Page 18 of To Clutch a Razor
“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.
8A 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’thave 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 factfrom 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 aredishes 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 maslanka. 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 strzygon 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.
