Daughter of Smoke and Bone(38)
She reached the mailboxes. There was no cab.
Karou sighed. The driver must have heard the gunshot and taken off. She could hardly blame him. It was like a scene out of a film noir: a girl pays him a ridiculous sum to drive her from Boise up into this no-man’s-land, where she vanishes into a hunting cabin and a shot is fired. Who in his right mind would stick around to see how that played out?
With another sigh, she closed her eyes and almost rubbed them, then remembered she’d been handling Bain’s filthy beard and wiped her hands on her pants instead. She was so tired. She reached into her bag. Judging it would take a lucknow to turn the cab around, she palmed one and was just about to make the wish when she stopped. “What am I thinking?” One cheek dimpled as her lips skewed into a smile.
She took out a gavriel instead. “Hello, you,” she whispered to it. Weighing it on her palm, she tilted back her head and looked up at the sky.
22
A PIECE OF EMPTY CANDY
Three months.
It had been three months since the portals burned, and Karou had had no word in all that time. How often had her thoughts, however otherwise occupied, suddenly skidded back to the scorched note in Kishmish’s claws? Like a scratch in a record, the note had worn its groove in her mind. What had it said? What had Brimstone wanted to tell her as the portals burned?
What had the note said?
And then there was the wishbone, which she now wore around her neck, as Brimstone always had. It had occurred to her, of course, that it might be a wish, one more powerful even than a bruxis, and she had held it in her hand and wished on it—wished for a portal to peel open to Elsewhere—but nothing ever happened. There was something comforting in the feel of it in her hand, though. Its frail wings fit between her fingers as if it were meant to be held. But if it was anything more than a bone, she couldn’t guess what, and as for why Brimstone had sent it to her, she feared she would never know. The fear festered alongside all her unanswered questions, and with it new fears, strange and undefinable.
Something was happening to her.
Sometimes when she looked in the mirror now, she experienced a moment of blank unfamiliarity, as if she were meeting the gaze of a stranger. Her name, called out to her, didn’t always register, and even the lay of her shadow could strike her as foreign. Recently she’d caught herself testing it with quick gestures to see if it was hers. She was pretty sure this was not normal behavior.
Zuzana disagreed. “It’s probably post-traumatic stress disorder,” she’d said. “What would be weird is if you were fine. I mean, you lost your family.”
Karou still marveled at the way in which Zuzana had accepted her whole bizarre story. Her friend was not, in practice, someone who believed in things, but after seeing Kishmish and getting a little scuppy demonstration she’d bought it all, and it was a good thing. Karou needed her. Zuzana was her anchor to her normal life. What remained of it, anyway.
She was still in school, if only technically. After the angel arsons it had taken about a week for her injuries to heal, at least enough that the yellow-green stage of her bruises could be concealed with makeup. She’d gone back to class for a couple of days, but it was a lost cause. She couldn’t keep her focus, and her hand, clasping pencil or paintbrush, seemed incapable of delicacy. A furious energy built up in her, and more than ever before she was plagued by that phantom sense that she was meant to be doing something else.
Something else. Something else. Something else.
She made contact with Esther and other of Brimstone’s less-vile associates around the world to confirm that the phenomenon was global: The portals were gone, every last one.
She also, in the process, discovered something quite unexpected: She was rich. Brimstone, it turned out, had established bank accounts for her over the course of her life. Juicy bank accounts overflowing with zeroes. She even owned real estate, such as the buildings in which, until recently, the portals had been. And land. A swamp, of all things. An abandoned medieval hill town in the lava path of Mount Etna. A mountain flank in the Andes where an amateur paleontologist claimed—to widespread scientific merriment—to have unearthed a cache of “monster skeletons.”
Brimstone had seen to it that Karou would never worry about money, which was lucky, as she had to pay her “social calls” in the way of ordinary humans: airplanes, passport, overly friendly businessmen, and all.
She made it to school only sporadically after that, claiming family emergency. If not for all the extra work she did, the constant drawing in her new sketchbook—number ninety-three, which picked up where ninety-two, left behind in Brimstone’s shop, had so abruptly cut off—she would surely have gotten the boot by now. As it was, she was hanging by a thread.
The last time she was there, Profesorka Fiala had been all frowns and judgment. Leafing through Karou’s sketchbook, she paused on one drawing in particular, a rendering of the angel in Marrakesh, done from memory. It was of the moment Karou had first seen him up close in the alley. “This is life drawing class, Karou,” said Fiala. “Not fantasy drawing.”
Karou did a double take. She was pretty sure she’d left the wings out, and indeed, she saw, she had. “Fantasy?” she asked.
“No one is this perfect,” said the teacher, skimming dismissively past the page.
Karou didn’t argue, but later had said to Zuzana, “The funny thing is, I didn’t even do him justice. Those eyes. Maybe a painting could capture those eyes, but a drawing never could.”