When he told his grandmother he wanted to go to America to find and destroy Baba Jaga, she considered him for a long time.
They were sitting in the coffee shop where she'd once picked a *zmora* out of a crowd of strangers. He drank his coffee black now, sweetened with honey rather than sugar. He bit down on the hard biscuit that came with it and met his grandmother's gaze.
"Why?" she asked.
"Why keep fighting foot soldiers when we can take out a general?" he countered. "You told me once that you believed I would do things none of our people have managed. Do you still believe that?"
His grandmother sipped from her cup. He could see the stiffness in her shoulders, the strain of leaving the bone weapon sheathed. She was too old to draw it now, her long life finally nearing its close. But her mind was as sharp as ever, and for a moment, he was afraid she would see right through him.
"Perhaps I do," she said, a small smile touching her lips.
***
Baba Jaga picked up a jar of teeth and tipped one into her palm, then ground it to dust in the huge mortar she kept on the table. She was stronger than she looked; her bicep bulged against her sleeve as she pressed down with the pestle.
"Niko, dear," she said without looking up. "Be a good boy and fetch me a dried thistle."
Niko moved around the table to search the shelves behind Baba Jaga, and Dymitr frowned. He'd gotten the impression before they arrived here that Niko had only met Baba Jaga once before. She was the one who had turned him from mortal to *strzygoń*, yet he seemed to know this place with more than passing familiarity.
*Babcia,* he had called her when they arrived.
Niko plucked a jar from one of the shelves and took a dried thistle from within it with two fingers. He offered it to Baba Jaga, who added it to the powdered tooth in the mortar and ground it up.
Dymitr picked up the bone sword he had unsheathed from his own body. It hummed with the same sense of rightness a person feels in their sleep when they shift into a comfortable position. He wondered if that would change when he transformed. Would this piece of his soul ever feel like his again?
He had expected to feel relief when he came to this decision—not to live a half-life, to spare himself the pain of his unmaking. Even a Knight plagued by guilt is a human being, driven by the desire to spare himself annihilation, isn't he? But he felt regret instead. He knew how to bear pain; he had been diligently instructed in the art of it since he was a child. Penance, before he took his oaths; the splitting of his soul that accompanied them; the unsheathing of the sword that came after—they were all ordinary to him. It would be easier, in some ways, to bear the pain of the sword's destruction than to embrace whatever this was.
Ala's eyes found his.
"Foolish hope, remember?" she said. Some of his regret ebbed away.
Baba Jaga poured the mixture into a pot and set it on a hot plate to boil. Her fingertips were stained green.
"I can't say what you'll become, exactly," she said. "No ordinary *zmora*, to be sure. Magic is not mastered; it moves as it will, even through me. But the allegiance you feel to the Holy Order will be broken. They will hunt you as if you are a dangerous animal, and that is, I assume, what you want. To make an enemy of those to whom you once belonged."
He wouldn't have put it that way, maybe, but she was right. He had begun the process much earlier than this, too. When he fought his sister with her own sword, defending Niko's life with his own. When he fled the Holy Order with a series of grand lies in his wake and came to this city with only his bow and arrows and a bag of necessities. And even before that, when he refused to draw his sword at all for months and honed his skill with the bow instead, so he wouldn't have to touch the hilt that weighed heavy on his shoulders. He had been betraying them since before Lena died. At least now he would do it thoroughly.
Baba Jaga took the bubbling mixture from the hot plate and poured it into a mug. It was dark red in color, thick as syrup. She offered it to him, and he took it in both hands.
"Drink it all," she said. "Then you'll fall asleep, and when you wake, the world will have one fewer Knight."
He held the mug against his sternum. Despite the fact that it had just been simmering on the hot plate, it felt like ice against his chest. Then he raised it to his lips, resolved to swallow it all at once. The last things he saw were Niko's fire-bright eyes and Ala's freckled nose.
***
He turned his face into the worn yellow pillowcase and took a deep breath. It smelled like detergent—the starchy, industrial kind they used in hospitals. He took a deeper breath, and he could smell something else, too. Bacon. Lavender. And something sweet as powdered sugar.
He opened his eyes and found himself staring at Ala.
She was sitting in a chair beside the bed. She looked different than she had when he last saw her. It took him a few seconds to realize it was because she no longer looked even faintly monstrous to him. She just looked like Ala: half stern, half soft, always skeptical, rarely unsure.
"Hello," she said.
"Something smells sweet," he replied. He turned his face into the pillowcase and breathed in, but he couldn't find the scent there. She laughed a little and held her hand out to him so he could smell her fingers, like a dog.
But then he smelled it—that powdered-sugar scent. Pleasant and light, like angel food cake.
"I'm worried about you," she said. "That's what it smells like."
"Makes me hungry," he said. "That's annoying."
"You'll get used to it."
Dymitr considered her. She never struck him as a tender-hearted person before. Yet here she was, sitting in an uncomfortable chair next to his bed, fretting over him.
"You're worried about me?" he said. "Why?"
"You just haven't thought about it," she said. "You were made from the same blood as me. That means you're my brother, and I'm your sister, and we'll always worry about each other from now on."
"Brother and sister." He thought of Elza with a sharp pain and rolled onto his back to stare at the ceiling. There was a crack there, where the paint had bubbled away from the drywall. It reminded him of the lines in his palm.
He looked at her again.
"Are you sure you want a brother who's done what I've done?" he asked.
