Page 3 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

“I heard you’re the Moore family historian,” Dymitr says. “I wondered if you’d ever come across information about what happens when a Knight is parted from their sword.”

Zuri, of course, chooses that moment to carry John’s latte over to their table.

The face of an owl stares up at Dymitr from the mug, and he feels a bubble of hysterical laughter in his chest as he thinks of Niko, his strzygoń…

not-quite-boyfriend, and the second form he can shrug on and off like a jacket.

Zuri winks at Dymitr, who manages a weak smile, and tells them to holler if they need anything else, one of those folksy phrases that sounds wrong if Dymitr tries to say it in his accent.

Once Zuri is gone, John leans over the table, conspiratorially.

“As a matter of fact, I have,” John says.

“And a more recent account than you’d think.

My great-grandfather’s death was a bit of a family mystery for most of my life, right?

In our family records he was a beast of a man, big and strapping, killed a whole bunch of game”— game is what they call their work in public, in case anyone is listening to their conversation—“and then one day, poof. Gone. No account of what got him, if anything. Weird stuff. But my grandfather, he left behind a lot of old journals when he passed, and guess who has two thumbs and got tasked with reading through all of them?”

He gives Dymitr a double thumbs-up, and then points back at himself.

“ This guy,” John says. “Anyway there was a record of him losing his sword in a fight against one of our fearsomest feathery friends—” Dymitr thinks that means strzygas.

“But the owl flew the coop instead of sticking around to kill him, with his sword in hand. He tried like hell to find her, and so did a few of the others, by all accounts—but no dice. And then things took a turn.”

“A turn?”

“Well, for the first few weeks, he was in pain—body aches, and constant thirst and hunger that never seemed to be sated. No big deal for a man of his constitution, right?” John shakes his head.

“Well, then he started seeing a different owl, one he’d brought down a few years before.

The family thought, you know—a curse. A haunting.

A hallucinogenic poison. Whatever. And then he saw other things.

Old game. Crows—” Those were zmoras. “And wolves—” Werewolves.

“All kinds of things. An entire menagerie. They didn’t replay old memories, or anything, they just talked to him nonstop.

Taunted him, refused to leave him alone.

Eventually there were so many of them he couldn’t hear anyone over the noise.

He just stayed in his room with his fingers in his ears. ”

“And he died from it?”

John shakes his head. “No, it didn’t kill him. Not directly, anyway. He did that himself. Couldn’t take it anymore, left a note and everything. That’s why there was no official record of it—a Knight’s not supposed to destroy himself, right? He’s supposed to take something else down with him.”

As a child, one of the first things Dymitr understood about Knights was that there were good ways for a Knight to die and bad ways.

Dying because you were stupid or scared or didn’t prepare for the work at hand adequately or lost your nerve in the middle of a fight, those were shameful ways to die.

But dying because you were saving someone else, or because you were fighting something especially fierce or deadly—those were good deaths.

No Knight hoped to live a long life; they hoped for a good death.

“I guess it makes sense, you know? You can’t just walk around without half your soul without suffering some consequences,” John says. “So why the sudden interest? Someone you know misplace theirs?”

“I know someone whose sword is in the wrong hands,” Dymitr says quietly. “Though he knows exactly where it is, it will be difficult to get back. He wanted to know how urgent it was that he do so.”

John’s smile fades.

“Tell your friend that it’s urgent. From beginning to end, it was only a few months for my great-grandfather. And it got bad much sooner than that.”

Dymitr looks out the window at the cars driving past. At the construction workers setting up orange traffic cones on Irving Park. At the woman walking her corgi past a hair salon and stopping by the door for the stylist to toss a treat.

“Thank you for your help,” he says to John distantly. “I have to go.”

John’s hand brushes his as he stands, an attempt at comfort that Dymitr doesn’t acknowledge.

Dymitr stops at the top of the stairs and leans against the wall.

The scents of the stairwell are overwhelming.

Rubber boots. Sweaty feet. Petrichor. Wet carpet.

Soggy paper from the mail Ala must have brought in earlier—the mailbox has a leak in it.

Whatever food the neighbors had delivered.

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nose.

Basil and peanuts—Thai food from the place down the street, if he had to guess.

The smells distract him from the ache in his chest. He rubs his sternum absently, and unlocks the door with the spare key. He’s been staying at Ala’s place since his transformation. Just until I get my bearings, he promised her. She just rolled her eyes, like he was being ridiculous.

The apartment is too small for both of them.

He sleeps on the couch, and his feet hang off the end of it.

There’s no room in the refrigerator for both his milk—whole—and her milk—1 percent—so they compromise by buying 2 percent.

Just this morning she made him get out of the shower early so she could use the toilet.

They don’t know each other, not really, but the cramped space has forced an intimacy neither of them is quite comfortable with yet.

He can tell it would be better if he was gone, and also that Ala is too stubborn to tell him so.

She’s in the kitchen when he arrives. She hasn’t gotten her hair cut in a while, so it’s starting to curl behind her ears.

She’s wearing an old gray T-shirt with holes at the collar seams. When he tries to peek at what’s on the stove, she blocks it with her body and grins at him. “Tell me what it is.”

She seems to love this game.

“It’s ramen,” he says.

