His grandmother was the one who taught him how to spot them. She had taken him to the town center and sat him down at Basia's Cafe for a coffee and a biscuit, right by the window so they could watch the street. He was only twelve years old, so sharing a coffee with steamed milk with the woman who liked to wink conspiratorially at him across the table was a rare treat.
"Look across the way there," she said, pointing a crooked finger out the window. "At the bank, at the market—someone there is not right. Can you tell me who it is?"
He'd been tested before, but only verbally. *What does a strzyga turn into when provoked?* "An owl—well, a creature the size of a human, with an owl's face, owl's wings—and claws." *When does a wraith appear?* "Any time of day, unless it's a noonwraith, and then it thrives in sunlight." But this… *Can you tell me who it is?* How was he supposed to know?
Dymitr sipped the thick foam dusted with cinnamon that covered his coffee and searched for the face that didn't match the others in the little crowd across the street. At the bank, a man in a wide-brimmed hat stopped at the ATM to withdraw cash. As he turned to tuck it into his wallet, Dymitr saw him in profile. Nothing unusual in the dusting of whiskers or the watery blue eyes.
A little girl stopped to pick something up from the side of the road. As she crouched with flat heels, her red skirt brushed the damp bricks, and her mother tapped her on the head to make her stand. She did, lifting what looked like a hoop earring to the light. Nothing unusual about her face, either.
Just behind them was a woman alone, middle-aged, with brown hair tied at the base of her neck. She raised an apple to her nose, one of the yellow ones with shiny red patches. Ordinary.
"I could guess," he said. "But it would be random."
His grandmother smiled. "I told your father you were wise."
The woman set the apple down and picked up another one. This one she hardly looked at before tucking it into her shopping bag.
"Watch me carefully," his grandmother said, and he set down his mug. She breathed deep, and her hand tightened. She dug into her palm with her fingernails, and then—he saw a red glint in her eyes, brief as a bolt of lightning.
"It's her," she said, her voice rougher than before. She pointed to the woman with the apple.
"What did you do?" he asked.
"When you become one of us, you will tap into a wellspring of power within yourself," she said. "You can unleash the full extent of that power, or you can let in only a trickle of it—and when you do so, you will see the monstrous parts of our world for what they really are. It requires tremendous control, but you are capable of it. You will become capable of it."
Dymitr nodded, though he couldn't imagine what she meant.
"What is she?" he asked, nodding to the woman across the way. He had reached the bottom of the foam in his cup, and the first bitter taste of coffee touched his lips as he drank.
"She is a *zmora*," Grandmother said. "Have you studied them yet?"
"*Zmora*," he repeated. "A nightmare?"
"In a manner of speaking." Grandmother snorted softly. She scratched at the age spot that kissed her cheekbone. "The old stories say they wear the faces of women and creep into a man's bedroom to perch on his chest, pour horrors into his mind, and drink down his life force. He wakes exhausted, not knowing why." She shrugged. "Like all of the old stories, there is a little truth and a lot of fancy."
"What do they eat, then?" He'd learned that was always the most important question.
"Fear," she replied.
He watched the woman approach the register. If the cashier sensed there was something strange about her, he didn't let on. He peered into her shopping bag and started to tally what was inside.
"The old stories also say they're shapeshifters, and can turn into a crow, or a horse, or a stoat—or even a hair, slight enough to slip through a keyhole." Grandmother shook her head. "Nonsense. But they can make you see whatever they want."
Her hand trembled ever so slightly as she lifted her coffee cup to her mouth.
"Don't be fooled by her human face, her human voice," she said. "That is no woman."
***
The Crow Theater doesn't have a sign. Instead, a row of neon birds, each in a different stage of flight, blinks above the marquee. Today the marquee reads:
ALIENS VS. GHOSTS: WHO WOULD WIN?
*Alien* (1979) vs. *The Haunting* (1963)—Double Feature
The theater itself is a sagging, scuffed place in Edgewater, one of Chicago's northernmost neighborhoods. It shows only horror movies, though it seems to treat "horror" as an umbrella term for anything that might unsettle or disgust. Showings from the past week, as listed on the theater's threadbare website, include a vampire movie from the early aughts where everyone was in skintight patent leather, a documentary on cane toads, and *Jaws*.
A man with ash-brown hair bypasses the box office and steps into the adjoining bar, Toil and Trouble. He passes beneath a cluster of sparkly bats when he steps down into the space, his shoes sticking to the floor a little as he walks. The bar top has been designed to look like a closed coffin, and perched on top of it is a mechanical witch that cackles every time the bartender passes it.
He knows without looking at the bartender that she's not human. He's gotten good at sensing it without seeing it, that undefinable something that he can almost taste. But he doubts any of the other patrons have noticed.
