Page 20 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A PERFECT REFLECTION

Ordinarily, for a transformation like this, Niko would make a detailed plan.

He would research the area and choose the right place for a moderate work of magic, a place bought at a price by people who loved it.

It’s a difficult task in Poland, not because there aren’t enough suitable places, but because it’s too soaked in pain.

Six million Polish people died here in the Second World War alone, half of them Jewish, and he would never dare to draw magic from the sites of deep horror where those lives were lost, death camps and bloody battles.

But even if he did, the magic wouldn’t cooperate.

It would bend back on itself. That’s the nature of magic that comes from pain.

It’s why the Holy Order’s magic can only ever harm.

So ordinarily, he would find a building that took a long time to build—or rebuild, in the aftermath of the war. He would pick the lock in the dead of night, when he’s unlikely to be disturbed. And he would kneel there to draw the magic from the ground.

Ordinarily, that’s how he would do it.

There’s no time for that now. He goes to the first place he can think of, which is the shore of the pond where the dybbuk attacked him.

The dybbuk took a risk by releasing that girl from its hold, and that act of sacrifice makes it as good a place as any for the kind of magic he needs to do.

He doesn’t see the girl anywhere, and he’s glad.

It means she woke, and will find her way back to civilization.

He kneels in the mud, and tucks one of Ala’s buttons—plucked from the cuff of her shirt—into his fist before plunging his hands into the pond.

He can feel the magic here, humming in the water. It’s as if an electric current is passing through it, prickling over his fingers. He takes a deep breath.

“Chcia ? bym przybra ? inn ? form ? ,” he says, “aby dokona ? zemsty.”

I wish to take another shape, for the purpose of revenge.

There are three methods for performing spoken magic.

It can be commanded, as he did to transform Dymitr’s pulled fingernail into pure light.

It can be caught in the net of a riddle or a rhyme and dragged into being.

And it can be requested. The first is the fastest method, good for quick, small acts that don’t require a lot of power.

But you have to be in control of the debt that invites magic in—you have to have something to offer, a name or an act or a gift, or the magic will backfire.

The second—catching magic in a rhyme—is the most powerful, but if the rhyme’s net isn’t strong enough, the magic will twist away from you.

And the third method—asking—depends on whether the magic of the place is sympathetic to the request. He thinks the magic of the dybbuk will be sympathetic to his desire to fight Knights, but he’s not sure.

Maybe revenge is not righteous enough for it.

He waits with his hands in the water as the magic decides.

That’s how he thinks of it, anyway, as slight currents pass over his knuckles and work their way over the veins of his hands.

Testing him, maybe, or maybe that’s just the most sense he can make of something that isn’t sensible.

Magic is wild, as Baba Jaga often reminds him, and it resists feeble attempts to master it, so it’s best not to try unless you’re sure of your own power.

She is maybe the only person alive who truly controls magic, and even she finds it wriggling away from her sometimes.

As the magic sparks over his hands, he thinks to add a simple: “Prosz ? .”

It’s that please that does it, he thinks. He feels the currents working their way between his fingers to wrap around the button in his fist. He opens his hand, and lets the button fall to the pond’s muddy bottom.

A black tendril, hair fine, creeps across the back of his hand and over his wrist. As he watches, it spreads over his skin in a web of black, multiplying again and again.

He’s reminded of a time when, as a child, he punctured a spider’s egg sac with a needle, and hundreds of baby spiders spread from the punctured hole at once.

The blackness crawls up his arms and disappears beneath his sleeves, but he can still feel it, like thousands of crawling feet racing over his skin.

The sensation is revolting, but Niko stays still, letting the magic do its work.

He closes his eyes when the dark tendrils creep over his cheeks and nose, and he can feel his body shifting beneath his clothes.

He’s shrinking, the fabric falling heavier against his skin.

Then he feels pressure against his bones, like two hands pushing inward on his shoulders, and then pulling outward at his hips. He bites down on a scream.

But the magic is gentle, all things considered.

When he opens his eyes, he finds narrow fingers and delicate wrists, small breasts and a bend in his waist, muscled thighs straining against pants not quite built for them.

