Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(28)

Everything seemed to slide away—the ground beneath me, the grit of the stone block against my back, the warm brush of Lina’s arm by mine—and I funneled into a thick and fragrant black.

AS I BLINKED against the darkened, frayed edge of the memory, I looked up to see the woman on the bastion gather her skirts in one hand and leap nimbly over the other side, beyond the Northern Gate—into the ?kurda River. I raced headlong through the gate, but there was nothing, no one, just the lacy green-and-white churn of the water rippling around rocks beneath the bridge.

I stood for a moment with the back of my hand to my forehead, reeling; the way she moved had been so fluid it was nearly inhuman. And now that I remembered her—remembered them both—I couldn’t believe that I had ever forgotten. I could recall the rest of that afternoon perfectly, almost too well, as if the excision of that memory had crystallized the remainder of the day. Lina and I had gone on as if nothing had happened, used some of the glasswork money to split a hazelnut and strawberry gelato before we headed to the beach with Luka and Niko. And there’d never been a single mention between us of a woman wrapped in feathers and scent, or another that could draw animal prints using nothing but her own skin.

It was the perfume that had done it: a perfume that made us feel things and then forget them, just like Mama had said our grandmother’s gleam had done before she died.

And both of those women had our eyes.

Those women were family, somehow, they had to be. And if they were, then everything Mama had told us—the three of us, all alone in the world—was a lie. And from what Sorai had said, the gleam she saw inside us was something not to be tamped down, but to be coaxed into full flame just like I’d always wanted.

But who were they to us? Why had Sorai given me back a memory she had stolen from me years ago, just like she had considered stealing both me and Malina from our mother? Why had they even wanted to take us—and why had they left us with Mama anyway when they could have spirited us away so easily, luring us with that perfume like some scented pied piper?

The only thing I could latch onto was that one of these three women, Dunja, Sorai, or Naisha, had hurt our mother, then somehow suspended her just short of death. It was Dunja’s name that Mama had spoken last, but then again, that “don’t” . . . now I wondered if she was truly our only suspect. Everything felt like twist-tied nonsense, without end and beginning, like the world had spun itself into a M?bius strip. I yearned suddenly for Luka, who’d taught me about M?bius strips and then indulged me endlessly when I caught a fascination with them, wondering how they could be worked into my glass fractals. If he were here, what would he tell me to do? How would he cut to the root of this tangle?

The root. That was it. Mama was the root of this, and even if I couldn’t go to her directly, I still had all her things.





TEN




I CROSSED THE BRIDGE OVER THE ?KURDA, WHICH LED TO the shop-lined street that backed ours. I was nearly home when it struck me that I had no actual plan for confronting any potential murderer lying in wait in our apartment, and that this was a thing I might want to consider.

Glancing around the riverbank, I armed myself with a rock and a sturdy branch snapped off from our oleander tree. Tucking the stick under my arm, I tried the doorknob; it didn’t budge under my hand.

Squatting near the base of the oleander, I dug gingerly around the roots, wary of beetles and things with stingers, until I found the spare key nestled there. The apartment felt hushed and stale as I let myself in, and my stomach contracted at the stubborn, lingering tang of rakija. Still clutching my stick and rock, and feeling only slightly like an asshole but mostly like a subscriber to the “best have it and not need it” school, I poked through the kitchen, bathroom, tiny living room, and two bedrooms—the pile of Lina’s shoes tipped precariously against one wall, like an abstract sculpture of stabby heels and glossy straps, seemed like it had multiplied exponentially, but that was always the case—until I was satisfied that no one was going to dart out at me from under a bed or behind a door.

Since there’d never been much of anything in our living room other than a TV with actual rabbit-ear antennas and more of Jovan’s gorgeous driftwood furniture, I started my search in Mama’s room. Other than two nights before, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in there. She’d kept it locked during the day since she’d caught us playing dress-up with her clothes once, years ago—that once had been enough to keep Lina humming her danger song for weeks.

The space between bed and closet was so narrow I had to do a little sideways shuffle as I eased open one wing and then the other. The armoire exhaled lavender, sage, and lemon peel into my face; no mothballs for our mother. Wooden hangers clacked as I plunged my hands into an assembly line’s worth of fitted dresses. Mama bought her clothes at the flea market stands and thrift shops just like we did, but she spent hours of her scarce free time painstakingly altering them until they somehow transformed into finery, as if she couldn’t bear anything less than perfection against her skin. She took fastidious care of them, and threw them away so rarely that some of these were almost ten years old, ones she’d worn even before I lost her.

And they smelled so strongly of her.

I let the sobs come rolling out, the louder ones I’d held trapped in my rib cage the night before. Curling the fabrics between my fingers, I pressed her dresses against my flushed face. It felt as if I were turning myself inside out and my innards were spikier than expected, spiny like burrs.