Page 30 of To Clutch a Razor
“How?” Elza asks sharply. Filip wasn’t careless, the way some of their number are. He kept meticulous notes and took twice as long on missions as anyone else. He also rarely had the close calls that others in the Holy Order had. In the last ten years, he’d gotten injured only once.
“His notebook didn’t say.” Marzena shrugs. “But Athene ran, and Filip followed it. He chased it across the border to Berlin, where it joined up with another clan, who ferried it down through Leipzig and Frankfurt. As long as it was with them, he wrote, it was untouchable. So he decided to lay a trap, instead.”
Even if Dymitr hadn’t told Ala which room was his, she would have known it by the smell. It’s not that it smells like him, though it does—it smells like him, mixed with copper and earth, the scents that all Knights seem to have in common. No—it’s because it smells like orange peel.
The scent has taken over Ala’s apartment in the weeks since Dymitr started living there. He has few indulgences, but oranges are among them, and he leaves the peels onthe coffee table, on the kitchen counter, and even, on one occasion, on the bookshelf. His fingernails are always yellow from them. So though it’s been a month or more since he was last in his bedroom, she can still smell the orange peels in the trash can.
She shifts uncomfortably—the dybbuk is heavy; she has no idea how that teenage girl bore it for so long. She doesn’t have time to look around, but she can’t help it. She looks at his nightstand, where a Bible waits as well as an empty glass, for water, and a small bowl with dry peas in it. She puzzles over the latter for a few seconds before moving to the bookcase, where there’s a shelf of small plastic figurines: a dinosaur, a dragon, a spider, a tiger. As far as she can tell, they’re the room’s only adornment. It’s otherwise sparse, like a guest room.
She feels a pang, thinking of a younger Dymitr keeping everything he thinks, everything he feels, inside his own head because it’s not safe to say out loud. Even in the memory she shared with him, she saw how honesty was punished with penance.Ten times,his grandmother instructed him, and Ala is sure that means he had to hurt himself—in exactly what way, she doesn’t know. But it makes sense, now, why it’s so easy for Dymitr to ignore the ache of his missing sword. His life has been replete with pain.
Ala opens the door an inch to peer into the hallway. She needs to make sure the coast is clear before she leaves the room.
“Filip picked off one of the younger members of the German clan and left an invitation in its place,” says a cold, clear voice, faint enough that Ala can barely make sense of it. “Come alone,he wrote,and you can have your youngling back alive.”
Ala recoils. She’s seen so many horrors inflicted by Knights. Children murdered in their beds, or made to watch as their parents died. She thought she was desensitized to it. But the way this Knight speaks, it’s not as if she’s talking about animals. A Knight hunting creatures believing they’re like animals would, in some ways, be understandable—humans hunt animals all the time.
But no—this Knight sounds like she knowsexactlywhat she’s hunting.
And she doesn’t care.
In the next room, just a few voices sing the hymns to keep the evil spirits at bay, their voices low and creaking.
“Filip picked off one of the younger members of the German clan and left an invitation in its place.Come alone,he wrote,and you can have your youngling back alive.He knew, of course, that Athene would never come to him alone. But he went to the Black Forest, where the trees are so dense that sunlight hardly penetrates to the ground below, and he laid false trails for Athene to follow. Then he waited by the edge of the forest to watch the clan arrive, Athene among them.”
Elza glances at Dymitr, who looks just as rapt as the others, his eyes fixed on his mother’s face. Only his face is drained of color, despite the warmth in the little house. He looks almost… afraid. And no wonder: his mission is to kill Baba Jaga, a far more dangerous target than Filip’s. Filip’s death must be a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable they all are.
“Filip followed Athene through the woods and drew his sword once he was under the cover of trees.” Marzena holds her hands behind her head, as if she’s about to draw her own bone sword; Elza remembers it well, a saber, a little curved, the blade bright white. “I followed his trail of blood deep into the woods, and there I found his body. Only there was something peculiar around the body—the feathers of an owl, of course, buttwosets of footprints instead of one.”
The young cousins are staring now, wild-eyed.
“For a long time I puzzled over this,” Marzena says. “One set of footprints leading through the woods, with Filip’s behind. One set of footprints leading away from his body. But two distinct sets surrounding him in the clearing where he was killed. How did two strzygas appear where there was only one, before? And how could I determine which set of tracks to follow out of the clearing?”
“You looked at the tread of the shoes?” Elza prompts her.
“Someone is eager to race ahead,” Marzena says, disapproving, but she’s smiling. “Yes, I looked at the tread of itsshoes, and found them to be identical—another oddity. But then I realized they weren’t actually identical. In one set of footprints, the tread was worn all the way down in the heel, but only on the left foot. In the other set, the tread was worn just the same way, but in the right foot. One strzyga was the mirror image of the other.”
“She doubled herself,” Dymitr says quietly.
All eyes swivel toward him, including Elza’s. She shouldn’t be surprised at this point. Dymitr has always been best at understanding the monsters’ magic, at sensing it and tracing it and identifying it. He’s the one who told her never to give her name, when she could help it, and who explained the missing teeth and fingernails on the fresh body they discovered, once, while tracing a rusalka through the plains south of here.Teeth and fingernails are useful,he said, as if she should have known it already.
So she wasn’t surprised, the way Kazik was, when their grandmother made Dymitr curse-bearer, the keeper of a Knight’s holy rituals. The rituals are like magic, and Dymitr understands magic.
Marzena’s eyes glitter a little as she looks at her youngest son. “Yes,shedid.”
Until then she didn’t realize that Dymitr called the strzyga “she,” like it was a person. But that, too, is typical. It’s what their grandmother said a few minutes ago: this is the flaw in Dymitr’s heart that he must do penance to correct. And he has. Elza has never known a Knight tosubmit himself to more penance than Dymitr did in the months before he left for Chicago. Steeling himself for what was to come.
And despite how good his instincts are, Elza didn’t trust him to do his mission alone. She’s the reason he has to start over from scratch. She feels the ache of guilt, and wishes she’d apologized to him, instead of the other way around.
“There were two strzygas in that clearing,” Marzena says. “One a mirror image of the other.”
Ala prepares an illusion in her mind, like loading a gun: Dymitr, as he was this evening when he set out: dark pants, worn at the knee; a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, creased here and there from packing, and fraying at the cuffs. Dark circles under his eyes. His hair curling a little at the ends, too long.
Holding that image in her head, just in case, she slips out of Dymitr’s room. In the hallway, it’s easier to hear the hymns sung in reedy voices over the body, and the cold, urgent voice speaking over it.
“One a mirror image of the other,” the voice says, and Ala’s steps falter as she thinks for one horrible moment that she’s been spotted, Dymitr’s own mirror image prowling through the back of the house. But the voice continues.
“Time for you to go,” Ala says, to the dybbuk on her back.
