After the first time, he came home trembling.
It was raining so hard that the short walk from the driveway to the house washed away most of the blood. But it still stained his nail beds. He stood in the foyer for a long time, alone, staring at them. They didn't seem to belong to him.
Elza found him there. He didn't know how long he had been standing. There was a puddle of rainwater on the floor at his feet, and he could hear his parents' voices in the kitchen. Elza frowned up at him and wrapped her warm fingers around his wrist.
She led him up the stairs to the second-floor bathroom they had all shared as children, before their older siblings moved out and before Babcia moved in. The names "Elza" and "Dymek" were scrawled in crayon under the sink, right above the bottles of cleaning fluid.
She stood at his shoulder and guided his hands into the water. It was warm, which meant it had been running for a while, though he hadn't noticed. She squeezed soap into her palms and worked it into a lather before rubbing it into his cuticles.
"What happened?" she asked softly.
He didn't answer.
Elza took out a little brush and used it to scrape the red out from under his fingernails. Then she set it down, turned off the water, and leaned her head against his shoulder.
"It's all right," she said. "You're all right."
"I killed her," he whispered.
"You killed *it*," Elza corrected him. She carded her fingers through his hair, ruffling it. "You did well, Dymek. You did exactly what you were supposed to."
He spared a glance at his own reflection. His cheeks were wet with tears.
*You killed it,* he tried to tell himself. He tried.
Dymitr can't feel his hands. Or really, he can feel them, but they don't seem to be attached to his body correctly; they feel too heavy and too big for him. He squeezes them into fists, briefly, to ground himself, but it doesn't quite work.
Baba Jaga stands across the room, looking no older than he is, but there's something about her that reminds him of his grandmother. Maybe it's the way she reduces him with a single look. Or the way she seems tired of the world and everything in it.
"No Knight has ever come to me before," she says, "and survived."
She moves closer to the table covered with bones and runs her fingers over them.
Niko and Ala stand to the side, near a waist-high stack of copper pots. Dymitr can't bring himself to look at them. This will be easier if he doesn't.
"Your name?" Baba Jaga says to him.
"Dymitr," he answers brokenly.
"Why?" she asks. "Why that name?"
"I don't know. It's just a name."
Baba Jaga picks up one of the bones—a femur—and holds it like a magic wand, delicate in her fingers. She points it at him.
"It's never just a name, boy," she says. "Dymitr comes from Demeter, Greek goddess of the harvest. A Greek name for a Polish boy. A name of abundant life for a child raised to murder. That… is a very special kind of joke. One that only the Holy Order can tell. One that only the Holy Order can laugh at." She wags her finger at him. "My wraith told me to expect you. She told me that you had a strange heart, and that I was in it. Imagine my surprise."
"I can't imagine that very much surprises you," he says unsteadily.
"No," she says, with a hint of that weariness. "Well, enough of this."
She tilts her head.
"Everyone always wants something," she says. "I am not a person to them; I am simply the one who can bring their desires to bear. So tell me. Do you wish to hurt me? To use me for evil?"
"No." Dymitr feels so heavy. So exhausted. His hand throbs and his shoulders itch. "No, I'm here to ask you to destroy a Knight of the Holy Order."
"You have blood on your hands already," she says. "Why can't you get rid of this person yourself?"
"I…" He trails off. He doesn't know where to begin.
"Which Knight?" Ala asks, with a sharpness that suggests she already knows what his answer will be.
Dymitr lets himself drop to his knees.
"Me," he says, and he closes his eyes.
"I may not have been honest," Dymitr says. "But I didn't lie."
When he opens his eyes, the room is still bathed in green light from the lava lamp, which is now warm enough for the wax inside to swell into blue bubbles.
He focuses on Ala. She's clutching something to her stomach—a packet of brown paper, faintly glowing from the wilting fern flower inside it. Her wide-set eyes are empty and passive, and he wishes he'd never told her not to lose hope—wishes he'd never done anything to make her like him, no matter how small, because now he's about to crush her.
"I killed your aunt," he says to her. "She was my first mission. I thought, afterward, that something inside me was broken. My siblings both came back from their firsts in triumph and drank themselves stupid. I tried… I tried to act more like I was supposed to, to feel more like I was supposed to."
He shakes his head.
"Your cousin—Lena—she troubled me. I recognized her as one of the younger students from my school the moment I entered the house," he says. "And then she fought for her mother in a way that made me doubt what I'd been told. When the curse passed to her, I started to visit her in secret—with her permission. I thought… well, I don't know what I thought. And then I found out my sister was assigned to execute her."
