Page 15 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A TALE OF TWINS

“Filip had been tracking the strzyga for some time,” Elza’s mother begins, running a hand over the tablecloth.

The guests rearrange themselves around the table, some of them taking the places of the singers in the next room, and Kazik grabbing his car keys so a sober cousin can drive him to his shift at the cemetery.

He’ll be guarding Filip’s plot until morning.

Marzena leans forward to draw the attention of all the young people at the table, and most of the older ones, too.

Elza remembers this side of her mother, holding court at the dinner table when she got home from a mission, still wearing her gear even though it made ? ukasz roll his eyes.

No one could deny her when she was like this, her eyes alight with victory.

As a child Elza tried to invite stories even when that light wasn’t in Marzena’s eyes— Tell us again about the po?ódnica in Warsaw! —and Marzena would snap at her. Can’t I get any goddamn peace, girl, she would say, and Elza has always hated being called “girl” as a result.

Marzena continues: “There were rumors of a small strzyga clan in Szczecin, and he believed killing their leader would force them to scatter across the region, so that he could pick them off one by one.”

Elza nods along with her words. It’s the same strategy Filip taught her: only a fool goes after a group of strzygas without destabilizing them first, and a Knight shouldn’t also be a fool.

Wisdom lies in identifying the clan’s leader and luring her away from the others.

The clan will then disintegrate into infighting, since none of the remaining strzygas will be willing to cede power to the others, and it’s easier to hunt them individually.

“He found one of them, but Filip was a patient man. He followed it for days through the city without it knowing, and on the fifth day, he permitted it to catch sight of him, so that it would call a meeting of its associates. And it did—at the home of the strzyga leader. An older one, with the pale yellow eyes of an owl, and eyebrows that crawled into each other.”

Marzena leans toward one of the young cousins and puts her finger up to bridge the gap between her eyebrows, to show her what Marzena means. The little girl giggles.

“Do strzygas sound like owls, Aunt?” the girl asks her.

“Sure they do!” Marzena replies, and she makes a hooting sound.

? ukasz sets a hand on the girl’s arm and shakes his head, to tell her Marzena is only joking, but he has a crooked smile on his face.

Even glum ? ukasz isn’t immune to Marzena’s charms; it’s why they got married in the first place, though Elza has a hard time imagining their courtship to be anything but perfunctory.

Marzena goes on. “Filip waited for the meeting to finish, and then he followed the strzyga leader, who he called ‘Athene’ after the owl breed Athene noctua . Only Athene must have been cleverer than he knew, because it spotted him.”

“How?” Elza asks sharply. Filip wasn’t careless, the way some of their number are. He kept meticulous notes and took twice as long on missions as anyone else. He also rarely had the close calls that others in the Holy Order had. In the last ten years, he’d gotten injured only once.

“His notebook didn’t say.” Marzena shrugs.

“But Athene ran, and Filip followed it. He chased it across the border to Berlin, where it joined up with another clan, who ferried it down through Leipzig and Frankfurt. As long as it was with them, he wrote, it was untouchable. So he decided to lay a trap, instead.”

Even if Dymitr hadn’t told Ala which room was his, she would have known it by the smell. It’s not that it smells like him, though it does—it smells like him, mixed with copper and earth, the scents that all Knights seem to have in common. No—it’s because it smells like orange peel.

The scent has taken over Ala’s apartment in the weeks since Dymitr started living there.

He has few indulgences, but oranges are among them, and he leaves the peels on the coffee table, on the kitchen counter, and even, on one occasion, on the bookshelf.

His fingernails are always yellow from them.

So though it’s been a month or more since he was last in his bedroom, she can still smell the orange peels in the trash can.

She shifts uncomfortably—the dybbuk is heavy; she has no idea how that teenage girl bore it for so long.

She doesn’t have time to look around, but she can’t help it.

She looks at his nightstand, where a Bible waits as well as an empty glass, for water, and a small bowl with dry peas in it.

She puzzles over the latter for a few seconds before moving to the bookcase, where there’s a shelf of small plastic figurines: a dinosaur, a dragon, a spider, a tiger.

