Page 47 of To Clutch a Razor
Dymitr doesn’t react. Doesn’t move at all, in fact—just stares at her, waiting.
“I’ve been having nightmares that replay everything the curse showed me. Especially about her. I thought if she was dead, I would get some peace. And I thought, because I’d seen so many memories of Knights, I knew how to fight them.” She closes her eyes. Swallows hard. “But none of that was true.”
She dreamed about Joanna last night, in fact. The same memory, playing again. She woke with the same trembling in her hands, and realized she’d been thinking of the aftermath of the curse as a puzzle to be solved. If shecould just get the letters in the right place, she would be free from it. But there’s no puzzle. Only a tangle. A knot that will take a lifetime to untie.
“The second thing I want to say is,” she says, “I—I’m sorry. I know how much you loved your grandmother, and that you only had to do that to her because I couldn’t manage to do it myself. And now I’ll always be the one you did that for, and… I’m sorry.”
Dymitr seizes her hand. His grip is warm and strong.
“Never…neversay that to me again,” he says, quiet but insistent.
Ala wipes her tears away with her fingers.
“What you will always be to me now,” he says, “is my sister, who I love and want to be safe. Understand?”
Their hands are clasped over the narrow metal armrest.
Ala nods. A garbled voice speaks over the intercom, warning them about upcoming turbulence. A man in a hooded sweatshirt squeezes past Ala’s seat in the aisle. The intensity between them passes, though Ala still feels unsteady, like she’s about to scream or sob or laugh out loud.
“Want a chip?” Dymitr says, and it should be strange that he’s still holding her hand, but it isn’t. It feels nice, instead.
“Are you referring to the hardened, salted paste of your preferred airport snack?” she says. “Because I don’t really think they qualify as ‘chips.’”
He grins at her—as much as he can, anyway, without reopening the split in his lip.
She leans her head on his shoulder, and he turns on a movie, and she thinks that if she’s going to spend her life untangling all this pain, at least she has someone she cares about to do it with.
At least she has him.
23A BONE SWORD
Baba Jaga likes to go for walks on summer nights in Chicago. Even she isn’t immune to the charms of this time of year. She wraps herself in a younger woman’s skin and walks the hot sidewalks with people coming in from the beach, still covered in sand. She lets panting dogs trot alongside her and nudge her with their wet noses. She listens to the screeching of the cicadas and the lapping of Lake Michigan against the rocks that hold it at bay. She swats at mosquitos and spots robins plucking fireflies out of the air and teenagers hiding their beers when they hear her approach.
The Knight is sitting on her steps when she returns to her house that evening. His face is spotted black-and-blue, and he sits like that’s not the worst of it, but it’s his aura that concerns her most. He wears his sorrow like a very heavy crown, indeed. The banshees and lloronas of the neighborhood could all feast on him at once and still leave sated.
He looks up at her, andsniffs—such a zmora greeting, they’re like a pack of dogs that way, only trusting theirnoses. He seems to recognize who she really is, but he doesn’t move out of her way, or come to his feet to let her pass. He’s here to be an obstruction.
She sighs. “You’ve piqued my curiosity, Knight. You can come in.”
He stands up, then. Stiff as an old man in his movements, and she wonders if she should offer to heal him just so she doesn’t have to see him wince like that. But not until she knows where the pain came from—not until she knows what it’s teaching him.
She climbs the creaky steps with their worn carpet, the smell of fried chicken following her all the way to the third-floor landing. The door opens for her, and the apartment lights up at her approach, every lamp at once. The lava lamp in the corner over the table of bones; the pink art deco lamp with the fringe shade; the lamp with the Tiffany-style shade covered in blue flowers; the fairy lights strung over one of the archways that wink on and off every second. She unwraps the shawl that makes her look like a younger, lighter-haired woman, and hangs it on a hook on the wall.
Beneath it, she’s old and weathered, which suits her mood. There’s gray mixed with the black of her long, thick hair. She beckons for the Knight to follow her deeper into the apartment, and stands before the apothecary table where she once mixed the cure for what ailed him.
Now, she arranges the ingredients for a healing potion, just in case she decides to give it to him. A thin slice ofdried starfish, a tiny spoonful of salamander eyes, a pinch of yarrow root, three drops of aloe vera, a preserved calendula petal. She puts them in the huge mortar, but doesn’t crush them with the pestle yet.
“And so?” she says to the Knight.
“I’ve come to make a deal with you,” he replies.
She laughs, and takes up the pestle. It’s so big it only just fits in her hand; hardly necessary for this particular blend, but she grinds the eyes and the petal and the yarrow and the starfish slice into a paste with the aloe vera.
“You came here before as a supplicant, and now you’re here as a businessman,” she says. “What changed?”
He hesitates, and she hears a murmur in that hesitation that interests her. She cocks her head, and then looks over her shoulder at his bruised face.
“You killed her,” she says softly.
