Page 21 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A FEINT

Ala’s jaw aches as she half carries, half drags Dymitr into the hallway beyond the weapons room.

The drone of the empty night singers across the house reminds her of cicadas in summer.

The hallway is lit by moonlight, blue-gray and bare.

She breathes in through her nose, and tastes the dark chocolate of Dymitr’s terror on her tongue, but nothing from the woman he calls Babcia except the powder sweet of anxiety.

Maybe it’s nice, Ala thinks, to live with so little fear. But it makes Joanna My?liwiec stranger to her than any so-called monster that walks the earth.

Ala feels a different kind of fear, though.

Anticipation. Apprehension. She feels the itching in her fingers that drives her to draw the knife at her back and stab Joanna My?liwiec in the side.

She feels her mother’s flesh giving way to the knife that ended her pain.

She remembers how it feels to deliver death, and she dreads it, and she craves it.

The end of her nightmares is at hand. Just a few minutes more.

“In here,” Joanna says, and she leads the way into the courtyard where the statue of the Archangel Michael stands, worn by weather and surrounded by untamed weeds.

Ala takes note of the dagger sheathed at the small of Joanna’s back; she wishes she could disarm her right now, but she doesn’t want to give herself away before she has Joanna trapped.

It’s a relief to be outside, even if they are surrounded on all sides by walls.

The earth is soft beneath Ala’s shoes, and she feels the weight of the knife she borrowed against her shoulder.

She shoves Dymitr into the courtyard, still playing her part, and her teeth squeak from grinding when he makes one of those horrible, agonized sounds.

She closes the door behind her, and locks it.

It feels a little like locking herself in a room with a grizzly.

Earlier, Joanna’s voice threatened to launch Ala into the past. In the memory she’d once shared with Dymitr, Joanna was speaking to her grandson, and she did it at a higher pitch, with a gentler timbre.

But in the weapons room, when she addressed him no longer believing he could possibly be her grandson, it was with a cold cruelty that Ala recognized from the vision of the zmora.

She hit me. I think she should lose the hand she used before she dies.

In the weapons room, Ala stuffed the memory down. But now, she lets it come. She lets herself see the desperate zmora turning into animal after animal, as if the illusions could help her escape. She lets herself watch the Knight pin the zmora’s wrist to the ground.

Her eyes are full of tears. The image that lingers, more than the stringy hair clinging to the zmora’s lips or the firm hands of the male Knight pressing her to the earth, is the light in young Joanna’s eyes as she moves her sword back and forth over the zmora’s flesh.

She can’t decide, even now, if it’s delight or determination.

Ala blinks the tears away, but she can hear them in her voice—in Dymitr’s voice—when she speaks next.

“Do you ever feel for them?” she asks, feeling distant from the whole scene—from Dymitr sagging on his knees by the door where she set him down, his back flayed and blood dribbling from his mouth; from the nettle and mugwort and mustard growing in the untended courtyard, tangled around the base of the Saint Michael statue; from Joanna My?liwiec, older than the fervent Knight of Ala’s cursed recollections but no less brutal, standing across from her.

“What?” Joanna asks her, as if she misheard. “Do you feel bad for this thing wearing your face?”

“Don’t you?” Ala tilts her head. “He looks like me, after all. What if we’re wrong, and he’s just a zmora with a skill for illusions? Doesn’t it pain you to hurt someone who looks just like your grandson?”

“It doesn’t,” she says, and Ala believes her.

“Other Knights will tell you that zmoras are benign, that a strzyga is a much more impressive kill—but those Knights are fools. The first zmora I hunted made me see visions of my father burning alive. The second zmora I hunted made me feel insects burrowing into my skin. They can make you see things that aren’t there, hear things that never were, feel things that no one should ever have to feel. ”

Her voice has gone low and guttural, like it was in the memory Ala wishes she didn’t have, and for the first time she wonders if Joanna is scarred by the creatures she’s killed, even though she has no right to be.

Trauma doesn’t ask whether the person experiencing it is a sympathetic figure or not, after all.

“Foul things they are, among the most wretched of the monsters we hunt,” Joanna continues. “A curse upon the earth that it is our duty to obliterate. But not to be underestimated.”

“You hunted them,” Ala says. “ You hunted them, and they did what they could to survive you, but you call them ‘foul’?”

Joanna regards her in silence for a long moment.

“Who are you?” she asks, casually, as if she’s asking how cold it will be today so she can choose the right jacket.

