Daughter of Smoke and Bone(68)

Karou had lowered her hands when Akiva came before her. She reached out, just her fingertips to his back, because she couldn’t help it.

He told her, “Karou, you have to go.”

“Go? But—”

“Get away from here. I’ll keep them from following you.” His voice was grim with what that would mean, but his decision was made. He gave her a quick look over his shoulder; his face was strained but set. “I’ll meet you in the place we first saw each other. Promise me you’ll wait for me there.”

The place they first saw each other. The Jemaa el-Fna, heart of Marrakesh, where she had caught his burning gaze through the chaos of a crowd and been pierced through the soul by it. Akiva said, in a voice hoarse with urgency, “Promise me. Karou, promise you won’t go with Razgut until I find you. Until I explain.”

Karou wanted to promise. She saw that he had thrown his allegiance to her, even against his own kind. He had surely saved her life—could she have survived an attack by two armed seraphim?—in addition to which, he had chosen her. Wasn’t that what she had always wanted, to be chosen? Cherished? He had given up his place in his own world for her, and he was asking that she wait for him in Marrakesh.

But something unyielding in her shrank from the promise. He might have chosen her, but that didn’t mean that she would do the same if she were faced with the same choice—against Brimstone, Issa, Yasri, Twiga. She had told Brimstone, “I want you to know I would never just leave you,” and she wouldn’t. She would choose her family. Anything else was unthinkable, though even now the idea of turning and leaving Akiva behind brought on physical pain.

She said, “I’ll wait for you as long as I can. That’s the best I can do.”

And she thought the brilliance of his burning wings dimmed just a little. He said in a hollow voice, still faced away from her, “Then that will have to be good enough.”

Liraz drew her sword, and Hazael followed suit. The police responded by falling back, raising their guns, shouting in Czech for the angels to drop their weapons. The onlookers cried out in a kind of ecstatic terror. Zuzana, jostled among them, kept her eyes on Karou.

Akiva, whose swords were less obvious in their crossed sheaths between his wings, reached double-handed over his shoulders and drew them with a harmonic ringing. Without looking back, he urged, “Karou. Go.”

She gathered herself into a crouch, and just before she sprang skyward to vanish into the ether in a streak of blue and black she said, both choked and pleading, “Come and find me, Akiva.”

And then she was gone, and he was left alone to face the fallout of his shattering choice.





Once upon a time,

an angel lay dying in the mist.





And a devil knelt over him and smiled.





37





DREAM-LOST



Akiva was helpless to keep his blood in his body. It pulsed up under his fingers and escaped, riding the tide of his heartbeat out in hot spurts. He couldn’t stop the bleeding. The wound was a mauling, and clutching at it was a little like gathering a fistful of meat scraps to fling to a dog.

He was going to die.

Around him, the world had lost its horizons. Sea mist choked Bullfinch beach, and Akiva heard waves breaking but could see only as far as the nearest corpses: gray hummocks obscured by the fog. They might have been chimaera or seraphim—except for the nearest one, he couldn’t tell. That one lay only a few yards away, with his own sword embedded in it. The beast had been part hyena, part lizard, a monstrosity, and it had raked him open from collarbone to biceps, rending his mail as easily as cloth. It had clung to him, its teeth meeting through the flesh of his shoulder, even after he’d skewered it through its barrel chest. He’d twisted his blade, thrust deeper, twisted again. The beast had screamed deep in its throat, but didn’t let him go until it died.

Now, as Akiva lay waiting to die, the post-battle silence was split by a roar. He stiffened and clasped his wound tighter. Later, he would wonder why he’d done that. He should have let go, tried to die before they could reach him.

The enemy was stalking the field, killing the wounded. They had taken the day, driven the seraphim back to the fortifications at Morwen Bay, and they had no interest in prisoners. Akiva should have hurried his dying, slipped away in the calm of blood loss, like falling asleep. The enemy would be far less kind.

What made him wait? The hope of killing one more chimaera? But if that was it, why didn’t he try to drag himself over to retrieve his sword? He just lay there, holding his wound, living those extra few minutes for no reason that he could fathom.

And then he saw her.

She was just a silhouette at first. Vast bat wings, long ridged gazelle horns as sharp as pikes—the bestial parts of the enemy. Black loathing filled Akiva and he watched her pause beside first one corpse and then the next. She came to the body of the hyena-lizard and stood there a long moment—what was she doing? Death rites?

She turned and prowled toward Akiva.

She came clearer with every step. She was slender, her legs long—lean human thighs that gave way, below the knee, to the sleek taper of gazelle’s legs, the fine cloven hooves making her seem to balance on pins. Her wings were folded, her gait both graceful and tense with suppressed power. In one hand she held a crescent-moon blade; another just like it was sheathed at her thigh. With the other hand she raised a long staff that was not a weapon. It was curved like a shepherd’s crook, with something silver—a lantern?—suspended from the end.