Page 16 of When Among Crows
“I can handle it,” Ala says to Dymitr as he crouches beside her to bandage her wound.
“I’m sure you can,” he replies. “But we’re still keeping up appearances,cousin.”
Rolling her eyes, she tugs the collar of her T-shirt aside to bare the strzyga’s bite. He’s familiar with this procedure: he sanitizes his hands, pulls on a pair of latex gloves, and rips open an antiseptic wipe.
Ala raises her eyebrows at him.
“You tend to a lot of bite wounds in your line of work?” she says. “Come to think of it, what is your line of work?”
“I’m unemployed at the moment,” he answers. “But as it happens, I grew up with a half-wild dog and a sister who couldn’t help but provoke it to bite her.”
He thinks of Elza sitting on the kitchen counter with her arm stuck out, her legs swinging. She didn’t understand, even after the third incident, that she shouldn’t try to take Borys’s bone away.
“German shepherd?” Ala guesses.
“Pomeranian,” he says, dabbing her wound with the antiseptic. She laughs, and for just a moment, she’s Elza in the yellow-tiled kitchen, laughing at one of his horrible jokes.
“If you’d ever met a Pomeranian, you wouldn’t think it was so funny,” he says, and he presses a clean square of gauze to the juncture of her shoulder and neck. She holds it there while he fastens it with tape.
She seems tired, sweaty, and bruised, but otherwise unharmed. He comes to his feet just as the Pitmaster approaches them.
“You’ve been summoned,” the strzyga says, tossing her curly black hair over one shoulder to gesture to the back corner. Dymitr can’t see what she’s trying to show them, but zmora eyes must be sharper, because Ala nods.
“You and the human both,” the strzyga adds, without looking at Dymitr.
“Fantastic,” Ala says under her breath, once the Pitmaster is out of hearing distance.
“What is it?” he says.
“Good news for you, I think,” Ala says. “The head of the Kostka family wants to meet you.”
Lidia Kostka looks middle-aged, which for a strzyga means she must be very old indeed. Her hair is copper in color and styled in a finger-waved bob straight from the 1920s—and she may have been wearing it that way since then. Her face is a sickly color, and her eyebrows are so fine and pale she almost seems to lack them entirely. If not for her eyes, she would resemble a wealthy woman from another time—but hereyes. They’re bright yellow and piercing as a shriek. They focus on him from the moment he steps into the room, and he feels them like heat.
Without thinking, he slides a hand into his pocket to touch the fern flower, safely wrapped in paper. They have one day before it’s no longer useful, and not to use it would be a criminal waste of magic—a waste of the pain that Dymitr gave to attain it.
The Pitmaster led them here from the boxing ring: away from the factory floor, to the end of a bare hallway where a line of creatures waits for the bathroom, and through a hatch in the floor guarded by a hulking man with a sword who seems to be completely human.
There was a network of rooms and hallways under the factory, which probably shouldn’t have surprised Dymitr as much as it did. The strzygi wouldn’t have chosen it as a haunt if it were merely a factory.
The room in which he now finds himself is dim, but elaborately decorated. The far wall is covered in a screenof delicate Art Deco metalwork that he recognizes as distinctly “Chicago” in feeling. Low navy-gray sofas are positioned around the room. A marble-top bar stretches along the right wall. There are little lamps with bright red shades positioned here and there, spots of brightness in the dark. One such lamp stands on a table beside Lidia Kostka, making her hair appear even redder.
She stays seated as Ala and Dymitr approach her, as do the other Kostka cousins lounging around her. Dymitr notices Niko slipping into the room behind them and sidling up to the bar, casual, as if he were already planning on coming here and the timing is just coincidence.
Almost all the strzygi in the room are women, and that’s no surprise. Dymitr’s father told him that Chicago was a city ruled by monsters, and all those monsters were women—strzyga, zmora, and llorona, each a legend of wronged women, sinful women, mysterious women. Tragic and powerful figures, all, not to be underestimated.
Lidia looks Ala up and down, and smiles, faintly.
“We’ve never had a zmora in our ring before,” Lidia says to her, her voice creaky and weak. The room goes quiet when she speaks, as if everyone is straining to hear her. “I hope you don’t mind my curiosity about you, Aleksja Dryja.”
“Of course not, proszepani,” Ala says, stumbling a little over the term of respectful address.
Lidia laughs, a wheezing little thing.
“That word falls out of your mouth like you’re spittingout bad food,” she says. “Did your mother tell youanythingabout your origins?”
Ala stiffens beside Dymitr.
“She came here several years after World War Two,” she says. “I don’t know exactly why.”
