Daughter of Smoke and Bone (17 page)

She knew that no was the right answer, but she couldn’t lie. She gasped, “Yes. Yes!”

He gave a kind of howl that chilled her worse than anything had during this whole terrible night. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Karou did not know.

“Brimstone!” Yasri squawked. “Brimstone, she’s injured!” The parrot-woman’s arms were flapping like wings. She tried to pry the Wishmonger’s hands from Karou’s wound, but he shook her off.

He dragged Karou to the front door and wrenched it open, shoving her ahead of him into the vestibule.

“Wait!” cried Issa. “You can’t put her out like that—”

But he wouldn’t hear it. “Get out, now!” he snarled at Karou. “Get away!” He wrenched open the outer door of the vestibule—another measure of his rage; the doors were never opened together,
never
, it was a fail-safe against intrusion—and the last thing she saw was his face contorted with fury before he shoved her hard and slammed the door.

Released so suddenly, she took three or four reeling steps backward before tripping off the curb and collapsing, and there she sat, stunned, barefoot, and bleeding, light-headed and gasping, in a gutter stream of melting snow. She was torn between relief that he’d let her go—for a moment she’d feared far worse than this—and disbelief that he had thrown her out injured and barely dressed into the cold.

Dazed and dizzy, she hardly knew what to do. Shivering was setting in. It was frigid out, and she was soaked with gutter slush now in addition to blood. She picked herself up and stood there, uncertain. Her flat was a ten-minute walk. Already her feet burned with the cold. She stared at the door—unsurprised now to see a black handprint on its surface—and thought surely it must open. At the very least Issa would bring her coat and shoes.

Surely.

But the door didn’t and didn’t and still didn’t open.

A car rumbled past at the end of the block, and here and there laughter and arguments drifted out windows, but no one was near. Karou’s teeth chattered. She clutched her arms around herself, for all the good it did, and stayed fixed on the door, unable to believe that Brimstone would just
leave
her out here. Cold, awful moments ticked by and finally, outraged tears springing to her eyes, Karou turned away, hugging herself, and began to limp on numb feet in the direction of her flat. She got a few wide-eyed looks along the way, and some offers of help, which she ignored, and it wasn’t until she reached her door, shivering convulsively, and reached for a coat pocket that wasn’t there that she realized she didn’t have her keys. No coat, no keys, and no shings, either, with which she would have been able to wish open the door.

“Damn damn damn,” Karou cursed, tears icy on her cheeks. All she had were the scuppies around her wrist. She took one between her fingers and wished, but nothing happened. Unlocking doors exceeded a scuppy’s small power.

She was about to buzz a neighbor awake when she sensed, behind her, a furtive movement.

She was beyond thinking. A hand came down on her shoulder, and she was all nerve and impulse. She seized the hand and threw her weight forward. The figure behind her was lifted—Karou registered a second too late the voice, concerned, saying, “Jesus, Roo, are you okay?”—to catapult over her shoulder and through the plate glass of the door.

The glass shattered as Kaz sailed through it and hit the ground with an explosive grunt. Karou stood still, the awareness catching up to her that he hadn’t even been trying to scare her this time, and now he was lying across the threshold in a litter of glass. She thought she should feel something—regret?—but she felt nothing at all.

The problem of the locked door, at least, was solved.

“Are you hurt?” she asked him, flat.

He just blinked, stunned, and she skimmed the scene with a cursory glance. No blood. The glass had broken into rectangular chunks. He was fine. She stepped over him and picked her way to the elevator. Throwing Kaz had cost her what little strength she had left, and she doubted she could walk up the six flights of stairs. The elevator doors opened and she got in, turning to face Kaz, who still hadn’t moved. He was staring after her.

“What
are
you?” he asked.

Not
who
, but
what
.

She didn’t answer. The elevator doors closed and she was alone with her reflection, in which she saw what Kaz had seen. She was wearing nothing but soaked jeans and a filmy white camisole gone see-through where it clung to her skin. Her hair clumped in blue coils around her neck, like Issa’s serpents, and rust-streaked bandages hung loose from her shoulders. Against the blood, her skin looked translucent, almost blue, and she was curled over, clutching herself and shaking like some kind of junkie. All of that was bad enough, but it was her face that caught her. Her cheek was swelling from when Brimstone had flung her into the chair, and her head was set in a hard-jawed downward tilt so that her eyes were hooded in shadow. She looked like someone you’d go a long way to avoid walking past, she thought. She looked… not entirely human.

The elevator doors pinged open and she dragged herself down the hall. She had to climb out a window to get onto her balcony, and break a pane out of her balcony door to get into her apartment, and she managed it before her strength gave out or her shivering incapacitated her, and finally she was inside, stripping off her wet clothes. She dragged herself onto her bed, tugged a quilt around her, curled up in a ball, and sobbed.

Who are you?
she asked herself, remembering the angel’s question, and the wolf’s. But it was Kaz’s that reverberated through her, an echo that wouldn’t die.

What
are you?

What?

20

T
RUE
S
TORY

Karou spent the weekend alone in her apartment, feverish, bruised, sliced, slashed, and miserable. Rising from bed on Saturday was torture. Her muscles seemed to have been wound with winches, tight enough to snap. Everything hurt. Everything. It was hard to pick out one pain from the next, and she looked like a brochure on domestic violence, her cheek achieving coconut proportions and blooming blue to rival her hair.

