Page 25 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A MEETING OF SISTERS

Elza is the best tracker, so while the others deal with the aftermath—with her grandmother’s body, rendered small and frail in death; with the knife speared through her mother’s arm; with the wieszczy who appeared at Filip’s grave and then vanished, seemingly without a trace; with the grave itself, waiting for Filip’s body to fill it; with her young cousin André, who disappeared sometime in the night; with all of it, the whole fucking nightmare of it all—

While the others deal with the aftermath, Elza follows the trail into town.

In truth, there’s no need for the best tracker to complete this task.

The three intruders who turned everything in her life upside down last night didn’t go to much effort to disguise their tracks.

They left bloody, muddy footprints through the forest, then stopped—to heal themselves, she thinks, because the footprints became less bloody after that—and then continued into town, where they walked right into a hotel.

All Elza had to do to figure out what room they were in was wait for a light to go on.

The intruders, that’s how she thinks of them now. Because that man, the one who killed her grandmother, can’t possibly be Dymitr. He has to be some thing wearing Dymitr’s face again, or Dymitr himself has to be cursed, his mind addled by magic—because the alternative is impossible.

Isn’t it?

She creeps up to a window, and draws her bone swords, her teeth gritted with fury as she remembers the way her grandmother’s face looked, so pale, her eyes still open but unseeing.

She’s here to exact bloody vengeance on all three of them, and she’s going to start by climbing through the bathroom window to ambush them while they’re still hurt and exhausted from their escape. She’s going to start right now .

She reaches up to see if the window is unlocked, and hears… sobbing.

She braces herself against the stucco wall. She knows that sound. She’s heard it just a few times before, through the paper-thin walls of their house, through the bathroom door, but it’s not easy to forget the sound of your older brother falling apart.

That’s him.

That’s really him.

She goes still, her body gripped with fear as she realizes the Dymitr she spent dinner trading knowing looks with was not, in fact, some zmora skilled with illusions and mimicry, or some strzygoń wearing a magical skin, but the real him.

And somehow, the real him… is now a monster.

Baba Jaga must have cursed him. That’s the only explanation she can think of.

Baba Jaga cursed him, and he was too afraid to tell anyone what happened because he thought they would kill him, and—and he was right to fear that, because her mother would have spent the night torturing him for information and then, whether he gave it or not, slit his throat at sunrise.

But that doesn’t explain why he lied to protect the zmora. Or why there’s a murmur just audible through the glass—the strzygoń, its voice deep and rumbling as an engine, trying to soothe him.

She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand, and she needs to, or this bloody night will haunt her for the rest of her life. So she sheathes her swords and decides to wait.

It takes hours for anything to happen. Elza knows she should go home, if she’s not going to act—go home, and change into her funeral clothes, so she can be there when they bury Filip. But she can’t make herself move. Not until she understands what happened to her brother.

Around sunrise, the zmora steps out of the hotel and walks down the road. Elza follows it all the way to the forest again.

The light is weak and pale, and there’s dew clinging to all the spiderwebs. When Elza finds herself getting too close to the zmora, she stops to examine one, a symmetrical orb weaver’s web with the spider herself perched in the middle, her legs curled up around her.

The zmora isn’t making much effort to move quietly.

It ducks under branches and hops over logs and swats at the little flies that are already out in force.

It keeps pausing to sniff the air, like a hunting dog.

Whatever scent it’s following, it follows all the way to the fort where Elza, Kazik, and Dymitr used to play as children.

Elza grits her teeth. No, she thinks. It can’t be.

The zmora can’t possibly know.

The fort is in a small clearing. The structure itself is built between two tall trees at the edge of the space, and it’s made of thin branches lined up next to each other like slats.

Elza and Kazik spent days searching the forest floor for the right ones, then they brought them to Dymitr, who was the only one patient enough to saw off the ends to make them all even.

The top of the fort is neat and tidy, as a result.

The zmora slips through the opening to the fort, and Elza thinks about killing it right here.

It would be simple enough to draw her bone swords again and corner the zmora in the fort; it would happen too quickly for the monster to devise some clever illusion to get away.

But then she wouldn’t be any closer to answers.

Through the fort’s uneven branches, Elza can see the zmora kneeling beside the metal lunch pail that’s nestled in the corner of the structure. Elza is the one who put it there, the one who nestled the book of curses inside it to keep it safe.

The zmora does know.

It lifts its head, and through the gap between the branches, Elza meets its eyes.

“How did you know the book was here?” Elza says.

The zmora draws a knife. Elza can see the metal glinting through the branches.

“I’m not here to kill you,” Elza says. “Not today, anyway.”

She holds her hands out in front of her, so the zmora can see that she’s not armed. She could become armed in a matter of seconds, of course, but she’s not eager to draw her swords right now. The zmora goes to the door of the fort, a knife in one hand and the blue book of curses in the other.

