Page 13 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

“That’s in a different part of the country,” he says, smiling a little. “Chicago has some nice buildings, though.”

“I’ve always wanted to go there.” She winks. “Maybe you need a partner for your mission?”

He looks across the room at Elza, who’s arranging the chrysanthemums someone brought in a vase.

“It’s something that has to be done alone, I’m afraid,” he says. “How are the kids?”

Agnieszka beams as she talks about her twin sons, who both love soccer, even though one of them kicks hard, but can barely run without tripping over his feet, and the other is fast, but always misses the ball.

She says, “Together, they would make one good player. Separately, they’re terrible.”

He laughs, and Elza thrusts another bouquet of chrysanthemums at him.

They’re a deep fuchsia, their petals narrow and pointed.

He thinks of the fern flower, and how it unfurled so elegantly, like a ballerina’s skirt as she turns.

He remembers how it tasted, green, almost herbal.

And how it burned the darkness from his blood, and then transferred that cleansing fire to Ala.

“God, I hate these,” Elza says, of the chrysanthemums. “Especially the purple ones. How did they end up becoming the official funeral flower, anyway? They’re worse than carnations.”

“I like carnations.”

Elza nods. “Oh, I remember. You gave Celina Nowak a bouquet of them on Valentine’s Day once, remember?”

He makes a face. That was before he realized that thinking a girl was pretty and wanting to sleep with her were two different things—and he only felt the former. “That’s right—the petals were dyed blue. She was very polite about them.”

“And then she very politely stuck her tongue in Bartek Adamczyk’s mouth later that day,” Kazik says, clapping Dymitr on the shoulder. He’s holding two small glasses of clear liquor. “Let’s drink.”

“None for me?” Elza says, pouting her lower lip a little.

“Oh, they’re both for you,” Kazik says, putting both glasses in her hands. “You think I don’t remember how you can drink? You put us both to shame that one Christmas. What were we drinking? Vodka?”

“J?germeister,” Elza says, with an exaggerated shudder. “I still can’t have licorice. That’s all I tasted when it was on its way back up.”

Kazik goes to pour another glass, and Elza gives Dymitr one of her two. They stand in a triangle in the kitchen, on the laminate floor, and touch their glasses together.

“Prost,” Kazik says.

“Santé,” Elza says.

“Cheers,” Dymitr says, with a weak smile.

And then, in unison: “Na zdrowie!”

They all drink, and Dymitr thinks it was a mistake, coming back here.

A month ago, when he set out for Chicago, he thought he was going to his death—or near enough to it.

If Baba Jaga had done as he asked, and destroyed his bone sword—and half of his soul—he would have wandered the earth diminished, in a haze of pain and emptiness.

The Knights who had suffered that fate in the past hadn’t been able to articulate it except in verbal accounts, since they lost the ability to write afterward.

What little they were able to describe was a miserable kind of detachment from their own bodies.

They were capable of basic functioning, but no connection—no emotion, and no relief.

He wouldn’t have cared, then, about his siblings or his cousins or his grandmother. He wouldn’t have cared about anything at all.

But now, he’ll have to say goodbye to them knowing they would hate him if they knew what he really was. Knowing that he’ll only ever be able to lie to them. Knowing that he still loves them, no matter what they’ve done, and no matter what lies they’ve believed.

And how can he blame them? He believed those lies, too.

It’s strange to eat with a body in the next room, but they do, squeezed in so tightly Dymitr can hardly move his fork without elbowing Agnieszka.

In the living room, a few people are already singing hymns to keep the evil spirits at bay.

Elza gives him pained looks across the table whenever the singing voices hit the wrong note—which is often—and he tries not to laugh.

Their mother, on Elza’s right, appraises him.

“Your sister says you were awfully comfortable around the local population when she saw you,” Marzena says.

In this context, local population doesn’t refer to humans, but to creatures. Quasi-mortals . Ala also calls them “monsters” with a kind of fondness, like she’s referring to a pesky little brother—but he doesn’t think the word would sound the same, coming from his mouth.

“We all have our sources,” Dymitr says.

“True,” Marzena acknowledges. “Some more tolerable than others.”

Dymitr slides his phone out of his pocket, and with a surreptitious glance at the cousin beside him, unlocks it.

“What was the one in town you told me about, Mother?” Kazik asks her. “The one who could barely keep its spit in its mouth.”

“It was a wieszczy, and I’ll thank you not to remind me of its spitting habit.

I had to shower after talking to it,” Marzena says.

“But it gave me a czart that turned out to be a windfall. I’m going to go back in a few months, see if it will give me anything else.

And if not…” She turns her knife over her fingers, a small smile on her face.

