Page 11 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A FAMILY REUNION

Elza is there when they carry Filip’s body in.

There’s a cousin at each shoulder, and her brother Kazik at the feet.

They carry it through the house and into the living room, where they set it down on a long board that someone brought in from the garden shed for just this purpose.

Filip isn’t the first person who’s died from that part of the family, and he won’t be the last.

Her mother is the one who killed the strzyga that killed Filip, but her father is the one who went to Germany to pick up all the pieces and clean things up. He was always better at that than Marzena, who would have been arrested a dozen times over if not for him.

Her father cast preservation magic over the body before sending it back.

He must have given some real pain to ensure the magic was strong enough to keep the body from decomposing, because Filip looks like he could be sleeping.

His skin is powder white, but his eyes are closed and his hands, stained with old blood, are folded over the hilt of his bone sword.

The killing blow is in his throat. The strzyga’s claw, maybe, or its beak. The wound is wrapped in gauze, so Elza can’t see it.

Her grandmother walks into the living room, and everyone stiffens all at once.

She surveys the body. Filip wasn’t related to her by blood, but he and his brother—Elza’s father—were a package deal, promised to marry two of Joanna’s daughters when they came of age.

So her grandmother has known—had known—Filip since he was a child. He was like one of her own sons.

Yet there’s no feeling in her voice when she says, “Krystyna and I will wash him. Kazik, cover all the mirrors. Elza, set the clocks. He died at five after ten.”

It’s all so pointless, Elza thinks, as she walks to the wall clock to turn the hands.

Covering mirrors and opening windows to clear the way for his soul.

Stopping the clocks at Filip’s time of death, to tell him that his time is ended.

But she does it, winding the clock back so its hands point at the ten and the one.

She moves into the kitchen to change the clock on the microwave, feeling like a ghost.

She wanders through the house in pursuit of other clocks, and behind her she can hear Krystyna, the new widow, murmuring to the body as she tells it what she’s doing.

We’ll start with your neck, okay? Let me just get this gauze off .

Elza wonders if she should set all of the watches to 10:05, too, or if that’s too much.

She checks her phone to see if Dymitr called; he hasn’t.

Her cousin Teresa is in the kitchen making cabbage rolls with her son André—his Knight name. Elza can hear him complaining about working in the kitchen like he’s not a proper Knight. “Well, you aren’t,” Teresa says sharply. “So until you do the ritual, you will help your mother!”

Elza sees her mother standing in the doorway to the living room, watching as Krystyna and her own mother—Joanna, fearsome matriarch of the Polish Holy Order—talk to a corpse.

One foot at a time, okay, Filip? Elza’s mother’s fingers twitch at her side, like she’s about to draw her sword or take out a cigarette.

“Has Father called yet?” Elza asks her.

“He’ll call when his work is done,” Marzena replies. “And not a moment before.”

Elza wonders if that’s why Dymitr hasn’t called her back—because his mission isn’t finished yet.

But she doesn’t think he has that much in common with their parents, so single-minded they think only of whatever they need to kill next, instead of considering their family.

Her cheeks suddenly hot, she steps outside, and leans against the railing.

It’s after sunset. The outdoor lights are on, and flies are buzzing around them.

The air is cooler now, the breeze ruffling her hair.

Soon all the cousins and aunts and uncles will pile into their cars and come here, parking on the lawn and crowding into the house.

Elza will pass out the sheet music and everyone will start singing.

And eating. And singing. And drinking. They’ll fill the house with noise and activity so no one has to be alone with Filip’s body.

Elza hasn’t fought a strzyga yet. They would never admit it—especially not her grandmother—but they don’t send women who can still bear children out on the risky missions, most of the time.

A woman Knight has two responsibilities: hunt monsters and make more Knights.

Even Marzena, who doesn’t have a maternal bone in her body, knew that.

She had three children when she probably would have preferred none.

So Elza’s taken down a zmora, a wraith, and two rusa?kas.

But she’s helped countless others track their own quarry.

She’s a better tracker than Dymitr or Kazik, though she couldn’t beat either of them in a fight, much to her mother’s constant disappointment.

“You have to work twice as hard as them because you’re weaker,” Marzena said to her once.

“But don’t think for a moment that you don’t have the capacity to beat them. ”

It was one of the nicer things Marzena ever said to her.

Elza sees a shadow along the tree line. Her hand is just going to the back of her neck, ready to draw one of her swords, when the outdoor light stretches across his face.

“Dymitr!” she says, in a gasp. She runs down the steps and across the gravel to fling her arms around her brother.

If she’d thought for a moment longer, she might have been more uncertain.

He was so strange to her the last time they spoke, so cruel.

You are an encumbrance. You are a burden.

And then ordering her to go home like she was an annoying kid tagging along with her older brother instead of a Knight, instead of his partner.

Go home, Elza, or the next time I see you I will kill you myself.

But he wraps his arms around her now. He feels different to her, not as sturdy. She holds him at arm’s length, frowning.

“Did you lose weight?” she asks him. “Is it stress?”

He’s on an important mission, after all. And he looks so tired.

“Maybe,” he says, with a weak smile. “How are you?”

“Oh, you know.” She wants to make a joke of it, but she can’t think of anything. She just lets the phrase hang over them both.

“I do.”

Her eyes burn. She looks back at the house.

“The singing will start soon,” she says. “Do you think he could really turn into something?”

The old stories said a body left undefended after death could turn into a wraith, or an upiór, or a wieszczy. The Holy Order knows, now, that wraiths are born, not made. But upiórs seem to spring from nothing and nowhere, and wieszczy are too rare, too mysterious, to be certain of them.

“It seems silly to me, to be so afraid of an impossible transformation that you’d sing all night,” she says.

“Maybe it’s not so impossible,” Dymitr says. “Or maybe the singing isn’t for him.”

She held back the tears in the car with their mother, and she tries to hold them back again now, but it’s hard around Dymitr.

They’ve always been each other’s refuge in vulnerable moments.

When Dymitr came back from his first kill, inconsolable, she was the one who calmed him down.

When she lost her first sparring match against their cousin Agnieszka and their grandmother called Elza’s performance “pathetic,” Dymitr dragged her out to the woods to sit in their childhood fort so she could cry in peace.

They let each other see the things they don’t reveal to anyone else. But she doesn’t want to do that now.

She blinks the tears away.

“I take it you didn’t finish your mission,” she says coolly.

“No, I had to… change my plan.”

“Because of me?”

He doesn’t answer for a little too long. Well, of course it was because of her. She revealed to those things he was with—the strzygoń and the zmora—that he was a Knight. He was probably using them to get into Baba Jaga’s apartment, and she ruined it for him.

“Come on, let’s go inside,” she says. “Mother’s in a foul mood, but I’m sure she’ll be nicer to you than she was to me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We both know it’s Kazik she really loves.”

It’s an old joke. Kazik is as cold and unsentimental as Marzena is.

“I’m sorry, Elza,” he says, taking her by the elbow so she doesn’t walk away from him.

He’s always looked like her twin. Ash-brown hair.

Gray eyes. Big lips—like a fish, Kazik used to tease them, sucking his cheeks in to imitate one.

The resemblance weakened as Dymitr got older and started filling out and growing facial hair, but still, there’s no mistaking that he’s her brother.

Only now… there’s something different about his eyes.

A kind of wildness she doesn’t understand. It makes her feel uneasy.

“For what?” she says, even though she knows what he’s apologizing for. She’d rather not hear the specifics, though it does relieve some of the tension in her, to hear that he’s sorry.

“For all of it,” he answers.

“It’s good you’re here” is all she says, and they walk together toward the house.