Page 8 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

The red tile roofs are how he knows he’s home. The little stucco houses clustered together with fields all around. The wrought-iron gates and metal fences. Narrow roads with village dogs running along them. Sagging sheds of corrugated metal or rotting wood.

Ala sleeps in the passenger seat as he drives the rental car, which smells like old cigarettes and whatever cleaner they used to get that cigarette smell out, like stale french fries and floral perfume and windshield wiper fluid.

He stops at a gas station and picks up a packet of paluszki.

He has one between his teeth like a cigarette when Ala wakes.

“How long before Mieczyk?” she asks.

The town of Mieczyk is nestled in the trees southwest of Gdańsk.

It’s big enough to disappear in, so it’s big enough that mortals and not-so-mortals alike live alongside each other.

A half hour north of it is a village, small and overlooked, where Dymitr’s family lives.

Dymitr spent most of his life going back and forth between Mieczyk and the village, close enough to the forest to disappear there when he needed to.

And he often needed to, thanks to the relentless teasing of his cousins and brother.

Some people in Mieczyk know what Knights are and what they fight. Some don’t. His grandmother always knew which people were which.

“Twenty minutes,” he says, because even though the town’s not far from them, they need to drive all the way around it to get to the hotel without passing through his family’s village.

He turns onto packed-dirt roads and they drive through fields of overgrown grass and stretches of tall trees with slim trunks.

Sunlight dapples the ground in front of them.

He opens the window to breathe in the smell of dirt baking in the sun.

He feels a kind of pressure against the right side of his head, like a headache is building.

“Do you have any other siblings?” Ala asks.

“A brother. Kazimierz,” he says. “Or Kazik, as we call him.”

She must hear something in his voice, because she grins. “You don’t like him.”

“He was fine when we were younger. But when he got too old to play with us, he became insufferable.” He glances at her. “As if you’re ever too old for a cool fort in the woods.”

Ala laughs, and says, “Kazik, Elza, and Dymitr. An interesting assortment of names.”

“We’re named for well-known Knights. Kazik’s namesake was Polish—one of our ancestors—and killed by a wraith. Elza’s was from a Latvian family, and she was killed by a vilka ? —like a werewolf. Mine was Russian. Killed by a strzyga.”

“So they’d find your choice of romantic partner… especially galling?”

Dymitr’s mouth curls into something that he’s sure looks like a smile, even if it doesn’t feel like one. “That’s the least of my worries, at this point.”

Ala nods, and rubs her temple with her fingertips. “The air feels weird here.”

Dymitr doesn’t answer for a moment. He listens to the wind shuddering through the car. He smells something like horseradish in the air; likely from garlic mustard plants growing nearby. They pass a field dotted with gladiolus, the flower that gives the town its name.

Eventually he says, “We’re driving around the place where my family lives. So I think what you’re feeling is their magic.”

“It doesn’t feel like magic.”

“The Holy Order’s magic comes from pain. The pain is a sacrifice, so it creates space for magic, like any other sacrifice—but it’s different. It feels different.”

He’s been able to sense it since he split his soul to become a Knight.

But he didn’t feel this way about it before.

Before, coming home felt like stepping into a quiet room.

Like a museum or a library. It felt sacred.

But now, the way it presses against him…

it’s like something that was alive in the air, something that danced around him, is now dead. The silence is stifling.

He takes a strange, circuitous route to the hotel, and he’s relieved when that pressure, that silence, lets up again.

The hotel is at the end of a dirt road, surrounded on three sides by fields.

There’s a pile of rubble next to the parking lot—an abandoned construction site—but the hotel itself looks nice enough.

It’s a white building in the Tudor style, with a red roof.

It looks more like a large house than a hotel, but the reviews were good and the rooms were cheap.

A bored-looking twentysomething checks them in, and they set their bags down in a worn-out room with bright orange carpeting.

There are two twin beds with thin mattresses inside it, but the bathroom is clean and there’s an air-conditioning unit on the wall, so they won’t be too hot when they sleep.

Dymitr takes the bed closer to the door, and he falls into an uneasy sleep while Ala takes a shower.

He dreams about Ala’s cousin, Lena. The last zmora he killed—or at least, the last zmora he didn’t stop his sister from killing.

She looked like Ala—or like a version of Ala that could have existed in another world.

She wore black eyeliner with sharp wings, and tight black clothing no matter the weather.

By the time he arrived, she was already dying, a short sword sticking out of her belly.

Elza had gone ahead of him to the house.

Lena’s father wasn’t there—probably draining his second beer while Knights killed his daughter, at his request.

But in the dream, Lena is sitting at the table when he arrives, her father across from her.

He’s slumped on the white lace tablecloth—sleeping or dead, it’s hard for Dymitr to say.

Lena is writing a message on a yellow legal pad, but she’s using a quill and red ink.

She doesn’t greet him, but she reaches out to stick the quill into her father’s mouth, and it comes away red, which is how he recognizes the ink as blood.

It’s a mundane scene, though grotesque, but Dymitr can’t look away from it, and it fills him with such dread he can hardly stand it.

That dread follows him to the waking world, where Ala is stepping through the door, her short hair mostly dry.

He stares up at her for a moment, still half-convinced she’s another Lena.

