Page 16 of To Clutch a Razor
He says, “Come on, I want to see if the shop has BakedLay’s,” and she decides to save the brainstorming for another time.
Instead, she makes a face. “The entire array of American snack foods is in front of you, and you’re on a quest forBaked Lay’s? They taste like almost nothing.”
“No, they taste both salty and bland,” he says. “All the comfort of a saltine cracker but with the satisfying snap of a chip.”
“Are the Lay’s people paying you to say this? Blink twice if you’re being blackmailed.”
Dymitr just grins, and leads the way to the store.
Ala ignores the gnawing in her stomach. It feels a lot like dread.
7A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
The red tile roofs are how he knows he’s home. The little stucco houses clustered together with fields all around. The wrought-iron gates and metal fences. Narrow roads with village dogs running along them. Sagging sheds of corrugated metal or rotting wood.
Ala sleeps in the passenger seat as he drives the rental car, which smells like old cigarettes and whatever cleaner they used to get that cigarette smell out, like stale french fries and floral perfume and windshield wiper fluid. He stops at a gas station and picks up a packet of paluszki. He has one between his teeth like a cigarette when Ala wakes.
“How long before Mieczyk?” she asks.
The town of Mieczyk is nestled in the trees southwest of Gdansk. It’s big enough to disappear in, so it’s big enough that mortals and not-so-mortals alike live alongside each other. A half hour north of it is a village, small and overlooked, where Dymitr’s family lives. Dymitr spent most of his life going back and forth between Mieczyk and the village, close enough to the forest to disappear there whenhe needed to. And he often needed to, thanks to the relentless teasing of his cousins and brother.
Some people in Mieczyk know what Knights are and what they fight. Some don’t. His grandmother always knew which people were which.
“Twenty minutes,” he says, because even though the town’s not far from them, they need to drive all the way around it to get to the hotel without passing through his family’s village.
He turns onto packed-dirt roads and they drive through fields of overgrown grass and stretches of tall trees with slim trunks. Sunlight dapples the ground in front of them. He opens the window to breathe in the smell of dirt baking in the sun. He feels a kind of pressure against the right side of his head, like a headache is building.
“Do you have any other siblings?” Ala asks.
“A brother. Kazimierz,” he says. “Or Kazik, as we call him.”
She must hear something in his voice, because she grins. “You don’t like him.”
“He was fine when we were younger. But when he got too old to play with us, he became insufferable.” He glances at her. “As if you’re ever too old for a cool fort in the woods.”
Ala laughs, and says, “Kazik, Elza, and Dymitr. An interesting assortment of names.”
“We’re named for well-known Knights. Kazik’s namesake was Polish—one of our ancestors—and killed by a wraith. Elza’s was from a Latvian family, and she waskilled by a vilkac—like a werewolf. Mine was Russian. Killed by a strzyga.”
“So they’d find your choice of romantic partner… especially galling?”
Dymitr’s mouth curls into something that he’s sure looks like a smile, even if it doesn’t feel like one. “That’s the least of my worries, at this point.”
Ala nods, and rubs her temple with her fingertips. “The air feels weird here.”
Dymitr doesn’t answer for a moment. He listens to the wind shuddering through the car. He smells something like horseradish in the air; likely from garlic mustard plants growing nearby. They pass a field dotted with gladiolus, the flower that gives the town its name.
Eventually he says, “We’re driving around the place where my family lives. So I think what you’re feeling is their magic.”
“It doesn’t feel like magic.”
“The Holy Order’s magic comes from pain. The pain is a sacrifice, so it creates space for magic, like any other sacrifice—but it’s different. It feels different.”
He’s been able to sense it since he split his soul to become a Knight. But he didn’t feel this way about it before. Before, coming home felt like stepping into a quiet room. Like a museum or a library. It felt sacred. But now, the way it presses against him… it’s like something that was alive in the air, something that danced around him, is now dead. The silence is stifling.
He takes a strange, circuitous route to the hotel, and he’s relieved when that pressure, that silence, lets up again. The hotel is at the end of a dirt road, surrounded on three sides by fields. There’s a pile of rubble next to the parking lot—an abandoned construction site—but the hotel itself looks nice enough. It’s a white building in the Tudor style, with a red roof. It looks more like a large house than a hotel, but the reviews were good and the rooms were cheap.
A bored-looking twentysomething checks them in, and they set their bags down in a worn-out room with bright orange carpeting. There are two twin beds with thin mattresses inside it, but the bathroom is clean and there’s an air-conditioning unit on the wall, so they won’t be too hot when they sleep. Dymitr takes the bed closer to the door, and he falls into an uneasy sleep while Ala takes a shower.
