Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(27)
There was something familiar about her voice, sweet and stripped of the other’s inhuman resonance, but the honeyed prison of perfume wouldn’t let me think enough to place it.
“But they do look at us,” I said, as if the blonde hadn’t even spoken. My voice sounded strange and echoing, as if the three of us were underneath a dome, an upended goldfish bowl. It made the air feel like cotton stuffed in my ears. “They stare at us all the time.”
“Of course they do, little one,” the brunette—Sorai—said, and the slight smile she gave me warmed me to my core. Looking at her felt like staring at a darkened sun, watching an eclipse until it turned your eyes to cinders. “You were born to draw the gaze, to snare it like a butterfly in a net. But you are not nearly what you should be. Show them, Naisha. Show them what beauty should be like. Show them all they are missing.”
Naisha’s face stayed impassive, and I would never have noticed the struggle beneath if I hadn’t seen Malina’s eyes on her and heard my sister’s dissonant little trill: Don’t tell me what to do. It seemed strange, that childish note of defiance. Especially since they both looked around the same age to me, not much older or younger than Mama.
Moving so slowly, Naisha unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall, tossing her head so the gleaming corn-silk rope of her hair slid over one shoulder. Her bare torso shone long and lithe, small teardrop breasts tipped in pink. Every gesture was beyond deliberate, the bending of each wrist and crooking of her fingers like the precise steps of the most minute dance. I noticed she had an odd piercing, a tiny diamond embedded into her left wrist, sparking between the forking green threads of her veins. My heart pounded wildly in my chest; I’d seen women topless on the beach sometimes, but they’d never looked anything like this, a perfection vast and heartbreaking as a sunrise.
Beside me, I heard Malina catch a shuddering breath, but still no one else in the square even looked our way.
Patterns began to flicker across the pristine canvas of Naisha’s skin, chasing one another. Tiger stripes of orange and black wound around her waist, then a silver spate of fish scales scattered across her ribs. Long, pale swan feathers fanned out over her chest, then bright-green and glossy black ones swept up her neck. Cheetah spots raced in trails down both her arms, and finally the skin around her eyes turned a stippled, tawny brown and beige, as if she had become part diamondback snake.
As she flicked through the patterns, her eyes and hair changed color to match, flowing from a brilliant, inhuman orange to a flaring peacock green, and even her features seemed to shift, sharpening or flattening out to mimic the animal she was showing for us. Yet it never went all the way; her face stayed beautiful in each incarnation, a gorgeous were-woman hybrid like a creature from one of my storybooks. A shape-shifter prettier than any succubus I’d ever read about.
I realized my jaw was hanging open, and closed it with a click as Naisha dipped to pluck her shirt from the ground, shaking her hair loose as she buttoned it briskly back up. Even that was gracefully done, nimble and quick like fingers flying over piano keys. My mouth had gone dry, and everything inside my head swam giddy. I should have been shocked to see something so dazzlingly strange, but the shock felt very far and faint, eclipsed by envy and wonder.
“Do you see?” Sorai said softly, reaching out to graze the crown of my head with her nails, Malina’s with her other hand. A tingling current ran through me, and I nearly arched my back like a cat at her touch. “This is how you should be. So beautiful that you can wound with it. Your beauty is a force, you know, a power all its own. It can be both sword and shield for you, and win you anything you want.”
“But I—I don’t know how,” I said hoarsely. Malina made an uncertain hmm beside me, as if she somehow almost knew what that meant, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Sorai enough to question her. “Will you show us?” I yearned for them to stay so badly, to remind me how to gleam.
“Oh, you will learn again when you need to,” she replied, still stroking my head. “It hasn’t died inside you. I see it merely asleep, like a fox kit curled up in her den. And even what is deeply sleeping nearly always wakes again. But remember that it burns inside you, a fox fire in your chest. Even if it might be simpler, never let yourself forget.”
“What about me,” Malina asked thickly. “Why aren’t you telling me not to forget?”
Sorai gave a bright, stirring laugh, a cluster of nested bells rung together. “Because you are my cuckoo, are you not, baby songbird? All that false meekness in your mother’s nest.”
“Are you going to . . .” Naisha hesitated, then cleared her throat. Sorai turned to her with a languid, too-slow swivel of her head, fine crow’s-feet crinkling as her eyes narrowed. “Do you wish to take them, then?” she finished.
“No, let her keep them still. She’ll serve as she needs to, when it’s time. She will, and they will.”
She turned back to me, dropping quick yet weightless to her knees, as if she were at once made of feathers and lead. The feathered gown pooled around her, and she tipped my chin up with a warm, curled finger—I could feel the sharp edge of her nail sink almost painfully into my skin—before leaning forward, her hair sliding like a curtain around both our faces. Her eyes were so bright I could barely stand to look at her, and my own slid closed as her lips covered mine in a smooth, chaste kiss, a long exhale of that dizzying perfume. It had deepened and darkened, too, turning closer to the earth; patchouli, frankincense, and even tobacco.