Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(33)
With an encouraging nod from me, she sang a low, clear note, the fundamental. Then she layered it with overtones, first one and then the second, an unsettling melody of warm empathy twining around stark skepticism, bolstered by a harmony so simple, elegant, and soul-stirring it sounded like the beginning of a Russian balalaika love song.
I could see Luka’s face wavering, and Lina’s song fleshed out even further, taking on the dissonance of his shock. He staggered back, bracing himself against the bar behind him, his face paling and knuckles turning white where he gripped its lip. Abruptly I became aware of a percussive beat accompanying her song, and I looked over to one of the nooks; Niko had stolen in silently at some point, and now she held one of the darabukka drums tucked beneath her arm, her palm striking the center of the drum’s head and then its edge. She nodded at me once, her eyes dark and intent with Lina’s song.
She knew. There was no shock written on her anywhere, not even a footnote of surprise.
Lina had told her. I’d kept our secret all these years, locked inside me like a treasure trapped within a puzzle box, and Lina had told her.
As my fury rose like a juggernaut and my sister felt it, Lina’s song shifted, churning into a tempest driven by the wild beat of Niko’s answering drum. The surge of it was so powerful that my head fell back, and my gaze landed on the café’s mad quilt of a ceiling—a series of overlapping Turkish carpets that Ko?tana had thought would be more fun there than on the floor.
The repeating designs of the rugs leaped out at me all at once, blocky, angular fauna and flora: a gridded fractal like the Minotaur’s maze, cream and crimson, scarlet and royal blue, reaching down toward me as if to swallow me up. I wanted to tamp it down, but then also I didn’t; it had been so many years since anything other than a flower bloomed for me, and this was glorious, so lush and complex—like the universe was giving me a Technicolor schematic of what these designs had looked like before they’d been born into physical being. My heart hammering against my ribs, I pulled even harder, made them multiply over and over as they echoed each other.
Abruptly, all that color began fading at the edges into black, and my insides boiled with nausea. I could hear myself make a miserable noise, a gag like a retching cat, along with the incongruously cheery tinkle of the bells strung above the café door behind me.
I staggered backward, sinking onto my knees on the scuffed parquet. My stomach heaved even as my head floated somewhere above me like a balloon with a snipped string. There was a warm, spicy smell—whiskey and chocolate, and just a hint of smoke—and a broad hand cupped the back of my head before it could strike the floor.
TWELVE
A FACE HOVERED ABOVE MINE, BLURRY AND OVERBRIGHT, as if I’d stared too long into sunlit water. I blinked a few times, waiting for it to resolve itself: a man, maybe twenty years old, with broad and bony Nordic features like a Viking’s, white-blond hair swept back, and gas-flame-blue eyes lined with smudged black. His nose was long and ridged, and his mouth wide and soft, the lower lip much fuller than the top. Following the lines of his lips, I licked my own in reflex. His cleft chin was stubbled with blond, and through my haze he looked somehow foggily familiar.
Blinking, I reached up at him, trying to touch his face like a groping child.
“So handsy,” he chided playfully, catching my hand. His long, blunt fingers wrapped around mine; they were very warm, with wide rings on almost every finger, the metal much colder than his skin. He flipped my hand over and brought it to his lips, brushing them over my knuckles. I felt the heat of the breath, and the shocking sear of something even warmer. From my very horizontal vantage point against his thigh, my belly bottomed out in the sweetest way. “Just like I remember. I told you next we met, I’d greet you properly, didn’t I? Though you do seem very inclined to pass out on me. Wonder how I should take that.”
“And where are you from, exactly, that a ‘proper’ greeting involves a girl lain out on her back?” Luka snapped from somewhere above us.
I focused on him, squinting, and Malina’s and Niko’s worried faces coalesced next to his. I abruptly remembered that there were other people here, and that I should start making an effort to move.
“Easy, now,” the blond said to Luka. He had the mellowest voice, comfortable and somehow careless, on the brink of laughter. The heedlessness of it was the sexiest thing I’d ever heard. “I’m not the one who put her there, am I? I can’t be blamed for catching a pretty apple already falling.”
“She is not a fruit,” Luka said, sounding so affronted it actually made me laugh out loud. The boy grinned down at me widely, his teeth very white and not quite straight.
“It’s true, I’m not,” I agreed, still giggling ridiculously. “I am, in fact, a female human. You—what is your name, anyway? Will you help me up?”
“It’s Fjolar, swoony lady. And of course.” He had a strange accent, clipped, upturned syllables, and an even stranger way of choosing words—like nothing I’d heard in Cattaro. Before I knew it, he’d wrapped his fingers around my upper arms and drawn me up easily against his broad chest, as if he were adjusting a piece of clothing rather than hauling up a person.
The inside of my head lurched back and forth as soon as I was upright. Everything sparkled for a moment—how pretty, daytime shooting stars indoors!—before I drew another breath of that tobacco, chocolate, and whiskey scent, and both my mind and stomach calmed. He was warm and very solid against my back, and I took a few more sips of air through parted lips, letting the smell rise up the back of my throat.