Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(100)

When she finished and dipped into a bow, he clapped like a child, his face bright with rapture-glow. “How beautiful,” he whispered. “None of the others danced quite like you, before.”

You see now, a dark voice rilled coolly through her mind. I bade him love you, just like so.

She shrugged it off like an unwelcome cloak. She could do it all herself, make him love her on her own. Keep Jasmina safe and free wherever she was, far from here in some new home.

“Do you want to see another?” she asked, dropping lightly to her knees before him. “I’m not tired, not at all. You could take me elsewhere if you wanted.”

“So, have you decided, then?”

“Decided what?” She wanted to stroke his hair, his face, but it was still too early yet.

“What you want to call me.” He smoothed her hair back from her temples, and she nudged his palm like a cat. She would let him touch her first, she thought. She could live with that.

“I’ll call you Artem,” she said.

Artem, who’s mine.

But she didn’t tell him that.

IT WASN’T UNTIL later that she understood. They were real, the two of them. It was the world that was the dream.

HE TOOK HER to a sere mountaintop, a cradle for three lakes that couldn’t keep their color. One was the brightest teal she’d ever seen; another green, the other black. But as the sky sped over them, from dawn to dusk to velvet night, she saw them shift their hue like lizards into brown and red and blue.

“Are you sure you didn’t make this for me?” she asked. “This place can’t be real.”

“Oh, it is,” he assured her. “Real, and very deadly, too. Those are the Kelimutu lakes, and all three will eat you to the bone.”

“They’ll eat someone else, maybe,” she called over her shoulder as she stepped into the blue one. The water pooled around her, darker than the sky above, and she didn’t feel a drop. “But not me.”

She didn’t notice, at least not yet, the streak of her hair that had begun to turn.

AFTER THE LAKES, he took her under the ocean, into the heart of a drowned Lion City. There she danced for him in a banquet hall filled with water, and found, as her hair floated and bubbles rose around her, that she no longer needed breath.

They never slept. She danced place after place for him, never needing rest. After the ocean, he took her to a village of houses with blue walls and inner dunes of sand. She danced this inside desert for him as he chased her from room to room, his laughter echoing when she hid-and-sought from him.

“If you like games, foxfire,” he said when he caught her, “then I know just where to take you next.”

It was a vast, abandoned amusement park, choked with weeds and red with rust, beneath the ancient ring of a Ferris wheel. She climbed its metal spokes and danced its shape for him, swinging from cabin to cabin without fear even as the metal groaned beneath her feet.

“And you like the rides, too, I see,” he said. “Let’s look for bigger ones to find.”

People left all sorts of things behind, she found, as she wound her way through roller-coaster tracks that sprawled over whole empty miles, while he watched her, clapping, from the ground. Even a domed ballroom beneath a lake, its walls water-stained and windows leaking dappled light, guarded above the surface by a hunched Neptune with a spear. And forts on spindly telescope legs stranded in the sea, and stained-glass train stations with curling ivy but no trains, and stone mills that sprouted grass instead of grinding grain, and peeling wooden houses like matryoshka dolls in Russian forests.

She didn’t need to eat. She didn’t need to drink. She only needed herself, and him.

The love was becoming her own, and real.

And still her hair was mostly red.

“I want to see what you do,” she told him once, taking him by the hand. “Helping them all die. Making them die. Whatever it is, I want to be by your side.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” He pulled her close, tucking her head beneath his chin. “It’s happening right now, and in every other moment. It’s not a thing I do, but the thing I am. All the other parts of me that you don’t see—that’s where they are instead of loving you.”

“You and your multitudes,” she teased. “But why can’t you take me with you, then? With all the rest of you?”

“Because if I did that, my foxfire love, then that would kill you, too.”

“Is that why we never see anyone else? Why it’s always just you and me? I’m just forgetting what other people do, a bit. And maybe I wish that I could see them.”

“And I would give that to you if I could, my heart. But this is the way she willed it to be.”

“Take me somewhere else, then,” she said, “where we can really be alone. Somewhere far away from here, where no one’s ever been before.”

THERE SHOULD HAVE been no light inside that tree. But she could see it perfectly, how its trunk was like a vault around them, wide and silent as a church. Bright beetles with green and pearly shells climbed the inner skin; they would have terrified her once. Now she wished, with part of her heart, to feel their tiny feet scrabbling against her palm.

“It’s the biggest banyan that there is,” he told her. “Is this much alone enough for you?”

She laid her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down until he sat. “It is.”