs it by the head, wrenches it back, and slits its throat. Blood splatters on the pavement. The smell of rot makes him choke.
There’s no time to thank her. Elza is only holding one sword now, the other lying forgotten on the street, but she’s still besting Niko, quick and deft and deadly. Niko is bleeding from a wound in his side, holding his elbow tight to his ribs. He stumbles, and Dymitr breaks into a sprint.
He loses himself in a rush of adrenaline, grabs his sister’s discarded sword, and thrusts it just in time to block her from cutting Niko’s throat. For a moment they stand braced against each other right above Niko’s Adam’s apple, Dymitr’s sword pressing up, his sister’s sword pressing down. He feels heat in his palms, in his eyes, clawing up his throat like acid.
Now it’shispalms and fingers that are stained the deep red of the Holy Order.
9A KNIGHT OF THE HOLY ORDER
Niko’s mortal life was brief, and suffused with the fear of death. Not his own fear—his mother’s. She watched his every footstep. He wasn’t permitted to do things that other children did, ride bicycles or play in the park or go to summer camp. The only risk that was small enough for Greta Kostka to bear was no risk at all.
But a child determined to find trouble would do so, even within the confines of a house.
She was chopping cucumber, once, so he could dip it in ranch dressing, one of his favorite snacks, when she received a phone call, and abandoned the vegetable on the counter with the knife beside it. Little Nikodem Kostka dragged one of the kitchen chairs over to the counter, turned it, and climbed on top of it so he could see over the counter.
He picked up the knife, which was heavier than he expected, for an object so slim. He took the cucumber in hand, as he had seen his mother do, raised the knife, and brought it down on the vegetable as hard as he could.
The cucumber rolled out of the way of the blade, but his fingers didn’t. Blood spurted from his hand, and hescreamed so loud Greta dropped the phone and left it dangling from its cord. She seized him around the middle and gathered him to her chest and breathed a healing spell over his fingers, the last of the magic she had left.
Greta sank to the ground with Niko held tightly to her body, so tightly he squirmed, but she didn’t release him. He could feel her heart thumping against his cheek, and the tickle of her fast, shallow breaths.
“You can’t do this to me, Niko,” she said to him, through tears. “You have to be careful. You’re so fragile, so fragile. There are so many ways you could die, so many, so many…”
She had watched his father die. He was a mortal man she’d met in Jordan, and he had traveled with her for a time; she had not been able to say how long, because time meant little to her. A gentle man, she’d told him, and the kindest mortal she’d ever known. She had loved him, in a way, which was unusual for a strzyga determined only to get a child and return to her family. He went out one morning for coffee and pastries, and he was found dead in the street later that day. Heart failure. It was the suddenness that had rattled her, and now Niko suffered the consequences for his father’s mortal frailty.
Niko looked at his hand, still streaked with blood, but healed now. There was a white line across the pads of his fingers, the scar lingering as a reminder.
“I’ll fix you,” his mother said. “Don’t worry, dear; I’ll fix you.”
She took him to see Baba Jaga a week later. To this day,he had no idea what his mother traded in exchange for his immortality.
As the Knight’s blade comes toward his throat, he thinks there should be something profound about this, that for all his mother’s efforts to keep him alive past the tolerances of mortality, his life was cut short anyway.
But that’s the lot of every zemsta. The Holy Order are trained from childhood to kill all manner of creatures, and they get the better of every zemsta eventually. The best thing he can do—or so Lidia Kostka told him, when he swore his oath—is take as many of them down with him as possible.
He just didn’t think it would happen here, on a quiet side street, with the red light of the Fat Cat Grill sign glowing in the distance, and the smell of french fries on the air.
And then, suddenly: Dymitr is there, his blade the only barrier between Niko and a swift end. His teeth gritted, Dymitr presses the Knight back, at first just a few inches, and then more, stepping between her and Niko. His blade is still crossed with the Knight’s. They both hesitate for a moment, and then all at once, they start fighting.
It’s only then, as Niko stumbles back and his sowa form—the owl form—recedes, that he sees the purple-red staining Dymitr’s hands like a birthmark, and the bright red sheen in his eyes.
Dymitr has an athletic build, and he’s capable with a bow and arrow. But nothing Niko saw ever made himthink that Dymitr would be likethis—the blade an extension of him, flashing white as he parries and thrusts and blocks with astonishing grace. Niko has faced a handful of Knights in the last few years, and none of them were likethis.
Dymitr and the Knight—theotherKnight—circle each other in the light of the streetlamp. The Knight lunges, sword thrusting at Dymitr’s leg; he bats her aside with a twitch of his wrist and slashes at her arm, slicing through the sleeve of her jacket as she turns away from the blow.
