Page 12 of To Clutch a Razor
“He wanted to say goodbye before a… hunt.”
“Ah.”
“He told me to find something of value to Baba Jaga and renegotiate. Something only I could give her.”
Ala often feels like she doesn’t belong among the not-so-human citizens of Chicago, accustomed as they seem to be to manipulation and subterfuge. She doesn’t like to weave around people.
But the image of Dymitr’s grandmother with her pinned curls and her bone sword, the zmora’s blood splattering her cheeks, is at the very surface of Ala’s mind.
Dymitr can’t kill his grandmother, as Baba Jaga demanded. But she needs to die.
“Something that belongs to your grandmother, maybe?” Ala says, trying to keep her voice casual. “Where is she now?”
“At home,” Dymitr says. “Her house is a kind of… home base, for our family. Elza lives there. I…” He pauses. “I used to live there, too.”
“Does she keep anything important there? A Knight relic or…”
Dymitr looks up at her. “I left the book of curses there. The one she used to…”
“Curse my family?” Ala asks, with forced brightness. “Yes, I remember.”
The image of his grandmother is a stain on her mind. An old lady in a floral blouse, nothing fearsome abouther—but when she sat forward with that blue book in her hands, her spine straight and stiff and the fire of a fanatic in her eyes…
Yes. She needs to die.
“Would it be valuable to Baba Jaga?” Dymitr says.
Baba Jaga demanded a high price from Dymitr: thirty-three dead Knights, beginning with the one he loves most. There’s nothing on Earth that’s worth the same. But a book of Knight curses that no one has ever seen before? It might come close.
“If you went back there,” Ala says, avoiding the question, “wouldn’t your family know what you are right when they see you?”
There’s nothing in particular that makes zmoras look different from humans. Eyes too old for their faces, maybe; speech patterns that haven’t updated to modern sensibilities. A certain restlessness to their physical forms, like any moment they could shrug on an illusion like an old coat. Lightness, too, and that was what seemed to throw Dymitr off in the weeks following his transformation, his body lacking the same heft. He ran into doorframes and countertops, tripped over his own feet.
But she knows Knights have ways of knowing. Ofseeing. She just needs him to tell her exactly how. Exactly what.
“She won’t look at me that way,” Dymitr says firmly.
“How do you know?”
Ala watches the leaves of the nearby catalpa tree flutterin the breeze. It was covered in white flowers just last week, but a strong wind blew them all into the street overnight, and now they’re rotting in the grass and crushed into the sidewalks. Still, it’s her favorite tree in the neighborhood, tall with long, crooked branches that attract squirrels.
“It’s not something they do casually,” he says. “It’s an altered state that allows us—” He pauses. Swallows. “That allowsthem…to see beyond the surface. Almost as advanced as the one they’re in when they draw their swords.”
She considers this for a moment.
“Can you still do it?” she asks. “You’re a zmora now, but you still have a sword, so you’re still part Knight, aren’t you?”
He looks into his mug, suddenly tense. “I don’t know.”
She feels the need to see, the need to know. Just how much of the man she’s welcomed into her house, into herlife,still belongs to the Holy Order? Baba Jaga promised a transformation, but she didn’t promise a straightforward one. Maybe Dymitr will always be a Knight. Maybe Ala will either have to make her peace with that… or not.
“Try it,” she says, and though it’s a suggestion, it comes out more like a command.
He looks into his coffee cup for a few seconds longer, and then sets it down on the roof, near his feet. Then he curls one of his hands into a fist, pressing the blunt edge of his fingernails against the meaty part of his hand. She watches him breathe in, and then out, and then hepresses,cutting into his skin with his fingernails until blood bubbles uparound the wounds. She watches in horror as his eyes lift to hers. They gleam bloodred.
She’s seen eyes like that so many times. So many Knights standing triumphant over a zmora, a strzyga, a czart, a wraith, a llorona. Their palms purple-red, their swords bone white. Their casual regard of death. A farmer who harvests grain looks at the harvest not with sorrow for the plants he’s cut down, but with satisfaction; the Knights are the same way. To them, Ala is… a weed. Something to be uprooted and left to rot.
She’s so tense her jaw aches.It’s Dymitr,she tells herself.He won’t hurt you. But still her heart races as he looks at her, still her body prepares to run as fast as she can.