“All sources become targets, eventually. I hope you didn’t get attached, boy. ”

Dymitr thinks of the czart he saw in the strzyga club, with his small horns and even smaller smile, like he was keeping a fond secret. He keeps his voice steady as he says, “My heart isn’t as soft as you imagine.”

“Tell that to the mice you used to cry over,” Kazik says, with a grin.

Dymitr looks down, like he’s embarrassed, only it’s just an excuse to look at his phone. He pulls up his messages, and opens the text chain he started with Ala earlier that day. With a few taps, he’s sent Ala the message they agreed on: a book emoji.

While he’s here at dinner, and certain that everyone is too busy to notice a hole in the house’s magic, Ala will sneak in through his old bedroom window and retrieve the book of curses from its hiding place.

She’ll be gone before anyone feels its absence.

Not that they would know where to search for a magical disruption like that anyway—only he knows where he put it, and only Elza knows to look under the bathroom sink.

“In his defense, I had just watched Cinderella, ” Elza says. “Maybe the cartoon mice made too much of an impact on him.”

Dymitr rolls his eyes and puts his phone back in his pocket.

“It wasn’t because of Cinderella, ” Joanna says, from farther down the table. She speaks a little coolly, as she often does when she hears Kazik taunting him. “It was because the traps didn’t usually kill the mice, and he didn’t like to watch them suffer.”

Dymitr has a vivid memory of one of the mice with its hips trapped under the metal bar, broken. It was scrambling with its front legs, its eyes bulging. He can hardly keep himself from wincing at the thought of it, even now.

Joanna goes on: “I explained to him that killing them was a mercy—that death is not the worst that awaits any creature, but suffering. He handled them well enough after that.”

“It shouldn’t be so hard, to kill something with no soul,” Marzena points out. “Not for us.”

Joanna says, “The things we hunt, they are clever in their deceptions. They convince us of their morality, their vulnerability, their wholeness. He pitied the mouse because he imagined it had a human’s awareness of doom, a human’s understanding of suffering.

It’s because the monstrous things of this world remind us of humanity that some of our number pity them.

And we need Knights who have an acute awareness of humanity, or we will become as twisted as the evil things are. ”

These kinds of speeches used to make Dymitr’s heart swell in his chest like a balloon.

They used to make him feel not only that he belonged in the Holy Order, but that he was an integral part of it, offering it something that no one else could.

Before, his grandmother’s speeches could make him shake off frustration and press through pain, they made him go eagerly to the weapons room to do penance, they made him pore over every detail of every mission to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, until the early hours of the morning.

Now, he feels cold, all the way to the core of him, as Joanna focuses on Dymitr, a solemn look on her lined face.

“If he falters in his belief,” she says, “it’s his task to do penance to correct the flaw in his heart.”

And he had, hadn’t he? He knelt on dry peas for hours. He prayed as he mortified his flesh with holy magic. He begged whatever and whoever was listening to wrench the doubt out of his heart by force and firm his resolve.

Joanna looks at her daughter, then, adding: “But if you have no human heart, Marzena, you must do penance as well.”

Marzena looks down at her plate. For once, she looks almost ashamed.

Kazik offers Dymitr a nod of apology. The silence is strained, and then there’s the sound of footsteps outside, and the door shivers as someone pounds on it with a heavy fist. For a terrible, irrational moment, he thinks it’s Niko coming to kill his mother or die trying.

Then it opens, and standing on the mat is Dymitr’s father, ? ukasz.

He’s a tall man, as tall as Dymitr and Kazik, but broader and sturdier, with a thick beard and ash-brown hair that’s thinning at the temples. He has round, shallow-set eyes that seem to bulge when he widens them. But now his face is pinched with fatigue and grief.

Joanna rises to greet him, and slowly, the others rise to do the same. Filip and ? ukasz went on missions together often; they were as close as twins, each one half of a whole. Though Krystyna is Filip’s wife, it’s ? ukasz who carries the most grief for his brother, felled by a strzyga.

As Dymitr watches his cousins giving his father a warm welcome, he thinks of Nikodem Kostka, his eyes like lit embers, his curve of a smile.

Some people move into the living room to join the singers, clearing a space in the middle of the table for ? ukasz to sit.

He piles a plate high with food: ? azanki with breaded pork nestled beside it, red cabbage and mashed potatoes with sour cream and dill.

He skips the pierogi, which André is already eyeing hungrily.

“Well, now that ? ukasz is here, you must tell us the tale,” Joanna says to Marzena.

Marzena doesn’t seem like a natural storyteller. She’s curt and impatient with foolishness. But war stories are different—they bring out another side of her, one that’s lively and engaging. Dymitr has always liked his mother best when she was telling stories.

In the next room, the singers drone on, and the mournful tune is, somehow, the perfect background music for the tale of Filip’s strzyga.