Page 23 of When Among Crows
She has a takeout box in hand from the Indian place down the street. As she looks them all over—with equanimity, as if this isn’t the strangest thing she’s seen tonight—she sticks a fork into her curry and sets it down on the counter, right next to a potted plant.
“Nicky,” she says to him. “I thought this place gave you the creeps.”
“Don’t act surprised,” he says. “I know you heard me coming.”
She laughs, but doesn’t deny it. “I’m allowed the niceties of normalcy, you know.”
She tilts her head toward Dymitr, as if straining to hear a whisper, and a small crease appears between her eyes, and Niko wishes he knew what it meant. What she hears about Dymitr’s future, minutes or hours from now.
“You’re not a banshee,” Dymitr says to her quietly.
“Is that a question?”
“No.” His gaze shifts to the ground just beside her, where her shadow should have been. He seems to reconsider. “Yes.”
“The word you’re looking for is sheid,” she says.
His next words seem to fall out of him like something tumbling out of a loose pocket. “A demon?”
Niko cringes. Sha gives Dymitr a cold smile.
“Demon,” she says, “is not our preferred terminology. We eat, sleep, breathe, live, and die just as you do. We simply know more.” She tilts her head a little as she acknowledges, “Some of my kind are more…troublesomethan others. But that is true of all of us, including your own people.”
Dymitr’s cheeks go pink in a way that Niko refuses to find charming. “My apologies. It’s not often I encounter… someone new.”
Niko knows he meanssomethingnew—but he’s aware, at least, that he should never call a creature a “something.”
“No, you wouldn’t have encountered my kind, would you.” Her voice is soft. There’s nothing menacing about Sha, exactly—but there’s something unsettling about a person who knows as much as she does, who hears whispers of what’s next. Her quiet is like the sky reflecting on still water: it obscures the depth and the dark of what lies beneath it. “They fled your country during the war along with all the other Jewish people. Or—the fortunate ones did.”
People say there are two different worlds, Niko thinks.Human and not-so-human. But there aren’t, really—not when it counts.
Dymitr looks at his shoes, and then back up at Sha.
“I’m sorry,” Dymitr says again, and if he had something to add, he swallows it instead.
Sha frowns at him for a moment longer, and then seems to come out of a daze, the crease in her brow disappearing as she focuses her attention on Niko again. “What do you need?”
This is why he loves her—because she really means it. He doesn’t explain the situation to her: the flower wilting in Dymitr’s pocket, the strzygi who have likely deemed him expendable, the quest to stand before Baba Jaga, the pursuit of the Holy Order. He tells her only that they need a safe haven until sundown, that Ala needs a private room that locks from the outside, per her request, and that he’ll owe her a favor—something he doesn’t offer lightly, given its rich potential for magic.
“No, you won’t,” Sha replies, patting his cheek. “You’ve already paid.”
Niko looks away. He doesn’t need the reminder—of what he is, and of what it means, and of why it makes her want to be kind to him. So he ignores it.
Sha takes Ala to one of the vacant hospice rooms, where Ala declines a sedative but accepts a clean T-shirt. Ala pulls all the curtains closed, takes off her shoes, and sits on the bed to wait for the curse to hit her. For a moment, Dymitr and Niko stand there, staring at her.
“What are you waiting for?” she says. “Lock me in and leave me alone.”
Niko pulls Dymitr out of the room to do as she says.
Niko nudges the bathroom door open with his toe, and watches Dymitr at the sink. The water is running, and Dymitr’s jacket hangs on a hook on the opposite wall, where it would be so easy, so simple to take the fern flower from his pocket and sell it to Lidia Kostka, or whoever wanted to pay the most for it. But Niko doesn’t.
Instead, he watches Dymitr peel the blood-soaked handkerchief from his right hand with trembling fingers and examine his exposed nail bed with a grimace. Under the fluorescent lights he looks ghostly. He eases his hand under the stream of water and hisses with pain.
“What are you, a masochist?” Niko says, setting down the first aid kit, bundle of clean clothes, and—thank God—toothbrushes that he scavenged from Sha’s supply closets. He closes the bathroom door behind him and reaches around Dymitr to put his hand under the faucet. He creates a kind of shelf with his fingers to slow the flow of water. It dribbles over Dymitr’s wounded finger gently.
“Thanks,” Dymitr mumbles, and Niko is aware of him, aware of himself. Dymitr’s shirt is white cotton, pulled up to his elbows, and there are scars across his knuckles, and he’s warm. Niko thinks of him lifting the bow to fire an arrow.
“I brought bandages,” he says. “So we can have our Florence Nightingale moment, if you’d like.”