Letting go of the illusion feels like unclenching a fist. Ala releases it, becoming herself again, and for the first time, stands face-to-face with the woman who cursed her family.

She can hear it again, what Joanna said when she passed the book of curses to Dymitr for safekeeping.

With this book, I can not only summon stronger weapons to fight my enemies—I can make those fights unnecessary.

Joanna’s intention was to avoid this very confrontation—to kill off Ala’s entire family, one by one, without ever having to look Ala in the eye or even become aware of her existence.

Well, Ala thinks, too damn bad.

“Someone you cursed,” Ala says, her voice trembling with rage. She drew her knife—more of a short sword, really—without realizing it, and she’s holding it with the blade tilted up, ready.

Joanna cocks her head, her silver hair catching the moonlight. “Did I, now.”

“I don’t know how far back it went,” Ala says. “The first person I heard about was my aunt. Then my cousin. Then my mother. Then me.”

“Then it did its job,” Joanna says passively. “Though it has not, I see, finished that job with you quite yet. Are you here to exact your revenge before you die?”

“Oh, I’m cured,” Ala says, with a forced grin. “Thanks to your grandson.”

She smells something sweet as peach nectar.

She’s finally succeeded in making Joanna afraid, though she doesn’t know exactly why, or exactly how.

She thinks it’s the fear that a person feels when they know something is true but don’t want to admit it to themselves. She thinks it’s something like dread.

“You’re lying,” Joanna says.

“Am I?” Ala raises her eyebrows. “Or did you lose your grip on your beloved curse-bearer?”

Before Joanna can respond, Ala lunges with the knife outstretched.

She thought, in this moment, she would be half-hearted—not accustomed to killing, maybe she wouldn’t be able to strike as hard as she needed to.

But her body doesn’t hesitate, as she feared it would.

She aims for Joanna’s belly, and the movement is strong and committed, the point of the blade about to bury itself in the old woman’s soft abdomen.

But she realizes right away how badly she miscalculated. Because Joanna may be an old woman, she may be finished with her life of hunting innocent creatures down, but she’s still a Knight.

In the space of a breath, Joanna draws a dagger from the sheath over her spine, and counters Ala’s blade. At the same time, she elbows Ala hard in the jaw, so hard she sees stars and lurches back, gasping.

Desperate, Ala projects the darkness illusion that she favors, the one that renders her opponent blind.

The problem with her illusions is that she has to see them, too; she’s never figured out how to exempt herself from the projection.

But she knows where Joanna was when she saw her last, so she rushes forward with her arms outstretched and collides with the Knight’s legs, shoving her back into the wall.

A line of heat along her arm; Joanna cut her, but not very deep.

Or maybe Ala is just choking on adrenaline and can no longer feel pain.

She stabs, and the illusion fails just in time for her to see her knife buried in Joanna’s leg.

The old woman roars and kicks Ala off her, sending her sprawling on the dirt.

Ala is ready with another illusion, this one inspired by her memory of the zmora. She makes herself look like a bear

and then a snake

and then a fox.

She’s hoping the reminder of the zmora Joanna once killed will destabilize her.

And it seems to—the Knight’s steps falter, though she keeps coming, and Ala tries to roll out of the way, but Joanna is too fast. She’s already grabbing Ala by the ankle and punching her in the gut by the time Ala registers movement.

As Joanna’s fingers close over Ala’s throat, she thinks, It was a mistake to come here . She thought she knew how fast Knights are, how strong, she thought she understood —

But as Dymitr said, there’s knowing and there’s knowing.

“Tell me, zmora,” Joanna asks her, as she chokes Ala. “How many of your kind have you watched die?”

This time, Ala isn’t interested in joining in the banter.

She’s busy imagining the courtyard from Joanna’s perspective.

The tangle of greenery and the bits of gravel; the side of the house lit blue by the moon.

She imagines it without Ala there to interrupt the flow of space.

And then, like she’s tearing out a piece of fabric, she twists away and stitches herself a few feet to the right, so Joanna will think she’s somewhere she isn’t.

It’s a trap, and Joanna falls into it, swinging at the illusory Ala and ignoring the one right in front of her. Her dagger hits nothing but air.

Ala is already moving toward her when she realizes she made another critical error:

Joanna’s last swing was a feint.

Her weight has already shifted, and she’s stabbing low and fast at Ala’s undefended side. She buries the blade in Ala’s gut. Ala screams.