Daughter of Smoke and Bone(37)

“What do you want?” Bain asked, wary. “Do you want teeth?”

“Me? No.” She perched on the edge of the recliner. Still with that hard, bright smile, she said, “Teeth are not what I want.”

“What, then?”

Karou’s smile disappeared, like flipping a switch. “I think you can guess what I want.”

A beat. Then Bain said, “I don’t have any. I used them all.”

“Well. I don’t think I’ll take your word on that.”

He gestured around the room. “Have a look, then. Knock yourself out.”

“See, the thing is, I know where you keep them.”

The hunter went still, and Karou considered the shotgun on the table. It was disassembled, not a threat. The question was whether he had another gun within reach. Probably. He was not a one-gun kind of guy.

His fingers twitched almost imperceptibly.

Karou’s pulse jumped in her hands.

Bain lunged for the couch. She was already moving. Smooth as dance, she leapt over the coffee table, caught his head with the flat of her palm and drove it against the wall. With a croak he collapsed onto the couch, and for an instant he was free to scrabble with both hands in the sofa cushions, frantic, and then he found what he was looking for.

He whipped around, pistol raised. Karou caught his wrist with one hand and grabbed a fistful of beard with the other. A crack; a bullet blazed over her head. She braced one foot against the sofa, heaved him by the beard, and swung him to the floor. The table tipped and shotgun parts scattered. Keeping her grip on his wrist, pistol pointed away, she came down hard on his forearm with her knee and heard bones grind. He yelped and released the gun. Karou took it up and pressed its muzzle into his eye socket.

“I’m going to forgive you for that,” she said. “I do see, from your perspective, that this sucks. I just don’t feel all that bad about it.”

Bain was breathing hard and looking murder at her. Up close he smelled rancid. Still holding the gun to his eye, Karou steeled herself and reached into the greasy thatch of his beard to root around. Right away her hand encountered metal. So it was true. He kept his wishes in his beard.

She drew her knife from her boot.

“Do you want to know how I knew?” she asked him. He’d drilled holes in the wish coins and knotted his dirty hair right through them. She sliced them free one by one. “It was Avigeth. The snake? She had to circle your stinking neck, didn’t she? I did not envy her that. Did you think she wouldn’t tell Issa what you have hidden in this disgusting shrub of yours?”

It gave her a pang, remembering those casual nights in the shop, sitting cross-legged on the floor, sketching Issa and gossiping while Twiga’s tools droned in the corner and Brimstone strung his endless necklaces of teeth. What was happening there now?

What?

Bain’s wishes were mostly shings. There were a few lucknows, though, and best of all, heavy as hammers, there were two gavriels. That was good. That was very good. From the other traders she’d visited so far, she’d gotten only lucknows and shings. “I was hoping you wouldn’t have spent these yet,” Karou told him. “Thank you. Sincerely. Thank you. You don’t know what this means to me.”

“Bitch,” he muttered.

“Well, that’s brave,” she said, conversational. “I mean, to say that to the girl with the gun against your eyeball.” She went on sawing away hanks of beard as Bain lay rigid. He was probably twice her weight, but he didn’t struggle. There was a wild light in her eyes and it cowed him. Plus, he’d heard rumors of St. Petersburg, and knew she wasn’t shy with her knife.

She depleted his wish stash and, sitting back on her heels, used the barrel of the gun to peel back his lower lip. She grimaced when she saw his teeth. They were crooked and tobacco-brown. They were real. No hope of a bruxis, then.

“You know, you’re the fifth one of Brimstone’s traders I’ve tracked down, and you’re the only one with your teeth.”

“Yeah, well, I like meat.”

“You like meat. Of course you do.”

Of the other traders on whom she’d paid these “social calls,” all had made the trade for a bruxis, and all had already spent them, mostly on long life. One, the hag matriarch of a clan of poachers in Pakistan, had botched the wish, forgetting to include youth and health, and she was a disaster of collapsing flesh, a testament to Brimstone’s admonition that even a bruxis had limits.

Well, a bruxis would have been quite a score, but it was a pair of gavriels that Karou really needed, and now she had them. She gathered up all the wishes, along with the dirty beard hair that clung to them, and shoved the whole mess into her satchel. She kept one shing in her palm; she’d need it to make her exit.

“You think you can just do this?” Bain asked, low. “You piss off a hunter, you’re gonna live like prey, little girl, always wondering who’s tracking you.”

Karou made a pondering gesture. “Hmm. Can’t have that, can we?” She raised the pistol and sighted down the barrel at him, saw his eyes go wide and then squinch shut as she gave an enthusiastic little-boy “Kablam!” and then lowered the gun again. “Dummy. Lucky for you, I’m not that kind of girl.”

She laid the gun on the sofa and, as he started to sit up, wished him to sleep. His head hit the floor with a thud and the shing vanished from her palm. Karou didn’t look back. Her feet were heavy on the porch steps, and all the way down the dark gravel drive to where she’d left a cab idling at a clump of mailboxes.