Daughter of Smoke and Bone (32 page)

“I don’t understand us, either.”

But thanks to the wishbone, fragile in his fist, Akiva finally did.

Karou lapsed into tense silence, keeping her eyes on the two seraphim. They had their wing glamours in place, but even so, their presence on the bridge seemed unnatural, and not a little unnerving—Liraz especially. Though Hazael was more powerful, Liraz was more frightening, she always had been; perhaps she’d had to be, being female. Her pale hair was scraped back in severe plaits, and there was something coolly sharklike about her beauty: a flat, killer apathy. Hazael had more life in his eyes, but just now it was mostly a frank bafflement as he regarded Akiva before him, still on his knees.

“Get up,” he said, not unkindly. “I can’t stand the sight of you like that.”

Akiva rose, drawing Karou up with him and keeping her behind the shield of his wings.

“What’s going on?” Liraz demanded. “Akiva, why did you come back here? And… who
is
that?” She made a wild gesture of disgust toward Karou.

“Just a girl.” Akiva heard himself echo Izîl, sounding just as unconvincing as the old man had.

“Just a girl who flies,” amended Liraz.

A heartbeat’s pause, and then Akiva said, “You’ve been following me.”

“What did you think,” Liraz spat, “that we’d let you vanish again? The way you were acting after Loramendi, we knew something was coming. But… this?”

“What exactly
is
this?” Hazael asked, clearly still hoping for some explanation that would make it all okay. Akiva felt split down the middle. Here before him were his closest allies, and they felt like enemies, and it was his fault.

If Akiva had a family, it was not his mother, who had turned away when the soldiers came to take him; and it was certainly not the emperor. His family was these two, and there was no answer he could give them to make this make sense. There was nothing he could say to Karou, either, who stood behind him desperate to know what had been kept from her all her life—a secret so big and so strange he couldn’t begin to find words to frame it. So he stood there mute, the languages of two races useless to help him explain anything.

“I don’t blame you wanting to get away,” said Hazael, always the peacemaker. He and Liraz bore a sibling resemblance they didn’t share with Akiva. They were fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a blush to their honey skin. Hazael had an ease to him, almost a slouch, and for a resting expression a lazy smile that could almost fool you into misjudging him. He was, always, a soldier—reflexes and steel—but at heart he had managed somehow to retain something childlike that training and years of war worked hard to stamp out. He was a dreamer. He said, “I had thoughts myself, of coming back to this world after everything—”

“But you didn’t,” snapped Liraz, who had within her no dreamer at all. “
You
didn’t vanish in the night, leaving others to make up stories to cover for you, not knowing when or even
if
you’d come back this time.”

“I didn’t ask you to cover for me,” said Akiva.

“No. Because then you’d have had to tell us you were going. Instead you snuck off, just like before. And were we to wait for you to come back broken again, and never tell us what had broken you?”

“Not this time,” he said.

Liraz gave him a brittle smile, and Akiva knew that under her iciness she was hurt. He might never have returned; they might never have known what had happened to him. What did that say for the decades they had protected one another? Hadn’t it been Liraz, years ago, who had risked her life to return to the battlefield at Bullfinch? Against any expectation that he might still be alive, and with chimaera crawling over their victory and spitting the wounded on pikes, she had returned and found him, and borne him away. She had risked her life for him, and would again without hesitation, and so would Hazael, and Akiva would for them. But he couldn’t tell them why he’d come here, or what he’d found.

“Not this time
what
?” Liraz demanded. “You’re not coming back broken? Or you’re not coming back at all?”

“I didn’t plan anything. I just couldn’t stay there.” He groped to explain; he owed them the effort, at least. “After Loramendi, an end was reached, and it was like the edge of a cliff. There was nothing else I wanted, nothing except…” He left the rest unsaid. He didn’t need to say it; they’d seen him on his knees. They fixed their eyes on Karou.

“Except
her
,” said Liraz. “A human. If that’s what she is.”

“What else would she be?” he said, covering a spark of fear.

“I have a theory,” she said, and Akiva’s heart lurched. “Last night, when she attacked you, there was something strange about that fight, wasn’t there, Hazael?”

“Strange,” agreed Hazael.

“We weren’t close enough to feel any… magic… but it certainly seemed as though
you
were feeling it.”

Akiva’s thoughts spun furiously. How could he get Karou away from here?

“You seem to have forgiven her for it, though.” Liraz came a step closer. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

Akiva retreated, keeping Karou behind him. “Leave her alone,” he said.

Liraz advanced. “If you have nothing to hide, let us see her.”