He shrugs the soft guitar case from his shoulders and leans it against the bar, then sits down to wait. His contact sent a message to the owner of this establishment requesting a meeting, but he has no way of knowing if Klara Dryja will actually show up. He's ten minutes early, regardless.
Above him, a string of lights made to look like flickering candles dangles a little too close to his head. He ducks to read the menu scribbled on the far wall in messy chalk handwriting. The *zmora* bartender sidles up to him.
Though there's still a chill in the air outside, she's dressed like it's the middle of summer, her arms bare, pale as milk. Her hair is cropped close to her head, but her high cheekbones and square jaw remind him of the place he just left. They should. All *zmory* are Polish, like he is, though they have creature cousins all over the world.
"Can I get you something?" the *zmora* asks. She sounds American.
It's so strange to speak to her like she's the same as him, but he's getting used to it. "Would I be a fool to order wine here?"
"It'll taste a little like feet, and it'll come in a chalice the size of a melon," she says. "Does that interest you?"
He pretends to consider this.
"I'll have a beer," he says. "Whatever you like best."
"Good choice."
There's an array of drinkware just behind the bar: a mug with cat eyes painted on it, a goblet with snakes wrapping around its base, a cup shaped like a human skull. She sets a bottle of beer down in front of him and then raises a glow-in-the-dark plastic cup at him in question. He shakes his head.
The bartender reaches for a rag, setting off the cackling witch, whose pointed hat bobs as she bounces with laughter. The bartender curses and turns the witch to face the wall.
He's suppressing a smile at this when someone at his shoulder clears her throat.
She's a small, slight woman with the sly smile of a fox and hoop earrings the size of his fist. That she's a *zmora* is more obvious for her than it is for the bartender—there's too much time in her eyes. Klara Dryja is her name, and she's the one he's here to meet.
"You." She says it as if it's a certainty. "Come with me."
"You must be Klara," he replies.
"Must I?" She's already stepping out of the bar and into the movie theater lobby beside it.
He leaves a ten-dollar bill on the bar, picks up his guitar case and his beer, and hurries after Klara. The air smells burnt and buttery. She leads him down a short hallway plastered with old movie posters, past the restrooms and both of the theater's two screens, up a flight of stairs and into a projection room. On the screen, Sigourney Weaver stands in a spaceship wearing a white tank top and underwear.
A man just inside the projection room glances at them, then draws the curtains across the windows. He's sitting beside a stack of film reels in tin cases.
"Thank you, Tom," Klara says to him. She turns back to Dymitr with eyebrows raised.
"Who are you?" she says.
"I came to make you an offer."
Klara smiles, and her smile is a warning. "That's not an answer."
"I know better than to just give you 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 movie *Alien*. 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. You are human, 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? *Oświęcony*? Or your *zmora* mother bore a human boy? Or you have a *zmora* girlfriend? How do you know what we are?"
*Oświęcony*. 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 "*oświęcony*": 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 *oświęcony*, 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.
The illusion falls away from Klara's eyes, as well as the room around them. He relaxes a little as the floor reappears beneath him.
"I know that the fern flower unravels most curses," he says. "But it can only be touched by mortal hands."
Klara's eyes stay locked on the fern flower.
"How did you get that?" she says, her voice rough.
"I was tested," he replies.
The memory of his own heart pulsing in front of him, of the bare, dry rib cage of the wraith, swells in his throat like a pill too big and too dry to swallow. He breathes, in and out, in and out, aware that he's now been quiet for far too long.
Klara sniffs and smiles a little, presumably as she tastes his panic.
"I was tested, and I was found worthy," he goes on. "A fact you should not take lightly."
He folds the paper over the flower again and tucks it into his pocket. Then he touches her wrist, guiding the needle away from his neck. She allows him to.
"What is it you expect in return?" she says.
"That is between me and your cursed *zmora*," he replies. "So if you would tell me how to find them, I would be grateful."
Klara slides the needle back into the knot of hair at the back of her head and smooths down the front of her shirt. She glances at Tom, still sitting at the projector and playing solitaire on his phone, as if nothing is happening behind him.
"Tempting though that offer is," she says, "I can't give you what you ask for without knowing what you want. I have to protect my people."
"You are afraid of a human?"
"A normal one, no," she says. "But the Holy Order blend in too easily, and they have killed too many of us."
Dymitr looks at Tom, who has just won at solitaire, the cards spilling across his screen.
"Fine. I'll tell you," he says. "I seek an audience with Baba Jaga."
