Poison's Kiss (Poison's Kiss #1)(20)

“One drop at a time over two or three doses should do it,” she says.

“Well, which is it? Two or three?”

Kadru’s eyes narrow, and when she speaks, her voice is icy. “Try kissing him after two doses. If he dies, it’s three.”

Anger flares in my chest, but I’m powerless against someone like Kadru and she knows it—a snap of her fingers and one of her beasts could devour me. I have no choice but to walk away. With some effort I hoist Mani into my arms. He’s too heavy for me—he has been for a long time now—but there are at least a dozen snakes between us and the door, and he is already panicked enough. I can carry him a small distance. He buries his face against my shoulder and I move through the maze of white snakes, stepping over them, winding around them. Kadru could call them to her, could make it easier on me, but she doesn’t. By the time I get to the front of the tent, I’m breathing heavily and I have to put Mani down. I lift the flap of the tent and Kadru calls out to me.

“I’ll see you soon, Marinda.” I turn toward her. She looks regal, like a rani on her throne surrounded by serpentine subjects. I don’t doubt her power. But I never want to see her again.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

She laughs. “We’ll see, rajakumari. We’ll see.” My arms break out in gooseflesh to hear her call me by Gopal’s pet name. She must have heard him use it, but it still unnerves me. I take Mani by the hand and we walk away without another word.

We’re halfway back to the flat before Mani stops trembling. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him.

“Who was she?”

I sigh. I’ve tried so hard to protect Mani, not to burden him with more of the truth than he can handle, but I have a feeling that won’t work anymore. “She’s the one who made me a visha kanya.”

“Oh,” he says. And then after a long pause, “Then why did you go to her?”

We’re back at the flat now and I don’t answer him right away. I put a finger to my lips, slide the key into the lock and ease the door open. The flat is empty and I breathe a sigh of relief. Smudge jumps from Mani’s bed and paws at his ankles, begging for affection. Mani sits in the middle of the floor and pulls the cat onto his lap. “Why did you go back?” he asks again. I sit in front of him on the floor.

“Gopal asked me to kiss Deven,” I tell him. Mani looks up sharply.

“You didn’t, did you?” His eyes are already shiny with new tears.

“Of course not,” I tell him. Though I don’t say that I thought about it. That I might have. That I almost did. “But Gopal will send someone else, and so I need to protect Deven by trying to make him immune. That’s why I went to visit Kadru. To get venom.”

“What’s ‘immune’?”

“It’s when you give someone just a tiny amount of poison so that he is protected if someone tries to give him a bigger amount. It would make it so none of the vish kanya could kill him.” Mani’s eyebrows pull together.

“Am I immune?” The question knocks something loose inside me and it takes me a moment to answer.

“No, monkey, you’re not immune.”

“Oh.” He continues petting Smudge and she starts purring loudly, a steady little hum that sounds like a small roar.

“She sounds like she’s part lion,” I say. Mani grins.

“Do you remember when we found her?” he asks. Of course I remember. She was just a kitten and she showed up at our flat several nights in a row. I let Mani give her a dish of milk, but I wouldn’t let him keep her. I didn’t need any more responsibility, no matter how tiny or adorable. And then one night she showed up with a dead snake in her mouth. It was just a little garden snake, but still, she’d killed it, and it made me feel connected to her in a way that all her mewing and begging had not. She’d proven she was one of us, and we let her in for good.

I scratch Smudge under her chin. “How could I forget? Our little hunter.”

“Our small tiger,” Mani amends. He’s quiet for a moment and then says, “Marinda?”

“Yeah?”

“I really hate snakes.”



After Mani falls asleep, I check my face in the mirror. I don’t look any older, and I wonder from which part of my life Kadru took five years. The end? The middle? Will I wake up one day and find a handful of years suddenly missing, or will I just die younger than I should? The terms of the price I’ve paid aren’t entirely clear, but I don’t have time to worry about it. My biggest concern right now is figuring out how to get the poison to Deven before Gopal goes after him again.

It’s an ironic problem, my wondering how to poison a boy when that is the sole purpose of my existence. But then again, I’ve never had to poison someone only a little bit. Nothing I’ve ever done has demanded the kind of subtlety that slipping Deven three separate doses of toxin will require. The jobs Gopal gives me are straightforward—they require only one meeting, only a moment of interaction. But this—this will require something so much more delicate, and I’m not sure I can pull it off. Subterfuge is squarely in Iyla’s skill set. So that’s probably where I should go for help.

I run a brush through my hair and then crawl into bed. After the day I’ve had, I’m expecting it to take me hours to drift off, but the last few nights of lousy sleep must have caught up with me, because before I know it, the night is over and sunlight is spilling across my cheeks. For just a moment I feel safe ensconced in a soft blanket with warmth on my face. But then the events of yesterday come rushing back and carve a pit in the middle of my stomach. I wish I could go back and live forever in that peaceful moment between sleep and reality.