"You'll find there's a lot of family drama among *zmory*," she said with a smile that he thought would have looked menacing to him before, but now seemed gentle. "We wouldn't be the first to reconcile after one has killed another's aunt."
"Really."
"Really," she said. "Eternity is long, Dymitr. Time enough for hearts to soften."
He wondered what he would look like to a *llorona* now. If the halo of sorrow around his head would still be as brilliant to them, or if untangling the curse from Ala's blood, and hearing that she wanted him to be whole, had healed over some of the loss that divided him.
He sat up, and he startled himself with how quick the movement was, and how forceful—he fell to his knees on the carpet right in front of the bed. Ala laughed.
"The old legends used to say that we could transform into a hair and fit through a keyhole," she said. "We can't, of course, but we do tend to be fast and light."
He lifted a hand and stared at it. His fingernail had grown back, and the wound in his palm was healed over. He came to his feet and met his own eyes in the mirror above Ala's dresser.
He looked like himself—there was some relief in that. His eyes were still that odd shade of brown-gray, his hair still matched them, as before. The scar in his lip was still there. But there was something different about him, too. Something sharper and wilder, like a fox that wanders into a suburban neighborhood in search of food—capable at any moment of ferocity.
Ala stood beside him, and he saw some similarity between them. That keenness.
"Sister," he said to her, and she nodded.
"No visions?" he asked her. "Memories?"
"Gone," she replied, and she smiled so wide it looked like it might split her face in half. "Let's go say hello to Niko. You can find out how worried he is."
She led him out of the room. The scents of her apartment hit him all at once. Stale crackers and dust. Old bacon, rubber boots, petrichor. Mold, rust, and blood. He considered the blood for a moment—he had a feeling about it, an attachment. He followed that feeling into the kitchen, where he could focus on nothing else, though there were plenty of other things to see. He followed it to the kitchen trash can, which he opened, and removed a square of gauze stained brown with blood.
He stared at it. It was his blood, from the gauze that had covered the pulled fingernail.
"Did you wake up a vampire?" Niko's voice asked.
"No, he's just discovering his new nose," Ala replied. "Give him a moment."
Dymitr dropped the gauze back into the trash. Niko was leaning against the sink, his arms folded, the light of the sun glowing behind his head. The menace that Dymitr used to see in his face wasn't gone, exactly. It was just that it no longer crept up Dymitr's spine the way it used to. Instead, he could see that Niko was beautiful, like a statue of a Roman soldier, like a Kupala Night fire, like a well-made sword.
Niko asked Ala, "Do we call him a *zmora*, since he's male? Or is he a *zmoron*?"
Ala laughed. "Technically, it's *zmór*," she said. "Though if you want to call him a *zmoron*, I suppose you can."
Niko smelled like powdered sugar, and—Dymitr stepped closer, and closer, following his nose to the curve of Niko's neck in a way that would have been embarrassing if he'd been in his right mind. He touched his nose to Niko's throat and breathed in. He smelled like some kind of flower, and ever-so-slightly of dark chocolate.
"You are worried about me," Dymitr said, pulling away. "And… a little bit afraid of me?"
Niko's eyes were wide. They skipped all over Dymitr's face, and Dymitr wondered how he looked to Niko, if he was still beautiful enough to fight for.
"The word you're looking for," Niko said, "is awe. I am a little in awe of you."
Dymitr opened his mouth to argue, and Niko held up a hand to stop him.
"Don't," he said. "You'll ruin it."
He curled his fingers under Dymitr's chin and drew him closer. His breath smelled like coffee and mint toothpaste. He kissed Dymitr, gentle and slow. It lit up parts of Dymitr he wasn't sure existed, as if the fire that flickered in Niko's eyes had kindled in Dymitr, too.
"See?" Niko said. "It's good to be something new."
***
The *leszy* sat on a stump in the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary and breathed in the moonlight. A moth fluttered around one of his horns and then settled at the edge of his eye socket, where all the flowers that once grew were now dead, dormant for winter.
He could smell snow in the air, though it hadn't fallen yet. He was as eager for the forest to fall asleep as he would be for it to wake again, come springtime. He enjoyed the sound of the trees settling in for their long sleep, and the earth going quiet as all the things that wriggled and scuttled and busied themselves inside it went still. He stretched out one hoof and listened.
He heard the pressure of footsteps, too light to be human footsteps, and lifted his stag head to see a man standing in the clearing across from him. He carried a bow and quiver. The *leszy* recognized him, though it had been months since he last laid eyes on the man's face. He thought he could even remember the man's name if he reached for it, but he didn't. The *leszy* had never understood the wraith's fixation on names. A *leszy* has no name; he has only the forest of which he is a guardian.
"He has found me again," the *leszy* said.
The man nodded and walked closer. The *leszy* could tell by his movements that he was different than he used to be. No longer human, perhaps. It was a strange thing to observe, since it happened rarely, but it did happen, every now and then. And so he accepted it, as he accepted the changing of the land, the changing of all things.
"I am leaving soon on an errand from Baba Jaga," the man said. "But before I go, I came to test your bow again, if you're willing."
The *leszy* tilted his head.
"The fern flower won't bloom for several months," he said. "And he will no longer be able to pick it, even so."
"This is just a friendly contest, my lord *leszy*," the man said. "I no longer have need of the fern flower."
The *leszy* considered this for a moment.
"Oh," he said at last. "Then let me make a target."