Page 4 of To Clutch a Razor
“We do it in here,” Filip said, gesturing to the weapons room before them. “You’ll lie on a table, face down. There will be four Knights with you. One will be your mentor, when you get one. One will speak the words of the ritual. And the other two…” He looked at Dymitr, assessing. “The other two will hold you down.”
Dymitr’s mouth went dry.
“Your mentor will take their own blade and cut into your back. Right down the center.”
Dymitr imagined it like carving a chicken: his skin crispy beneath the blade, clear juices bubbling up from that first cut. He shuddered.
Filip continued, “Then they’ll cut into themselves, and let their blood spill into the wound. The words of the ritual are spoken, and then…” He swallowed hard. “It will hurt. It will feel like every bone in your body is breaking. It will feel like a thousand deaths. You’ll pass out. But then, when you wake… you’ll be twice as powerful as before.”
Filip reached out and put his hand on Dymitr’s head. He gave him a serious look.
“Don’t fear pain, Dymek,” he said. “Fear… losing your purpose, losing your family, losing yourself. Those things are worse than pain.”
Dymitr chose this coffee shop because it has two exits.
Well, and because the baristas are good at latte art. There’s one, Zuri, who always draws something special for him. Most of the time, she just makes beautiful patterns, but once it was a swan, once it was a seahorse, once a four-leaf clover. Her cheek dimples when she smiles. And she’s always stressed, which he’s now realizing is a source of appeal… given that he now eats fear.
He sits by the window, equidistant from each exit, and waits for John to arrive.
There are American families of Knights, of course. Onefor each region. Like the country itself, their traditions are cobbled together from other places, a patchwork-quilt version of Knighthood that Dymitr’s family always liked to sneer at… despite the fact that they themselves had pieced their practices together from Polish tradition and Kashubian and Jewish, from Orthodoxy and Catholicism and paganism. The hypocrisy stands out to Dymitr now, though it never did before.
John is slim and blond and walks with forearm crutches. His skin is a few shades darker than Dymitr’s, like he recently spent some time in the sun. When he spots Dymitr sitting by the window, he grins, and Dymitr has to wonder how John identified him so quickly. The coffee shop is crowded with stressed-out students hunched over their laptops, spandex-clad yoga students with mats tucked under their table, and two older men playing cards.
“Process of elimination,” John says, like he heard Dymitr’s thoughts. Once he’s seated, he leans the crutches up against the window. “You must be Dymitr.”
He makes the name sound clumsy. He offers Dymitr his hand, and Dymitr shakes it. He’s tense, even though John never became a Knight, so he can’t use magic to see what Dymitr really is. From what he’s heard, John makes up for his lack of magic in other ways. He’s adept at following digital footprints—increasingly important these days—and has a knack for spotting things others don’t.
“A pleasure to meet you,” Dymitr says.
“I’m glad our schedules overlapped. I’m only here for acouple days. Have you tried a hot dog yet? I’m told I need to surrender to the full cadre of toppings, but I’m suspicious of the neon-green relish.”
Dymitr was already aware that John talked a lot, but hearing it in person is another thing entirely.
“I haven’t, no,” Dymitr says.
“You Eastern Europeans always have this aura of profound gloom, you know that?” John waves at Dymitr’s face. “Or maybe Americans are just obnoxiously chipper. That world-famous optimism, right? Not so much to be optimistic about these days, of course—”
Though Dymitr didn’t ask, John launches into a summary of the situation across the Midwest. The region is spotted with so-called monstervilles—small towns full of creatures of all varieties who realized they could band together to keep themselves safe. And that’s not even accounting for the new influx ofthingsfrom all around the world.
“Not just your old-world standards anymore,” John says, with an exaggerated wince.
“The world is the same age no matter where you go,” Dymitr replies. “Just because it’s new to you doesn’t mean it’s new.”
John blinks at him, like Dymitr was just spouting philosophy instead of a simple fact.
“Suppose you’re right about that,” he says with a shrug. “Now what was it you wanted to meet about? Something about…swords?”
“I heard you’re the Moore family historian,” Dymitr says. “I wondered if you’d ever come across information about what happens when a Knight is parted from their sword.”
Zuri, of course, chooses that moment to carry John’s latte over to their table. The face of an owl stares up at Dymitr from the mug, and he feels a bubble of hysterical laughter in his chest as he thinks of Niko, his strzygon… not-quite-boyfriend, and the second form he can shrug on and off like a jacket.
Zuri winks at Dymitr, who manages a weak smile, and tells them to holler if they need anything else, one of those folksy phrases that sounds wrong if Dymitr tries to say it in his accent.
Once Zuri is gone, John leans over the table, conspiratorially.
“As a matter of fact, I have,” John says. “And a more recent account than you’d think. My great-grandfather’s death was a bit of a family mystery for most of my life, right? In our family records he was a beast of a man, big and strapping, killed a whole bunch of game”—gameis what they call their work in public, in case anyone is listening to their conversation—“and then one day, poof. Gone. No account of what got him, if anything. Weird stuff. But my grandfather, he left behind a lot of old journals when he passed, and guess who has two thumbs and got tasked with reading through all of them?”
He gives Dymitr a double thumbs-up, and then points back at himself.
