Page 51 of To Clutch a Razor
“Is it, now.”
Dymitr swallows hard. He nods.
“Is that why you were jealous of that woman?” Niko says, grinning. “The sensation was—quite forceful.”
His smile is a half-feral thing. Dymitr likes it.
“Maybe,” he says.
“What happened to not being jealous because you’re not entitled to me?”
“I’d like to be entitled to you,” Dymitr replies. “Is that all right?”
Niko’s eyes are bright as lit coals. His fingers brush over the metal now buried in Dymitr’s shoulder. Frowning, he follows the smoothness to the center of Dymitr’s back,and then down his spine in a slow, curious creep of his fingers. Dymitr shudders, and it’s not from the cold, and it’s not from the memory of the sword melting into his body again.
“Yeah,” Niko says to him. “It is.”
25A STONE FOR TWO BIRDS
It’s not a long drive to the harbor south of the Loop. They go in Niko’s car, where the wind rattles the cloth top, and there’s an R.E.M. song—“Drive”—playing over the speakers. The only other car in the parking lot has two teenagers in it, probably about to make out; Niko doesn’t linger long enough to find out.
The Razor’s sword is in the back seat, wrapped up in cloth. It took some creative magic to smuggle it here on the plane, but Niko’s done it before. He’s eager to get rid of it. He doesn’t like the way he feels in its presence, like his head is stuffed up. It’s stifling, somehow.
Niko had to make a plan on the fly, since he never planned to take the sword to begin with—and he doesn’t even know why Dymitr told him to. They’ll take out the boat that Niko rented from some creature-friendly company—owned by nixies, naturally—and drop the sword in the middle of Lake Michigan. He intended to do it alone, but Dymitr offered to go with him, with a hard look in his eyes that Niko was desperate to understand. So he agreed.
He gets out of the car and reaches into the back seat to pick up the sword. He winces when he touches it, his ears muffled and his head pulsing like a headache without pain. He doesn’t bother to lock his door—anyone who wants to break into a cloth-top Jeep just needs a knife and a can-do attitude.
Dymitr is standing at the front of the car, staring at the water. It looks more like an ocean than a lake, here, with the waves rippling in the moonlight, the repetitive sound of them crashing against the rocks. He turns to Niko.
“Can I…?” he asks, and he holds out a hand for the sword.
It means something, Niko thinks, that he doesn’t hesitate to hand the weapon over to Dymitr. And he might have, last week. But that was before he saw the lengths to which Dymitr would go to protect Ala, to protect someone who wasn’t human.
Dymitr is careful as he unwraps the blade. He closes his hand around the golden handle, and red spills into his palm, red pools in his eyes. Niko steps back, all his instincts screaming at him to transform and attack before he gets attacked himself. But instead of turning away, he forces himself to look. He needs to be honest with himself about what Dymitr is, just as he needs Dymitr to be honest with himself about what Niko is.
“Do you know what will happen to her without it?” Dymitr asks, and it’s absurd, to talk to an armed Knight like this.
“I know it’ll hurt her, like being separated from your sword hurt you,” Niko says. “But beyond that… no.”
“She’ll go mad.” Dymitr turns the blade over, studying it. “She’ll be haunted by all the creatures she’s killed, and then she’ll lose her mind.”
“Well, I didn’t want to be the one who killed your mother, but I’m not going to weep for her.”
“I know.”
Dymitr sounds strange. Detached. Then he wraps the sword in cloth again, the red receding from his hands, from his eyes. He balances the weapon on his palms, and looks up at Niko, with that same hard expression Niko saw when he insisted on coming along.
“Don’t throw it in the water,” Dymitr says.
“I’m not going to spare her—”
Dymitr holds up a hand to silence him. “I mean, there’s a better use for it.”
Niko raises his eyebrows. “And that is…?”
“She’ll be able to track it using magic,” Dymitr says. “She’ll come here, with another Knight, since they almost always travel in pairs. And she’ll go wherever the sword is. To a place of your choosing.”
Niko catches on, suddenly. “You want me to set a trap.”
