Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(66)
We didn’t talk about it. Lina could hear that I felt what she felt, a madcap thrill strong enough to revive me from my stupor. As the bus groaned into its ?abljak stop, we were the first to pile out and rush into the station. A leathery woman with windburned cheeks and wiry hair signed a yellow Fiat into our custody without even bothering to check my license, though her eyes narrowed as she scanned our faces.
Outside, a single shared glance confirmed that Lina would drive. I’d gotten the most practice with Luka, but there was no way I could have managed it, not with my limbs still feeling like kindling. As she pulled carefully out of the lot, easing back into the motions of driving stick, it didn’t seem to matter that all we had was a tourist guidebook and map the woman at the station had given us. The ribbons didn’t just warm and soothe; they tugged in a gentle, possessive way, like fingers wound lovingly into our hair, massaging away the qualms. Straining like a compass needle. We were going home. And maybe there, we’d finally find our mother again—or at least understand enough about what had happened to her to learn how to let her go.
We drove past the ?abljak township, bare of people in its off season. We passed empty streets lined with domed streetlamps, wooden chalets with long, slanted eaves that shed snow during the heavy winters, and ski hotels shaped like wedges for the same reason. For a while, a sheepdog puppy trailed the car, barking like a beast, his coat shaggy and his eyes a startling, milky blue. We reached a glacier lake ringed with soaring pines—Zmijsko Jezero, I found on the map, the Lake of Serpents—and still we climbed higher into the dense, evergreen woods.
“This is the way, isn’t it?” I asked her. “You feel it, too?”
“Oh, yes.” She jiggled her shoulders with pleasure. “It’s definitely the way.”
Checking the guidebook, I pointed out the mountain summits silhouetted above us as we drove deeper and higher into the forest. The humped outline of Veliki Medjed, named “Big Bear” for its bear-snout shape, roared into the sky next to the crisp, near-perfect triangle of Savin Kuk.
When the forest finally widened into a clearing that held a dark, massive chalet the size of a hotel, the ribbons pealed like soundless bells, all homecoming and jubilance. As Lina pulled us into the gravel driveway, neither of us had any doubt that we’d arrived.
We stepped out into the clearing together, the chalet looming in front of us, hewn from deep mahogany logs. It was at least five stories tall, its eaves nearly brushing the ground, wide glass windows opening into what looked like a ballroom. The clearing itself looked like something out of a fairy tale, the kind that Malina and I had read to each other once Mama could no longer be bothered. Clouds of midges whirled like snowflakes in the golden shafts of afternoon sunlight, and silken spiderwebs glinted, strung between the pines. Some even floated through the air in glimmering strands, untethered, clipped from their moorings by the briskness of the breeze.
“It’s so pretty here,” Malina murmured, echoing my thoughts.
I was still nodding when the giant door swung open on silent hinges. A woman stepped out, and for a moment the world shifted sideways.
In the slanting light, and still shadowed by the inside of the chalet, she looked exactly like our mother.
The illusion shattered as soon as she came forth to meet us, each step delicate and deliberate, like a cat walking along a sill. A jade tulip dress parted above long, bronzed legs, and a simple silver lariat looped around her slender throat. My mind flashed back to the photo of Anais, the smiling girl with the valley behind her. Something about this woman called her up. The bright, curling fall of her sorrel hair, threaded with ribbons like our own, was darker than that fiery copper but close enough, though her jawline was much squarer than the girl’s had been, more like Mama’s.
“Faisali’s girls,” she murmured, her frost-pane eyes welling. Her full lips pressed into a smile so much like Mama’s that my eyes filled instantly, too, like a reflex. “Finally. It’s so good to meet you, after all these years.”
“Who are you?” Malina asked, her voice trembling.
“I’m Shimora, dear heart. Your grandmother.”
Before we knew it she’d drawn us against her, sinewy arms wrapped around us both. She was surprisingly warm and solid, all muscle beneath that silken, amber skin, and her perfume lapped over me like a fragrant tide, like how the air must have smelled in the Garden of Eden. Pomegranate, cinnamon, fig, and calla lily, and something else too sweet and unusual for me to know its name, yet familiar all the same.
“But how is that possible?” I whispered into her neck, struggling to understand how I could believe her so readily when nothing made sense. “You—you’re dead. You died before we were born. Mama said that our grandfather killed you and her sister, that you died trying to protect our aunt. And even if she lied about that, look at you. You’re young. You’re Mama’s age, if that.”
Sadness flickered prettily across her face. “Is that what she told you? My poor Fai. She was hurting badly when she left us, and I suppose the truth wouldn’t have done, not when she was trying so terribly hard to protect you from it all.”
“Protect us from what? And do you have her? Do you have our mother?”
She sighed deeply and stepped back, trailing her long fingers down our arms until she held our hands in a warm, smooth grip. From this close, she was somehow even more flawless. A faint spray of freckles speckled the tanned bridge of her falcon’s nose, and even that seemed deliberate, a subtle, natural enhancement rather than a flaw. She wore the lightest makeup, flicks of mascara to bring out the ice glint of her eyes, high sweeps of blush on her cheekbones, and a peachy, near-transparent lip gloss. Her hair fell in sculpted curls, loose ringlets that gleamed as if each had been carved from cherrywood, like the mermaids on ships’ prows.