Page 6 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A PUZZLE SOLVED

There are two of them.

There are always two of them. Knights travel in pairs. Sometimes, when she was still getting visions of them, Ala tried to guess what they were to each other. Siblings. Spouses. Parent and child.

These two are husband and wife. It’s obvious in the way they move together, the way they look at each other.

The woman has gray eyes, narrowed in focus, and Ala can tell this event is long past because of the woman’s hair, curled and pinned like Marilyn Monroe’s even though she’s pulling a damn bone sword out of her spine.

She yanks it free with a grunt, her hands sticky red, the gray in her eyes now Knight bright.

At the corner of her mouth is a cut, like she’s been struck.

“Hold her down,” the woman says, her voice rough, and she marches toward the man, who has his knee on a zmora’s back.

Ala can tell she’s a zmora by the way the illusions flicker over her.

She gives herself the appearance of a bear, a snake, a fox.

The work of a frantic mind and wild illusion powers run amok.

In the spaces between them, though, she looks young, her dirty-blond hair tangled over her face, which is pressed to the dirt by the man’s palm.

He handles her like an animal and maybe that’s why she makes herself look like one.

The man’s palms are stained red, not with fresh blood, but with the peculiar transformation of a Knight with his bone sword drawn. It’s clutched in his left hand, which bears his wedding ring.

“She hit me,” the woman says.

“I saw,” the man replies.

“I think she should lose the hand she used before she dies,” the woman says, and the zmora on the ground screams—in rage or in fear, it’s hard for Ala to say.

It’s just a dream, Ala says to herself, but it’s not just a dream, is it? It’s also a memory.

“Just kill me!” the zmora yells. “Just—kill—me!”

The man asks the woman Knight, “Is that really necessary? Lost limbs are so bloody.”

The Knights look at each other for a moment, and that seems to be the answer.

The man sets aside his bone sword and wrestles one of the zmora’s arms free from where he holds them against her back.

Then, keeping her pressed to the dirt, he bats aside her attempts to hit him and pins her hand to the ground next to her face.

The first time Ala saw this—when it was provoked by the bloodline curse that was killing her by inches—she didn’t know who either of the Knights were. They were as anonymous as any of the Knights who tormented her.

Now, dreaming of them again, Ala recognizes the woman.

She’s Dymitr’s grandmother.

Even though she’s seen this before, she still expects the woman—Joanna—to position herself over the zmora’s arm, bring her sword over her head like an axe, and swing.

That’s not what she does.

Instead, she kneels on the ground next to the zmora’s head, presses the edge of her bone sword to the zmora’s wrist like a bread knife poised over a loaf…

And starts to saw.

Ala rolls out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom to vomit. She makes it to the sink.

For a long time, sunrise brought her nothing but dread. The first light on the horizon meant the curse would soon latch on to her like a parasite, showing her visions of the Holy Order’s violence against all of creaturekind. Monsterkind. Whatever.

These days, daybreak is a relief. She’s no longer cursed, but she hasn’t forgotten everything the curse made her see. The visions torment her still—but in the form of nightmares.

Ala washes her mouth out, and brushes her teeth. Her hands are trembling so badly she can barely squeeze out the toothpaste.

She can’t take it anymore. This has to stop.

Teeth brushed, she pours herself a cup of coffee and climbs the ladder to the roof to watch the sun come up.

They’re not technically allowed on the roof, but the building’s landlord is negligent at best, irresponsible at worst, so no one’s going to stop them.

Dymitr is the one who bought the ladder that’s propped up on her back porch.

He’s also the one who put together the table and chairs that are up there.

He didn’t mention that he was doing it, just left the finished furniture there for her to find.

Dymitr’s like that—always willing to make little improvements, even if the tasks are tedious and annoying; always willing to chop something if she’s cooking, even if he was already in the middle of something else.

The other day she put on a pair of socks to discover he’d mended the holes in the heels with neat stitches.

She’s not looking forward to the day when he has enough money to move out of her crappy apartment.

Ala sips her coffee, and remembers sitting at the table with her mother in the mornings.

Her mother always read the newspaper while Ala did the crossword, and despite often declaring how much she personally hated the crossword, she occasionally offered Ala an answer.

