Page 22 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)
A RAZOR’S EDGE
The first time Niko killed a Knight, he was ready to die.
Statistically speaking, that was the most likely outcome for a strzygoń who had just taken the zemsta oath.
Most of them rushed in too fast and got skewered by a bone sword and then the next strzygoń in the database, some cousin creature, a Greek strix or a Jewish estrie or even the rare Japanese tatarimokke—who could fully shift into owls, something Niko can’t even imagine—would be called forward for the job.
So Niko didn’t rush in too fast the first time.
He got a tip from a double-crosser in Boston that a Knight had come calling about a suspected changeling, and he flew out there a few days after taking his oath.
The oath made it so he could do simple tracking spells, so he used them to sniff the Knight out, to plant a few rumors, to lure them to the place of his choosing, and so on.
In the end, though, it came down to sword against sword.
And you couldn’t really prepare for what it was like to cross blades with a Knight.
They were all good at it—every single one Niko had come across.
They trained from childhood. And more than that, they were driven by the deep conviction that anyone they drew their sword against was a soulless, life-sucking, humanity-torturing being that needed to die .
No matter how much Niko hated Knights, he could never believe that of them in return…
because he simply didn’t believe that anyone was beyond redemption.
Which is how he’d ended up in this pickle to begin with.
But his first Knight—
His first Knight was American, not Polish.
There were chapters of the Holy Order, after all, in almost every country in the world.
And the Knight was a boy, too—only eighteen.
Acne dusted his cheeks and he was still gangly with youth and Niko desperately didn’t want to kill him.
So Niko almost got himself killed, instead.
Because when that child drew his bone sword, and his eyes turned bloodred, and he came at Niko with all the strength and fervor in his body, it was damn hard to survive him.
But one thing Knights usually weren’t was tricky, and Niko was born with a superabundance of trickiness.
So some clever footwork and some well-timed light spells—always his favorite—caught the Knight off guard.
The boy ended up bleeding out in a little alley next to some trash cans.
To be disposed of the following day by the local family of banshees.
One thing Niko never told anyone is that he requested a mass for the Knight. The boy was young, after all, even if he was on a mission to murder a changeling, which was really just a child—albeit a child of a very different nature.
The whole debacle was an important lesson in preparation: its importance, and also its insufficiency.
Marzena paces the edge of the weapons room, and Niko listens to her footsteps.
Sometimes he learns things from listening that he doesn’t learn from watching, though his kind have both good vision and good hearing, as a rule.
From Marzena, he learns that she’s favoring her right leg.
She must have injured herself on her recent hunt.
The weapons room is hexagonal, though the exterior of this part of the house is round.
A bench that must have been taken from an old church is leaning against the wall near the door, and all along the walls are cabinets that Niko assumes hold weapons.
They’re locked, so they’re of no use to him, but they’re made of dusty, rough wood, like an old ship.
And above him, etched into the vaulted wood ceiling, are protective symbols—some of them are Catholic, some not, like a six-pointed rosette, or a triquetra, or an Auseklis cross.
Niko puzzles over them. He knows the Knights’ belief system has no real depth to it—every culture has Knights, and Knights always use the religious rhetoric of whatever place they come from to justify killing monsters—but he thought there was at least the appearance of consistency. It seems he was wrong.
“Do they trouble you?” Marzena asks him, and she sounds polite, if detached. He’s not surprised she hasn’t attacked him yet. From what he’s heard of Marzena, she loves to play with her food before she eats it.
“I can look at them without bursting into flames, if that’s what you mean.” Maybe he should attack her right now, before she’s ready for it—but there may also be value in learning as much as he can about her before he does.
“When I was young, I believed in them.” She wiggles her tattooed fingers at Niko. “But now I’m aware they have no true power. There’s nothing otherworldly about you.”
“Oh really?” Niko laughs a little. “The fact that I can make you see things that aren’t there, that seems completely ordinary to you?”
“A hallucinogenic mushroom can also make me see things that aren’t there. I don’t call them supernatural, either.”
Niko raises his eyebrows. “That’s a good point, actually. And here I was thinking all Knights were mindless brutes.”
Marzena stops in front of him and folds her arms. She’s wiry, her body all sinews and tendons.
