Page 9 of To Clutch a Razor (Curse Bearer #2)

A BARGAIN STRUCK

Anywhere there are Knights, Niko knows, there are informants.

After centuries of being hunted, most quasi-mortals—as Ala would call them—are pretty good at evading the Holy Order.

So even the most rigid Knight knows they need a little bit of hypocrisy to keep the whole operation running.

In other words, they need help from the quasi-mortals themselves.

The vulnerable and the desperate will go to great lengths to save their own skin… or the skin of their loved ones.

Niko is sympathetic, to a point. He’s never been in a position to make that kind of choice.

He’s pretty sure he knows what he would do if he was—or what he wouldn’t do—but then, strzygas are stronger and fiercer than most, and it’s harder for them to hide what they are, what with the fingernails and the owl eyes, so they’ve had to learn to be smart, too.

It’s the harmless ones who have more limited options. Czarts. Zmoras. Kikimoras. Banshees. Anyone who isn’t strong enough to rely on force. If they’re clever, they don’t have to turn on their own people to protect themselves… but not everyone is born clever.

So he’s careful of everyone he passes when he’s hunting, even the ones he’s pretty sure aren’t human.

He has a contact in the city nearest to his hunting ground—the brother of a zmora Feliks avenged a few years back—who points him toward the wieszczy.

A known traitor, but perhaps a sympathetic one, given the circumstances.

The wieszczy lives in a town with cobblestone streets and an old church at its center.

The church is all red: red brick with a terracotta tile roof, red trim around its heavy wooden doors.

The bell tower is the tallest point for miles.

And tucked away in an alley, still close enough to be in the bell tower’s shadow, is a little apartment where the wieszczy lives.

Niko goes to its door at dusk, still wearing his sunglasses.

It’s too warm to get away with wearing gloves at this time of year, so he painted his fingernails black, instead.

He doesn’t like nail polish much, but his kind don’t get to pick the color of their talons, so to speak, and his are dark, like the face of the owl he wears when he transforms. He raises his fist and knocks on the apartment door.

There aren’t many creatures who begin their lives as human, but the wieszczy is one. Born with cauls on their heads. Born with pink cheeks and an eager, busy nature. Born with spots of blood under their fingernails. Or so the legends say.

There aren’t many of them, so Niko doesn’t know fact from fiction.

He only knows that after they die, they rise again with a craving for human flesh, even if it’s their own.

And they remain that way, dead but not dead, hungry but not sated, until they eat enough of their own bodies to crumble into dust, or until someone kills them.

The most pitiful of all the pitiful creatures that walk the earth, his mother used to say, and they don’t deserve our scorn .

The woman who answers the door is shrouded in darkness. She wears all black, her garments overlarge, so they cover her hands and any shape she has. She looks up at him through a curtain of dark hair. What little of her skin he can see is pale and sickly as a frog’s belly.

“Can I help you?” she asks him—in Polish, of course, and he understands it well, even though his accent is—as Dymitr says—hard on the ears.

He takes off his sunglasses. His eyes are just a little too orange to be normal—just enough for attentive humans to comment on when he’s checking out at the grocery store. And just enough for the wieszczy to understand, not what he is exactly, but that he’s something other than human.

“What do you want?” she asks, her tone harsh. She’s starting to shut the door, even as she asks the question.

Niko puts his foot in the doorjamb, and leans closer.

“I mean you no harm,” he says, “but I won’t let you push me out, either. Not until I’ve spoken to you.”

The wieszczy doesn’t quite meet his eyes. She steps away from the door, though, and he slips inside the apartment.

The door leads right into the kitchen, where there are dishes piled high in the sink and stacks of newspapers covering the little table.

Empty paper bags smeared with fruit jam litter the countertop along with cartons of ma?lanka.

All the windows are covered with cardboard. It smells like sour milk.

The wieszczy fidgets and shifts. There’s a kettle of water on the stove with steam pouring from its spout.

She turns the burner off. As her hand emerges from beneath the drape of her sleeve, he sees she only has three fingers—thumb, index, and middle.

For a moment he wonders how she lost them, and then he thinks of her clawing her way out of the grave, desperately hungry for flesh no matter whose it is, and his mouth goes dry.

