Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(38)
Luka’s face brightened like a little boy’s, despite all the skepticism. “We’d love to,” he said. “Thank you.”
Ivan squeezed behind the altar, his voice growing muffled. “It’s tight back here, but you’ll come through just fine.”
I startled as his hand wrapped around mine, and he gently tugged me forward, placing my palm against the altar’s cool, dusty back. I edged in sideways, trying not to breathe too shallowly. The dark, tight space smelled as clean as the rest of the chapel, nothing but the fresh saltwater breeze from outside and the ghostly undertone of faded incense. Still, my flesh crawled as Ivan guided my hand around the dry rim of an opening carved into the altar’s back, as if there might be creatures in there, a snake or swarming beetles, a scorpion with its barbed tail held poised to strike.
But when I finally slipped my hand into the smooth, rounded opening and ran my fingers over stone polished by countless palms, I felt a deep wash of disappointment, as if I had thought there might be something here. A clue, maybe, something we could use to begin picking at this thorny tangle with Mama—and the two of us—at its center.
But nothing was ever so easy.
After all four of us wriggled out the other side, Ivan gestured toward the doorway to the left of the altar. “The museum is through there. It’s a shame that I can’t show it to you, but after yesterday, my father thought it’d be best to be a little careful, even if we can’t close down the church itself.”
Malina stiffened beside me. “What . . .” My voice came out raspy. I could practically taste my heart in my throat. “What happened yesterday?”
“Someone stole our most precious votive offering. It was a tapestry of the Madonna and child, embroidered by Jacinta Kuni?-Mijovi?, from Perast. She worked on it for twenty-five years while her husband was away at sea, until she lost her eyesight. She used gold and silver fibers, and seed pearls, but by the end, when she ran out of money and could barely see, she used her own hair. You can see how it pales from dark to white where she wove it in.”
He turned away from us, as if to straighten a little display of candles, but I could hear the fury in his voice. “Can you imagine how much love went into something like that? Her wealth, her sight, her own hair—just in the hope that her husband would come home. And now it’s gone forever. It was given to Our Lady, and someone stole it. Our Lady wouldn’t ever be vengeful, but I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say that I hope that woman pays for it.”
“Were you here when it happened?”
“I was,” he said bitterly. “I showed her everything, even the first stone. And I let her stay upstairs alone so I could tour a French group that had come in. She seemed so . . . She didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d do something like that. But what do I know. I can’t even be remembering her right.”
“Why not?”
“I thought she was old, to begin with. Her hair was white. But when she took her sunglasses off inside, I could have sworn she wasn’t any older than me.”
FOURTEEN
“WHAT IS SHE DOING?” I DEMANDED. WE SAT AT THE outermost table of the trellis-shrouded restaurant’s terrace, overlooking the water as the sun dipped behind the mountains across from us. I’d wanted to head straight back to Cattaro, as if simple movement could make up for how stagnant and lost I felt, but apparently I’d still looked pale when we got off the ferry. Luka had insisted we get something to eat. “What could she possibly want with a tapestry? And if she burgled a church, it seems likely that she’s the one who took our things, too.”
Malina dipped her chin, her cascade of curls rushing over her cheeks. “But what for? It’s not just why a tapestry—it’s why that one.”
“Maybe if we understood the context better,” Luka mused. He was sitting next to me, across from Malina and Niko, one arm slung across the back of my chair. “This gleam, these things you both can do, and Jasmina too.” He leveled a gaze at his sister. “That you knew about, apparently.”
“Yes,” I said flatly, looking at Malina, who met my eyes with a guilty dart of a gaze. “About that.”
Niko shrugged, one brown shoulder slipping free of her black-and-gold top, slim as a sparrow wing. “Well, I obviously wasn’t going to tell you, Luka. I didn’t think it was such a terribly big deal anyway. Mama did things for us sometimes, cantrips and blessings, little songs for health and wealth. No need to look so shocked about it—you were the one who never wanted to hear about her old family, her compania in Bosnia, before she married Tata. Anyway, this seemed like that, just scaled up. And it was Lina’s secret, which she didn’t exactly mean to tell me in the first place. We were singing together, and then—”
“Yeah,” Lina broke in. “Niko was teaching me one of Ko?tana’s songs, the Romany rounds. We were singing on top of each other, and it just happened. I showed too much. It was three or four years ago. I was still doing it by accident a lot more than I do now.”
I looked between the two of them. They were staring away from each other, Lina’s eyes near silver in the dimming light, as if her irises were limned with mercury, Niko’s dark and gleaming like a doe’s, blackened with liner. There was something glinting right beneath the surface there, a goldfish flicker in a pond, but I lost it just as quickly. Niko’s eyeliner reminded me of Fjolar, and I wondered if he might be free when we got back tonight. If he might want to see me.