Klara looks a little surprised. He doesn't blame her; most humans aren't stupid enough to look for Baba Jaga. She's a powerful witch—the powerful witch. She who defeated Koschei the Deathless; she who lures children and maidens and knights alike into dark tangles of trees and sells them favors at too high a cost; who rides a mortar and pestle and lives in a house that stands on chicken legs. Fearsome, eternal, capricious Baba Jaga.
"What makes you think that the *zmora* you're looking for will know how to find her?"
He shrugs. "I think she'll know more than I do, which is a start. Or perhaps you'll share something useful with me on her behalf."
"And when you don't get anywhere," Klara says. "What will you do? Renege on your side of the deal?"
"I'll get somewhere."
"I know human men," she says. "I have made their worst nightmares come to life around them. I have made them weep. I know what happens when they don't get what they want from us." Her voice lowers to a whisper. "They get angry. They seek out a member of the Holy Order. And they have us killed."
The Holy Order—the bogeyman of the bogeymen. She speaks of them the way his mother used to speak of Baba Jaga stealing his toes if he didn't stop running in the hallway. He wonders what kinds of stories the *zmory* tell their children to scare them into behaving. Do they tell them the Holy Order split their souls to make their swords? That they have to wrench them from a sheath of vertebrae every time they fight?
He asks, "What will it take to convince you that I mean no harm?"
"There's nothing you can say or do that will convince me of that," Klara says. "Men always mean harm. The question is simply when."
She gestures to the door, dismissing him.
"If you change your mind," he says, "I'll be at the Thorndale Red Line stop at midnight. I'll wait for half an hour."
He picks up his beer bottle, shoulders his guitar case, and leaves the projection room with the fern flower heavy in his pocket.
He's walking down a dark stretch of Clark Street, past a defunct furniture store with EVERYTHING MUST GO scrawled on one of the windows, when he hears the footsteps. They lack the purpose of someone walking home, and the purposelessness of someone stumbling away from a bar. They're light and even, and when he stops, they stop.
He straightens the straps of the guitar case he wears on his back and steps backward into the pool of light cast by a streetlamp. At the edge of the circle that lights the cracked concrete, he sees a pair of glittering eyes.
"Can we hurry this up?" he says. "I know you're following me, so you may as well reveal yourself."
He expects a *zmora*, maybe; someone who sniffed him out at the theater and decided to find out what he was up to. Or a wraith, some cousin to the noonwraith who flayed him open and has her own use for the fern flower in his pocket. What he isn't expecting is a woman.
Specifically his sister, Elza.
She has the same cool brown hair as him, though she wears hers in a braid, and the same mouth—too full for a man, his older brother used to say, teasing, as he poked Dymitr in the lip. But her eyes are honey-warm in color, and there's a dimple in her left cheek even when she isn't smiling.
"I don't know how you can stand to talk to them like that," she says, with an exaggerated shudder. "They want to eat you, you know."
He scowls at her and demands, in Polish: "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Keeping you from doing something stupid," she replies. "Father told me you had left on some fool's errand—"
"I proposed a mission based on information I collected in the field," Dymitr says, and he can hear how his voice changes when he uses official language, pitched lower and without inflection. "Grandmother approved it. So I'm sure Father didn't tell you it was a fool's errand—"
"No, I decided that all by myself," Elza says, scowling right back at him.
She's dressed for a fight, her black boots laced tight and her black canvas pants loose enough to allow movement. When she's not anticipating danger, Elza loves ruffles and bows, airy fabric that floats around her body like gossamer, bright lipstick and pointed shoes. Fragile, impractical things that fill her closet with color.
"Baba Jaga is your target?" she says. "Really?"
"I'm not discussing this with you."
"Funny, I thought that's what we were doing right now." She rolls her eyes. "If you're going to do this, you'll need backup—"
"Backup will get me killed," he replies. "I need to be as unobtrusive as possible, I can't charge in with the entire Order at my back—"
"I didn't realize you thought of me as an entire army unto myself." She folds her arms, and he can see a knife sheathed along her forearm, the handle peeking out from her jacket sleeve. "I'm not stupid, Dymek. I know you didn't propose a mission in America just because, what? You stumbled across some random tip—"
"A thread connects this place and ours, and it has for almost two hundred years," he says. "Today I ordered gołąbki at a diner and didn't even have to speak a word of English."
"Yes, the wonders of Polonia never cease." She reaches for his arm, pinches the sleeve right over his elbow. "I know you. You're acting strange. Tell me why."
"I," he says, stepping toward her, "am doing what's necessary. And if Grandmother thought I needed you here, she would have sent you." He lowers his voice, hardens it. "If I wanted you here, I would have asked you."
He tugs his arm from her grasp and steps back.
"Go home, Elza," he says, and he leaves his sister standing in the circle of light, a crease between her eyebrows.