Page 23 of To Clutch a Razor
“The singing will start soon,” she says. “Do you think he could really turn into something?”
The old stories said a body left undefended after death could turn into a wraith, or an upiór, or a wieszczy. The Holy Order knows, now, that wraiths are born, not made. But upiórs seem to spring from nothing and nowhere, and wieszczy are too rare, too mysterious, to be certain of them.
“It seems silly to me, to be so afraid of an impossible transformation that you’d sing all night,” she says.
“Maybe it’s not so impossible,” Dymitr says. “Or maybe the singing isn’t for him.”
She held back the tears in the car with their mother, and she tries to hold them back again now, but it’s hardaround Dymitr. They’ve always been each other’s refuge in vulnerable moments. When Dymitr came back from his first kill, inconsolable, she was the one who calmed him down. When she lost her first sparring match against their cousin Agnieszka and their grandmother called Elza’s performance “pathetic,” Dymitr dragged her out to the woods to sit in their childhood fort so she could cry in peace. They let each other see the things they don’t reveal to anyone else. But she doesn’t want to do that now.
She blinks the tears away.
“I take it you didn’t finish your mission,” she says coolly.
“No, I had to… change my plan.”
“Because of me?”
He doesn’t answer for a little too long. Well, of course it was because of her. She revealed to thosethingshe was with—the strzygon and the zmora—that he was a Knight. He was probably using them to get into Baba Jaga’s apartment, and she ruined it for him.
“Come on, let’s go inside,” she says. “Mother’s in a foul mood, but I’m sure she’ll be nicer to you than she was to me.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We both know it’s Kazik she really loves.”
It’s an old joke. Kazik is as cold and unsentimental as Marzena is.
“I’m sorry, Elza,” he says, taking her by the elbow so she doesn’t walk away from him.
He’s always looked like her twin. Ash-brown hair.Gray eyes. Big lips—like a fish, Kazik used to tease them, sucking his cheeks in to imitate one. The resemblance weakened as Dymitr got older and started filling out and growing facial hair, but still, there’s no mistaking that he’s her brother. Only now… there’s something different about his eyes. A kind of wildness she doesn’t understand. It makes her feel uneasy.
“For what?” she says, even though she knows what he’s apologizing for. She’d rather not hear the specifics, though it does relieve some of the tension in her, to hear that he’s sorry.
“For all of it,” he answers.
“It’s good you’re here” is all she says, and they walk together toward the house.
10A FEAST FOR THE DEAD
He steps into the living room, and the scents of the house overwhelm him. Cooked cabbage in the kitchen. Rose perfume clinging to his aunt Krystyna’s clothes. Nalewka and cigarettes on someone’s breath. Dirt. Blood.
Death.
And those are just the smells that any person with a decent nose could detect. There’s also the peach-sweet aroma of anticipation, the dark-chocolate richness of dread, the powdered sugar of anxiety. All the fear-scents of his cousins, his siblings, his mother—
But he can’t think about the smell, or about Nikodem Kostka, zemsta, prowling the woods outside the house in pursuit of Knight blood. He can’t think about whether he’s more afraid that Niko will fail, or that he’ll succeed. He has to focus.
He murmurs condolences in his aunt’s ear. Krystyna’s cloying perfume is in his nose, and beneath it, a peculiar vanilla smell that he thinks might be grief.No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,isn’t that a quote from C. S. Lewis? Only a zmora could confirm it, it seems.
Krystyna’s hand, when she pats his cheek, is cold and a little damp, and he realizes she was just washing the body. It’s as if she left a handprint of death on his face. He can smell it even when she pulls away.
“So here you are,” a familiar voice says from behind him, flinty. Marzena. His mother.
She smells like copper and leather. Not a small woman, but not a tall one, either. Her dark brown hair is limp and loose over her shoulders, and her gray eyes are exactly like his.
Will they be the last thing Niko sees before she dies? Beforehedies?
“I thought you were on an important mission,” Marzena says. “You failed?”
“No,” Dymitr replies. “I’m still in the middle of it.”
