Daughter of Smoke and Bone(25)
Rushing from above. Heat and the bass whumph of wingbeats.
Overhead, darkness massed where a shape blotted out the moon. Something was hurtling down at Karou on huge, impossible wings. Heat and wingbeats and the skirr of air parted by a blade. A blade. She leapt aside, felt steel bite her shoulder as she slammed into a carved door, splintering slats. She seized one, a jagged spear of wood, and spun to face her attacker.
He stood a mere body’s length away, the point of his sword resting on the ground.
Oh, thought Karou, staring at him.
Oh.
Angel indeed.
He stood revealed. The blade of his long sword gleamed white from the incandescence of his wings—vast shimmering wings, their reach so great they swept the walls on either side of the alley, each feather like the wind-tugged lick of a candle flame.
Those eyes.
His gaze was like a lit fuse, scorching the air between them. He was the most beautiful thing Karou had ever seen. Her first thought, incongruous but overpowering, was to memorize him so she could draw him later.
Her second thought was that there wasn’t going to be a later, because he was going to kill her.
He came at her so fast that his wings painted blurs of light on the air, and even as Karou leapt aside again she was seeing his fiery imprint seared into her vision. His sword bit her again, her arm this time, but she twisted clear of a killing thrust. She was quick. She kept space around her; he tried to close it, and she danced clear, lissome, fluid. Their eyes met again, and Karou saw past his shocking beauty to the inhumanity there, the absolute absence of mercy.
He attacked again. As quick as Karou was, she couldn’t get clear of the reach of his sword. A strike aimed at her throat glanced off her scapula instead. There was no pain—that would come later, unless she was dead—only spreading heat that she knew was blood. Another strike, and she parried it with her slat of wood, which split like kindling, half of it falling away so she held a mere dagger’s length of old wood, a ridiculous excuse for a weapon. Yet when the angel came at her again she dodged in close to him and thrust, felt the wood catch flesh and sink in.
Karou had stabbed men before, and she hated it, the gruesome feeling of penetrating living flesh. She pulled back, leaving her makeshift weapon in his side. His face registered neither pain nor surprise. It was, Karou thought as he closed in, a dead face. Or rather, the living face of a dead soul.
It was utterly terrifying.
He had her cornered now, and they both knew she wouldn’t get away. She was vaguely aware of shouts of amazement and fear up the alley and from windows, but all of her focus was on the angel. What did it even mean, angel? What had Iz?l said? The seraphim are here.
She’d heard the word before; seraphim were some high order of angels, at least according to the Christian mythos, for which Brimstone had utter contempt, as he did for all religion. “Humans have gotten glimpses of things over time,” he’d said. “Just enough to make the rest up. It’s all a quilt of fairy tales with a patch here and there of truth.”
“So what’s real?” she’d wanted to know.
“If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it’s real.”
By that definition, this angel was real enough.
He raised his sword, and she just watched him do it, her attention catching for a moment on the bars of black ink tattooed across his fingers—they were fleetingly familiar but then not, the feeling gone as soon as it registered—and she just stared up at her killer and wondered numbly why. It seemed impossible that this was the final moment of her life. She cocked her head to the side, desperately searching his features for some hint of… soul… and then, she saw it.
He hesitated. Only for a split second did his mask slip, but Karou saw some urgent pathos surface, a wave of feeling that softened his rigid and ridiculously perfect features. His jaw unclenched, his lips parted, his brow furrowed in an instant of confusion.
At the same moment, she became aware of the pulse in her palms that had made her curl her hands into fists at her first sight of him. It thrummed there still, a pent-up energy, and she was jolted by the certainty that it emanated from her tattoos. An impulse overcame her to throw up her hands, and she did, not in cringing surrender, but with palms powerfully outthrust, inked with the eyes she’d worn all her life without ever knowing why.
And something happened.
It was like a detonation—a sharp intake, all air sucked into a tight core and then expelled. It was silent, lightless—to the gape-jawed witnesses it was nothing at all, just a girl throwing up her hands—but Karou felt it, and the angel did, too. His eyes went wide with recognition in the instant before he was flung back with devastating force to hit a wall some twenty feet behind him. He crumpled to the ground, wings askew, sword skittering away. Karou scrambled to her feet.
The angel wasn’t moving.
She spun and sprinted away. Whatever had happened, a silence had risen from it, and it followed her. She could hear only her own breathing, weirdly amplified like she was in a tunnel. She rounded the bend in the alley at speed, skidding on her heel to avoid a donkey standing stubborn in the middle of the lane. The portal was in sight, a plain door in a row of plain doors, but something was different about it now. A large black handprint was burned into the wood.
Karou flung herself at it, hammering with her fists in a frenzy such as she had never unleashed on a portal before. “Issa!” she screamed. “Let me in!”