Page 43 of To Clutch a Razor
20A PARTING SHOT
Niko is pretty sure he’s about to die, but he’s not one to give up in the middle of a fight. He swings the saber at Marzena’s head, and she bats him aside harder than is necessary, which wrenches his broken finger. Her smile sharpens by a fraction and then she comes at him.
Whatever she was doing before was just a warm-up. This is the real thing: Marzena hacking at him with all the force of her muscled, magically strengthened body. It’s all he can do to counter each blow, his shoulder aching with the effort of holding the saber aloft.
He should transform again, but it would take a split second hedoesn’t have,because she’s putting so much pressure on him he can hardly breathe. She’s herding him back toward the wall, so he’ll have no room to evade her; he knows that, but he also can’t stop it.
He listens to the shuffle of their feet, the clang of their swords colliding, the heaving of his own breaths. But all he can see is her, eyes bright, jaw clenched, body in constant motion.
He feels the wood against his back, and brings the saber up at an awkward angle to catch her blade close to his abdomen. She slides bone against metal all the way down to the hilt of his sword, and grins crookedly at him.
“How would you like to die?” she asks him, roughly. “Bleeding, or suffocation?”
He wishes he had some kind of clever answer. She whispers the spell to break his bones again, and he hears something deep inside him cracking, and a sharp agony in his rib cage. Suddenly it’s even harder to breathe than before; he sees spots as she presses him down even harder, trying to force him to his knees.
“Zlam,” she spits, and another one of his ribspops. He screams into gritted teeth.
The wood against his back reminds him of the warm metal of the fence earlier that day, Dymitr’s hands in his shirt, the prickling of his frustration over Niko’s skin. It’s not a bad memory to go out with, really. Dymitr is beautiful like a Rembrandt painting, the only focal point in a room of darkness, expressive andsignificantsomehow. And he can see Dymitr in Marzena’s face, just a hint of him, so if he tries, he can pretend—
He goes to his knees, but he keeps pressing up against Marzena’s sword. Then he sees, as if for the first time, her boots. Knee-high. Leather. Scuffed everywhere, like she’s never bothered to polish them, with the laces all frayed. The same aura of carelessness that Dymitr carries around;he must have learned it from her. Her weight is off her left foot; it’s the one she injured—and there’s something else about it, something at the very edge of his thoughts—
She keeps a knife in her left boot,Dymitr said to him, right before they parted ways. Niko sees the knife handle poking out of the top of it. He’s reaching for it before he even decides to. He yanks it free and then stabs up, not at her belly but at her arm.
The knife goes between the bones of her forearm, slicing through tendons and arteries and muscle. Marzena’s grip on her bone sword falters, and he wrenches away from her, still on his knees. Her sword clatters to the ground, and he twists, kicking her in the left knee.
She sprawls, falling to the stone, and he grabs her bone sword in his left hand, leaving her with the knife stuck through her arm. He’s on his feet in an instant, holding the blade she made from half her soul right up against her throat.
She looks up at him. Her forehead is sweaty and her breathing is labored.
Her eyes are gray.
“Do it,” she spits at him.
Niko curses himself. He curses the wieszczy who agreed to help him and Ala with her nerves of steel, and Dymitr with his fucking gray eyes. But mostly… he curses himself, for letting himself be softened by all those things.
“You’re lucky your son is so beautiful,” he says.
And because he’s not a saint, he kicks her in the sidebefore limping out of the room, her bone sword still in his hand.
When Niko steps out of the weapons room, Ala and Dymitr are in the hallway, bloody and pale as death. Dymitr’s gaze fixes over Niko’s shoulder at the still-writhing—stillliving—form of his mother on the floor behind him. He doesn’t seem to understand what he’s looking at; Ala has to snap her fingers in front of his face to remind him they need to get moving.
And when Niko moves to put the bone sword down on a side table, Dymitr’s eyes bear down on his with startling intensity.
“Take it,” he says roughly.
So Niko does.
They go out the back and into the woods, though the woods aren’t much of a comfort out here, not when Knights are well trained in tracking. At a certain point, when they’re far enough from the house that the pressure of the Knights’ magic eases a little and Ala says she can no longer smell copper, they stop so that Niko can heal the worst of their injuries: the wound in Ala’s hip, Niko’s broken bones, and some of the deeper gashes on Dymitr’s back.
Niko’s hands shake when he lays them on Dymitr’s bloody shoulders, and he tries not to think about what it must have felt like for his own mother to cut into him like that, over and over again, with the pain magnified by ten.
When Niko asks about that particular curse, though, Dymitr just shakes his head. “Gone now,” he says, and he doesn’t elaborate. Niko puts the pieces together himself: the curse ended when Joanna’s life did.
Walking through the hotel where Ala and Dymitr are staying, all of them soaked in blood, is one of the most absurd things Niko has done lately, but he addles the night manager’s senses enough that he’s pretty sure she’ll dismiss it as a dream the following morning. Ala meets Niko’s eyes once they’re in the room, and nods toward the bathroom.
Niko leads Dymitr in with him and closes the door.
They’ve had a little Florence Nightingale moment before, in the hospice center, with Dymitr’s lost fingernail. Niko thinks about it all the time, the way something was crackling between them, but Niko wasn’t sure if he was reading it right; the way Dymitr’s eyes went wide when Niko called him beautiful; the ache Niko felt in his chest when they first kissed.