The other half, the half that still feels guilty for Lena’s death, knows that can’t be true.

“You’re afraid,” she says, and she sniffs the air, like she’s trying to determine exactly what kind of fear he’s feeling.

“Bad dream,” he manages to reply. “You went out?”

She’s carrying a long, thin box, too big to hold a necklace but too small for anything else he can think of. She lifts the lid and shows him a knife with a sturdy handle.

“There are zmoras here, too. Klara gave me a name,” she says. “They were helpful.”

Dymitr’s stomach turns. “And what do you intend to do with a knife?”

“We’re close to a lot of Knights. I’m not going to stay here unarmed.” She doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “What’s our plan?”

“We’ll drive out to their house at dusk,” he says, “and then… I have an idea. It’ll keep you out of harm’s way.”

“Let me guess: it puts you directly into harm’s way, instead.”

Dymitr holds up his hands in surrender. “It allows us both to keep the other safe. Okay? I just need to work out some of the details.”

She doesn’t look convinced. In fact, he catches a whiff of powdered-sugar sweetness—she’s nervous. Well, of course she’s nervous. But there’s something different about this scent. He closes his eyes as he breathes it in. It’s darker than pure anticipation. Deeper.

He’s not a fool. He knows Ala is struggling with something. She smells like terror every morning, and apprehension at bedtime. But if she doesn’t trust him enough to talk to him about it, it’s not his place to ask.

She sighs, and looks at the wall clock. “Can we get caffeine?”

“I know a place.”

Dymitr trips into the bathroom to stick his head under the faucet.

The first time Dymitr went to Basia’s Cafe was after scouting.

Every prospective Knight had a mentor. On the day of the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year, the family gathered and all the young people sat in the kitchen, and if they’d been chosen to begin their Knight education, they were called into the living room to find out who had selected them.

Dymitr’s father, ? ukasz, chose his older brother when he was just ten years old, claiming he was maturing fast. Elza, despite being younger than Dymitr, came a few years later, picked by their uncle Filip.

And Dymitr kept sitting in the kitchen with all the cousins far younger than he was—doomed, he thought, to learn to cook and never to fight.

That was before he knew that his grandmother had chosen him years before, when he was still just a child.

She had her reasons for delaying in telling him.

I wanted to make you patient, she said to him once, almost as an apology.

I wanted to test your resolve. She had a way of making suffering feel almost like heroism.

For the first few years of his apprenticeship to her, she took him out to the countryside to scout.

Scouting was as important as fighting, according to his grandmother.

She taught him simple things first, like tracking.

He could identify a particular set of boot prints on a forest trail; he could find the places where they broke sticks or bent grass with their movements.

Then, because monsters had folded themselves into the modern world, she taught him how to find people using modern means. Everyone leaves a trail, my boy.

He had just located a strzyga for her, finding first the alias she was using and the apartment where she was staying, and then identifying her boot prints in a nearby field.

His grandmother ordered him to stay put while she took care of the rest. She returned fifteen minutes later with blood under her fingernails and a smile on her face, and she took him to Basia’s to celebrate.

While she washed her hands in the cafe’s bathroom, Dymitr looked over the menu and chose a coffee and a pastry, rewards for a job well done.

Now, as he walks toward the cafe with Ala, he thinks there was another reason his grandmother delayed his education: she wanted him to be starved for approval and desperate to please. She believed it would make him a better student. And she was right.

“All right, I can’t take it anymore,” Ala says, after they’ve been walking for ten minutes. They’re passing an Orange store with rows of phone cases hanging on the wall, and a discount supermarket with a big ladybug on the sign. She turns to him, a little unsteady on the cobblestones.

“What are you afraid of, exactly?” she says to him. “We’re not likely to run into your family here, are we?”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it? You smell like a patisserie. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind having the consistent food source—”

“Everything is the same,” Dymitr says, cutting her off mid-sentence.

He gestures vaguely to the street ahead of them.

“The stores, the streets. All the same as when I was…” As when I thought you weren’t a person, he thinks.

As when I thought it was my duty to kill you.

“But nothing’s the same. The more I remember, the more I realize that every memory I have here is a horror, even the good ones. ”

It feels like finding a spot on an apple, he thinks. You hope that you can just slice it away and still eat the rest of the fruit. But then you discover the flesh is brown all the way to the wormy core.

“I’m afraid of what I’m going to find here,” he says.

Ala’s hand twitches, like she’s going to reach for him, and then she seems to think better of it.

She’s not a demonstrative person, and he prefers it that way.

If she tried to offer comfort, it would crush him.

Better, then, to just see her nod, and to fall into step beside her as they cross the street.

Basia’s Cafe is just around the bend. He sees the familiar blue letters fixed to the side of the building, a little crooked. The grid of blue-glass windows. And the small blue tables in front where he used to sit with his grandmother.

He half expects to see her there, sipping her espresso, her eyes narrowed at the passersby because she’s nearsighted but never wants to wear her glasses.

Instead, though, he sees a man. He has dark hair and light brown skin and despite the cloud cover, he’s wearing a pair of sunglasses. When he lifts his coffee cup to his lips, Dymitr sees that his fingernails are black.

Nikodem Kostka is sitting at Basia’s Cafe.