“Didn’t think I’d ever see a strzygoń in this town again,” she says. She speaks with a lisp.

“I’m only visiting.”

“ Visiting .” She laughs. “Flirting with death is what you’re doing. Do you know who lives near here?”

“I’m well aware.” Niko hooks his foot around a chair leg and tugs it back from the table, then sits, though he wasn’t invited to.

The wieszczy hooks two fingers around the handle of a cabinet door and takes down a box of cherry tea. She fumbles with the box for a while before she gets a bag out of it. She drops the bag in a mug waiting on the counter. Her other hand stays hidden in her sleeve.

“Then what is the purpose of your visit?”

“I was sent here as part of my vengeance oath.”

At that, her hands falter. She leans into the counter, her shoulders bunching up around her ears.

“Do it, then,” she snaps.

She’s braced in anticipation of a blow, he realizes. She expects him to kill her.

A zemsta’s job must have been easier in the time when you could carry weapons without causing alarm, Niko thinks.

As it is, he has a knife hidden in his boot and another one strapped to his forearm, which means he has to wear long sleeves no matter how warm it is.

Not ideal, for being so close to the Holy Order he can practically taste their magic in the air, but he can’t really walk around town with a sword at his hip.

“I’m not taking vengeance against you, ” he says. “But I did come for your help.”

She relaxes by a fraction, and pours water over the tea bag. Then she turns toward him. The light from the stove shines across her scarred cheek, and he realizes why she has a lisp—her lower lip is gone, and only scar tissue remains.

“I’m hunting one of them,” Niko says. “Someone who’s notoriously difficult to pin down, but they’re here, now, for a funeral. Along with… quite a few others.”

He’s still certain that Lidia sent him here to die, but she doesn’t know Niko.

He’s cleverer than his predecessor, and he knows that if he’s going to hold his own against the Razor, he’ll need help, and he’ll need to use the circumstances—a house full of Knights, all gathered to put one of their number into the ground—to his advantage.

“The bees are swarming the hive, and you want to stick your hand in it?” The wieszczy laughs, and sips her cherry tea. The red liquid dribbles down her chin like blood. She doesn’t bother to wipe it away. “You must be new.”

“I’m not, as a matter of fact.” Niko is getting annoyed. “Anyway, it’s not your concern, whether I’m likely to succeed or not. You’re either going to do what I ask, or you’re not, regardless of the outcome.”

“And why would I consider doing what you ask?”

“Because of the czart, Maja,” Niko says harshly, and when he speaks her name the air seems to crackle as if charged with electricity. Niko closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. There’s no sense in wasting magic—not here, not now.

But maybe it wasn’t a waste, because it seems to remind the wieszczy exactly who and what he is.

Not just a strzygoń, but someone whose oath provides him with a constant flow of magic.

The sacrifice of his safety, his ambitions, his dreams—it’s created a debt that can never be repaid.

When he opens his eyes, the wieszczy is holding the teacup in both mangled hands, looking stricken.

“I didn’t mean to—” she says, and her breath catches.

“Of course not,” Niko says, his voice soft and soothing. “You only meant to get the czart killed, didn’t you? And no one cares about a czart, do they? It’s not your fault he had friends with him when the Knight came calling. It’s not your fault six people died when you only intended one.”

The wieszczy bows over the mug of tea, pulling into herself like a bug curling up to die.

“I was human, once,” she says.

“So was I.” Niko leans back in his chair. “Ask me how many creatures I got killed when I was still mortal.”

“Mortal,” she scoffs. “How can a strzygoń be born human?”

“My long life was bought at a terrible price. Though perhaps not as terrible a price as the six lives your survival cost.”

The wieszczy’s eyes are dark. They remind him of rain puddles in moonlight, just a sheen of light on black pavement.

Her expression is neutral, as if their discussion means nothing to her, but guilt is just anger and shame intermingling, so he can feel it as surely as he felt the prickle of her anger before.

He has more sympathy toward her than he lets on.

It’s hard not to. Either she lived a normal human life, if her parents didn’t know what signs to look for in their newborn, or she lived a life under the shadow of dread, if they did.

To be a wieszczy is to know all your life that after the horror of death, there will be a new horror: a mouthful of grave dirt, a taste for flesh, and an endless un-life.