Page 5 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A DESPERATE PLEA

Elza’s journey home is long. O’Hare to Zurich, nine-hour flight.

Two-hour layover. Zurich to Warsaw, two-hour flight.

Warsaw to Gdańsk, one-hour flight. And her mother was waiting for her at the airport, behind the wheel of an old, boxy ?koda.

The car’s air-conditioning has been broken since they bought it, so the windows are down, and Elza prefers it that way. It means they won’t have to talk.

But Marzena is drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, so Elza knows she’s agitated.

Thanks to the Knights’ slow aging, they look like they could be sisters, though Marzena’s hair is a deeper brown than Elza’s.

They both have the high cheekbones and soft, ruddy cheeks of fairy-tale princesses lost in the woods.

Marzena lights up a cigarette once they’re outside the city, on the country roads.

“So you ran off, and for what?” Marzena asks, smoke spilling over her lips as she talks.

She’s wearing sunglasses even though it’s cloudy.

There’s a protective symbol tattooed on the back of each of her fingers.

A five-petaled red flower on one. A white eagle from the Polish coat of arms on another.

“I tried to help him.” Elza scowls. “Just because he wouldn’t accept it doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do. We travel in pairs for a reason.”

“If he wants to get himself killed, let him. The weak should weed themselves out.”

It’s strange, Elza thinks, that a way of looking at a person can be a habit as surely as biting your nails or cracking your knuckles.

When Dymitr was young, he was small for his age, with a soft voice and an even softer heart—he cried whenever mice got caught in the traps, so their father made it his job to set them and empty them.

But then he got older, and bigger, and harder, and their grandmother started paying special attention to him, and no one could call him soft after that.

But sometimes, it’s like her mother forgets that he’s no longer a child.

“He’s not weak.”

“Then he really doesn’t need your help anyway, does he?” Marzena flicks her ash out the window. Elza is just considering whether she could fall asleep even with the warm wind blowing through the car’s interior when her mother speaks again. “Filip is dead.”

She delivers this so casually that Elza hardly notices it, at first. It’s just another fact, like what time dinner will be on the table or how warm the weather is.

When she finally hears it, she stares at her mother, eyes wide, and all she feels is rage.

Filip isn’t Marzena’s brother, he’s their father’s brother, but she’s still known him for decades.

How can she speak of his death so casually, as if it’s nothing?

“Pull yourself together,” Marzena says, and she tosses the cigarette out the window. Elza watches in the side mirror as it bounces across the road, still lit, and disappears from view.

“How?” Elza asks, and the rage is giving way, now, to something slower and heavier.

Filip. Her mentor. Everyone’s favorite uncle.

He taught her curse words when she was too young for them.

He taught her to make pierniki one Christmas, star-shaped and glazed with sugar.

He swam with them—Elza and Dymitr and their older brother, Kazik—in the lake at the edge of town, unfazed by the tadpoles. He was deft with a knife.

“Strzyga” is the reply, and at this, Marzena’s hands tighten around the steering wheel. Her jaw flexes. All her grief, turned to anger. “I hunted it and killed it already. Your father is cleaning up the aftermath. Filip’s body is on its way home.”

Tears prick at Elza’s eyes, but she can’t cry. The last time she cried in front of her mother, Marzena boxed her ear and told her to grow up. That was years ago. Elza breathes deep, until the sharp edges of grief have dulled.

“Good,” she says, then. “I hope it died slowly.”

“Hear, hear,” Marzena says, and she turns on the radio.

Elza drops her bag on the floor of her bedroom and opens the closet door.

She didn’t bring anything pretty with her to America, just practical clothing that would help her disappear.

So she presses her face to a tulle skirt, a silk slip dress, a brocade jacket.

They smell like floral perfume, and the textures against her cheek are comforting.

She strips off her boots, her jacket, her canvas pants.

She puts on pink satin shorts and sits on the edge of her bed.

The door is closed and everyone else is in the kitchen, making plans for the body’s arrival.

Her cousins just got back from the cemetery, where they picked out a plot to salt it in advance of the burial.

Red cabbage is already simmering on the stove, and her aunt is mixing cake batter for yogurt plum cake.

Babcia, someone told Marzena, is at the butcher.

Elza’s job is to get the songbooks out of storage for pust? noc—the empty night.

The empty night is an old ritual, and it only belongs to some members of her family, really.

It’s Kashubian, and it’s her father’s side that’s Kashubian—Filip’s side.

Rituals tend to bleed over, regardless, especially when their purpose is to ward off evil spirits.

The Holy Order is always interested in warding off evil spirits, so they borrow from every culture, every faith, if it means keeping themselves safe from pollution.

Once the body arrives, they’ll put it in the living room on a board, wash it, and wrap its hands in rosary beads.

Then the family will gather and pray and sing until daybreak to keep the body safe from dark creatures that want to possess it or transform it.

They’ll eat and drink and try not to fall asleep.

Then they’ll carry the body on its plank to the burial plot, and someone will keep watch after it’s buried, just to make sure it doesn’t rise again.

There’s something comforting about knowing what to expect from the next few days, even if Elza doesn’t want to see Filip’s body, cold and dead, lying on a plank between the chess set and the old record player.

The last time she spoke to Dymitr, he was rude and dismissive, exhorting her to leave him alone as he pursued Baba Jaga.

He was with two monsters, a zmora and a strzygoń—a male, which was peculiar—and he kept her from killing one of them.

She assumes he needed it to find Baba Jaga, but she doesn’t understand why he was pretending to be its ally instead of just taking it hostage.

Maybe he was right, though—maybe she shouldn’t have gotten involved when she didn’t know his plan.

He could have been nicer about it, though.

It wasn’t like Dymitr to be cruel. But then, he hadn’t been acting like himself for months before going to Chicago.

Mournful and exhausted. Refusing to draw his sword.

Their grandmother kept ordering him to pay penance for his doubt.

Hail Marys and kneeling on uncooked peas and God knows what else, in the hope that pain would purge him of whatever ailed him.

Apparently it worked, because he came into the kitchen clear-eyed one morning, having proposed an important mission in America that their grandmother had approved.

Elza unlocks her phone and dials his number. She might be angry with him right now, but he loved Filip as much as she did, and he deserves to hear the news. She’s not surprised when she gets his voicemail.

“Hello,” she says. “I know you’re still on your mission, but…

Filip is dead.” Her eyes burn again. This time, with no one to see her, she lets the tears fall.

She wipes her nose with the back of her hand so her sniffle won’t be audible in the message.

“The ritual starts tomorrow night. I don’t know how long you’re expecting to be gone, but…

” She chokes a little. “I’d like it if—if you came.

Mom is… Mom. Everyone’s here, and they’re—”

She stops. Clears her throat.

“I’d like it if you came,” she says again. “But I understand if you can’t.”

She hangs up before she can say anything even more embarrassing. Then she gets up to pick out a black dress for the funeral.