Daughter of Smoke and Bone(2)
“Get Svetla to be your vampire vixen,” she said. “She’s got the vixen part down.”
He looked pained. “I don’t want Svetla. I want you.”
“Alas. I am not an option.”
“Don’t say that,” he said, reaching for her hand.
She pulled back, a pang of heartache surging in spite of all her efforts at aloofness. Not worth it, she told herself. Not even close. “This is the definition of stalking, you realize.”
“Puh. I’m not stalking you. I happen to be going this way.”
“Right,” said Karou. They were just a few doors from her school now. The Art Lyceum of Bohemia was a private high school housed in a pink Baroque palace where famously, during the Nazi occupation, two young Czech nationalists had slit the throat of a Gestapo commander and scrawled liberty with his blood. A brief, brave rebellion before they were captured and impaled upon the finials of the courtyard gate. Now students were milling around that very gate, smoking, waiting for friends. But Kaz wasn’t a student—at twenty, he was several years older than Karou—and she had never known him to be out of bed before noon. “Why are you even awake?”
“I have a new job,” he said. “It starts early.”
“What, you’re doing morning vampire tours?”
“Not that. Something else. An… unveiling of sorts.” He was grinning now. Gloating. He wanted her to ask what his new job was.
She wouldn’t ask. With perfect disinterest she said, “Well, have fun with that,” and walked away.
Kaz called after her, “Don’t you want to know what it is?” The grin was still there. She could hear it in his voice.
“Don’t care,” she called back, and went through the gate.
She really should have asked.
2
AN UNVEILING OF SORTS
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Karou’s first class was life drawing. When she walked into the studio, her friend Zuzana was already there and had staked out easels for them in front of the model’s platform. Karou shrugged off her portfolio and coat, unwound her scarf, and announced, “I’m being stalked.”
Zuzana arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the eyebrow arch, and Karou envied her for it. Her own eyebrows did not function independently of each other, which handicapped her expressions of suspicion and disdain.
Zuzana could do both perfectly, but this was milder eyebrow action, mere cool curiosity. “Don’t tell me Jackass tried to scare you again.”
“He’s going through a vampire phase. He bit my neck.”
“Actors,” muttered Zuzana. “I’m telling you, you need to tase the loser. Teach him to go jumping out at people.”
“I don’t have a Taser.” Karou didn’t add that she didn’t need a Taser; she was more than capable of defending herself without electricity. She’d had an unusual education.
“Well, get one. Seriously. Bad behavior should be punished. Plus, it would be fun. Don’t you think? I’ve always wanted to tase someone. Zap!” Zuzana mimicked convulsions.
Karou shook her head. “No, tiny violent one, I don’t think it would be fun. You’re terrible.”
“I am not terrible. Kaz is terrible. Tell me I don’t have to remind you.” She gave Karou a sharp look. “Tell me you’re not even considering forgiving him.”
“No,” declared Karou. “But try getting him to believe that.” Kaz just couldn’t fathom any girl willfully depriving herself of his charms. And what had she done but strengthen his vanity those months they’d been together, gazing at him starry-eyed, giving him… everything? His wooing her now, she thought, was a point of pride, to prove to himself that he could have who he wanted. That it was up to him.
Maybe Zuzana was right. Maybe she should tase him.
“Sketchbook,” commanded Zuzana, holding out her hand like a surgeon for a scalpel.
Karou’s best friend was bossy in obverse proportion to her size. She only passed five feet in her platform boots, whereas Karou was five foot six but seemed taller in the same way that ballerinas do, with their long necks and willowy limbs. She wasn’t a ballerina, but she had the look, in figure if not in fashion. Not many ballerinas have bright blue hair or a constellation of tattoos on their limbs, and Karou had both.
The only tattoos visible as she dug out her sketchbook and handed it over were the ones on her wrists like bracelets—a single word on each: true and story.
As Zuzana took the book, a couple of other students, Pavel and Dina, crowded in to look over her shoulder. Karou’s sketchbooks had a cult following around school and were handed around and marveled at on a daily basis. This one—number ninety-two in a lifelong series—was bound with rubber bands, and as soon as Zuzana took them off it burst open, each page so coated in gesso and paint that the binding could scarcely contain them. As it fanned open, Karou’s trademark characters wavered on the pages, gorgeously rendered and deeply strange.
There was Issa, serpent from the waist down and woman from the waist up, with the bare, globe breasts of Kama Sutra carvings, the hood and fangs of a cobra, and the face of an angel.
Giraffe-necked Twiga, hunched over with his jeweler’s glass stuck in one squinting eye.