“The wieszczy was your doing, wasn’t it?” she says. “How did you get it to cooperate? I found it to be… rather stubborn, myself.”
“Let me tell you the secret to getting any creature to do your bidding,” Niko says, and he leans closer, theatrical. “You have to realize they’re people and treat them accordingly .”
Marzena smiles.
“Let me tell you a secret, zmora,” she says.
“I have never been under the impression that you and your kind are soulless monsters, or whatever the usual Knight sermons are these days. I believe what my eyes see, which is that you have feelings, you have families, you have all the same shit we have.” She rolls her eyes, like families and feelings are just inconveniences—and to her, perhaps they are.
She doesn’t strike Niko as particularly maternal, whatever that really means.
She goes on: “We’re all just meat, I know that.
Animals, eating whatever food we find, and trying to keep other creatures from killing us.
But your kind feeds on my kind—you’re our only natural predator.
You’re fast and strong and long-lived, and you have strange abilities we don’t fully comprehend.
The way I see it, our only advantage is that we outnumber you.
And it’s my job—my duty, as a member of the human race—to make sure it stays that way.
” She shrugs. “I take no particular joy in killing a harmless little zmora. It’s nothing personal. ”
“Can’t really say the same. For me, it’s definitely a little bit personal.” Niko smiles. “And I’m not a zmora, you idiot.”
And then he lets the ropes that Ala pretended to bind his hands with fall away…
and he transforms, shrugging off the temporary body Ala loaned him like it’s a suit that he’s grown out of, and relaxing into his sowa form, the owl version of himself that shifts beneath the surface of him, always waiting to emerge.
It’s painful to change—it always is—but it feels like wiggling a loose tooth, the way the beak grows out of his mouth, the way the fine hairs all over his skin turn into feathers, the way his eyeballs elongate, pulled backward into his skull like taffy.
Wings grow from the bones of his spine, so rapidly they’re just a white-hot burst of agony before they explode from his back, and talons split open his fingertips.
All of it happens in a flurry of sensation, and he’s already launching himself into the air to collide with Marzena My?liwiec, the Razor, with all the force he can muster.
He carves ten long, bright gashes into her chest, and she screams—not like she’s afraid, but like she’s enraged .
He’s not prepared for how ready she is to make use of the pain he gave her.
She spits a spell at him, hurling him backward with a powerful breath of wind, and he slams into the cabinets as she puts both hands behind her head and buries her blunt fingernails in her flesh.
He hears it, this time. The splitting of skin and the piercing of muscle, the way her bones creak and crack to release the sword. She breathes hard and fast, and red stains her palms, her arms. Red stains her eyes, too, making her look like—of all things—a vampire from an old movie.
He lands on his feet, his balance aided by his wings. Marzena is already on top of him, swinging her bone sword hard at his head; he just manages to roll away as the blade lands, breaking one of the planks on the cabinet door with its force.
He twists and kicks at her left leg, the one she’s so careful to take weight away from when she walks, and she howls, grabbing her knee with her free hand.
He uses her moment of distraction to reach into the cabinet she broke open and grab the first sword he can get his hands on.
It’s a szabla—a little old, if the roughness of the blade is any indication, and a little curved.
Heavy at the hilt, but he adjusts to it, letting the owl sink back into him as he charges his opponent.
He’s even-footed and he uses the saber as a cudgel, bashing at Marzena’s head.
She blocks him and pushes him back with that startling Knight strength.
Light on his feet, he rebounds, but only in time to defend himself against three blows in quick succession.
The impact makes his wrist ache; Marzena is stronger than the last Knight he fought, though smaller, and he’s not sure how that’s possible, unless it’s by magic—
He tries to cut her, but she only laughs, and digs her bloody fingers into one of the gashes he left her at the start of all this.
“Rozszczep,” she says, in a tone of command, and the skin over his heart simply… splits open, like a burst grape. Blood runs hot down Niko’s torso, and he swallows a scream, but she hasn’t finished.
“Z ? am!” she commands, pressing down again with her fingers in her own wound, and one of his fingers twists in the wrong direction and cracks, the bone unmistakably breaking—
—and in her smile, he sees that no amount of preparation could have aided him in this task. She’s fearless and she’s ready and she has a mouth full of Knight curses and he gave her all the pain she would need to use them.
He really was sent here to die.