Daughter of Smoke and Bone (30 page)

“Are you going to introduce us?” Akiva asked. The chimaera tongue, which they had been using all along, now sounded out of place, like a rough echo from another world.

Karou nodded, fanning away laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said, and made a cursory introduction. “Of course, I’ll have to translate if you want to say anything to each other.”

“Ask him if he’s in love with you,” said Zuzana at once.

Karou almost choked. She turned her whole body in her chair to face Zuzana, who held up a hand before she could protest. “I know, I know. You’re not going to ask him that. And you don’t even need to. He so
is
. Look at him! I’m afraid he’s going to set you on fire with his crazy orange eyes.”

It did feel like that, Karou had to admit. But
love
? That was preposterous. She said so.

“You want to know what’s preposterous?” said Zuzana, still studying Akiva, who looked bemused by her appraisal. “That widow’s peak is preposterous.
God.
It really makes you feel the sad dearth of widow’s peaks in daily life. We could, like, use him as breeding stock to seed widow’s peaks into the populace.”

“My god. What’s with all the mating and seed talk?”

“I’m just saying,” Zuzana said reasonably. “I’m crazy about Mik, okay, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my part for the proliferation of widow’s peaks. As a favor to the gene pool. You would, too, right? Or maybe…” She shot Karou a sidelong glance. “You already
have
?”

“What?” Karou was aghast. “No! What do you think I am?”

She was certain Akiva couldn’t understand, but there was an amused quirk to his mouth. He asked what Zuzana had said, and Karou felt her face flame crimson.

“Nothing,” she told him in Chimaera. In Czech she added, sternly, “She. Did not say. Anything.”

“Yes, I did,” piped Zuzana, and like a child who has gotten a reaction for naughty antics, she merrily repeated, “Mating! Seed!”

“Zuze, stop, please,” begged Karou, helpless and so very glad the two had no common language.

“Fine,” said her friend. “I can be polite. Observe.” She addressed Akiva directly. “Welcome to our world,” she said with exaggerated gestures. “I hope that you are enjoying your visit.”

Chewing on a smile, Karou translated.

Akiva nodded. “Thank you.” To Karou, “Would you tell her, please, that her performance was beautiful?”

Karou did. “I know,” agreed Zuzana. It was her standard acceptance of a compliment, but Karou could tell she was pleased. “It was Karou’s idea.”

Karou didn’t convey that. She said instead, “She’s an amazing artist.”

“So are you,” Akiva replied, and it was Karou’s turn to be pleased.

She told him they went to a school for the arts, and he said they had nothing like that in his world; only apprenticeships. She told him that Zuzana was kind of like an apprentice, that she came from a family of artisans, and she wondered if he was from a family of soldiers. “In a manner of speaking,” he replied. His siblings were soldiers, and so had his father been in his day. He said the word
father
with an edge, and Karou sensed animosity and didn’t press, and talk shifted back to art. The conversation, filtered through Karou—and Zuzana, even on her best behavior, required a high degree of filtering—was surprisingly easy. Too easy, she thought.

Why was it so easy for her to laugh with this seraph, and keep forgetting the image of the fiery portal, and Kishmish’s little raw body as his heartbeat went wild and then failed? She had to keep reminding herself, chastening herself, and even so, when she looked at Akiva, it all wanted to slip away—all her caution and self-control.

After a moment, he remarked, nodding toward Zuzana, “She’s not actually very scary. You had me worried.”

“Well, you disarm her. You have that effect.”

“I do? It didn’t seem to work on you, yesterday.”

“I had more reason to fight it,” she said. “I have to keep reminding myself we’re enemies.”

It was as if a shadow fell over them. Akiva’s expression turned remote again, and he put his hands under the table, removing his tattoos from her sight.

“What did you just say to him?” Zuzana asked.

“I reminded him that we’re enemies.”

“
Tch
. Whatever you are, Karou, you are
not
enemies.”

“But we are,” she said, and they
were
, no matter how powerfully her body was trying to convince her otherwise.

“Then what are you doing, watching sunrises and drinking tea with him?”

“You’re right. What
am
I doing? I don’t know what I’m doing.” She thought of what she
should
be doing: getting herself to Morocco to find Razgut; flying through that slash in the sky to… Eretz. A chill snaked through her. She’d been so focused on getting gavriels that she’d avoided thinking too much about what it would be like to actually
go
, and now with Akiva’s depiction of his world fresh in her mind—war-torn, bleak—dread crept over her; suddenly, she didn’t want to go anywhere.

What was she supposed to do when she got there, anyway? Fly up to the bars of that forbidding fortress and politely ask if Brimstone was at home?

“Speaking of enemies,” Zuzana said, “Jackass was on TV this morning.”

“Good for him,” said Karou, still in her own thoughts.

“No. Not good.
Bad.
Bad Jackass.”

“Oh no. What did he do?”

