Daughter of Smoke and Bone(51)

Again, the helplessness. He groped for meaning. “I didn’t understand who you were. Are. A human, marked with the devil’s eyes.”

Karou looked at her palms, then up at him, a confused vulnerability in her expression. “Why do they… do that? To you?”

He narrowed his eyes. Could she not know?

The eye tattoos were just one example of Brimstone’s deviltry. The magic hit like a wall of wind, one that carried a fury of sickness and weakness, and Akiva had trained to resist it—all seraph soldiers did—but there was only so much he could take. If he’d been in battle, he’d have sliced off the enemy’s hands before letting them focus so much of their evil energy at him. But Karou… the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her again, so he had endured as much as he could.

Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale—a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion. The scorch of her touch on his neck felt like an acid splash, accompanying the dull, roiling nausea from her relentless assault. He felt enfeebled, and feared he might collapse again.

He said carefully, “They’re the revenants’ marks. You must know that.”

“Revenant?”

He studied her face. “Do you really not know?”

“Know what? What’s a revenant? Isn’t it a ghost?”

“It’s a chimaera soldier,” he said, which was part of the truth. “The hamsas are for them.” Pause. “Only.”

She made tight, sudden fists. “Obviously not only.”

He didn’t answer.

Everything was between them, everything he’d felt suffuse the air while they faced each other over the rooftops. Being near her was like balancing on a tipping world, trying to keep your footing as the ground wanted to roll you forward, hurl you into a spiral from which there was no recovery, only impact, and it was a longed-for impact, a sweet and beckoning collision.

He’d felt this before and never wanted to feel it again. It could only diminish the memory of Madrigal; it already was. Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played. Karou’s face was all he could see—shining eyes, smooth cheeks, the arc of soft lips pressed together in consternation.

He’d cut out feeling; it shouldn’t even have been possible to feel this—this welter, this urgency and tumult, this thrum. And under it all, a crippled twist of thought he held prisoner in the shadows of his mind, so warped he didn’t recognize it for what it was: a hope. A very small hope. And at its center: Karou.

She was a wingspan away, still pacing. They were prowling on the edges of their mutual compulsion, both afraid to draw nearer together. “Why did you burn the portals?” she asked.

He let out a deep breath. What could he say? For vengeance? For peace? Both were true in their way. Warily, he said, “To end the war.”

“War? There’s a war?”

“Yes, Karou. War is all there is.”

She was taken aback, again, by his use of her name. “Are Brimstone and the others… are they okay?” There was a breathlessness in her voice Akiva realized was fear—fear of what his answer would be.

Under the roiling nausea from the hamsas, he felt another, deeper sickness—the beginnings of dread. “They’re in the black fortress,” he said.

“Fortress.” Her voice lifted in hope. “With the bars. I was there, I saw it, the night you attacked me.”

Akiva looked away. A wave of nausea went through him. The throbbing in his head was getting hard to focus past; only once before had he taken such sustained trauma from the devil’s marks, a torture he had not expected to survive, and still didn’t understand why he had. He was having a hard time holding his eyes open, and his body felt like an anchor trying to drag him down.

Voices.

Karou’s head snapped around. Akiva looked. Some of their audience had traced them here and were pointing.

“Follow me,” said Karou.

As if he could have done anything else.





30





YOU



She led him to her flat, all the while thinking, Stupid, stupid, what are you doing?

Answers, she told herself. I’m getting answers.

She hesitated at the elevator, unsure about being in so small a space with the seraph, but he wasn’t in any state to climb stairs, so she pushed the button. He followed her in, seeming unfamiliar with the principle of elevators, and startled slightly when the mechanism chugged to life.

In her flat, she dropped her keys in a basket by the door and looked around. On the wall: her Angel of Extinction wings, uncannily like his wings. If he noticed the similarity, his face gave away nothing. The space was too small for the wings to be spread to their full span, so they were suspended like a canopy, half-sheltering the bed, which was a deep teak bench piled princess-and-the-pea with feather mattresses. It was unmade and lost in an avalanche of old sketchbooks that Karou had been leafing through the night before, keeping company in the only way she could with her family.

One lay open to a portrait of Brimstone. She saw the angel’s jaw clench at the sight of it, and she grabbed it and clutched it to her chest. He went to the window and looked out.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Akiva.”