Page 5 of To Clutch a Razor
“Thisguy,” John says. “Anyway there was a record of him losing his sword in a fight against one of our fearsomest feathery friends—” Dymitr thinks that means strzygas. “But the owl flew the coop instead of sticking around to kill him, with his sword in hand. He tried like hell to find her, and so did a few of the others, by all accounts—but no dice. And then things took a turn.”
“A turn?”
“Well, for the first few weeks, he was in pain—body aches, and constant thirst and hunger that never seemed to be sated. No big deal for a man of his constitution, right?” John shakes his head. “Well, then he started seeing a different owl, one he’d brought down a few years before. The family thought, you know—a curse. A haunting. A hallucinogenic poison. Whatever. And then he saw other things. Old game. Crows—” Those were zmoras. “And wolves—” Werewolves. “All kinds of things. An entire menagerie. They didn’t replay old memories, or anything, they just talked to him nonstop. Taunted him, refused to leave him alone. Eventually there were so many of them he couldn’t hear anyone over the noise. He just stayed in his room with his fingers in his ears.”
“And he died from it?”
John shakes his head. “No, it didn’t kill him. Not directly, anyway. He did that himself. Couldn’t take itanymore, left a note and everything. That’s why there was no official record of it—a Knight’s not supposed to destroy himself, right? He’s supposed to take something else down with him.”
As a child, one of the first things Dymitr understood about Knights was that there were good ways for a Knight to die and bad ways. Dying because you were stupid or scared or didn’t prepare for the work at hand adequately or lost your nerve in the middle of a fight, those were shameful ways to die. But dying because you were saving someone else, or because you were fighting something especially fierce or deadly—those were good deaths.
No Knight hoped to live a long life; they hoped for a good death.
“I guess it makes sense, you know? You can’t just walk around without half your soul without suffering some consequences,” John says. “So why the sudden interest? Someone you know misplace theirs?”
“I know someone whose sword is in the wrong hands,” Dymitr says quietly. “Though he knows exactly where it is, it will be difficult to get back. He wanted to know how urgent it was that he do so.”
John’s smile fades.
“Tell your friend that it’s urgent. From beginning to end, it was only a few months for my great-grandfather. And it got bad much sooner than that.”
Dymitr looks out the window at the cars driving past. At the construction workers setting up orange trafficcones on Irving Park. At the woman walking her corgi past a hair salon and stopping by the door for the stylist to toss a treat.
“Thank you for your help,” he says to John distantly. “I have to go.”
John’s hand brushes his as he stands, an attempt at comfort that Dymitr doesn’t acknowledge.
Dymitr stops at the top of the stairs and leans against the wall. The scents of the stairwell are overwhelming. Rubber boots. Sweaty feet. Petrichor. Wet carpet. Soggy paper from the mail Ala must have brought in earlier—the mailbox has a leak in it. Whatever food the neighbors had delivered. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath through his nose. Basil and peanuts—Thai food from the place down the street, if he had to guess.
The smells distract him from the ache in his chest. He rubs his sternum absently, and unlocks the door with the spare key. He’s been staying at Ala’s place since his transformation.Just until I get my bearings,he promised her. She just rolled her eyes, like he was being ridiculous.
The apartment is too small for both of them. He sleeps on the couch, and his feet hang off the end of it. There’s no room in the refrigerator for both his milk—whole—and her milk—1 percent—so they compromise by buying 2 percent. Just this morning she made him get out of the shower early so she could use the toilet. They don’t knoweach other, not really, but the cramped space has forced an intimacy neither of them is quite comfortable with yet. He can tell it would be better if he was gone, and also that Ala is too stubborn to tell him so.
She’s in the kitchen when he arrives. She hasn’t gotten her hair cut in a while, so it’s starting to curl behind her ears. She’s wearing an old gray T-shirt with holes at the collar seams. When he tries to peek at what’s on the stove, she blocks it with her body and grins at him. “Tell me what it is.”
She seems to love this game.
“It’s ramen,” he says.
“Not specific enough.”
“It’s the Sapporo brand,” he says. “You put carrots and broccoli in it. And an egg.”
She grins and steps aside, revealing an old pot—red, with white flowers painted on it—full of noodles. “Want some?”
“Do you even need to ask?”
She takes another bowl out of the cupboard, and starts ladling soup into it. Zmoras don’t need to eat much regular food, since fear makes up the bulk of their diet. A meal every few days, maybe. But he still appreciates how generous she’s been with food and money while he looks for work.
As she hands him the bowl, she says, “I’ll never get tired of that, I swear. Your nose is so much better than mine.”
“A pity my illusions are so much worse.” Ala has beentrying to teach him the art of it, but his illusions, when he even manages to conjure them, have no strength. They flicker in and out, they go hazy at the edges. Sometimes they don’t even look like what he’s picturing.
They sit at the rickety yellow table in the corner. It’s only big enough for two people, and even then, his knees knock against hers when he sits down, so he turns sideways in his chair. He lets the steam from the soup envelop his nose, and closes his eyes. Salt. Carrot. Chicken bouillon. Metal, from the pot. Wood, from the spoon. His chest aches.
“I saw there’s a showing ofI Know What You Did Last Summertomorrow night at the Crow,” he says casually.
Ala hesitates. The Crow Theater is a zmora operation, run by Ala’s family, the Dryjas. They play scary movies as a kind of fear buffet in disguise. He hasn’t been there since his transformation—hasn’t actually metanyof the other zmoras in Ala’s life. It’s as if she doesn’t want them to know he exists.