As far as she can tell, they’re the room’s only adornment.

It’s otherwise sparse, like a guest room.

She feels a pang, thinking of a younger Dymitr keeping everything he thinks, everything he feels, inside his own head because it’s not safe to say out loud.

Even in the memory she shared with him, she saw how honesty was punished with penance.

Ten times, his grandmother instructed him, and Ala is sure that means he had to hurt himself—in exactly what way, she doesn’t know.

But it makes sense, now, why it’s so easy for Dymitr to ignore the ache of his missing sword. His life has been replete with pain.

Ala opens the door an inch to peer into the hallway. She needs to make sure the coast is clear before she leaves the room.

“Filip picked off one of the younger members of the German clan and left an invitation in its place,” says a cold, clear voice, faint enough that Ala can barely make sense of it. “ Come alone, he wrote, and you can have your youngling back alive. ”

Ala recoils. She’s seen so many horrors inflicted by Knights.

Children murdered in their beds, or made to watch as their parents died.

She thought she was desensitized to it. But the way this Knight speaks, it’s not as if she’s talking about animals.

A Knight hunting creatures believing they’re like animals would, in some ways, be understandable—humans hunt animals all the time.

But no—this Knight sounds like she knows exactly what she’s hunting.

And she doesn’t care.

In the next room, just a few voices sing the hymns to keep the evil spirits at bay, their voices low and creaking.

“Filip picked off one of the younger members of the German clan and left an invitation in its place. Come alone, he wrote, and you can have your youngling back alive. He knew, of course, that Athene would never come to him alone. But he went to the Black Forest, where the trees are so dense that sunlight hardly penetrates to the ground below, and he laid false trails for Athene to follow. Then he waited by the edge of the forest to watch the clan arrive, Athene among them.”

Elza glances at Dymitr, who looks just as rapt as the others, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face.

Only his face is drained of color, despite the warmth in the little house.

He looks almost… afraid. And no wonder: his mission is to kill Baba Jaga, a far more dangerous target than Filip’s.

Filip’s death must be a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable they all are.

“Filip followed Athene through the woods and drew his sword once he was under the cover of trees.” Marzena holds her hands behind her head, as if she’s about to draw her own bone sword; Elza remembers it well, a saber, a little curved, the blade bright white.

“I followed his trail of blood deep into the woods, and there I found his body. Only there was something peculiar around the body—the feathers of an owl, of course, but two sets of footprints instead of one.”

The young cousins are staring now, wild-eyed.

“For a long time I puzzled over this,” Marzena says.

“One set of footprints leading through the woods, with Filip’s behind.

One set of footprints leading away from his body.

But two distinct sets surrounding him in the clearing where he was killed.

How did two strzygas appear where there was only one, before?

And how could I determine which set of tracks to follow out of the clearing? ”

“You looked at the tread of the shoes?” Elza prompts her.

“Someone is eager to race ahead,” Marzena says, disapproving, but she’s smiling.

“Yes, I looked at the tread of its shoes, and found them to be identical—another oddity. But then I realized they weren’t actually identical.

In one set of footprints, the tread was worn all the way down in the heel, but only on the left foot.

In the other set, the tread was worn just the same way, but in the right foot.

One strzyga was the mirror image of the other. ”

“She doubled herself,” Dymitr says quietly.

All eyes swivel toward him, including Elza’s.

She shouldn’t be surprised at this point.

Dymitr has always been best at understanding the monsters’ magic, at sensing it and tracing it and identifying it.

He’s the one who told her never to give her name, when she could help it, and who explained the missing teeth and fingernails on the fresh body they discovered, once, while tracing a rusa?ka through the plains south of here.

Teeth and fingernails are useful, he said, as if she should have known it already.

So she wasn’t surprised, the way Kazik was, when their grandmother made Dymitr curse-bearer, the keeper of a Knight’s holy rituals. The rituals are like magic, and Dymitr understands magic.

Marzena’s eyes glitter a little as she looks at her youngest son. “Yes, she did.”