“Not specific enough.”

“It’s the Sapporo brand,” he says. “You put carrots and broccoli in it. And an egg.”

She grins and steps aside, revealing an old pot—red, with white flowers painted on it—full of noodles. “Want some?”

“Do you even need to ask?”

She takes another bowl out of the cupboard, and starts ladling soup into it. Zmoras don’t need to eat much regular food, since fear makes up the bulk of their diet. A meal every few days, maybe. But he still appreciates how generous she’s been with food and money while he looks for work.

As she hands him the bowl, she says, “I’ll never get tired of that, I swear. Your nose is so much better than mine.”

“A pity my illusions are so much worse.” Ala has been trying to teach him the art of it, but his illusions, when he even manages to conjure them, have no strength. They flicker in and out, they go hazy at the edges. Sometimes they don’t even look like what he’s picturing.

They sit at the rickety yellow table in the corner.

It’s only big enough for two people, and even then, his knees knock against hers when he sits down, so he turns sideways in his chair.

He lets the steam from the soup envelop his nose, and closes his eyes.

Salt. Carrot. Chicken bouillon. Metal, from the pot. Wood, from the spoon. His chest aches.

“I saw there’s a showing of I Know What You Did Last Summer tomorrow night at the Crow,” he says casually.

Ala hesitates. The Crow Theater is a zmora operation, run by Ala’s family, the Dryjas.

They play scary movies as a kind of fear buffet in disguise.

He hasn’t been there since his transformation—hasn’t actually met any of the other zmoras in Ala’s life.

It’s as if she doesn’t want them to know he exists.

Or maybe as if she doesn’t trust him around them. And really, can he blame her, after all the things he’s done—not just to her people, but to her family, specifically?

“I didn’t mean you should take me,” he clarifies. “I meant you should go alone. Get some… junk food.”

It’s hard for him to get used to, thinking of other people’s fear as a meal.

But he can tell when he gets a good one.

He feels sated, almost giddy. The more fear he eats, the more fearless he becomes.

Reckless, like he could climb a tall building or leap off a bridge.

He was alarmed by this at first, but it’s gotten easier to control.

The first few days, he went searching for it.

There are some places where people are always afraid.

The first place he went was the hospital waiting room, where he sat steeped in anxiety for hours.

The next day, he went to a sports bar, where some kind of important fight was on every television set.

There, he found a blend of anxiety, apprehension, eagerness. All shades of fear.

So there’s been no shortage of food, even though he hasn’t been to the Crow.

“I’m being silly,” Ala says.

“You’re not being silly,” Dymitr says. “You don’t want to tell a family of zmoras that you’re harboring a Knight. There’s nothing silly about that.”

Ala stabs at her soup with her spoon, even though it’s an ineffectual tool for stabbing. She scowls at him. “You’re not a Knight. And you saved my life. I just need some time to—”

Some time to believe I’ve really changed, he supplies, and the thought twists his insides. And really, should she believe it? He’s done very little to earn her trust, and a great deal to break it.

Dymitr touches her wrist, lightly. She tenses at the contact, and he can’t tell if it’s because a part of her is still afraid of him, or if she just doesn’t like to be touched. Either way, he withdraws his hand.

“Just because I helped you with that curse doesn’t mean you owe me something,” he says. “And it doesn’t mean everything’s all better now.”

He says it too darkly, thinking about his sword, fixed to Baba Jaga’s wall.

Ala stares down at her soup. She brings a spoonful of the broth up to her mouth, and blows on it. Then she asks, without looking at him: “What did she say?”

She doesn’t need to specify who she is. There’s only one she that Ala would be reluctant to name: Baba Jaga.

“The price of my sword is thirty-three deaths. One for each vertebra.” And he chokes a little as he adds: “Beginning with my grandmother.”

Ala lets the soup drip back into the bowl. She doesn’t look surprised. The look in her eyes is unreadable. “I thought it might be something like that.”

“And I spoke to an old contact about what will happen to me if I don’t pay that price,” he says. “It’s… bad.”

“Death?”

“Madness.”

They’re both quiet for a while. She knows better than anyone what it is to inch closer and closer to losing yourself, but he doesn’t want to bring it up—doesn’t want to suggest that it’s the same thing.

They start eating in silence. Ala has the furrowed brow she gets when she’s thinking something through.

And Dymitr, well. He’s used to eating when he feels terrible.

After every mission. Before every mission.

And eventually… between every mission, too.

He hasn’t felt ease at the dinner table since he was a child. Since before he split his soul.

“My parents didn’t act like parents,” he says, when the silence has gone on too long for him to bear.

“They preferred to be… working. Away from each other, and away from us. So my grandmother raised me instead.” He can’t bring himself to look at Ala.

“She was the first person to tell me she loved me.”

Ala reaches out and puts her hands on top of his. He only realizes then that he’s been clenching his hands together so hard he’s lost the feeling in his fingers.

“I know she deserves to die,” he says. “But I would rather give my own life than be the one to do it. I would rather lose my mind.”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

She coaxes his hands away from each other, and presses them flat to the table. Then she picks up their bowls and carries them to the sink.

“We’ll think of something,” she says. “We’re not giving up yet. Not even close.”

He doesn’t reply.