Page 27 of To Clutch a Razor
In the next room, the singers drone on, and the mournful tune is, somehow, the perfect background music for the tale of Filip’s strzyga.
11A RESTLESS SPIRIT
Ala crouches next to a pine tree, her phone in her hand so she doesn’t miss the signal. One hundred yards in front of her is the house of Knights, lit up like a lantern against the night. She can see shadows shifting behind the lace curtains of each window. The gravel driveway is packed with cars.
She watched them all arrive from her place in the trees, kneeling in the dirt to make sure she wasn’t visible over the brush. Despite knowing they couldn’t see her, she still quaked with terror at the sight of so many of them. They were too far away for her to recognize them, but she suspects she would, if she saw them up close—she would know their faces from the memories that once played for her every morning like a horror film.
She’s glad she didn’t see them up close.
All around her is the cool, humid air and the buzz of insects and the rustling of birds in the trees. She hears music coming from the house, a dirge that reminds her of going to church with her mother as a child, with an itchy dress on and shoes that pinched her toes. Her mother insistedon going every Sunday until Ala was fourteen, and when Ala asked her why, she said that some days it was an act of devotion, and some days it was an act of defiance.The Holy Order doesn’t get to decide who receives salvation and who doesn’t,her mother said.They don’t get to take this from us.Ala agreed with the sentiment, even if she didn’t share her mother’s faith.
Behind her, she hears voices from somewhere among the trees. Her stomach gives a lurch. She draws the knife at her hip and turns her back on the house of Knights, creeping into the darkness to see what’s going on.
She doesn’t have to go far. There’s a small pond a dozen yards behind her, and there are two figures at the edge of it, one crouched and one… strange.
A cloud passes over the moon, and in the clarity of the moonlight Ala sees them for what they are. A girl—but not just a girl. She has lanky arms and acne-spotted cheeks, and there’s a body growing out of her spine, like a plant sprouting from a crack in a stone. Black fabric swirls around the body, and instead of a human head, a human face, all Ala can see is a skull.
They’re back-to-back, the girl andwhatever it is,attached at the spine and facing two different directions. It’s the girl, though, who’s holding a sword to a man’s throat.
The man isn’t facing her head-on, so it takes her a moment to recognize that he’s Niko.
She knew Niko was going on a hunt, but she never imagined he’d turn up here, in the same town whereDymitr’s grandmother lives—or that he would turn uphere,in the woods right behind the woman’s house, when the entire family is gathered inside it. The sight of him is so incongruous, in fact, that all she can do is gape at him as he kneels in the dirt at the mercy of this two-bodied thing.Badass zemsta my ass.
“If you are planning to go inside the cockroach nest, you should say so,” the girl is saying to Niko. As her mouth moves, the mouth of the skull behind her also moves, the teeth clattering together in a gruesome imitation of speech. “Because I have no use for a means of conveyance that’s about to die.”
The girl’s voice is high and young. As a cloud passes over the moon, the body attached to the girl’s back disappears, as if it was never there.
Ala’s phone buzzes in her pocket; Dymitr is giving her the signal. But she can’t leave now, not until she knows Niko is safe. And she doesn’t want to step out of the relative safety of the trees until she knows what this thing is.
She also wants to spit curses at Niko, because he’s currently, at this very moment, fucking everything up for her.
“You wouldn’t like possessing me,” Niko says. “My life is too full of danger. You should find someone more boring. A shopkeeper, maybe, or a farmer—”
Ala’s heard of possessing spirits. Too many, in fact; people all over the world believe in spirits. She’s most familiar with the idea of demon possession, something her mother didn’t believe in, but other Catholic zmoras seem to.Weexist, so why not demons?Even if they’re wrong about the particulars, they seem to agree that the possessing spirit is malicious, like a host-devouring parasite.
There are other spirits, though, that seem to be neutral, or even beneficial to the host. She has no idea what this one is, though given the knife she’s holding to Niko’s throat, she’s betting on “malicious.”
“You don’t know what I’dlike,” the girl says, her voice now impossibly deep. “So few of my people are left in this place, and even fewer of my kind. No one knows me, not even when they try to draw magic from the land and it twists in their hands. No one is left to know what I want.”
The girl turns her head and spits. Then she leans down to whisper into Niko’s ear, and her voice is so deep that it carries over to where Ala stands among the trees.
“You think I want a quiet life? I don’t want a life at all.” She turns the blade so it catches the light of the moon. Niko’s next swallow is labored. “I already lived. Now I want what comes after. And you’re going to get me there.”
Ala still doesn’t know what this is, but she’s running out of time. She steps forward, into the moonlight.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “But I feel like I should point out that if you were going to possess him, you would have done it already. Which means either your threat is empty, or… that you can’t do it.”
The girl looks up at her. As it so often is, it’s the eyes that give her away. She doesn’t look at Ala the way a normal teenage girl would—wary, maybe, or bored, orcurious. She looks at Ala like she’s tired. Worn down by the world.
“I can,” the girl says.
Niko lets out a short laugh.
“You can’t,” Ala says, as calmly as she can manage. “The only reason you’re still alive is because your host is a child, and my friend doesn’t want to kill her. Congratulations, by the way, that’s a new level of fucked up.”
“Ala, the host is still alive under there,” Niko says in English, and it takes effort for her to understand him, like her ears have almost forgotten the words. “I can hear her heart.”
The phone in Ala’s pocket is like a stone weighing her down. She has togo. She can’t go.
