Page 44 of To Clutch a Razor
Well, this isn’t like that.
There’s nothing sexy-sweet about peeling the blood-soaked shirt from Dymitr’s body, or listening to his harsh breaths, or surveying the damage his own mother did to him. All Niko can do is try not to stare. He crouches in front of Dymitr and takes off his boots for him.
“You didn’t kill her,” Dymitr says roughly. “Why?”
And Niko says, “You know why.”
He straightens. Dymitr reaches for Niko’s hand. Hishold a little too tight, he brings their clasped hands to his chest. Niko feels the hard thump of Dymitr’s heart.
“Dziekuje,” Dymitr says, and it’s as solemn as a vow.Thank you.
As Dymitr strips down and steps into the shower, Niko splashes water on his face at the sink, and takes off his shirt to examine the magical wound Marzena gave him just by commanding his skin to split. It’s not pretty, and it’s still bleeding. He should probably stitch it; maybe there’s a sewing kit in one of the drawers.
Then he hears Dymitr sobbing like he’s trying to keep it quiet, and he thinks,Fuck it,and he gets into the shower, too, still half-clothed and determined to ignore the sudden intimacy of Dymitr’s nakedness as he gathers the other man close.
The water is so warm it’s almost too hot, and the hotel soap smells like a Jolly Rancher. Dymitr tucks his face into the side of Niko’s neck. He holds Niko so tightly they meld together, Dymitr’s shaking body against his, the water drumming against Niko’s back. He runs his fingers through Dymitr’s wet hair, and doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing to say.
21A MEETING OF SISTERS
Elza is the best tracker, so while the others deal with the aftermath—with her grandmother’s body, rendered small and frail in death; with the knife speared through her mother’s arm; with the wieszczy who appeared at Filip’s grave and then vanished, seemingly without a trace; with the grave itself, waiting for Filip’s body to fill it; with her young cousin André, who disappeared sometime in the night; with all of it, the whole fucking nightmare of it all—
While the others deal with the aftermath, Elza follows the trail into town.
In truth, there’s no need for the best tracker to complete this task. The three intruders who turned everything in her life upside down last night didn’t go to much effort to disguise their tracks. They left bloody, muddy footprints through the forest, then stopped—to heal themselves, she thinks, because the footprints became less bloody after that—and then continued into town, where they walked right into a hotel. All Elza had to do to figure out what room they were in was wait for a light to go on.
The intruders,that’s how she thinks of them now.Because that man, the one who killed her grandmother, can’t possibly be Dymitr. He has to be somethingwearing Dymitr’s face again, or Dymitr himself has to be cursed, his mind addled by magic—because the alternative is impossible.
Isn’t it?
She creeps up to a window, and draws her bone swords, her teeth gritted with fury as she remembers the way her grandmother’s face looked, so pale, her eyes still open but unseeing. She’s here to exact bloody vengeance on all three of them, and she’s going to start by climbing through the bathroom window to ambush them while they’re still hurt and exhausted from their escape. She’s going to startright now.
She reaches up to see if the window is unlocked, and hears… sobbing.
She braces herself against the stucco wall. She knows that sound. She’s heard it just a few times before, through the paper-thin walls of their house, through the bathroom door, but it’s not easy to forget the sound of your older brother falling apart.
That’s him.
That’s really him.
She goes still, her body gripped with fear as she realizes the Dymitr she spent dinner trading knowing looks with was not, in fact, some zmora skilled with illusions and mimicry, or some strzygon wearing a magical skin, but the real him.
And somehow, the real him… is now a monster.
Baba Jaga must have cursed him. That’s the only explanation she can think of. Baba Jaga cursed him, and he was too afraid to tell anyone what happened because he thought they would kill him, and—and he was right to fear that, because her mother would have spent the night torturing him for information and then, whether he gave it or not, slit his throat at sunrise.
But that doesn’t explain why he lied to protect the zmora. Or why there’s a murmur just audible through the glass—the strzygon, its voice deep and rumbling as an engine, trying to soothe him.
She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand, and she needs to, or this bloody night will haunt her for the rest of her life. So she sheathes her swords and decides to wait.
It takes hours for anything to happen. Elza knows she should go home, if she’s not going to act—go home, and change into her funeral clothes, so she can be there when they bury Filip. But she can’t make herself move. Not until she understands what happened to her brother.
Around sunrise, the zmora steps out of the hotel and walks down the road. Elza follows it all the way to the forest again.
The light is weak and pale, and there’s dew clinging to all the spiderwebs. When Elza finds herself getting tooclose to the zmora, she stops to examine one, a symmetrical orb weaver’s web with the spider herself perched in the middle, her legs curled up around her.
The zmora isn’t making much effort to move quietly. It ducks under branches and hops over logs and swats at the little flies that are already out in force. It keeps pausing to sniff the air, like a hunting dog. Whatever scent it’s following, it follows all the way to the fort where Elza, Kazik, and Dymitr used to play as children.
Elza grits her teeth.No,she thinks.It can’t be.
