Daughter of Smoke and Bone(66)

“But you didn’t,” snapped Liraz, who had within her no dreamer at all. “You didn’t vanish in the night, leaving others to make up stories to cover for you, not knowing when or even if you’d come back this time.”

“I didn’t ask you to cover for me,” said Akiva.

“No. Because then you’d have had to tell us you were going. Instead you snuck off, just like before. And were we to wait for you to come back broken again, and never tell us what had broken you?”

“Not this time,” he said.

Liraz gave him a brittle smile, and Akiva knew that under her iciness she was hurt. He might never have returned; they might never have known what had happened to him. What did that say for the decades they had protected one another? Hadn’t it been Liraz, years ago, who had risked her life to return to the battlefield at Bullfinch? Against any expectation that he might still be alive, and with chimaera crawling over their victory and spitting the wounded on pikes, she had returned and found him, and borne him away. She had risked her life for him, and would again without hesitation, and so would Hazael, and Akiva would for them. But he couldn’t tell them why he’d come here, or what he’d found.

“Not this time what?” Liraz demanded. “You’re not coming back broken? Or you’re not coming back at all?”

“I didn’t plan anything. I just couldn’t stay there.” He groped to explain; he owed them the effort, at least. “After Loramendi, an end was reached, and it was like the edge of a cliff. There was nothing else I wanted, nothing except…” He left the rest unsaid. He didn’t need to say it; they’d seen him on his knees. They fixed their eyes on Karou.

“Except her,” said Liraz. “A human. If that’s what she is.”

“What else would she be?” he said, covering a spark of fear.

“I have a theory,” she said, and Akiva’s heart lurched. “Last night, when she attacked you, there was something strange about that fight, wasn’t there, Hazael?”

“Strange,” agreed Hazael.

“We weren’t close enough to feel any… magic… but it certainly seemed as though you were feeling it.”

Akiva’s thoughts spun furiously. How could he get Karou away from here?

“You seem to have forgiven her for it, though.” Liraz came a step closer. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

Akiva retreated, keeping Karou behind him. “Leave her alone,” he said.

Liraz advanced. “If you have nothing to hide, let us see her.”

In a sorrowful voice that was worse than Liraz’s sharp tone, Hazael said, “Akiva, just tell us it isn’t what it looks like. Just tell us she isn’t…”

Akiva felt a kind of rushing around him, years of secrets catching him up like a wind—a wind, he wished with a wild kind of surrender, that could just bear him away, with Karou, to a place without seraphim and chimaera and their talent for hate, without humans to stand around and gape, without anyone to come between them, ever again. “Of course she isn’t,” he said. It came out as a snarl, and Liraz took it as a challenge to prove it—what Karou was and what she wasn’t—and her eyes flashed with a look Akiva knew too well, a hard fury she harnessed on the battlefield. She came closer.

Adrenaline surged hot as his hands seized into fists, the wishbone bowing under the pressure, and he braced himself for what must come next. Sick incredulity washed over him, that it had come to this.

But whatever he expected to happen, it was not for Karou to speak up in a clear, cool voice and ask, “What? What am I not?”

Liraz halted, her fury blinking to shock. Hazael looked startled, too, and it took Akiva a beat to realize why, but, with a start, he did.

Karou’s words. They were as smooth as falling water. They were in his language. She had spoken the tongue of angels, which she had no way, earthly or elsewise, of knowing. In the hesitation wrought by her question, she stepped out from the shelter of his wings and stood exposed before Liraz and Hazael.

Then, with the same bright savagery she had smiled at Akiva when she attacked him the night before, she said to Liraz, “If you want to see my hands, all you have to do is ask.”





36





TO DO ELSE THAN KILL



All it took was a lucknow from her pocket and a whispered wish, and the words of the seraphim swam from melodious flow into meaning—another language for Karou’s collection, and it was a prize. She already knew, from the hard, darting eyes of the female seraph and the protective stance of Akiva, that they were talking about her.

“Just tell us she isn’t…” said the male, letting his words trail into some unspoken horror, as if he were pleading with Akiva to disprove their suspicions about her.

Who did they think she was? Was she to stand here mute while they talked her over?

“What?” she asked. “What am I not?” She saw their faces freeze in shock as she stepped out from behind Akiva. The female angel was just paces away, staring. She had the dead eyes of a jihadist, and Karou felt a tremor of vulnerability with Akiva no longer between them. She thought of her crescent-moon knives sitting useless in her flat, and then she realized she didn’t need them. She had a weapon tailored just to seraphim.