Page 31 of To Clutch a Razor
For a moment, she worries the dybbuk will break its promise, and keep clinging to her. But with a click of its teeth and a flutter of dark fabric, its weight lifts, and it disappears. She doesn’t know where it will go, which of the Knight cousins it will attach itself to, but she hopes it chooses wisely.
It strikes her as a little funny, in a dark way. The Knights going to all this effort to keep a spirit from invading them, possessing them… but none of their rituals will prevent the dybbuk from doing just that.
“Mirroring is a strange sort of magic, beyond the capabilities of a strzyga, so it must have consulted a witch somewhere along its path.” Marzena sits back in her chair. “After that, I matched the footprints that walked into the clearing with the set of tracks that walked out. I followed the strzyga back out of the forest to a little hotel close to the big road. But it was nowhere to be found. The hotel manager had seen it, though he didn’t know what it really was, but he couldn’t say where it had gone. So I did what I always do.”
She looks atLukasz, who’s resting his chin on his hand, his elbow propped up next to a plate of bread.
“You paid the hotel manager off,” he supplies, when prompted.
“I paid the hotel manager off,” Marzena agrees. “He let me into the room the strzyga used and there, I found allI needed.” She reaches out and tugs at the young cousin’s dark blond braid. “A strand of its hair.”
At the end of the table, André gasps. At first Elza thinks it’s just a reaction to the story—and a melodramatic one, at that. But André hunches over his plate, breathing hard. Krystyna puts an arm across his shoulders, speaking softly to him and touching a hand to his forehead.
“How did you find it withhair?” the cousin asks, pulling her braid free of Marzena’s grasp. The question draws everyone’s attention back to the story, to Marzena, as Krystyna ushers André into the kitchen.
“I didn’t,” Marzena says. “I called the dogs.”
She tugs up her left sleeve, revealing a bandage down the length of her arm, from wrist to elbow. Elza has a similar wound on her own left arm, which she used to summon a murder of crows—at the time, she thought she was helping Dymitr escape a pack of strzygas, though now she knows she did more harm than good.
What Marzena summoned wasn’t “dogs,” of course, but wolves. A pack of them, with otherworldly strength and focus. Despite their size, they’re easier to call forth than crows, which are faster and resist control by their very nature. Wolves are pack animals, used to following a single leader. Of all the Knights Elza knows, Marzena calls the strongest, most fully realized wolves. She has a way with dogs, their grandmother says. Always has.
“I offered the hair to the wolves, and they led me to thestrzyga. It was wounded, so it hadn’t gone far. It was limping along the road.” She tilts from side to side to mimic the strzyga’s gait. “It didn’t even warrant the drawing of my sword. I sent the wolves ahead of me, and watched them overtake it. When they were finished with it, there wasn’t much left. Some entrails and some feathers.”
She reaches into the inner pocket of her jacket, and takes out a single feather. It’s brown, and dotted with white at regular intervals, like it was dabbed with paint. A pretty little thing, to belong to such a monstrous creature as a strzyga.
Elza sees Dymitr’s hands in his lap, clenched so hard it looks painful.
“We will bury my brother with this small trophy,”Lukasz says, his voice solemn and quiet. “So he knows that he’s avenged.”
Marzena adds, “And then you and I will finish what he started, and pick off the rest of Athene’s strzyga clan.”
“Hear hear,” Elza’s grandmother says, thumping the table with a fist. Then she raises her wineglass to Marzena. All around the table, everyone picks up their glasses, even the young cousins, who have only kompot or apple juice. As one, everyone drinks.
And then Marzena’s spell is broken. A few others go into the next room to join the singers who watch over Filip’s body. Marzena takes the feather in there with them, to slide it into Filip’s clasped hands, beneath the beads ofthe rosary. Everyone else helps to clear the table of the dirty plates.
It’s not until Elza is piling up the napkins that she realizes: she didn’t see Dymitr toast their mother for her victory.
“When they were finished with it,” Ala hears from the dining room, “there wasn’t much left. Some entrails and some feathers.”
A shiver crawls down Ala’s spine. She hurries into the bathroom and closes the door behind her. Dymitr told her the book of curses was hidden under the bathroom sink. She opens the cabinet doors there and sees, in the back of the door, two names drawn on the wood in waxy crayon. On one side:ELZA. On the other side:DYMEK.
Under the sink, she finds a scrub brush and a bottle of bleach, a few spare rolls of toilet paper, a stack of washcloths. But Dymitr explained the hiding spot to her carefully: she has to feel along the cabinet’s left side, because there’s a false wall there. She feels it give way a little under the pressure of her fingers, and slides it to the side, expecting to run her fingers over the dark blue leather cover of the journal his grandmother handed to him in the memory.
She feels nothing.
Alarm prickles over the back of Ala’s neck. She runs her fingers all along the cabinet wall. Then she taps along the false panel she slid back to see if the book got stuck theresomehow. She uses her phone’s flashlight to peer inside the cabinet itself, moving the washcloths to the side, feeling along the pipes, knocking over the stack of toilet paper rolls.
There’s nothing. The book isn’t there.
And there are footsteps coming right toward her.
13A SONG FOR THE DEAD
The next song is “Zegar bije, wspominaj na ostatnie rzeczy,” and Elza feels the familiar tune prickling over the back of her neck.The clock is ticking,the droning voices from the living room say to her,remember the last things.
She remembers the last time Filip spoke to her—doubling back to the house before he left on this mission that brought him only death, he asked her if she’d seen his wallet. She rolled her eyes and reached into his left jacket pocket to produce it. “You know me best,” he said to her. “More a teacher than a student from the start.”
Remember the last things,she thinks, and she leaves the chaos of the kitchen to get just a moment alone. She walks down the narrow hallway and around the corner to the part of the house she shared with Dymitr and Kazik, growing up. After Kazik moved out, it was just her and Dymitr, their doors facing each other, a cramped bathroom perpendicular to them both.
