Page 41 of When Among Crows
“It’s not just that,” Dymitr says. His hands come up to Niko’s elbows, unbearably gentle. His gray-brown eyes are soft. “I can’tbe thisanymore. I can’t bear it.”
“Then be something else instead,” Niko says firmly. He looks up at Baba Jaga. “Change him.”
“You say that as if it’s simple,” she says.
“You changed me into a strzygon,” he says. He doesn’t mean to say it. His connection to Baba Jaga is private. But then, these two already know more than anyone else does about him—when his mother died, the secret of his mortal origins, the other secrets he carries, they died withher, and he has kept them alone since then. It’s something of a relief, to share that burden.
Baba Jaga seems unfazed by his disclosure.
“You already had strzygi blood,” she says with a shrug. “I merely amplified it.”
Niko looks down at Dymitr’s hands, at the wound in his palm. He thinks of the ribbon in his pocket, stained with Ala and Dymitr’s intermingled blood.
“He already has Ala’s blood in him,” he says. “Zmora blood.”
Baba Jaga brings a finger up to tap against her lips, considering the wound just as Niko did.
“Interesting,” she says.
She pulls away from the desk, and walks on silent feet to one of the windows, pulling back the curtain to look out at the city. Niko has walked through this apartment before with all the curtains drawn; he knows its impossibilities, how it stands on the edge of the Chicago River in the Loop, but also on top of the Harold’s Chicken in Buena Park, butalsooverlooking Hyde Park, depending on which segment of the apartment you’re in. Still, he finds himself amazed by the line of light along the river. Chicago always reminds him of a stray line from T. S. Eliot—Unreal City, under the brown fog of a winter dawn—though he knows, of course, that the line refers to London.
Baba Jaga lets the curtain fall back across the window, and turns to Dymitr, Niko, and Ala again.
“The payment I require for changing you,” she says, “is your sword.”
Dymitr stiffens beneath Niko’s hands.
“My soul, you mean,” he says.
“A piece of it. Yes.”
“And what will you do,” Dymitr says quietly, “with a piece of my soul?”
“What I wish,” Baba Jaga says.
The back of Niko’s neck prickles. His mother was in Baba Jaga’s debt, once. She refused to tell him what the witch asked of her, but he saw its aftermath. Night after night, for a year, his mother came home with dirt caked under her fingernails and sweat curling her hair and trouble in her eyes. It’s no small thing, to be the hands and feet of Baba Jaga.
“Will you ever return it to me?” Dymitr says.
“For the right price,” she replies.
There’s that, at least. It’s a door left cracked, instead of closed and locked. Dymitr looks at Niko, and then Ala.
“Is this what you want from me?” he says. “To change?”
She crouches in front of him, and reaches for his hand. He gives it to her, and holds on.
“I want you to live,” she says. “I want you to try.”
It takes a long time, but finally, Dymitr nods.
12A MONSTER’S DEATH
When he told his grandmother he wanted to go to America to find and destroy Baba Jaga, she considered him for a long time.
They were at the coffee shop where she’d once picked out a zmora from a crowd of strangers. He drank his coffee black, now, with honey instead of sugar. He bit down on the hard biscuit that came with it, and met his grandmother’s gaze.
“Why?” she asked him.
