To Clutch a Razor, page 3
“More like an excuse,” Iga replies. “Spoken in an unrepentant tone, no less.”
“It was an explanation,” Niko says. “I haven’t gotten to the apology yet.”
“An explanation for why you chose a zmora and a mortal over your own family?” Lidia’s voice is smooth and pleasant. “I’m afraid that if a simple debt is your explanation, your apology is bound to be insufficient.”
“Then maybe you can just tell me how I can make amends. I’m eager to make it up to you.”
“As it happens, that’s why I’ve summoned you here, my dear boy,” she says. “I have a special target in mind for you.”
His job, as zemsta, is to hunt down members of the Holy Order on behalf of his people—and on behalf of all not-so-human people, really, since they’ve all been wronged by Knights at one point or another. He takes specific requests from anyone with a sincere desire for vengeance. They tell him who they lost and how, and they give him all the details they have about the Knight who took their loved one from them. Then he finds them and eliminates them.
This is not a request. This is a demand.
“Oh?” he says. “Which Knight has particularly offended you?”
Lidia smiles, enough to show off yellowing teeth. Though Niko’s own smile stays plastered on his face, fear spikes in his chest. If Lidia is smiling, this is going to be bad.
“I think it’s time someone does something about Brzytwa,” she says.
Very bad.
“You want me to hunt the Razor,” he says.
Not all Knights get a nickname. Only if they’re particularly prolific, cruel, or long-lived. The Razor is all three, a monster among monsters, one of the most ferocious Knights alive. At the mention of the name, the entire room goes still, like they’ve spotted a predator and are contemplating taking flight.
“Yes,” Lidia says. “Does that trouble you? I have the utmost confidence in your abilities, Niko. You haven’t failed us yet.”
If I had, I’d be dead, he thinks. You don’t just fail to kill a Knight—you die trying. That’s the way every zemsta before him has gone: bloody and sudden.
If Lidia has decided his next target is the Razor, it’s because she wants him dead.
“Trouble me?” he says, and he forces an even broader smile. “Of course not.”
* * *
The gangway between Ala’s apartment building and its neighbor is so narrow the brick walls scrape Niko’s shoulders as he walks. Dymitr’s guitar case bumps against his back. He nudges the gate open and steps around the herb garden to the back stairs.
As he climbs, he sends Dymitr a text message. Out back. Come get your bow.
At first, after Dymitr’s transformation, Niko came by every day. Though they were little better than strangers, they’d all gone through something intense together, told each other things they hadn’t told anyone, and it didn’t feel right to just return to his normal life after that. But eventually, once Dymitr was set up with a burner phone and a little stack of clothes fresh from the nearest resale shop—the T-shirt with three wolves and a moon on it was Niko’s favorite, though it smelled musty even to his average strzygoń nose—Niko had to admit there was no reason for him to hang around quite so much anymore. He lives across the city, after all.
But he’s leaving tomorrow, so he wants to see Dymitr before he goes. Just in case. Danger is an inevitability for a zemsta, oath-bound to hunt the Holy Order in pursuit of vengeance. And this mission in particular …
Well.
He shrugs off the guitar case and leans it up against the half-rotten table Ala keeps on her back porch, then perches on the edge of it, next to the pot of petunias. They’re the pink-and-white-striped kind. Hideous.
The back door opens, and Dymitr steps out of the apartment, his feet bare, wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt that’s too big for him. His hair is mussed. Niko wants to run his hand through it, but instead he just crosses his arms and says, “Dobry wieczór.”
It’s intentionally formal. Good evening, like they’re from another time.
As if he can’t quite stop himself, Dymitr steps closer—too close. He touches the side of his nose to Niko’s jaw and breathes in. The first time he did this was in Ala’s kitchen, right after he woke as a zmora, and Niko assumed the fascination with his new nose would fade, in time. So far, it hasn’t—not where Niko is concerned, anyway. And he’s not complaining. There’s something … appealing about the way Dymitr takes those deep breaths of his skin. About how attentive he is.
Niko is counting on it today. Anna O’Connor ran a perfumed finger across Niko’s shoulder at the boxing ring earlier, and he wants to see if Dymitr can smell it—and if he can, Niko wants to feel Dymitr’s jealousy. He’s a strzygoń, after all, and anger—and all its many shades—is his sustenance.
He can tell when Dymitr notices it, his head dropping to Niko’s shoulder as he breathes in again, only … there’s no cold spill of jealousy. No anger at all, in fact.
“Well, that’s disappointing,” Niko says, though he runs a hand through Dymitr’s hair anyway, scratching at his scalp with the blunted-talon fingernails of a strzygoń in human form.
“What is?” Dymitr says, his head heavy against Niko’s shoulder.
Niko was the one to point out to Ala that Dymitr was in pain. He’s good at bearing it, so the signs were subtle, but the way even the briefest comfort—Niko’s fingers in his hair, for example—makes him sag with relief, the way he rubs at his chest when he thinks no one’s paying attention …
“I have someone else’s perfume all over me, and you don’t feel even a little bit jealous.”
Dymitr looks up at him, an eyebrow raised. “You want me to be jealous?”
“Can you blame me for being curious what it feels like?” Niko smiles a little. “I am what I am, after all.”
