Page 17 of To Clutch a Razor
He dreams about Ala’s cousin, Lena. The last zmora he killed—or at least, the last zmora he didn’t stop his sister from killing.
She looked like Ala—or like a version of Ala that could have existed in another world. She wore black eyeliner with sharp wings, and tight black clothing no matter the weather. By the time he arrived, she was already dying, a short sword sticking out of her belly. Elza had gone ahead of him to the house. Lena’s father wasn’t there—probably draining his second beer while Knights killed his daughter, at his request.
But in the dream, Lena is sitting at the table when he arrives, her father across from her. He’s slumped onthe white lace tablecloth—sleeping or dead, it’s hard for Dymitr to say. Lena is writing a message on a yellow legal pad, but she’s using a quill and red ink. She doesn’t greet him, but she reaches out to stick the quill into her father’s mouth, and it comes away red, which is how he recognizes the ink as blood.
It’s a mundane scene, though grotesque, but Dymitr can’t look away from it, and it fills him with such dread he can hardly stand it. That dread follows him to the waking world, where Ala is stepping through the door, her short hair mostly dry. He stares up at her for a moment, still half-convinced she’s another Lena. The other half, the half that still feels guilty for Lena’s death, knows that can’t be true.
“You’re afraid,” she says, and she sniffs the air, like she’s trying to determine exactly what kind of fear he’s feeling.
“Bad dream,” he manages to reply. “You went out?”
She’s carrying a long, thin box, too big to hold a necklace but too small for anything else he can think of. She lifts the lid and shows him a knife with a sturdy handle.
“There are zmoras here, too. Klara gave me a name,” she says. “They were helpful.”
Dymitr’s stomach turns. “And what do you intend to do with a knife?”
“We’re close to a lot of Knights. I’m not going to stay here unarmed.” She doesn’t quite meet his eyes. “What’s our plan?”
“We’ll drive out to their house at dusk,” he says, “and then… I have an idea. It’ll keep you out of harm’s way.”
“Let me guess: it puts you directly into harm’s way, instead.”
Dymitr holds up his hands in surrender. “It allows us both to keep the other safe. Okay? I just need to work out some of the details.”
She doesn’t look convinced. In fact, he catches a whiff of powdered-sugar sweetness—she’s nervous. Well, of course she’s nervous. But there’s something different about this scent. He closes his eyes as he breathes it in. It’s darker than pure anticipation. Deeper.
He’s not a fool. He knows Ala is struggling with something. She smells like terror every morning, and apprehension at bedtime. But if she doesn’t trust him enough to talk to him about it, it’s not his place to ask.
She sighs, and looks at the wall clock. “Can we get caffeine?”
“I know a place.”
Dymitr trips into the bathroom to stick his head under the faucet.
The first time Dymitr went to Basia’s Cafe was after scouting.
Every prospective Knight had a mentor. On the day of the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year, the family gathered and all the young people sat in the kitchen, and if they’d been chosen to begin their Knight education, they were called into the living room to find out who hadselected them. Dymitr’s father,Lukasz, chose his older brother when he was just ten years old, claiming he was maturing fast. Elza, despite being younger than Dymitr, came a few years later, picked by their uncle Filip. And Dymitr kept sitting in the kitchen with all the cousins far younger than he was—doomed, he thought, to learn to cook and never to fight.
That was before he knew that his grandmother had chosen him years before, when he was still just a child. She had her reasons for delaying in telling him.I wanted to make you patient,she said to him once, almost as an apology.I wanted to test your resolve.She had a way of making suffering feel almost like heroism.
For the first few years of his apprenticeship to her, she took him out to the countryside to scout. Scouting was as important as fighting, according to his grandmother. She taught him simple things first, like tracking. He could identify a particular set of boot prints on a forest trail; he could find the places where they broke sticks or bent grass with their movements. Then, because monsters had folded themselves into the modern world, she taught him how to find people using modern means.Everyone leaves a trail, my boy.
He had just located a strzyga for her, finding first the alias she was using and the apartment where she was staying, and then identifying her boot prints in a nearby field. His grandmother ordered him to stay put while she took care of the rest. She returned fifteen minutes later withblood under her fingernails and a smile on her face, and she took him to Basia’s to celebrate. While she washed her hands in the cafe’s bathroom, Dymitr looked over the menu and chose a coffee and a pastry, rewards for a job well done.
Now, as he walks toward the cafe with Ala, he thinks there was another reason his grandmother delayed his education: she wanted him to be starved for approval and desperate to please. She believed it would make him a better student. And she was right.
“All right, I can’t take it anymore,” Ala says, after they’ve been walking for ten minutes. They’re passing an Orange store with rows of phone cases hanging on the wall, and a discount supermarket with a big ladybug on the sign. She turns to him, a little unsteady on the cobblestones.
“What are you afraid of, exactly?” she says to him. “We’re not likely to run into your family here, are we?”
“It’s not that.”
“Then what is it? You smell like a patisserie. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind having the consistent food source—”
“Everything is the same,” Dymitr says, cutting her off mid-sentence. He gestures vaguely to the street ahead of them. “The stores, the streets. All the same as when I was…”As when I thought you weren’t a person,he thinks.As when I thought it was my duty to kill you.“But nothing’s the same. The more I remember, the more I realize that every memory I have here is a horror, even the good ones.”
It feels like finding a spot on an apple, he thinks. You hope that you can just slice it away and still eat the rest of the fruit. But then you discover the flesh is brown all the way to the wormy core.
