Page 46 of To Clutch a Razor
If she thinks back to everything he said to her in Chicago, and everything she said to him, it makes a certain amount of sense. He chose his words so carefully. She asked him if Baba Jaga was his target; he said he wouldn’t discuss it with her. She told him he was acting strange; he said,I am doing what’s necessary.
What’s necessary.
“Why?” Her voice breaks over the word. “Why would he ever want this?”
“Because he wanted to stop being a murderer,” the zmora says. “Which is really all a Knight is, once you strip away the rhetoric.”
Elza’s face burns hot as a fever. “We’re fighting for humanity—”
The zmora holds up the book of curses. “If you really believe that, why did you hide this here?”
Elza went looking for a secret message from Dymitr right after he left for America. She assumed he would leave one in the bathroom cabinet, explaining why he was going on this mission alone. Instead, she found the book of curses. She remembers kneeling on the bath mat and flipping through it, her skin crawling. She knows the methods for killing most things—what needs a blade through the heart, what needs its head chopped off, what needs to be burned or salted or buried at a full moon. But the torments written on those pages made her feel sick.
So she brought the book here. She still doesn’t understand why, not fully.
“The book scared me,” Elza says. “I didn’t want anyone else to find it.”
“It scared you because it’s a handbook for creative torture,” the zmora says. “And deep down, you know that it’s horrible to do those things to a living creature. You know that you don’t like what it says about your people, that they’ve done those things so many times they decided to write them down. And now, hopefully, you know that if this book falls into the wrong hands, those horrors can be inflicted on your brother.”
The zmora steps closer, but only a little.
“And heisstill your brother, Elza,” the zmora says. “He’s kind, and quiet, and he’ll mend your socks withoutbeing asked, and he leaves orange peels everywhere, and he’s got incredible aim. He’s Dymitr.”
Elza is crying again. She tells herself it’s because she’s mourning the loss of him. That the creature that now wears his face is just an echo of him. It can do the things he used to do, but it’s no longer him, it no longer has his soul or his heart or his mind.
The zmora says, “Let me take the book so no one can use it against him. Please.”
A tear rolls off the end of Elza’s chin. She looks away, into the brightening woods. “If I cross paths with you again, I won’t be merciful.”
The zmora smiles a little too wide—like the Cheshire cat from the old cartoon, just teeth aglow in the dark woods.
“Neither will I,” it says.
22AN AIRPLANE MOVIE
Niko pays for their tickets home. They sit together on the plane, all three of them in a row, with Dymitr in the middle seat. Ala waits until after the meal has come and gone and Niko has fallen asleep against the window to take the book of curses out of her bag. She sets it on Dymitr’s tray table like it’s an old magazine.
He stares down at it, gray eyes wide.
He’s bruised. On his jaw, around his eye, on his cheek. His lip is split, too. She hates to look at those wounds, knowing he endured all of that because he refused to give her up to his grandmother and his mother. When she thinks about that, she gets an uncomfortable feeling in her throat like she swallowed a grapefruit whole.
“How did you…” He looks up at her. “Where—”
“You were very insistent that only you and Elza knew about the bathroom hiding place, so when the book wasn’t there, I figured she had found it and moved it,” Ala says. “And last night, when we were dragging our broken selves through the woods, I saw the fort and I felt…” She taps her temple. “That Knight magic thing.”
“Brilliant,” he says breathlessly.
“Your sister found me there.”
That startles him. His head jerks up.
“She knew it was really you, last night,” Ala says. “I asked her to let me keep the book so it couldn’t be used to hurt you.”
“And?” he asks, his voice soft.
“And she let me go. I think… there’s hope for her. Just a little sliver of it, but… some.”
Dymitr’s eyes are bright. He takes the book and slides it into his backpack. He’s zipping it back up and pushing it under the seat in front of him when Ala finally works up the courage to say, “There’s some things I need to say to you before I lose my voice to that wila for a few days. The first is that I misled you. I told you I came here to help you, and that was mostly a lie—I came here to kill her. Joanna.”