“I saw this place last night,” the zmora says. “Thought I’d take a look.”

Last night. It sounds so casual to Elza, like last night wasn’t a series of horrors. But then, as a creature who’s named after the nightmare itself, maybe it doesn’t think of betrayal and deception and murder as a series of horrors.

Last night—the empty night.

Remember the last things, the singers sang. The clock is ticking, death is cutting down the tree of life.

“What are you here for, if not to kill me?” the zmora asks Elza, and Elza can’t think of the last time she spoke to a monster like this.

It has such a human face. High cheekbones, sharp, almost wild eyes.

It could be someone Elza went to school with, someone Elza passed on the street. Ordinary. Pretty, even.

“Answers,” Elza says. “If I get them, I won’t kill you. Provided you leave that book behind.”

“We’ll see” is the zmora’s response.

“Last night.” Grief rises up in Elza’s throat like vomit. She swallows it down. “That was really him?”

The zmora doesn’t respond, at first. It sniffs the air, looking thoughtful.

“Do you know,” it says, “a zmora can tell the difference between dread and fear. A person fears what’s unknown, but they dread what’s known. What you’re feeling right now smells very much like dread. So I can tell that you already know the answer to your own question.”

“A yes would have sufficed.”

“I’m not sure it would have, actually. Because if you’re going to have a zmora for a brother, you should really understand more about our kind than ‘monster bad, monster needs to die.’”

“I do not have a… a monster for a brother. If that thing is what my brother is now, then my brother is dead.”

“Your brother, who is not a ‘thing,’ killed the person he loves most to save my life yesterday,” the zmora replies. “So you’ll talk about him with respect, or you can fuck right off.”

Elza only notices that her cheeks are wet with tears when a breeze blows cool against her skin. She wipes them with the heel of her hand.

“Who cursed him with this?” Elza asks. “And how? Can it be undone?”

“It probably can. But since he’s the one who asked for it to begin with, I’m pretty sure it won’t be.”

“Don’t lie to me. He would never ask for this.”

The zmora tilts her head. “Are you sure about that? Are we talking about the brother who doesn’t like when you call us ‘monsters’?”

Elza opens her mouth to argue further, but she can’t help remembering. Dymitr, sobbing after his first kill instead of celebrating. Dymitr, calling the strzyga who killed their uncle “she” instead of “it.” Dymitr, sparring with Elza in the street to keep her from killing the strzygoń.

If she thinks back to everything he said to her in Chicago, and everything she said to him, it makes a certain amount of sense.

He chose his words so carefully. She asked him if Baba Jaga was his target; he said he wouldn’t discuss it with her.

She told him he was acting strange; he said, I am doing what’s necessary.

What’s necessary.

“Why?” Her voice breaks over the word. “Why would he ever want this?”

“Because he wanted to stop being a murderer,” the zmora says. “Which is really all a Knight is, once you strip away the rhetoric.”

Elza’s face burns hot as a fever. “We’re fighting for humanity—”

The zmora holds up the book of curses. “If you really believe that, why did you hide this here?”

Elza went looking for a secret message from Dymitr right after he left for America.

She assumed he would leave one in the bathroom cabinet, explaining why he was going on this mission alone.

Instead, she found the book of curses. She remembers kneeling on the bath mat and flipping through it, her skin crawling.

She knows the methods for killing most things—what needs a blade through the heart, what needs its head chopped off, what needs to be burned or salted or buried at a full moon.

But the torments written on those pages made her feel sick.

So she brought the book here. She still doesn’t understand why, not fully.

“The book scared me,” Elza says. “I didn’t want anyone else to find it.”

“It scared you because it’s a handbook for creative torture,” the zmora says.

“And deep down, you know that it’s horrible to do those things to a living creature.

You know that you don’t like what it says about your people, that they’ve done those things so many times they decided to write them down.

And now, hopefully, you know that if this book falls into the wrong hands, those horrors can be inflicted on your brother. ”

The zmora steps closer, but only a little.

“And he is still your brother, Elza,” the zmora says. “He’s kind, and quiet, and he’ll mend your socks without being asked, and he leaves orange peels everywhere, and he’s got incredible aim. He’s Dymitr.”

Elza is crying again. She tells herself it’s because she’s mourning the loss of him. That the creature that now wears his face is just an echo of him. It can do the things he used to do, but it’s no longer him, it no longer has his soul or his heart or his mind.

The zmora says, “Let me take the book so no one can use it against him. Please.”

A tear rolls off the end of Elza’s chin. She looks away, into the brightening woods. “If I cross paths with you again, I won’t be merciful.”

The zmora smiles a little too wide—like the Cheshire cat from the old cartoon, just teeth aglow in the dark woods.

“Neither will I,” it says.