Page 25 of To Clutch a Razor
When Joanna gave him the book of curses, she told him it was a secret—and it is, because no one else in the family is supposed to lay eyes on it. But the fact that he has it in his possession is not a secret anymore. She told everyone last Christmas, so they knew how the knowledge was being passed down. Dymitr still remembers how Kazik looked at him, then, like he’d betrayed his older brother in some profound way, by being the one she chose. It was the same way Dymitr had looked at Kazik, once, when their father decided to train him.
“Sir,” he says, with a nod.
He doesn’t want to talk about the curses. It only makes him think of Ala, who will be taking a huge risk, helping him tonight. Retrieving the book isn’t as simple as grabbing it and tucking it under his waistband—it’s too big for that, and too powerful to go undetected. It would only draw attention.
He slips into the kitchen, where his older cousin, Agnieszka, is chopping a cooked sausage to go in thelazanki. Her shirt is too big for her, and it’s slipped down hershoulder to reveal the sliver of gold from the hilt of the bone sword. She looks back at him.
“How was America?” she asks him. “Did you see the Empire State Building?”
“That’s in a different part of the country,” he says, smiling a little. “Chicago has some nice buildings, though.”
“I’ve always wanted to go there.” She winks. “Maybe you need a partner for your mission?”
He looks across the room at Elza, who’s arranging the chrysanthemums someone brought in a vase.
“It’s something that has to be done alone, I’m afraid,” he says. “How are the kids?”
Agnieszka beams as she talks about her twin sons, who both love soccer, even though one of them kicks hard, but can barely run without tripping over his feet, and the other is fast, but always misses the ball.
She says, “Together, they would make one good player. Separately, they’re terrible.”
He laughs, and Elza thrusts another bouquet of chrysanthemums at him. They’re a deep fuchsia, their petals narrow and pointed. He thinks of the fern flower, and how it unfurled so elegantly, like a ballerina’s skirt as she turns. He remembers how it tasted, green, almost herbal. And how it burned the darkness from his blood, and then transferred that cleansing fire to Ala.
“God, I hate these,” Elza says, of the chrysanthemums. “Especially the purple ones. How did they end up becomingthe official funeral flower, anyway? They’re worse than carnations.”
“I like carnations.”
Elza nods. “Oh, I remember. You gave Celina Nowak a bouquet of them on Valentine’s Day once, remember?”
He makes a face. That was before he realized that thinking a girl was pretty and wanting to sleep with her were two different things—and he only felt the former. “That’s right—the petals were dyed blue. She was very polite about them.”
“And then she very politely stuck her tongue in Bartek Adamczyk’s mouth later that day,” Kazik says, clapping Dymitr on the shoulder. He’s holding two small glasses of clear liquor. “Let’s drink.”
“None for me?” Elza says, pouting her lower lip a little.
“Oh, they’re both for you,” Kazik says, putting both glasses in her hands. “You think I don’t remember how you can drink? You put us both to shame that one Christmas. What were we drinking? Vodka?”
“Jägermeister,” Elza says, with an exaggerated shudder. “I still can’t have licorice. That’s all I tasted when it was on its way back up.”
Kazik goes to pour another glass, and Elza gives Dymitr one of her two. They stand in a triangle in the kitchen, on the laminate floor, and touch their glasses together.
“Prost,” Kazik says.
“Santé,” Elza says.
“Cheers,” Dymitr says, with a weak smile.
And then, in unison: “Na zdrowie!”
They all drink, and Dymitr thinks it was a mistake, coming back here. A month ago, when he set out for Chicago, he thought he was going to his death—or near enough to it. If Baba Jaga had done as he asked, and destroyed his bone sword—and half of his soul—he would have wandered the earth diminished, in a haze of pain and emptiness. The Knights who had suffered that fate in the past hadn’t been able to articulate it except in verbal accounts, since they lost the ability to write afterward. What little they were able to describe was a miserable kind of detachment from their own bodies. They were capable of basic functioning, but no connection—no emotion, and no relief.
He wouldn’t have cared, then, about his siblings or his cousins or his grandmother. He wouldn’t have cared about anything at all.
But now, he’ll have to say goodbye to them knowing they would hate him if they knew what he really was. Knowing that he’ll only ever be able to lie to them. Knowing that he still loves them, no matter what they’ve done, and no matter what lies they’ve believed.
And how can he blame them? He believed those lies, too.
It’s strange to eat with a body in the next room, but they do, squeezed in so tightly Dymitr can hardly move his fork without elbowing Agnieszka. In the living room, a few people are already singing hymns to keep the evil spirits atbay. Elza gives him pained looks across the table whenever the singing voices hit the wrong note—which is often—and he tries not to laugh. Their mother, on Elza’s right, appraises him.
