Page 19 of When Among Crows
Dymitr nods, and Niko pulls.
Ala can’t stand to look, then. She flinches and turns away at the sound of Dymitr’s yell, muffled by his wrist. She wonders if he’ll leave a bite there to match his little sister’s.
She turns back in time to see Niko holding Dymitr’s fingernail aloft, still pinched in the pliers. Dymitr, meanwhile, is hunched over, trembling. Blood spatters the floor beneath him.
Niko offers him a handkerchief, but his eyes are on Ala’s.
“Cover your eyes,” he says to her. “Now.”
Ala has just enough time to bring her arm up to her head when Niko flicks his wrist, sending the fingernail flying. It’s just reached its apex when he says, in his rough, deep voice,“Promienny.”
A brilliant light explodes from the fingernail, and Ala shuts her eyes. A moment later she feels a hand on her wrist.
“Keep them shut,” Niko’s voice says, and he yanks her toward the door.
She knows only by her nose that Dymitr is with them, the scent of his fear more potent than she’s detected so far. She smells mildew, too, and she knows she’s in the hallway just outside. She stumbles after Niko, her wrist still captive to his stern grip and her shoulder aching from the strzyga bite she got during the fight.
“You can open them now!” Niko says. “And I’d recommend an illusion in—Well, now.”
Ala’s vision is crowded with dark patches from her brief glimpse of the fingernail, but when she looks over her shoulder, she sees a few strzygi toppling out of the room where they just were, squinting. She doesn’t have time to refine an illusion, to master its details. She just creates an image of three moving shadows climbing the stairs, and another three shadows running down the hallway to their left. Niko leads them down the hallway on the right.
She gets brief glimpses of the rooms they pass: another sitting room; a smaller boxing ring stacked with pads, for practice; an office with a padded chair and a closedlaptop; a supply closet full of liquor bottles; a wine cellar. The creaky wood beneath her shoes gives way to plain concrete again, and she smells rot as well as mildew—the lake. She heard once that they closed the beaches because theE. colilevels of the lake got too high, causing her to wonder just how high they were on an average weekend, and why anyone wouldeverswim in Lake Michigan while that information was readily available—
Dymitr holds his bloody hand against his chest, and his guitar case bumps against his shoulders with each running footstep. He looks pale and clammy, but more focused than Ala feels, than she thinks she could ever be with a pack of strzygi on her heels.
Niko hits a door at the end of the hallway shoulder first, and it opens to a set of cracked and mossy stairs, and the taste of the night air, which Ala picks apart without even thinking about it: mud, garbage, exhaust, grass, gravel. Without even knowing if there’s anyone behind them, she sends illusory figures tumbling in every direction, like ants spilling out of a ruined anthill. Dymitr blinks at them, and she grabs his elbow, dragging him along.
“Don’t get distracted,” she snaps, and they both chase Niko across the parking lot.
Where a group of strzygi wait for them.
The first time Ala’s mother ever talked to her about the curse, she had been afflicted by it for a year already, seeing phantoms every morning where there were none, rambling about snow getting in her boots even though it was August, and making Ala’s aunt—not really her aunt, but her mother’s closest friend—fuss over her until her mind cleared, typically sometime around noon.
Her mother sat at the kitchen table, which was rickety and round and salvaged from an alley a few blocks away from them. Ala had wedged a piece of cardboard under one of the legs to keep it from wobbling, but it wobbled anyway. Her mother stirred honey into her tea—chamomile, to relax her—with a dazed expression. Ala cradled a mug of coffee to her chest and worked on that day’s crossword.
“I know how it seems,” her mother said, still stirring her tea. Her eyes were focused on the center of the table. “Like I am going mad.”
“Mom, that isn’t—”
“You are very careful not to say so.” Her mother’s eyes were a dull blue. Almost gray, sometimes, in certain lights. “You are too careful of me, I think. Do you think I can’t tell that you are afraid of me now?”
She sniffed, as if to make her point.
“You smell like a fucking bakery,” she said, and Ala’s face warmed. She went on: “So. Let us get the truth out there. They are not delusions. I know they aren’t real, when I’m inside them.”
“Oh,” Ala said, setting her pencil down. “What… what is it you see, exactly?”
Her mother shrugged. Her nightgown slipped off her shoulder, exposing a freckled collarbone and the little round scar on her upper arm from the smallpox vaccine.
She swept her palm across the center of the table, and a scene appeared. Ala’s mother was gifted with small, detailed illusions that reminded her of dioramas or model train sets. She couldn’t immerse you in them, but she could show the whole picture at once, something that always made Ala a little envious.
On the table before them was what looked like a Christmas landscape: a little house on a snow-covered hill that poked up from a dark forest. It was nighttime, and the moonlight turned the snow blue-white.
As Ala watched, two men on horseback rode through the trees toward the house. Only one light was on inside it, a warm and unsteady glow that reminded Ala of a lantern or a hearth fire. She could see one of the riders by its light when he passed in front of the house.
Even though he was small, no larger than a china doll, she could still see that his palms were stained the deep red of the Holy Order.
The Knight dismounted and drew his sword, which was fascinating to watch from this distance. The hilt was buried in his flesh, like his spine was bulging from his body. He had to dig into his skin to loosen it, which he did with the ease of someone who had done it a thousand times before. But she could see the agony of it nonetheless, his red-stained hands shuddering, his tiny teeth gritted.