“Some people would call that a red flag.”
“The fact that I can turn into a deadly monster in an instant should be a much bigger, redder flag.”
Dymitr gives him a small smile in return. There’s a crease between his eyebrows that Niko wants to smooth away. So he does, pressing his thumb right between Dymitr’s eyes, then brushing the tension away with a sweep of his hand.
“I’m not jealous because I’m not entitled to you,” Dymitr says.
It should be reassuring, maybe, or noble, but to Niko it only seems sad. Sometimes anger is entitled and jealous, but sometimes it rises up to demand what you feel you deserve. And Dymitr feels he deserves nothing and no one.
Niko doesn’t know what to say, so he kisses Dymitr instead. Lightly, at first, but soon Dymitr’s hands are clutching at the lapels of Niko’s jacket, and Niko is pressing Dymitr back into the brick wall. He tastes something familiar—the old, dusty mints that his grandmother keeps in a dish outside of her apartment—but he brushes that recognition aside in favor of … this, this frantic need to burrow under Dymitr’s skin and stay there forever. He leans closer, pinning Dymitr against the wall with his own body, to feel the warmth of him, the solidity of him.
He’s been careful, over the last few weeks, to slow himself down whenever he’s with Dymitr. His life is always a breath away from ending, thanks to his role as zemsta, and Dymitr barely knows what he is right now, let alone who he wants to spend time with. And it’s far, far too easy for Niko to drink Dymitr down to the dregs.
But this time, when he tries to move away, Dymitr holds on, breathing fast and shallow against Niko’s cheek. Too fast. Too shallow.
“Hey,” Niko says. “Are you all right?”
Dymitr nods, and Niko studies him for a moment—his eyes are closed, his brow furrowed.
“I don’t believe you,” Niko says.
Dymitr looks up at him. “It was a difficult day.”
Niko thinks of the mint he tasted on Dymitr’s breath. “You saw my grandmother.”
“The cost of not having the sword is high, but the price Baba Jaga has named for it is higher than I’m willing to pay.”
“I see.” Niko smooths down Dymitr’s T-shirt, but doesn’t pull away. “Do you know how many times my mother went to her to ask her to make me into a strzygoń?”
Niko remembers every one. The first time, his mother told him to sit on the top step outside of Baba Jaga’s apartment. That’s when he tried the mints, popping them in his mouth one after another until his tongue hurt. The next time she dragged him in with her, hoping the sight of him would spark some sense of familial obligation or sympathy. He’s not really Baba Jaga’s grandchild—more of a great-great-great-grandchild—so he was too far removed from her to make much of an impact. Until later, anyway.
“Four,” he says, answering his own question. “Each time before that, my grandmother demanded more than my mother could give. But the fourth time … that’s when my mother showed up with something of value to bargain with. Understand?”
“I have nothing,” Dymitr says. “A passport. A name. A body. That’s all.”
It takes all of Niko’s willpower not to give him a lecherous smile at the mention of having a body.
“What you have is a wealth of knowledge about our enemies that she would otherwise be unable to access,” Niko says. “And trust me. There’s nothing she wants more than to access that knowledge, no matter what she says.”
Dymitr looks thoughtful. He relaxes against the brick and releases the lapels of Niko’s jacket.
“You didn’t really come here just to return my bow,” Dymitr says, and Niko remembers, suddenly, why he’s here.
“I leave tomorrow. I just wanted to see you before I go.”
“You’re leaving? Where are you going?”
Niko tilts his head. Dymitr’s ash-brown hair has flopped over his forehead, skimming his eyebrow. It makes him look younger.
Niko says carefully, “I don’t think you really want to know the answer to that question.”
“Why wouldn’t I—” Dymitr’s eyes sharpen with understanding. He looks down. “Oh. You’re going on a—mission.”
“I prefer to call it ‘going hunting,’” Niko says, and he watches Dymitr’s face to see his reaction. After all, if it bothers Dymitr that Niko’s job is to hunt down Dymitr’s old Holy Order friends and exact bloody vengeance, whatever is between them may fizzle out before it even properly catches fire.
Dymitr doesn’t meet Niko’s eyes.
“It bothers you?” Niko says, stepping back at last.
“It shouldn’t.”
“But it does.”
“That’s not your problem, that’s mine,” Dymitr says curtly.
Niko tastes something bitter in the back of his throat. He rarely thinks of Dymitr as a Knight. Dymitr is someone he wants his hands on, someone he misses when he’s alone. Dymitr introduced him to the leszy of Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary like the forest guardian was an old friend, and knows every word of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But if Niko lets his mind drift, he can still see the purple-red that spilled into Dymitr’s hands when he picked up his sister’s bone sword, the red glint in his eyes, and that question, that question. Do you know how many of your kind I’ve killed? And the answer he gave: Neither do I.
“Be careful.” Dymitr meets his gaze, then, and he looks painfully sincere, as always. “I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”
It should be comforting, maybe, to know that even though Niko’s off to murder a Knight, Dymitr is still concerned about him. But the damage is done, the spell of the warm summer night and the buzz of insects broken by memories of past deception.
Still, when Dymitr leans in and touches a featherlight kiss to Niko’s cheek, Niko doesn’t pull away.
4
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 Škoda. 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 pustô 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.
