Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(65)
THE BUS JUDDERED BENEATH US, STRAINING ALONG THE narrow mountain roads. I sat next to the window so Lina wouldn’t have to look at the plunging depths beyond the mountainside, but both of us were too exhausted to care much either way. She held my hand in her lap, cradled in both of hers; my head was tucked into her neck. The pilled seats were so saggy I kept feeling like I was going to collapse right through mine, like falling down a rabbit hole, and the air was stale and warm from the feeble AC.
Even worse, that quivery, unstable feeling of emptiness refused to recede, as if Fjolar had sucked the marrow from my bones. I’d gone limp as a jellyfish washed out onto a beach. Even deadened with fatigue, it scared me badly how empty I felt.
Still, I passed out almost as soon as we’d boarded and settled in, right after wolfing down two smoked-ham and cheese sandwiches that Lina pressed on me, washed down with a liter bottle of orange Fanta. I dreamed about him in jolts and flashes as I drowsed on Lina’s shoulder. Every time I woke up enough to be aware of her, I could hear her grinding her teeth in silent fury, jaw clicking.
“You were right about him,” I whispered up to her, and even defenseless as I was, the words stuck like burrs in my mouth. “I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s not your fault, Riss.”
“But you warned me—”
“It doesn’t matter. I can hear you hurting and tired, and still I can’t even tell what happened. So whatever it is, you couldn’t have been ready for it, okay? Whatever it is, it was his fault.”
I grasped her hand tight, hoping she could hear my unspoken thanks.
As I slipped in and out of sleep, my temple tilted against the window after Lina curled up away from me, my mind batted vaguely at the happenings of the morning. Niko had checked her mother’s book for us and confirmed that the honey in Mama’s perfume had been very specific—a batch harvested in ?abljak, in early spring. ?abljak was the highest-altitude town in all the Balkans, perched on the imposing Durmitor range; Lina and I had both known that much from school.
It was far from the kind of cliffside-clinging village I’d always imagined from Mama’s story. But it felt, at least, like another version of the truth. As if everything she’d ever told us had been like a matryoshka nesting doll, and we had to crack open shell after shell to find the kernel of pure truth at the heart.
Luka and Niko had raged in every way they could think of, but Lina and I had found our way back to each other and clasped tight. No amount of their battering against our seamless united front would budge us. We’d left Niko in raging tears, pounding her tiny clenched fist against the Prince’s bar top.
“Why won’t you let us come?” Luka had asked me after she turned away from us to pour herself a shot of tequila, slamming both glass and bottle with abandon, refusing to talk or to accept a good-bye hug. “Or just me. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. You’ll need help.”
“And that’s exactly why we have to do it alone,” I’d whispered back. It hurt so much to meet his eyes and see what I was doing to him, but I refused to spare myself by looking away. “We have no idea what we’re going to find and I—I can’t risk you like that. Or Niko. Whatever’s in those mountains, I can’t let it have you. You would do the same, if it were you and Niko instead of us, all tangled up in something this terrifying and invisible. You’d never let us come with you. You know it.”
He kept his teeth clamped tight against everything he wanted to fling at me, his fists clenched on the bar top. “Okay, then,” he said finally. “Fine. But is there anything I can do for you? I need—just something to do, Iris. Anything.”
“Could you tell Jovan that we had to go, please? If we say good-bye, he’ll never let us go, he’ll have the police hold us if he has to. Maybe if you could tell him that we found something to do with Jasmina, with the people who made her—he’ll know what that means—and that we had to follow it all the way to the end. Maybe it’ll give him some comfort.”
“Of course it won’t. But I’ll do it, and we’ll see him through this. I promise.”
He nodded one last time, then caught me in a fierce hug. I could feel the hammering of his heart against my cheek. It would take me a long while to forget the carefully curated devastation in his eyes, especially because of how completely I deserved it. I’d let him down and broken his trust in every form, and now I wouldn’t even let him do the only thing he’d ever wanted—just to help me.
Still, whatever was waiting for us in the mountains had to be cordoned off from everyone we loved, no matter how much those left behind us hurt.
ABOUT AN HOUR and a half in, it was the ribbons that woke me fully.
I peeled my face from the glass, squinting into the glare. My cheek was both numb and hot, and I’d left a charming snail-smear of drool on the window. Beyond it, the day was crystalline, a pennant of clear sky above even greener mountains on either side of us.
We’d worried about what we’d even do once we got to ?abljak, but as we looped around the hairpin turns that seemed impossibly narrow for the unwieldy lumber of the bus, I could feel the ribbons surging against my scalp, glowing with a sweet, lovely warmth nothing like the spitting-cobra tingle I’d felt at the churches.
It must have been a slow burn, like the gradual turning of a dial, because neither of us could tell when it had begun. But now it felt purely wonderful, like the pull of home after such a long, long time away. Like the idea of crawling into your own bed after the hardest day.