He takes his hands from the water and probes at his high cheekbones and the thin lines of hair above his eyes.

He’s wearing Ala’s body.

“Well that was unnerving,” Ala herself says, stepping out of the woods. “Keep your hands to yourself, would you?”

“You know, I see women all the time and manage to keep my hands off them,” he says, in a higher, clearer voice than his own. “I think I can handle it now, too.”

He stands, and his pants sag, so he hoists them up to his new waist and pulls the belt tighter. Then he rolls up his pant legs so they’re not dragging on the ground. There’s not much he can do about the oversized shirt except tie it at the bottom.

He’s too frantic to dwell on the strange feeling of being smaller and differently shaped than he was two minutes ago. He feels like there’s a hand tugging him back toward the house where Dymitr is being tortured by people who claim to love him.

But they don’t love him, Niko thinks. Because if love doesn’t allow change, then what the fuck is that love worth?

He and Ala walk quickly through the woods. Once the house is in view, Ala stops to concentrate on her illusion. She has to appear as Dymitr again.

He’s never met a zmora so talented with illusions before.

Oh, there are powerful illusionists among the Dryjas, those who can put you in a different place entirely, who can make it feel and sound convincing.

But the detail of Ala’s constructions and the number of people she can project them to at once—it’s something he would marvel at, if he didn’t feel alarm prickling at his skin.

“You need to calm down,” Ala says to him, her eyes closed. “I can’t concentrate with you scared like this, it’s like you’re waterboarding me with hot chocolate.”

“Sorry,” Niko says.

She opens her eyes, and suddenly, she’s Dymitr. Solemn gray eyes. Scarred lip. Stern brow. That look in his eyes, like he’s always waiting for something.

He grabs Niko’s wrist, and Niko almost falls against him with relief, almost reaches for his hand.

But this isn’t Dymitr, as convincing an illusion as it is, and Ala is only trying to bind Niko’s wrists so he looks like a convincing prisoner.

Niko puts his wrists together, and she ties them loosely with a length of rope he created from a strand of her hair—commanding magic, that time.

It won’t be difficult for him to pull his hands free, when the moment is right.

“Let’s go,” Ala says, in Dymitr’s voice.

Niko nods, and they march toward the house, Ala with her hand firm on Niko’s elbow, Niko stumbling alongside her, as if he’s injured. Mud turns to gravel beneath his feet, and Ala puts one hand on the back of his neck as she pushes him up the front steps and through the front door.

The smell of bread and sour cake assaults his nose, and he hears two reedy voices singing a hymn in the next room.

He doesn’t look around—doesn’t dare to, not in this place when he’s supposed to be acting cowed and terrified.

But he sees the old tile floors and the white lacy tablecloths and an old gramophone—Knights, too, are long-lived, and they bring the past with them wherever they go, just as Niko’s people do.

Elza is there right away, her hand reaching back toward her spine—it’s a Knight’s reflex, she’s ready to draw her bone swords. Her eyes are wide and alarmed as she takes in Niko’s Ala-shaped face. She recognizes him. Her. Whatever.

“Why didn’t you take her through the back?” Elza demands of Ala.

“I didn’t want to waste time. Stay at your post,” Ala replies. If Niko was asked to critique, he would say she sounds a little too much like a soldier barking orders at an underling, but Elza seems to accept it.

Ala steers Niko roughly toward the back of the house. He plays up his limp.

Just past the kitchen, they walk down a hallway lined with portraits.

Each one is a photograph—some black-and-white, some color—of a fallen Knight.

Niko scans them to see if anyone he’s exacted vengeance on as zemsta is among them; he recognizes none of them, though he sees hints of Dymitr in them.

A nose, a chin, and in more than one of them, a pair of gray eyes.

They walk past a courtyard where a statue of Michael the Archangel stands untended, a dagger glinting on its weather-worn back, and that’s when he hears another sound—not a scream, because the time for screaming has passed.

Screaming is for the first moments of pain, the shocking ones, the ones that happen before pain is so layered over itself that there’s no energy left to scream.

No, what he hears is worse—it’s a moan, a sob, a helpless, pathetic sound that rips out his insides.