He remembers Elza in her jacket, a smear of red paint over her collarbone where their mother had painted the protective symbol. *Where are you headed?* he had asked her. *Just some zmora,* she replied, and he knew.
"I tried to help Lena, but I was too late," he says. "I forced myself to admit that every person I'd killed had a soul, just like Lena. And I had to find a way to atone for those deaths." He pauses. Swallows hard. "Those murders."
"If you wanted to die," Ala says distantly, "there are easier ways."
"It's not death I want. It's… unmaking. Unraveling."
Dymitr looks down at his hands, which are now their usual color. He remembers the stain flowing into them for the first time, right after the ripping of his soul. The heat in his palms and in his eyes, pulsing with his heartbeat, so hot he could barely stand it—
"Knights divide their souls in half—one half resides in our bodies and one half resides in our swords. My request is the destruction of my sword. I'll survive, but I'll be… diminished. The world will have one fewer Knight, but I'll still live to carry the burden of what I've done. It seems… fitting. That I should still have to carry it."
"You've chosen your own punishment." Ala sounds angry. "You think your victims will be satisfied by your suffering?"
"I think my victims are dead."
It's too sharp, not quite the tone he intended, but… he meant it.
"I can't be a Knight anymore," he adds, gentler now. "I have to… tear out the part of myself that is."
"You want to wander the earth in pain," Ala says. "But suffering isn't atonement, Dymitr."
"Then what is?" he asks, and she doesn't answer him. She looks askance, at first at nothing in particular, and then at Baba Jaga, who still stands behind the table of bones, a pair of dice cradled in her palm. Dymitr almost forgot she was there.
"You can't allow this," Ala says to her.
"It's his choice, not yours," the witch replies. "I suppose that before I unmake you, boy, you have a suggested use for that special item she's holding? It bears your fingerprints, not hers."
"She's afflicted by a bloodline curse," Dymitr says. "I thought if anyone could break it, it would be you. With the fern flower."
Baba Jaga raises her eyebrow at Ala. Ala holds out the packet of paper and unwraps it, revealing the red flower within, emanating light like a firefly. It looks limp, but its color hasn't changed since he first picked it.
The witch nods.
"I see," she says. "They were right to name you for the harvest, weren't they?"
Baba Jaga leans over the fern flower, her hair draping over Ala's hand like a curtain. Ala is afraid—afraid that the witch will straighten and declare that the fern flower is defective, or too old now to be useful, or not a fern flower at all, the process of picking it an elaborate ruse to trick foolish mortals. She isn't sure she can bear it. She's been feeling the curse creeping through her, devouring her eternity, for the last several years, without understanding. It was like watching water go down a drain. She wasn't human, with a human's limited awareness of mortality. She was supposed to last, and trimming her centuries down to a handful of years was a cruelty she was hardly able to endure.
But now she can have them back. If only Baba Jaga chooses to give them to her.
Ala glances at Dymitr. She can hardly look at him now, knowing what he's done, what he is, what he intends. But he meets her eyes for only a moment.
Baba Jaga straightens, a smile playing over her lips. One of her incisors—pointier than the norm—sticks out like a fang for just a moment before she tucks it away again.
"Very well," Baba Jaga says. "The fern flower's power lies in its ability to attract and devour dark energy. Mortals have misinterpreted this, as they so often do, to mean that it will bring them wealth or luck or good fortune, but really it is like a poultice that draws pus from an abscess; it is useful only if you are already afflicted. Take it into your body, and it will draw the curse away from you. But the paradox of it, for you, is that since you aren't mortal, you cannot touch it without dying. But you will die without touching it."
Ala waits, expecting more—a recipe, maybe, or a set of instructions, like crushing the flower beneath a full moon and circling a fire three times, something an ancient and powerful witch might say. But Baba Jaga only gazes at the flower still held in Ala's hand with a glint of greed in her eyes.
"Then what do I do?" Ala says.
"How did you pick something you weren't allowed to touch?" Baba Jaga says. "How did you carry it without being able to bear it? Yet you ask me how you can take it in?"
"Witches and their riddles," Niko says, sounding almost bored. But the light in his eyes reveals that he's anything but.
Dymitr considers the flower, his head tilting. He's still on his knees, his hands limp in his lap.
"I did it for you," he says, after a moment of thought. "I picked it, I bore it." He glances at Baba Jaga. "So I can swallow it for you, too."
"I don't understand," Ala says. "How can it work as a… poultice, if it never enters my body?"