“Well, while you’ve been watching sunrises with your
enemy
, the news has been all over you, and a certain actor has been most helpful, preening for the camera and telling the world all about you. Like, um,
bullet scars
? He’s made you out to be some kind of gangster’s moll—”

“
Moll?
Please. If anything, I’m the gangster—”

“Anyway,”
Zuzana cut her off. “I’m sorry to say that whatever anonymity you might have had, blue-haired girl, your flying stunt put an end to it. The police are probably at your flat—”

“What?”

“Yeah. They’re calling your fight a ‘disturbance’ and saying they just want to talk to the, er,
people
involved, if anyone knows their whereabouts.”

Akiva, seeing her distress, wanted to know what was being said; she quickly translated. His look darkened. He stood and moved to the door, glancing out. “Will they come for you here?” he asked. Karou saw the protectiveness in his stance, shoulders hunched and tense, and she realized that in his world, such a threat might be much more dire.

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “It’s not like that. They would just ask questions. Really.” He didn’t move away from the door. “We didn’t break any laws.” She turned to Zuzana and switched to Czech. “It’s not like there’s a law against flying.”

“Yes there is. The law of
gravity
. The point is that you are looked for.” She shot a glance at the waitress, who was skulking nearby and most certainly eavesdropping. “Isn’t that right?”

The waitress blushed. “I haven’t called anyone,” she was quick to say. “You’re okay to stay here. Do… do you want more tea?”

Zuzana waved her off and told Karou, “You can’t stay here forever, obviously.”

“No.”

“So what’s the plan?”

Plan. Plan. She
had
a plan, and it was near its fruition. All she had to do now was
go
. Leave her life here, leave school, her flat, Zuzana, Akiva… No. Akiva was
not
part of her life. Karou looked at him, watchful in the doorway, ready to protect her, and she tried to imagine walking away from the…
placeness
… of him, the rightness, the patch of sunlight, the
pull
. All she had to do was get up and leave. Right?

A moment passed in silence, and Karou’s body did not so much as twitch in response to the idea of leaving.

“The plan,” she said, exerting a massive effort of will and facing up to it. “The plan is to go away.”

Akiva had been looking out the door, and only when he pivoted to face her did she realize she’d spoken in Chimaera, addressing this to him.

“Away? Where?”

“Eretz,” she said, standing up. “I told you. I’m going to find my family.”

Dismay spread over his face as understanding dawned. “You really have a way to get there.”

“I really do.”

“How?”

“There are more portals than just yours.”

“There were. All knowledge of them was lost with the magi. It took me years to find this one—”

“You’re not the only one who knows things, I guess. Though I would rather
you
showed me the way.”

“Than who?” He was thinking, trying to figure it out, and Karou saw by the flicker of disgust when he did. “The Fallen. That
thing
. You’re going to that thing.”

“Not if you take me instead.”

“I truly can’t. Karou. The portal is under guard—”

“Well then. Maybe I’ll see you on the other side sometime. Who knows?”

A rustle from his unseen wings sent sparks shivering across the floor. “You can’t go there. There’s no kind of life there, trust me.”

Karou turned away from him and picked up her coat, slipping it on and fanning out her hair, which had a damp mermaid quality to it and lay in coils over her shoulders. She told Zuzana that she was leaving town, and she was fending off her friend’s inevitable queries when Akiva took her elbow.

Gently. “You can’t go with that creature.” His expression was guarded, hard to read. “Not alone. If he knows another portal, I can come with you and make sure you’re safe.”

Karou’s first impulse was to refuse.
Be that cat. Be that cat
. But who was she fooling? That wasn’t the cat she wanted to be. She didn’t want to go alone—or alone with Razgut, which was worse. Her heart hammering, she said, “Okay,” and once the decision was made, a tremendous burden of dread lifted.

She wouldn’t have to part with Akiva.

Yet, anyway.

34

W
HAT’S A
D
AY
?

What’s a morning?
Karou asked herself. A part of her was already flying into the future, imagining what her reunion with Brimstone would be like, but another part of her was settled firmly in her skin, mindful of the heat of Akiva’s arm against her shoulder. They were walking down Nerudova with Zuzana, against the flow of tourists heading up to the castle, and they had to press close to navigate a horde of Germans in sensible shoes.

She had her hair tucked away in a hat, borrowed from the waitress, so her most obvious feature was disguised. Akiva was still drawing an inordinate amount of attention, but Karou thought it was mostly because of his otherworldly beauty, and not recognition from the news.

“I have to stop by school,” Zuzana said. “Come with me.”

Karou wanted to go there anyway—it was part of her good-bye program—so she agreed. She’d have to wait until nightfall anyway to get back in her flat, if the police were watching it. After dark she could return by way of sky and balcony, instead of street and elevator, and get the things she’d need for her journey.

What’s a day?
she asked herself, and there was a buzzing happiness in her that she had to admit had a lot to do with the way Akiva had stood in the teahouse doorway, and the solidity of him beside her now in all its rightness.

There was wrongness, too, faint and flickering, but she attributed that to nerves, and as the morning went by in its buzz of unlooked-for happiness, she kept brushing it aside, unconsciously, as one might fan at a fly.