In a sorrowful voice that was worse than Liraz’s sharp tone, Hazael said, “Akiva, just tell us it isn’t what it looks like. Just tell us she isn’t…”

Akiva felt a kind of rushing around him, years of secrets catching him up like a wind—a wind, he wished with a wild kind of surrender, that could just bear him away, with Karou, to a place without seraphim and chimaera and their talent for hate, without humans to stand around and gape, without anyone to come between them, ever again. “Of course she isn’t,” he said. It came out as a snarl, and Liraz took it as a challenge to prove it—what Karou was and what she wasn’t—and her eyes flashed with a look Akiva knew too well, a hard fury she harnessed on the battlefield. She came closer.

Adrenaline surged hot as his hands seized into fists, the wishbone bowing under the pressure, and he braced himself for what must come next. Sick incredulity washed over him, that it had come to this.

But whatever he expected to happen, it was not for Karou to speak up in a clear, cool voice and ask, “What? What am I not?”

Liraz halted, her fury blinking to shock. Hazael looked startled, too, and it took Akiva a beat to realize why, but, with a start, he did.

Karou’s words. They were as smooth as falling water. They were in his language. She had spoken the tongue of angels, which she had no way, earthly or elsewise, of knowing. In the hesitation wrought by her question, she stepped out from the shelter of his wings and stood exposed before Liraz and Hazael.

Then, with the same bright savagery she had smiled at Akiva when she attacked him the night before, she said to Liraz, “If you want to see my hands, all you have to do is ask.”

36

T
O
D
O
E
LSE
T
HAN
K
ILL

All it took was a lucknow from her pocket and a whispered wish, and the words of the seraphim swam from melodious flow into meaning—another language for Karou’s collection, and it was a prize. She already knew, from the hard, darting eyes of the female seraph and the protective stance of Akiva, that they were talking about her.

“Just tell us she isn’t…” said the male, letting his words trail into some unspoken horror, as if he were pleading with Akiva to disprove their suspicions about her.

Who did they think she was? Was she to stand here mute while they talked her over?

“What?” she asked. “What am I not?” She saw their faces freeze in shock as she stepped out from behind Akiva. The female angel was just paces away, staring. She had the dead eyes of a jihadist, and Karou felt a tremor of vulnerability with Akiva no longer between them. She thought of her crescent-moon knives sitting useless in her flat, and then she realized she didn’t need them. She had a weapon tailored just to seraphim.

She
was
a weapon tailored just to seraphim.

The smile rose unbidden from her phantom self, and she said, with a leaping, dark excitement, “If you want to see my hands, all you have to do is ask.”

And then, there on the Charles Bridge in full view of gawkers, their upheld phones and cameras capturing it for the world, and with the police approaching, wary and grim-faced, all hell broke loose.

“No!” cried Akiva, but it was too late.

Liraz moved first, like the slash of a knife, and she was fast, but Karou matched her with a knifelike speed of her own. She threw up her hands and the air rippled with the expulsion of magic. It made a slow-motion tracery, hanging there for a second like a warp, and then it hit. Its fringes shivered wide to catch Hazael and Akiva, and they both staggered. Liraz, though, was hurled back like a flicked bug. She twisted, acrobatic, and landed on her feet with a concussive force that shook the bridge. In the aftermath of the blast, only Karou stood straight. Her hair had been caught as in a backdraft, sucked forward and then turned loose, and it floated on the churning air.

She was still smiling, cold. With her drifting hair, and her palms outfaced with their staring ink eyes, she looked malevolent, even to Zuzana, like some species of fell goddess in the unconvincing guise of a girl. Zuzana, Mik, and the other onlookers faltered back. Liraz dropped her glamour, and it was as though the veil that had cloaked them was drawn away to reveal a raging fire. Hazael dropped his glamour, too, and moved to his sister’s side, and a battle line was drawn, the two angels facing Karou, their heads lowered against the misery her hamsas were pulsing at them.

Akiva stood between them, stricken. He had to move to one side or the other. A step or two in either direction, just that, and it was a choice that would define him forever. He looked rapidly back and forth between his comrades and Karou.

“Akiva,”
hissed Liraz. She expected him to come to them. It had always been the three of them, advancing against the enemy, killing, and afterward drawing the rough tally marks on one another’s hands with knife tips and campfire soot. To them, Karou was just another tattoo waiting to happen, a line to be carved.

And then there was Karou, so ready to raise her hands and unleash Brimstone’s noxious magic.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Akiva said, but his voice was thin, as if he didn’t believe it himself.

“It
is
like this,” said Liraz. “Don’t be a child, Akiva.”

He was still between them, straddling two possible futures.

Liraz said, “If you can’t kill her yourself, then go. You don’t have to see it. We’ll never speak of it again. It’s over. Do you hear me?
Go home.
”

She spoke with urgency and resolution. She really believed she was taking care of him, and that this—this thing with Karou, so beyond her ken—was some madness to be forcibly forgotten.