Ala shows no recognition of it, but her hand tightens on his arm. She releases him and pounds on the door with her fist.

“Babcia!” she calls out. “I caught one!”

At the sight of Dymitr on the floor, Niko lets out a harsh breath.

It’s only been twenty minutes since Ala found Niko in the woods to ask for his help. But it seems that twenty minutes is plenty of time for Knights to do some damage.

Dymitr’s back is soaked with blood. His black shirt is wet and sticking to him. His nose is bleeding, too, and one of his eyes is bloodshot. Swollen. Swollen eye, swollen lip. He’s curled in on himself—to protect his internal organs, maybe. Or just like a dead leaf, curling up as it dries.

For a horrible moment Niko thinks maybe he is dead—but then he sees Dymitr’s chest heaving, and gray eyes—hollowed out like the shell of a walnut—swivel to meet his.

Niko strains against Ala’s hold, his body struggling toward Dymitr—but that’s all right, because they think Dymitr is a strzygoń in disguise, and they think Niko is the zmora in cahoots with him.

The old woman is scrutinizing him with the bright red eyes of a half-transformed Knight, but the younger one smirks at him, and he realizes she looks familiar. She looks like Dymitr.

This is his quarry.

Brzytwa. The Razor.

He’s used to sizing up opponents before attacking them, used to watching them move and making quick assessments.

As Marzena rises to her feet, her body uncoiling, he feels every one of his muscles tense in anticipation.

She moves like a predator. He sees the flap in her boot that conceals a knife, the one Dymitr warned him about.

He sees the bright red blood of her son on her palms.

“That one’s a zmora. The female,” Elza’s voice says from the doorway.

She followed them here. She nods to Niko, who she must recognize as Ala, from their confrontation on the street outside the Uptown Theatre.

He feels the sudden urge to laugh as he realizes he’s in yet another Shakespearean nightmare—switched bodies, switched identities, a night of confusion in the woods.

Elza adds: “So the one you captured earlier must be the strzygoń, disguised by magic. He’s the stronger fighter.”

“Perhaps it was,” Marzena says, drawling a little. She nudges Dymitr hard with the toe of her boot, and Dymitr bites back a whimper. “Not in its current condition, I think.”

“We’ll use them against each other,” Joanna says, as if it’s already decided—and perhaps if she says it, it is. “I will take that one out—” She nods to Dymitr, still lying at her feet. “And question it further. It hardly poses a threat anymore. Marzena and Dymitr will handle this new one.”

Niko’s chest leaps with panic. He can’t let Joanna drag the real Dymitr out of this room alone, to take him God knows where and do God knows what to him. Ala squeezes his arm.

“If you don’t mind, Babcia, I’d like to speak to that one myself.” Ala points at the real Dymitr, bleeding on the stone. “Since he’s wearing my face and seems to know so much about me.”

“Of course,” Joanna says, and she smiles at Marzena. “I think your mother can handle one zmora on her own.”

Marzena’s eyes glitter as she looks Niko over, her eyes pausing on the belt cinching his too-large pants around his waist, the bob of his—or Ala’s—throat as he swallows.

“Pick it up, if you would. It’s been cursed with tenfold pain, so it may scream,” Joanna says to Ala, and Ala moves toward Dymitr to obey.

It’s a strange sight, one Dymitr moving closer to another, like Ala stepped across a mirror and into the land of reflections.

Niko tenses as she grabs Dymitr by the arm, hoping that she handles him gently and hoping that she remembers to be rough with him all at the same time.

Ala has a stronger stomach than he does.

She wrenches Dymitr upright, and his jaw clenches around a moan, his swollen, bloodied face shiny with sweat and maybe tears, though it’s hard to say.

He stumbles to his feet, and Ala pays him no mind, half marching and half dragging him toward the door.

Elza opens it for them both, and as Dymitr stumbles past his sister, she spits on him, hitting him in the cheek.

Then Joanna, Elza, Dymitr, and Ala walk out of the room, Ala still wearing Dymitr’s face like a veil.

And Nikodem Kostka, the Kostka zemsta, is alone with the Razor.