Page 6 of When Among Crows
“I know better than to justgiveyou my name,” he replies, and he hooks his finger around the neck of the beer bottle to raise it to his lips.
She doesn’t stop smiling, but the hint of amusement in her eyes disappears.
“So you know a little about magic,” she says. “You know that a name is powerful. And you know, I assume, what this place is?”
He shrugs. “A nightly buffet, laid for creatures who feast on human fear? Yes. I know.”
“You make us sound so uncultured.” She gestures to the curtains. “Playing in that room is the movieAlien.1979. Ridley Scott. A symphony of tension, rising to shock, disgust, horror. Mellowing to a tremulous kind of anxiety. For those zmory with far more delicate palates than most—for the rest, we offer a slasher movie every Wednesday. Quick,hot scares, like a plate of french fries.” She touches her hand to her belly. “Delicious. But not particularly refined.”
“Fascinating.” He swallows more beer.
Klara cocks her head. “It doesn’t alarm you at all. That you’re among monsters who consider you a food source. Youarehuman, aren’t you?”
“I’m human,” he says. “But I’m not easily frightened.”
“How very annoying.” She leans against the wall and tucks her hands into her pockets. “What are you, then? Oswiecony? Or your zmora mother bore a human boy? Or you have a zmora girlfriend? How do you know what we are?”
Oswiecony. Her mouth forms the word with ease. She speaks Polish, but sounds American; someone caught in between worlds in more than one way.
“Does it matter?”
“You show up here with something to offer me, but you won’t give me your name and you won’t tell me how you’re aware of us,” she says. “Why do you expect me to listen? Or really, I should be asking…” She pulls away from the wall, and moves closer—too close; her proximity makes the hair on his arms stand on end. “Why do you expect me to spare your life?”
“We share a mother country. Maybe I’m counting on that to stay your hand.”
“I share a mother country with a lot of people, and they don’t always mean well,” she says. “I’ve threatened you, and you’re still not afraid. You must have a very good offer for me.”
Dymitr smiles at her. “If you promise not to kill me, I’ll give you my name in exchange.”
Klara rolls her eyes. “I promise you’ll leave this place alive and intact if you pose no threat to us. Good enough?”
“Sure.” He sets his beer bottle down on the table next to the film reels. “My name is Dymitr.”
He can’t feel the weight of the name, but he thinks she can. A name is a gift, but a name is also a weapon. It makes him vulnerable to her. She can use it to find him, even to curse him. She could, in theory, give it to someone else on his behalf, but she won’t. If she did, its power would be lost; no one can use it against him unless he’s the one to hand it over.
She replies, “Stop wasting my time, Dymitr.”
Dymitr doesn’t know much about Klara Dryja. She’s the youngest of the Dryja family’s three leaders, and the most receptive to humans, of which each family has a handful. Not all babies born to zmory are zmory, after all. Humans born to creatures—or monsters, as some call them—are “oswiecony”: enlightened. Aware of the creature world, or the World That Endures, as Dymitr’s mother calls it, since it’s full of beings with long lifespans.
His contact told him that the other two leaders of the Dryja family won’t even speak to their oswiecony, and instead funnel all communication through other, lower-status zmory. So though Klara’s ferocity is well-known, she’s still the most likely to listen to him.
He touches a hand to the paper in his pocket.
“I heard a rumor,” he says. “That one of your number is under a curse.”
Klara works her jaw. She’s not smiling now. “Did you.”
He nods. “I heard this curse degrades its victim day by day, tormenting them with visions until they lose touch with reality.”
The room goes dark around them. He stiffens as not just the walls, but the floor and ceiling disappear, leaving the two of them standing in a void. He knows that all zmory are skilled illusionists, but it’s one thing to know that, and another to be caught in one of their illusions.
Klara tugs something from her hair: a long, sharp needle with a decorative spider at the end of it. She turns it in her fingers.
“I mean no harm,” he says, in his gentlest voice. “I simply want you to know that I understand how much suffering this curse inflicts. And I know…”
He takes the paper out of his pocket. As he does, Klara raises the needle to his throat, poking the point into his skin just enough for him to feel it. He holds up the paper so she can see it. Her eyes have gone as black as the void that surrounds them.
Slowly he unfolds the paper, revealing the red flower nestled inside it. The petals emit a gentle glow.