She was especially good at remembering who won awards—Tonys, Emmys, Grammys, it didn’t matter.

The sky is deep pink and she only has half a cup of coffee left when Dymitr climbs up the ladder himself. He’s quicker than a human would be, and he still seems delighted by it, a smug smile on his face as he walks over to the empty chair beside her.

“Good morning,” he says. And then, with a look of concern: “What’s wrong?”

She hasn’t told him about the nightmares.

His grandmother—Joanna, who she just watched cut off a zmora’s hand, slowly —is the one who cursed her family line.

And before he knew better, Dymitr killed Ala’s aunt, along with countless others.

If he knew the curse he helped her break was still tormenting her, but in a new way, he would blame himself.

And he’d be, perhaps, a little bit right.

So it’s better not to tell him.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Ala says. “This is just my face.”

He frowns. “You smell like—”

“Keep your nose to yourself,” she snaps.

It’s very annoying, how good his nose is. How he can probably smell the lingering effects of her nightmare, chocolatey and rich.

He looks away, chastened.

“Surprised you’re up early,” she says. “I saw that Niko returned your bow at some point in the night.”

She spotted the guitar case that holds Dymitr’s bow and arrow leaning up against the wall in the kitchen.

She’s trying to tease him, but his expression is grim.

“He wanted to say goodbye before a… hunt.”

“Ah.”

“He told me to find something of value to Baba Jaga and renegotiate. Something only I could give her.”

Ala often feels like she doesn’t belong among the not-so-human citizens of Chicago, accustomed as they seem to be to manipulation and subterfuge. She doesn’t like to weave around people.

But the image of Dymitr’s grandmother with her pinned curls and her bone sword, the zmora’s blood splattering her cheeks, is at the very surface of Ala’s mind.

Dymitr can’t kill his grandmother, as Baba Jaga demanded. But she needs to die.

“Something that belongs to your grandmother, maybe?” Ala says, trying to keep her voice casual. “Where is she now?”

“At home,” Dymitr says. “Her house is a kind of… home base, for our family. Elza lives there. I…” He pauses. “I used to live there, too.”

“Does she keep anything important there? A Knight relic or…”

Dymitr looks up at her. “I left the book of curses there. The one she used to…”

“Curse my family?” Ala asks, with forced brightness. “Yes, I remember.”

The image of his grandmother is a stain on her mind. An old lady in a floral blouse, nothing fearsome about her—but when she sat forward with that blue book in her hands, her spine straight and stiff and the fire of a fanatic in her eyes…

Yes. She needs to die.

“Would it be valuable to Baba Jaga?” Dymitr says.

Baba Jaga demanded a high price from Dymitr: thirty-three dead Knights, beginning with the one he loves most. There’s nothing on Earth that’s worth the same. But a book of Knight curses that no one has ever seen before? It might come close.

“If you went back there,” Ala says, avoiding the question, “wouldn’t your family know what you are right when they see you?”

There’s nothing in particular that makes zmoras look different from humans.

Eyes too old for their faces, maybe; speech patterns that haven’t updated to modern sensibilities.

A certain restlessness to their physical forms, like any moment they could shrug on an illusion like an old coat.

Lightness, too, and that was what seemed to throw Dymitr off in the weeks following his transformation, his body lacking the same heft.

He ran into doorframes and countertops, tripped over his own feet.

But she knows Knights have ways of knowing. Of seeing . She just needs him to tell her exactly how. Exactly what.

“She won’t look at me that way,” Dymitr says firmly.

“How do you know?”

Ala watches the leaves of the nearby catalpa tree flutter in the breeze.

It was covered in white flowers just last week, but a strong wind blew them all into the street overnight, and now they’re rotting in the grass and crushed into the sidewalks.

Still, it’s her favorite tree in the neighborhood, tall with long, crooked branches that attract squirrels.

“It’s not something they do casually,” he says. “It’s an altered state that allows us—” He pauses. Swallows. “That allows them… to see beyond the surface. Almost as advanced as the one they’re in when they draw their swords.”

She considers this for a moment.

“Can you still do it?” she asks. “You’re a zmora now, but you still have a sword, so you’re still part Knight, aren’t you?”

He looks into his mug, suddenly tense. “I don’t know.”

She feels the need to see, the need to know.

