Page 16 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

Until then she didn’t realize that Dymitr called the strzyga “she,” like it was a person.

But that, too, is typical. It’s what their grandmother said a few minutes ago: this is the flaw in Dymitr’s heart that he must do penance to correct.

And he has. Elza has never known a Knight to submit himself to more penance than Dymitr did in the months before he left for Chicago. Steeling himself for what was to come.

And despite how good his instincts are, Elza didn’t trust him to do his mission alone. She’s the reason he has to start over from scratch. She feels the ache of guilt, and wishes she’d apologized to him, instead of the other way around.

“There were two strzygas in that clearing,” Marzena says. “One a mirror image of the other.”

Ala prepares an illusion in her mind, like loading a gun: Dymitr, as he was this evening when he set out: dark pants, worn at the knee; a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, creased here and there from packing, and fraying at the cuffs.

Dark circles under his eyes. His hair curling a little at the ends, too long.

Holding that image in her head, just in case, she slips out of Dymitr’s room. In the hallway, it’s easier to hear the hymns sung in reedy voices over the body, and the cold, urgent voice speaking over it.

“One a mirror image of the other,” the voice says, and Ala’s steps falter as she thinks for one horrible moment that she’s been spotted, Dymitr’s own mirror image prowling through the back of the house. But the voice continues.

“Time for you to go,” Ala says, to the dybbuk on her back.

For a moment, she worries the dybbuk will break its promise, and keep clinging to her.

But with a click of its teeth and a flutter of dark fabric, its weight lifts, and it disappears.

She doesn’t know where it will go, which of the Knight cousins it will attach itself to, but she hopes it chooses wisely.

It strikes her as a little funny, in a dark way. The Knights going to all this effort to keep a spirit from invading them, possessing them… but none of their rituals will prevent the dybbuk from doing just that.

“Mirroring is a strange sort of magic, beyond the capabilities of a strzyga, so it must have consulted a witch somewhere along its path.” Marzena sits back in her chair.

“After that, I matched the footprints that walked into the clearing with the set of tracks that walked out. I followed the strzyga back out of the forest to a little hotel close to the big road. But it was nowhere to be found. The hotel manager had seen it, though he didn’t know what it really was, but he couldn’t say where it had gone. So I did what I always do.”

She looks at ? ukasz, who’s resting his chin on his hand, his elbow propped up next to a plate of bread.

“You paid the hotel manager off,” he supplies, when prompted.

“I paid the hotel manager off,” Marzena agrees. “He let me into the room the strzyga used and there, I found all I needed.” She reaches out and tugs at the young cousin’s dark blond braid. “A strand of its hair.”

At the end of the table, André gasps. At first Elza thinks it’s just a reaction to the story—and a melodramatic one, at that. But André hunches over his plate, breathing hard. Krystyna puts an arm across his shoulders, speaking softly to him and touching a hand to his forehead.

“How did you find it with hair ?” the cousin asks, pulling her braid free of Marzena’s grasp. The question draws everyone’s attention back to the story, to Marzena, as Krystyna ushers André into the kitchen.

“I didn’t,” Marzena says. “I called the dogs.”

She tugs up her left sleeve, revealing a bandage down the length of her arm, from wrist to elbow.

Elza has a similar wound on her own left arm, which she used to summon a murder of crows—at the time, she thought she was helping Dymitr escape a pack of strzygas, though now she knows she did more harm than good.

What Marzena summoned wasn’t “dogs,” of course, but wolves.

A pack of them, with otherworldly strength and focus.

Despite their size, they’re easier to call forth than crows, which are faster and resist control by their very nature.

Wolves are pack animals, used to following a single leader.

Of all the Knights Elza knows, Marzena calls the strongest, most fully realized wolves.

She has a way with dogs, their grandmother says. Always has.

“I offered the hair to the wolves, and they led me to the strzyga. It was wounded, so it hadn’t gone far.

It was limping along the road.” She tilts from side to side to mimic the strzyga’s gait.

“It didn’t even warrant the drawing of my sword.

I sent the wolves ahead of me, and watched them overtake it.

When they were finished with it, there wasn’t much left. Some entrails and some feathers.”

She reaches into the inner pocket of her jacket, and takes out a single feather. It’s brown, and dotted with white at regular intervals, like it was dabbed with paint. A pretty little thing, to belong to such a monstrous creature as a strzyga.

Elza sees Dymitr’s hands in his lap, clenched so hard it looks painful.

“We will bury my brother with this small trophy,” ? ukasz says, his voice solemn and quiet. “So he knows that he’s avenged.”

Marzena adds, “And then you and I will finish what he started, and pick off the rest of Athene’s strzyga clan.”

“Hear hear,” Elza’s grandmother says, thumping the table with a fist. Then she raises her wineglass to Marzena. All around the table, everyone picks up their glasses, even the young cousins, who have only kompot or apple juice. As one, everyone drinks.

And then Marzena’s spell is broken. A few others go into the next room to join the singers who watch over Filip’s body. Marzena takes the feather in there with them, to slide it into Filip’s clasped hands, beneath the beads of the rosary. Everyone else helps to clear the table of the dirty plates.

It’s not until Elza is piling up the napkins that she realizes: she didn’t see Dymitr toast their mother for her victory.

“When they were finished with it,” Ala hears from the dining room, “there wasn’t much left. Some entrails and some feathers.”

A shiver crawls down Ala’s spine. She hurries into the bathroom and closes the door behind her.

Dymitr told her the book of curses was hidden under the bathroom sink.

She opens the cabinet doors there and sees, in the back of the door, two names drawn on the wood in waxy crayon.

On one side: ELZA . On the other side: DYMEK .

Under the sink, she finds a scrub brush and a bottle of bleach, a few spare rolls of toilet paper, a stack of washcloths.

But Dymitr explained the hiding spot to her carefully: she has to feel along the cabinet’s left side, because there’s a false wall there.

She feels it give way a little under the pressure of her fingers, and slides it to the side, expecting to run her fingers over the dark blue leather cover of the journal his grandmother handed to him in the memory.

She feels nothing.

Alarm prickles over the back of Ala’s neck.

She runs her fingers all along the cabinet wall.

Then she taps along the false panel she slid back to see if the book got stuck there somehow.

She uses her phone’s flashlight to peer inside the cabinet itself, moving the washcloths to the side, feeling along the pipes, knocking over the stack of toilet paper rolls.

There’s nothing. The book isn’t there.

And there are footsteps coming right toward her.