"You have spent too much time with mortals if you expect magic to move in a straight line," Baba Jaga replies. She points at Ala, and then bends her index finger so it's shaped like a hook. "Magic is crooked, and so are we."
She turns to Dymitr.
"I will transfer the curse from her to you," she says. "Then you will eat the petal, and it will be gone. But it will only work if you are willing to take it in."
Dymitr's gray, solemn eyes are on Ala's.
She knows she should hate him. He's an enemy of her people—of all who walk the earth who aren't human. He killed her aunt and failed to save her cousin. He was the reason the curse ever leapt to her in the first place. And he lied to her, to Niko. Manipulated her.
But all she can think about is how young he must have been when he was sent to her aunt's house to kill a zmora—barely more than a child. She remembers the look in his eyes in the back of the car when he told her not to lose hope. How soft his voice was when he promised he wasn't toying with her.
"Of course I'm willing," he says to Baba Jaga, to Ala.
Baba Jaga beckons them into the next room—so to speak. All the rooms of Baba Jaga's house appear to be part of a continuous whole. But the walls narrow at one point, and Dymitr tugs a curtain back from a window to see, not the glow of the Harold's Chicken sign below them, but the winking lights of the Chicago skyline and the shimmer of the river in the moonlight. He stares, forgetting to be subtle about his snooping.
"Crooked," Baba Jaga says to him, and she brushes a fingertip down his arm. The shadow of a nearby bookcase falls across her face, and Dymitr sees deep lines around her mouth that weren't there before, reminding him that she's far older than she appears. He shivers, and pulls away from the window.
The apartment is indeed crooked, far larger inside than it should be, in addition to—apparently—being in the wrong building. After the walls narrow, they open up again, and Dymitr's ears pop, as if he's suddenly changed elevation. There are no windows in this part of the apartment, only a heavy wooden table that looks older than the city itself, with herbs hanging above it in dry bunches and ribbons dangling among them in every color. A huge mortar and pestle made of stone stand in the center of the table, dusted with whatever she was grinding up last. Jars of shriveled and dry ingredients are in dense clusters at the edges of the table and on narrow shelves fixed at random heights to the walls behind it. He thinks he sees eyes staring at him from one of them, and there's another one full of dark liquid that looks like blood.
He doesn't know how she intends to transfer a dark curse from Ala to him. But when she takes a paring knife from her pocket and plucks a red ribbon from the ceiling with a flourish, he doesn't flinch.
"Your hand," she says to him, and he gives it to her, resting his knuckles against her palm. She digs the paring knife into the meaty part of his thumb, suddenly and fiercely enough to make him wince. Blood bubbles up from the wound, and he ignores the stinging in his palm to watch Baba Jaga gesture for Ala's hand, too.
Ala holds it out to her. Baba Jaga seizes it and cuts it without ceremony. Holding Ala's wrist, she turns the zmora's hand and brings it down on top of Dymitr's, so their blood intermingles between their palms. Ala looks up at him, startled, as Baba Jaga ties the red ribbon around their hands. She whispers words he can't hear over them.
Ala's fingers lace with his. She doesn't really look like Lena, and doesn't sound like her, either. They grew up across the world from each other, in different generations, speaking different languages. But Lena spoke of her fondly, Aleksja, her last remaining cousin, the American, gentle enough in spirit to live among mortals but fierce enough to endure their cruelty.
Baba Jaga knots the ribbon and steps back. Somewhere in the apartment he hears the ticking of a clock. Then pain, deeper than the shallow cut in his palm, reaches its white-hot fingers all the way down his arm. His knees threaten to buckle; he locks them, tightening his hold on Ala.
Blood spills from between their palms, first just a trickle and then a flood of it, splattering over Baba Jaga's worn carpet. It's darker than it should be, almost black, and the purple-red stain of the Holy Order creeps over his fingers; he can feel the heat of it in his eyes, the Knight in him emerging.
Then he was opening the door to his grandmother's room on the first floor of his father's house. His hand, pressed to the lacquered wood, looked softer than he was used to, the fingertips not yet callused by a bowstring, the knuckles not yet marked by scars. He looked over his shoulder to see Ala standing in the hallway behind him, looking startled, and he tried to speak to her, to explain, but he was powerless to make a sound.
The room beyond smelled like faded perfume. He'd been in there only a handful of times in his life, mostly to fetch things for his elders. He'd never been welcome to explore it, which was a hardship for the curious boy he was, because it was full of objects. There was a line of medals on the bureau, from wars he wasn't alive to witness; stacks of photographs on the bookshelves, in front of old volumes with gold lettering; glass figurines on the bedside table; journals piled on the foot of the bed; coins from every country in little glass dishes on the desk. So many things to touch and turn over and look through, and he'd never dared.