Just how much of the man she’s welcomed into her house, into her life, still belongs to the Holy Order?

Baba Jaga promised a transformation, but she didn’t promise a straightforward one.

Maybe Dymitr will always be a Knight. Maybe Ala will either have to make her peace with that… or not.

“Try it,” she says, and though it’s a suggestion, it comes out more like a command.

He looks into his coffee cup for a few seconds longer, and then sets it down on the roof, near his feet.

Then he curls one of his hands into a fist, pressing the blunt edge of his fingernails against the meaty part of his hand.

She watches him breathe in, and then out, and then he presses, cutting into his skin with his fingernails until blood bubbles up around the wounds.

She watches in horror as his eyes lift to hers. They gleam bloodred.

She’s seen eyes like that so many times.

So many Knights standing triumphant over a zmora, a strzyga, a czart, a wraith, a llorona.

Their palms purple-red, their swords bone white.

Their casual regard of death. A farmer who harvests grain looks at the harvest not with sorrow for the plants he’s cut down, but with satisfaction; the Knights are the same way.

To them, Ala is… a weed. Something to be uprooted and left to rot.

She’s so tense her jaw aches. It’s Dymitr, she tells herself. He won’t hurt you . But still her heart races as he looks at her, still her body prepares to run as fast as she can.

“It’s a shadow,” he says, his voice rougher than usual, and grating. “Only instead of following you the way a shadow does, it’s inside you. Shifting, like a flame flickering inside a lantern. Like smoke spilling from a thurible.”

He opens his fist. The red recedes from his eyes. His hand is still bleeding.

“I frightened you,” he says. There’s no point in arguing. He can probably taste her terror.

Ala tries to steady herself. She’s trembling again.

“I don’t know if you know this, but we can’t create visions that feature the markers of a Knight,” she says. Breathe, she tells herself. “The eyes, the hands—they simply don’t appear. Many of my kind have tried. An illusion that makes a zmora look like a Knight… our magic doesn’t allow it.”

“Strange,” Dymitr says. He’s giving her a concerned look. “All the illusions you can create, and you can’t make red eyes?”

Ala shrugs a little.

“Our magic doesn’t like your magic— their magic,” she says.

“So while I can’t make myself look like a Knight, I think, based on what you just told me…

I think I could still trick a Knight into seeing me as a human instead of a zmora.

” She pauses. “But in order for you to do that, you would have to be a much more accomplished illusionist than you are now.”

She’s tried to teach him the art of it, but not every zmora has the same gift for it that she does. He has a sensitive, remarkably well-developed sense of smell, but his illusions are flimsy at best.

“So you do think the book is worth something,” Dymitr presses.

“I do,” she says, and it’s true—the Knights guard their secrets closely, and a book of their curses is a weapon more powerful than she can imagine. “But I think letting any of them lay eyes on you now that you’re a zmora is a bad idea.”

“It’s the only idea I have.” There’s a note of pleading in his voice.

Hardly necessary—she knows the situation he’s in.

Troubled by pain, and the only hope of respite he’s been offered is to kill the woman who raised him.

A minor heist does seem like an appealing alternative, even if it’s going to be like trying to steal an egg from a pit of vipers.

But there’s another solution: Joanna could die by someone else’s hand. That way, Dymitr wouldn’t have to do it himself. A small mercy.

“I’ll do it instead,” she says.

Dymitr is already shaking his head. “No. There’s no way you’re going anywhere near them—”

“I know what they are. I know what they can do.”

“There’s knowing and there’s knowing,” Dymitr says firmly. “They’re expecting to see me. They have no reason to suspect that I’ve turned into a zmora —as far as they know, it’s impossible. Why would they even check?”

“Of the two of us, which one can make a Knight see whatever they want, you or me?” She gives him a hard look. “Let me help you, at least. You’ll be safer with me there.”

“Ala. No.”

“You don’t get to say no like that. Like you’re a parent.” She feels the barest hint of a tremble in her chin, and she clenches her jaw to control it. “Your grandmother used that book of curses to kill my family, one by one, remember?”

He winces. She feels that twinge of guilt again.

“I remember,” he says softly.

“Well, I want it out of their hands more than you do,” she says. “So I’m going.”

She knows she has him, and he seems to know it, too. He nods.