Page 36 of To Clutch a Razor
“Let’s begin,” she says.
Marzena draws the knife from her boot, and grabs him by the hair again to drag him upright. He has to bite back a scream at the pulling in his scalp, which feels like she’s trying to rip off his skin. His eyes are full of tears, though he’s never cried from pain before, not even when he was strapped face down at his Knight ceremony and his grandmother was cutting a line across his shoulders to create space for the bone sword.
“What,” his grandmother says, her mouth twisted into a sneer, “are you planning?”
“I can’t—” He chokes. He’s already in so much pain, and they’re only just beginning. “I can’t tell you—”
Pain explodes across his back as Marzena drags her knife over his shoulder blade.
He screams.
15A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT
Ala never thought of herself as steady in a crisis until her mother, deteriorating rapidly thanks to the bloodline curse that later passed to Ala herself, begged for death, and Ala granted it.
Ala looked at her bone-pale, emaciated mother, shuddering in the corner of her bathroom, and opened the medicine cabinet to tip a few sleeping pills into her hand. Just enough to ferry her mother into unconsciousness. She ran her hand over her mother’s hair as the woman drank them down with the glass of water from her bedside table.
Then, once she drifted off, Ala found the sharpest blade in the house to take care of the rest. She remembers only select moments from the act itself—how warm her mother’s skin was against her hand as she eased her down into a prone position on the tile, how hard it was to actually pierce her flesh—
But the aftermath is a stain she can’t remove from her mind. There was so much blood.
She accomplished it all without weeping, without hysterics, and without hesitation. Even Klara commented onit when she came to collect the body so that the Dryjas could dispose of it for her. Ala was just sitting on the couch in her living room, watchingLaw & Order,her mother’s corpse wrapped in a dark sheet on the bathroom floor. Everything was neat and tidy. Even Ala’s fingernails were trim and clean. Klara said,It’s a little disturbing how calm you are, you know.
Ala kept waiting for the breakdown after that, for the moment when the numbness faded and the horror set in. But there was less horror than she expected in the act of releasing her mother from agony.
She didn’t panic back then, and she doesn’t panic now, moving through the trees in pursuit of Nikodem Kostka. He can’t have gone far. His quarry—Marzena, Dymitr’s mother—is still inside.
The sight of Marzena, with just enough of Dymitr in her eyes and in her mouth to make the comparison unavoidable, watching impassively as Joanna bashed the hilt of her sword into her son’s head, made Ala feel like she’d been caught in a winter rain and drenched to the bone.
And Joanna herself—sofamiliarin a way she hadn’t been when Ala walked through one of Dymitr’s memories. Her mind was too addled by the fear of the curse to really pay attention, then, but in person, Joanna’s eyes, herface—
It’s better not to think of that now. If she thinks of whatshe saw in that weapons room, then she’ll think of Dymitr with his mouth determinedly closed, letting her pretend to be him to save her own skin even though it means pain and death for him.
All her doubts about Dymitr’s new loyalties are gone now. And she’s equally sure that he’ll forgive her for ridding herself of the torments his grandmother caused her. Of all the people that walk the earth, she’s the only one he won’t be able to condemn for killing one of his family.
Not after he killed one of hers.
Her nose isn’t impressive by zmora standards, but it’s not difficult to pick out Niko from the smell of wet earth and car exhaust permeating the woods. He smells like anxiety and trepidation, like powdered sugar and hazelnut. Ala’s mouth waters as she follows the scent to its source.
He’s crouched at the edge of the woods, near the back of the house but still in position to watch the front door. When she draws near, his hand moves to the hilt of the knife at his side. His bright eyes fix on her, and he relaxes.
“I need your help,” she says, and maybe she’s not as calm and steady as she thinks, because he comes to his feet, looking alarmed.
“What happened?”
“After I let the dybbuk loose, I… ran into someone. Dymitr’s sister. I had an illusion at the ready, but she saw two of us. Two Dymitrs.” She fights to swallow. “I couldn’t get away. I convinced them I was him, but now they have him instead—and they know he’s a zmora.”
A scream—distant but agonized—sounds from somewhere deep in the house, like the house is a ship and the scream is its horn, wailing into the night as a warning to fellow travelers. She feels it in every inch of her body, and she knows it’s Dymitr.
Niko’s face flickers into his owl form in the space of a moment: he’s a man, then a sharp-beaked bird with wings manifesting over his shoulders, and then a man again, knife drawn, eyes wild.
“Fucking hell, I have to go in there,” Niko says. “I have to get him, I have to—”
Ala, though, feels the steadiness of knowing what she needs to do, even if it’s dangerous, even if it will kill her.
“I have a plan,” she says. “And it’s very, very stupid.”
16A PERFECT REFLECTION
