Page 33 of When Among Crows
His feet are quick as he advances on her, forcing her to trip backward toward the curb. His sword is shorter than hers, but he has reach; he stabs at her, the movement fluid. She blocks him, but he thrusts again, and again, building speed.
They’re close to each other now, sharing the same breaths as they strike-block-strike-block, trading blows so fast Niko can’t even keep track of them. Then Dymitr swings hard, and the Knight’s grip on her sword falters. The bone weapon clatters to the sidewalk, and she trips over the curb behind her, falling hard on her butt.
He holds the sword against her throat, and they both pause.
Her face is streaked with tears. Without the sword in her hand, the red glint to her eyes is gone, and her palms and fingers are back to their usual shade, pale to match her cheek. Seeing them both in profile now, Niko realizes they have to be brother and sister.
The Knight looks a little younger than Dymitr, withthe same light brown hair that appears almost gray, the same stubborn mouth and chin.
“I told you,” Dymitr says to her, “to go home, Elza.”
He speaks in Polish, which Niko understands, though he sometimes struggles to piece words together himself. In his own language, Dymitr sounds different. His voice is deeper, flatter. Or maybe that’s just because he’s shed his harmless persona. Maybe this is how Dymitr the Knight speaks.
“You aren’t acting like yourself,” the knight—Elza, apparently—says. Her eyes flick from Dymitr’s to Niko and Ala, in turn. “I thought you could use the help.”
Dymitr scowls. “You thought sending a flock of birds to peck me half to death was helping me?”
Ala inches closer to Niko. He knows they should take advantage of Dymitr and his sister’s mutual distraction andrun,but he can’t convince his feet to move.
“You were surrounded by strzygi!” Elza replies.
“And now?”
“You got the address you needed,” Elza says. “So I sent you a cleanup crew.”
She gestures to the pale bodies twisted together on the pavement all around her, the fallen vampire pack.
“You,” Dymitr says, as he lowers his blade, “are not helping me. You are an encumbrance. You are aburden.”
Even Niko can see how the words wound her. He can feel it, too, as if her hurt is the hard press of a hand. He can’t feel sadness, but he can feel where rage coils around it like a snake.
“Go home,” Dymitr says again, and his voice is cold and cruel. “Or the next time I see you, I will kill you.”
He tosses the sword at her feet, and steps back, his eyebrows raised. Elza’s tears spill over her cheeks. She grabs the bone sword from the ground, and holds both weapons at once, the handles layered over each other. She bends her head and touches the blades to the back of her neck. Her teeth clack together as she clenches her jaw; the sheathing seems to be as painful as the unsheathing.
We bear the sword, and we bear the pain of the sword—isn’t that what they say? Niko has seen this mantra of the Holy Order written, has even heard it from the mouth of a dying man, like a final prayer, not to his God, but to the other half of his soul, buried in that damn weapon.
Elza turns and stumbles into the dark, disappearing between two of the houses on the lonely street and into the night.
Dymitr turns too, slowly, so he’s facing Ala and Niko. Up until this point, Niko has felt frozen. But when he meets Dymitr’s eyes again, rage prickles through him like blood rushing back into a numb limb. Dymitr’s eyes are the color of stone.
Dymitr doesn’t have a weapon. His bow and quiver are on the hood of the Jeep, and he gave the bone sword back to Elza. But the thing about facing a Knight is that they always have a weapon—they have the other half of their soul, buried in their spine.
Niko is so on edge, he almost shifts into his owl form right there. He can feel the wings itching at his shoulderblades, the beak scraping at the interior of his nose. To be strzygi is to be twice-souled, the legends say—to have two complete beings inside of you at once. Whichever form he’s in, he can feel the other one alive just beneath the surface, waiting to break free. He squeezes the handle of his sword.
But before Niko can so much as twitch, Dymitr grips his gauze-wrapped hand so tightly his knuckles turn white. His face crumples, and he utters words too quiet and too quick for Niko to hear. Then shadow wraps around him, not unlike the black wings of the crows that swarmed them the night before.
By the time it dissipates, he’s gone.
“Fuck,” Niko says. “Fuck!” He runs his bloody hands over his hair, frantic. “He saw the address, he knows where to go—”
“What is that?” It’s the first thing Ala has said since the vampires surrounded them. He can’t read her, can only tell that she doesn’t feel angry to him, or hurt, or wounded in any way. It’s as if the revelation of Dymitr’s identity has left her in shock.
She points, and he sees what she’s pointing at: a square of brown paper on the street where Dymitr was just standing. Ala picks it up, and cradles it in both hands like it’s spun glass. Like it’s something precious.
And it is. It’s the fern flower.
“He left it,” Ala says, frowning. “Why would he do that?”
