Page 38 of To Clutch a Razor
Elza is there right away, her hand reaching back toward her spine—it’s a Knight’s reflex, she’s ready to draw her bone swords. Her eyes are wide and alarmed as she takes in Niko’s Ala-shaped face. She recognizes him. Her. Whatever.
“Why didn’t you take her through the back?” Elza demands of Ala.
“I didn’t want to waste time. Stay at your post,” Ala replies. If Niko was asked to critique, he would say she sounds a littletoomuch like a soldier barking orders at an underling, but Elza seems to accept it.
Ala steers Niko roughly toward the back of the house. He plays up his limp.
Just past the kitchen, they walk down a hallway lined with portraits. Each one is a photograph—some black-and-white, some color—of a fallen Knight. Niko scans them to see if anyone he’s exacted vengeance on as zemsta is among them; he recognizes none of them, though he sees hints of Dymitr in them. A nose, a chin, and in more than one of them, a pair of gray eyes.
They walk past a courtyard where a statue of Michael the Archangel stands untended, a dagger glinting on its weather-worn back, and that’s when he hears another sound—not a scream, because the time for screaming has passed. Screaming is for the first moments of pain, the shocking ones, the ones that happen before pain is so layered over itself that there’s no energy left to scream.
No, what he hears is worse—it’s a moan, a sob, a helpless, pathetic sound that rips out his insides.
Ala shows no recognition of it, but her hand tightens on his arm. She releases him and pounds on the door with her fist.
“Babcia!” she calls out. “I caught one!”
At the sight of Dymitr on the floor, Niko lets out a harsh breath.
It’s only been twenty minutes since Ala found Niko inthe woods to ask for his help. But it seems that twenty minutes is plenty of time for Knights to do some damage.
Dymitr’s back is soaked with blood. His black shirt is wet and sticking to him. His nose is bleeding, too, and one of his eyes is bloodshot. Swollen. Swollen eye, swollen lip. He’s curled in on himself—to protect his internal organs, maybe. Or just like a dead leaf, curling up as it dries.
For a horrible moment Niko thinks maybe heisdead—but then he sees Dymitr’s chest heaving, and gray eyes—hollowed out like the shell of a walnut—swivel to meet his.
Niko strains against Ala’s hold, his body struggling toward Dymitr—but that’s all right, because they think Dymitr is a strzygon in disguise, and they think Niko is the zmora in cahoots with him. The old woman is scrutinizing him with the bright red eyes of a half-transformed Knight, but the younger one smirks at him, and he realizes she looks familiar. She looks like Dymitr.
This is his quarry.
Brzytwa. The Razor.
He’s used to sizing up opponents before attacking them, used to watching them move and making quick assessments. As Marzena rises to her feet, her body uncoiling, he feels every one of his muscles tense in anticipation. She moves like a predator. He sees the flap in her boot that conceals a knife, the one Dymitr warned him about. He sees the bright red blood of her son on her palms.
“That one’s a zmora. The female,” Elza’s voice says from the doorway. She followed them here. She nods to Niko,who she must recognize as Ala, from their confrontation on the street outside the Uptown Theatre. He feels the sudden urge to laugh as he realizes he’s in yet another Shakespearean nightmare—switched bodies, switched identities, a night of confusion in the woods.
Elza adds: “So the one you captured earlier must be the strzygon, disguised by magic. He’s the stronger fighter.”
“Perhaps it was,” Marzena says, drawling a little. She nudges Dymitr hard with the toe of her boot, and Dymitr bites back a whimper. “Not in its current condition, I think.”
“We’ll use them against each other,” Joanna says, as if it’s already decided—and perhaps if she says it, it is. “I will takethatone out—” She nods to Dymitr, still lying at her feet. “And question it further. It hardly poses a threat anymore. Marzena and Dymitr will handle this new one.”
Niko’s chest leaps with panic. He can’t let Joanna drag the real Dymitr out of this room alone, to take him God knows where and do God knowswhatto him. Ala squeezes his arm.
“If you don’t mind, Babcia, I’d like to speak to that one myself.” Ala points at the real Dymitr, bleeding on the stone. “Since he’s wearing my face and seems to know so much about me.”
“Of course,” Joanna says, and she smiles at Marzena. “I think your mother can handle one zmora on her own.”
Marzena’s eyes glitter as she looks Niko over, her eyes pausing on the belt cinching his too-large pants around his waist, the bob of his—or Ala’s—throat as he swallows.
“Pick it up, if you would. It’s been cursed with tenfold pain, so it may scream,” Joanna says to Ala, and Ala moves toward Dymitr to obey. It’s a strange sight, one Dymitr moving closer to another, like Ala stepped across a mirror and into the land of reflections. Niko tenses as she grabs Dymitr by the arm, hoping that she handles him gently and hoping that she remembers to be rough with him all at the same time.
Ala has a stronger stomach than he does. She wrenches Dymitr upright, and his jaw clenches around a moan, his swollen, bloodied face shiny with sweat and maybe tears, though it’s hard to say. He stumbles to his feet, and Ala pays him no mind, half marching and half dragging him toward the door. Elza opens it for them both, and as Dymitr stumbles past his sister, she spits on him, hitting him in the cheek.
Then Joanna, Elza, Dymitr, and Ala walk out of the room, Ala still wearing Dymitr’s face like a veil.
And Nikodem Kostka, the Kostka zemsta, is alone with the Razor.
17A FEINT