She considered calling Zuzana for help but abandoned the idea when she realized she didn’t have her phone. It was with her coat and shoes, bag, wallet, keys, and sketchbook, back at the shop. She could have e-mailed, but in the time it took to boot up her laptop she imagined how Zuzana would react to the sight of her, and she knew her friend wouldn’t let things pass this time with evasions. Karou would have to tell her something. She was too tired to come up with a lie, so she ended up feeding herself Tylenol and tea and passing the weekend in a daze of chills and sweats, pain and nightmares.

She woke often to imagined sounds and looked to her windows, hoping as she had never hoped to see Kishmish with a note, but he didn’t come, and the weekend went by with no one checking on her—not Kaz, whom she’d put through plate glass, and not Zuzana, whom she’d conditioned to accept her absences with wary silence. She had never felt so alone.

Monday came, and she still didn’t leave the apartment. Erratically she kept up with the tea and Tylenol. Sleep was a carousel of nightmares, the same creatures coming around again and again—the angel, the thing on Izîl’s back, the wolf chimaera, Brimstone in fury—and when she opened her eyes the light would have changed, but nothing else did except perhaps that her misery deepened.

It was dark when the buzzer rang. And rang. And rang. She pulled herself over to the console by the door and croaked, “Hello?”

“Karou?” It was Zuzana. “Karou, what the hell? Buzz me up, truant.”

Karou was so glad to hear her friend’s voice, so glad someone had come to check on her, that she burst into tears. When Zuzana came through the door she found Karou sitting on the edge of her bed, tears streaming down her battered face. She came to a halt, all five-almost-feet atop cartoonish platform boots, and said, “Oh. Oh. God.
Karou
.” She was across the tiny room in a streak. Her hands were cool from the wintry air, and her voice was soft, and Karou put her head on her friend’s shoulder and cried for long minutes without stopping.

Things got better after that.

Zuzana got her settled without asking questions, then went out for supplies: soup; bandages; a box of butterfly closures for sealing the split flesh along Karou’s collarbone, arm, and shoulder, where the angel’s sword had cut her.

“These are going to be some serious scars,” said Zuzana, bent over her doctoring with the same concentration she applied to building marionettes. “When did this happen? You should have gone to the hospital right away.”

“I did,” said Karou, thinking of Yasri’s balm. “Sort of.”

“And what—? Are these
claw marks
?” Both of Karou’s upper arms were livid purple, darkest where Brimstone’s fingers had sunk in, and pierced with scabbed puncture marks.

“Um,” said Karou.

Zuzana regarded her in silence, then got up and heated the soup she’d brought. She sat on a chair beside the bed, and when Karou finished eating, she kicked her feet—bootless now—up on the mattress and folded her hands in her lap. “Okay,” Zuzana said. “I’m ready.”

“For what?”

“For a really good story that I hope will be the truth.”

The truth. Karou attempted a subject change—“First tell me what happened Saturday with violin boy”—while she rolled the idea of truth around in her mind.

Zuzana snorted. “I don’t think so. Well, his name is Mik, but that’s all you’re getting until you do some talking.”

“His name! You got his name!” This morsel of normal life made Karou almost absurdly happy.

“Karou, I’m serious.” She
was
serious. Her dark Slavic eyes took on a no-nonsense intensity that Karou had told her in the past would stand her in good stead as an interrogator with the secret police. “Tell me what the hell happened to you.”

The thing was, Karou told the truth all the time, but she told it with that sardonic smile, as if she were being outrageous. Did she even have a facial expression that went with telling the truth in earnest? And what would she say? This wasn’t a story she could ease into gently, like dipping a toe in cold water. She had to just jump.

“An angel tried to kill me,” she said.

A beat, and then, “Uh-huh.”

“No, really.” Karou was conscious—too conscious—of her expression. She felt as if she were auditioning for the role of “truth teller” and trying way too hard.

“Did Jackass do this?”

Karou laughed, too quick and too hard, then winced and held her swollen cheek. The idea of Kaz hurting her was just silly. Well, hurting her
physically
, though now even the idea that he could have hurt her heart seemed silly, with everything else she had to worry about. “No. It wasn’t Kaz. The cuts were made by a sword, when an angel tried to kill me Friday night. In Morocco. God, it was probably on the news. Then there was this wolf guy who I thought was dead but was most definitely
not
. The rest was Brimstone. And, oh. Um, everything in my sketchbooks is true.” She held her wrists out, lined up so her tattoos spelled out
true story
. “See? It’s a hint.”

Zuzana was not amused. “Jesus, Karou—”

Karou plunged ahead. The truth, she found, felt
smooth
, like a skipping stone in the palm of your hand. “And my hair? I don’t dye it. I wished it this color. And I speak twenty-six languages, and those were mostly wishes, too. Didn’t you ever think it was weird that I speak Czech? I mean, who speaks Czech but Czechs? Brimstone gave it to me for my fifteenth birthday, right before I came here. Oh, and remember the malaria? I got it in Papua New Guinea, and it sucked. And I’ve been shot, too, and I think I killed the bastard, and I’m not sorry, and for some reason an angel tried to kill
me
, and he was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and also the scariest, though that wolf guy was pretty freaking scary, too, and last night I pissed off Brimstone really bad and he threw me out, and when I got back here Kaz was waiting and I threw him through glass, which worked out great actually because I didn’t have my key.” Pause. “So I don’t think he’ll try scaring me again, which is about the only good thing to come of all this.”