Days of Blood & Starlight(115)

It’s not what you think, she could have told Akiva.

It’s worse.

But she said nothing. He would get no explanations or apologies from her. She forced herself to turn. To Thiago. She hadn’t set eyes on him since they returned from the pit. She made herself look at him now. If she couldn’t do that much, what chance was there for all that lay ahead?

She looked.

The Wolf was the Wolf, imperious and breath-catching, a work of Brimstone’s highest art. He wasn’t his usual impeccable self, which was no surprise considering the past day and a half. His sleeves were pushed up, bunched and wrinkled over his tanned and muscled forearms, and Ten’s attention to her master’s hair appeared to have slipped. It had been gathered back by hasty hands and tied in a white knot. Some strands had escaped, and when he pushed them back it was with a flicker of impatience. As for that hated, handsome face, it bore scratches from Karou’s nails, but the wound where her blade had slid up under his chin, that was sealed and mended as if it had never been. It had been an easy fix, nothing like Ziri’s hands or even his smile; only a few layers of tissue to draw back together along a tiny slit. Karou could scarcely have killed him more cleanly if she’d planned to bring him back to life, and she’d had pain in plenty for the tithe.

It was his eyes, oh god, it was his eyes that were hardest to look at. Life in those pale eyes.

We’re all just vessels, after all.

Behind her own eyes came the sting of tears and she looked down. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She hugged her bruised arms to her body and cast wildly about for something to say. Angels in her room, one of them dead and one of them Akiva; here was a pretty predicament.

It had been only a space of seconds since the Wolf entered. His stillness and silence did not yet ring strange, but soon they would.

If Liraz hadn’t screamed, Karou would have helped the angels get away. She would have burned incense to cover their scent. She owed Akiva that much and more. No one would have needed to know they had ever been here. But it was too late for that. Now Thiago would have to do something about them, and—Karou had seen it in his eyes in that brief glance—he was at an even greater loss than she was.

His course of action should have been clear; he had dealt with Akiva before: tortured him, punished him not only for being a seraph but for being Madrigal’s choice, and everyone close to him knew how he hungered to finish what he had started. The White Wolf should have been laughing now; he should have been drunk on his bloody delight.

But he wasn’t.

Because, of course—of course, of course—he wasn’t really the White Wolf.





79


DONE


“So, is this what it looks like?” Thiago asked.

“What does it look like?” Akiva asked, hating to speak to the Wolf at all. They hadn’t been face-to-face since the dungeon in Loramendi, and now that they were, talking was not what Akiva wanted to do.

“It looks like a dead angel.” Indicating Hazael, Thiago turned from Akiva to Karou and back again with a contemptuous half laugh. “Did you come to pay a call on our resurrectionist? I’m sorry, but we don’t service your kind. Perhaps you are aware, we are at war.”

“The war is over,” snarled Liraz, with a passion Akiva knew she didn’t feel for their victory. “You lost.”

“Did we? I like to think that remains to be seen.”

Slowly, Akiva reached a restraining arm around his sister’s shoulder. If she launched at the Wolf the way she had at Karou, the serpent-woman would not be shoving her back to him alive. Maybe death was what Liraz wanted, or thought she wanted in her mourning, and maybe death was going to happen, here, tonight, no matter what they did, but Akiva would not court it further than he already had by coming here, and that had been pure desperation.

He looked to Karou, trying to guess what she was thinking. She would have helped Hazael; he had seen the truth of her sorrow. What now? Would she help them? Could she? Those bruises on her arms… She still held her arms cradled against herself, and though Akiva was fairly sure she was trying to conceal her bruises—why did she look so ashamed?—the effect was that he kept finding his eyes drawn to them. And… he had seen her tithe bruises when he came before; the memory had haunted him. These were different.

These bruises weren’t made by brass clamps, but by hands.

All at once, they were all he could see. A wave of fury overcame him and it was he who needed to be restrained. He was on his feet and it was only the insistent tug of darkness, the infuriating weakness, that made it so easy for Karou—Karou—when he lunged or staggered forward, to step between him and Thiago and shove him back. Her brow was drawn hard and her eyes were fierce; her look asked Are you mad?

And he was. He was also pathetic. He stumbled over Hazael and it was Liraz this time who caught him. They were both so weak, so debilitated and demoralized, that they just sank together to the dirt floor beside their brother’s body. This without the chimaera even having to flash a hamsa in their direction. They were just so done, so painfully, obviously, pitifully done.

“Just do it,” hissed Liraz, and Akiva couldn’t even bring himself to argue. “Kill us.”

Karou regarded them with that hardness she’d shown when she shoved him—it was anger, Akiva thought, that he had again forced her to decide his fate. She had changed so much in just a few months. The sharpness, the bleakness. He remembered how she had been back in Prague and Marrakesh, in the little time they’d spent together before the wishbone: the softness and mobility of her expressions; the shy, incongruous smiles; and the rapid-flare flushes that had spread up her fair neck. Even her anger had been a flashing, vital thing, and he hated this new carved-mask hardness, and he hated his part in bringing it about. But at that moment, if he was given the choice, he would still have said he wanted to live.