Page 11 of When Among Crows
She glances at Dymitr, who’s watching her like he knows exactly what she’s doing. He rolls his eyes.
“You’re going all the way to… uh, Ninety-Second?” the driver says, frowning at the phone fixed to his dashboard. “Didn’t even know the streets went up that high.”
“Well,” Ala says. “You should get out more.”
The driver pulls onto Lake Shore Drive, which will take them south all the way past downtown, past Hyde Park, and right up to the invisible line that divides Illinois from Indiana. On the Illinois side of the line is an old warehouse that makes containers—bottles, cans, jars, and the like—during the day. At night, though, it’s something different.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Dymitr asks.
“South Chicago,” she says. “Where the old steel mill used to be. There’s still a factory there.”
“And we’re going there… why?”
She glances at the rearview mirror to see if the driver is paying attention. He is, but when he meets her eyes, he turns up the radio. Music pulses so loud it rattles the car windows.
“You’ll see,” she says, loud enough for Dymitr to hear her.
They coast along the lakefront with the road to themselves. Moonlight reflects off the water, jagged from thewaves. In the distance, the band of light around the top of the Sears Tower glows blue in honor of Father’s Day.
“Do you speak Polish?” Dymitr asks her.
“Do you know what a strzyga is?” she asks in return.
Dymitr hesitates, likely for the sake of the driver—but Ala isn’t concerned about the driver thinking they’re mad, or even less likely,believingwhatever they say about monsters in the streets of Chicago. Dymitr seems to make the same calculation, because he answers:
“Like a vampire, right?” He grins, and she can’t tell whether he’s messing with her or not.
“No,” she says. “And if that’s what you think, we should call this whole thing offright the fuck now—”
“Relax,” he says. “Yes, I know what they are. Not vampires. Much worse than vampires.” He taps the guitar case held between his knees with one finger. “And there’s no guitar in here.”
That’s no surprise, though she wonders whatisin there.
“Good.” She sits back, and chews her thumbnail. A few minutes pass before she remembers that he asked her a question.
“No,” she says. “I never learned to speak Polish.”
“Your mother didn’t teach you?”
Most zmora are women, so it’s a safe assumption that her mother would have been the one to teach her. But Ala’s mother had resented being forced to learn it by her own mother, who used to slap her knuckles with a ruler if she didn’t use the Polish words for things, and she hadn’t wanted to inflict the same hardship on her daughter. Alahad grown up with the ache of not knowing it—not knowing where she was from, or what she was, really, as a result.
There are, of course, zmory from other places. They go by other names: lamia in Greek, pesanta in Spanish, dab tsog in Hmong. Even some of her Dryja cousins wear features from other places, their skin umber and russet and sable instead of pale and freckled like her own. But most of them still know how their family came here, and why, and how to speak to the Dryja leaders in their own language. Among them, Ala still feels twinges of loneliness that she tries to ignore. She feels it now, with Dymitr, though he’s no zmora.
“No,” she says. “She sang to me sometimes, though. One song in particular. A Christmas song—Gdy sieChrystus… something.”
Dymitr grins.
“‘Gdy sieChrystus rodzi’?” he says.
“Maybe. Probably. She used to laugh during the third verse, and I don’t know why.”
The driver’s music fades for a moment between songs, with just a late-night DJ chattering through the speakers. She hears Dymitr singing, his voice creaky but mostly on key: “Powiedzciez wyrazniej co nam czynictrzeba… bo my nic nie pojmujemy… Ledwo od strachu zyjemy…”
Ala can’t help but laugh.
“That’s it,” she says. “Can you translate it?”
“I think… ‘Say more clearly what we must do, because we don’t understand anything. We hardly live… from fear.’”