His grandmother—Joanna was the name she chose when she became a Knight, so it was the only name for her he'd ever known, selected to honor Joanna D'Arc—sat in a chair by the window. Beyond it was the gate, and beyond that, the street. A lantern burned on a little table in front of her. She preferred its light to an electric lamp. Knights were long-lived—not quite as long as the creatures they hunted, but longer than a typical human life—so he wasn't sure how old she was, exactly, but when she was born, electricity wasn't abundant. She told him once that she never got used to it.
Her face was lined, the skin of her hands as fragile as paper, the veins showing beneath it. But her back was still straight, thanks to the bone sword buried in it. She was still strong.
"Boy," she said to him. "Come."
He crossed the room and went to one knee in front of her, a soldier presenting himself to his commander.
"Babcia," he called her. "You asked for me?"
"I did." She sat forward, her hands folded over her lap, and studied his face. Her teeth were crooked.
"Your ceremony is in the morning," she said. "Are you prepared?"
"Yes, Babcia."
"Are you afraid?"
He blinked at her, startled. No one had ever asked him that before. He assumed it didn't matter whether he was afraid or not.
"Yes, Babcia," he said, because he was. He was so afraid he hadn't slept through the night in months. There were so many reasons he was afraid. He wasn't sure that he could kill. He didn't like pain. He didn't want to split his soul in half.
The old woman nodded. "I can see it in you."
She didn't reassure him, and he didn't expect her to. No adult in his life had ever reassured him, not about the dark, or about the monsters that lurked in it, or about the violence of the world beyond their walls.
"But you will do your duty," she supplied.
"Yes, Babcia."
"Good." She sat back and picked up the journal, bound in blue leather, that rested on the little table near her. "I have summoned you here to give you a secret. Each of my living descendants is entrusted with one on the eve of their ceremony, so that the knowledge of this family is preserved from generation to generation, yet no one person must bear the weight of all that I know. When you are my age, you will have as many secrets as I do, and you will bestow them on your children and your children's children in just this way. Understand?"
He didn't, but he nodded anyway.
She offered him the journal, and he took it in both hands, as if it was something precious.
"This is a book of curses," she said.
"Curses? Like a witch's curses?"
"No," she snapped. "Not like a witch's curses. These are the curses of a Knight."
He raised his eyebrows.
"Some of our number know how to forge our weapons; some keep the grimoires of knowledge about our enemies; some keep the texts of our names and histories throughout the ages; you will keep our curses." Her eyes glittered. "Our magic."
"I… didn't know we could do magic, Babcia," he said to her, feeling uneasy. "Isn't that what monsters do?"
"Did you think the splitting of the soul was not done through magic, boy?" She shook her head, and a strand of white hair escaped her braid. She tucked it behind her ear with clumsy fingers. "Our magic is not like their magic. It is not offered in repayment of debts; it is costly, righteous, and bloody. It is one of our most important weapons in fighting back the forces of darkness that threaten to claim our world."
He stared down at the journal in his hands. It suddenly felt too heavy to hold.
"Listen," she said, and he so rarely received this kind of focus from his elders that he couldn't look away from her. "We are long-lived, and we are strong. But we do not have the same innate power as the monsters we fight. With this book, I can not only summon stronger weapons to fight my enemies—I can make those fights unnecessary. I can turn their powers against them; I can create wounds that do not heal; and I can even, on occasion, attach a curse to their blood that will wipe out their entire family line. All I need to give…" She ran a finger along the outside of her forearm, where he could see the dark line of a scar. "… is a little pain."
He'd heard of his mother summoning crows, his father summoning wolves, of a trail of blood that could bewitch a single sigbin or an entire pack of upiór, of pain that lit fires and rent flesh and muffled screams. But he'd never heard of the kind of magic that warped a creature's powers or crept through their blood. He wondered how many times she'd used it; he wondered what, exactly, she'd done.
"Our task as Knights is to step closer to the dark so that other humans, humans less suited to bear its influence, don't have to. And these curses… these curses are even closer to the dark than most Knights dare to go," she said. "None of my children had the disposition for it, so I withheld it from them. But I believe you can bear this burden, Dymitr. You can be our curse-bearer."
She laid a cold, dry hand against his cheek.
"Before you sleep, you must do penance for your fear," she said. "Ten times, to root it out from your heart before your ceremony tomorrow. Understand?"
He suppressed a shudder.
"Yes, Babcia," he said, clutching the book to his stomach.