Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(32)
Ko?tana had collected all of these. She apparently liked her pretty things on the broken side. Sometimes I’d wondered if that was why she’d loved having me and Lina underfoot so much over the years.
Some of the nargilehs squatting in corners as decoration, pipes coiled around them, were my own; I’d made their blown-glass bases using the flowers Luka gave me for inspiration, sometimes even capturing the original petals within the fractal folds. Years of scented tobacco haunted the air, and I could smell the ripe, wet cloy of fresh wads too.
It was too early yet for the throng of tourists and local teens who’d descend on the store later. Luka sat alone, reading, perched on the stool behind the counter with his back against the mirrored shelves of liquor and his feet propped on the bar. His eyes snapped up to mine as I stepped in, and a thrill flicked through me. He’d been gone for long enough that even after our reunion two days ago, he seemed more like a striking stranger with amber-bright hazel eyes than my best friend since I was nine. Beside me, I could feel Malina casting the room for Niko, but I didn’t see her anywhere.
“Hi,” I said tentatively as he eased out from behind the counter in his lithe, narrow-hipped way. “I don’t know if you’ve—”
I abruptly found myself tucked beneath his chin, my nose nestled into the soapy hollow of his throat. It wasn’t one of his bone-clenching hugs, either; he held me more than hugged me, letting me decide how close I wanted to be. The tenderness demolished me in a second, and I let out a strangled sob against him, my fingers curling into the blue linen of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered against the top of my head, rocking me a little. “Jesus, Missy, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe it. Niko and I tried to come and see you yesterday, but the police wouldn’t let anyone talk to you.”
“They had to keep things quiet,” I mumbled tearfully against his shirt. “It’s bad, what happened. Worse than bad.”
“That was the impression I got.” His voice tightened. “Do they know what happened to Jasmina? Who killed her?”
So they’d heard she was dead, too. I shook my head beneath his chin, then pulled back, wiping haphazardly at my face with both hands. He let me go and held his arms out for Lina, murmuring, “Linka, heart, come here, accept my condolences,” and she slipped into his arms in her graceful way, resting her cheek against his chest as he kissed the top of her head. I frowned at them, uneasy without any good reason. They’d never really been much for touching each other, easy as the four of us all were together—Niko was the cuddler, forever hugging all of us and dealing out kisses without provocation—but that hug had seemed so effortless. Like something they’d done many times before.
He caught my eyes above her head, brows lifted in question.
“She’s not dead, Luka. Someone hurt her, enough that she should be dead, but isn’t. They have no idea who did it. And they don’t understand why she’s even still alive, if you can call it that.”
He hissed in a breath, then stepped away from Lina to lean back against the counter, arms crossed and eyes heavy-lidded. “Explain.”
He listened as I frantically described Dunja, Mama’s drunken night—Niko had already filled him in on that—what I’d seen at the café in the morning, and the moaning ruin of our mother in the hospital. His narrowed gaze stayed focused somewhere over my shoulder as I talked. Luka always did that, the sideways, thousand-yard stare when he was concentrating deeply, as if gesturing and facial expressions distracted him from absorbing the useful core of information he needed.
“So Jasmina should be dead,” he murmured. “No vital signs, no functioning heart or lungs. But she has brain activity. She’s alive, and not even just technically.” He finally met my eyes, and I nearly buckled beneath their intensity, dropping my own in reflex. “Iris. How would that be possible?”
“I don’t know,” I nearly whispered, clasping my hands in front of me. I hated how easily he’d always done this to me in all the years we’d been friends. Lowering my volume, making me calm even when I didn’t want to be. “But it is. Lina and I think there’s some sort of . . . magic happening.”
“Magic,” he repeated quietly. “You think that’s what’s keeping Jasmina from dying. Or keeping her alive when she should be dead, rather.”
“Yes,” I said, bristling. “Like what Lina and I have.”
“Magic, like what you and Lina have.”
I flung up my hands. “What are you, a mountain valley now? Are you going to just echo everything back at me? Yes, magic. We’ve always called it a gleam. Mama has—had, I don’t know—something like it, too.”
“All right.” He tilted his head. “Well, then. Show me yours.”
I gritted my teeth. “The thing is, I can’t. I used to be able to, but years ago Mama stopped teaching us, and—you know what, fine. I knew you’d be this way. Well, see about this, then.” I turned to Lina, who was watching us nervously, eyes flicking back and forth between us like a fencing-match spectator. “Sing something for him. Whatever he’s feeling. All the way through.”
She cleared her throat, shifting from foot to foot and winding her hair around her wrist as Luka’s implacable gaze settled on her like an alighting hawk. For all that he was so restrained, Luka could be unnerving as hell, his attention like a wide-winged shadow circling a grassy field.