Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(67)
From that simple dress to the long muscles in her bare arms, and even down to the nude-painted toes, everything about her was so precisely, near-painfully right. An elegance so sleek and Spartan it felt like the privilege of looking at her must have a price.
That thought drove a tiny pinprick of recognition through the blanketing warmth of her presence and her scent—it reminded me of what Luka had said about me and Malina. That we were too beautiful, near unnerving to the eye.
But the slight sense of quailing vanished immediately as she moved back toward the chalet, drawing us with her, stepping deeper into the perfume.
“We’ll tell you everything as soon as you’re properly back with us,” she said, her gaze shifting warmly between us. “Everything you want to know, and everything you need. But you’ll let us welcome you first, yes? We’ve missed you for so many years—and you’ve missed us even if you didn’t know it.”
“Who is ‘us,’ exactly?” Malina asked. “We don’t have anyone to miss.”
Shimora hummed mournfully, deep in her throat. “Your whole family, of course, dear heart. Will you come inside with me, meet some of your kin?”
I nodded immediately, without thinking. Beside me, Malina took a beat longer before she bit her lip and nodded too. Together, we let Shimora lead us across the threshold.
TWENTY-TWO
FROM THE INSIDE, THE CHALET’S GROUND FLOOR WAS even grander, vast and wide as a ballroom. The four stories above us formed an atrium, ringing a glass-and-steel chandelier strung from the highest eaves, each piece dangling down to a different level—hollow spheres and onion bulbs like Christmas ornaments, and long cylinders scored with patterns, like the metal rolls of sheet music I’d seen inside self-playing pianos. A row of silken white bolts trailed down from the ceiling as well, ends pooled on the floor behind a round dais made of gleaming black marble, forked with veins of amethyst.
All those fascinating patterns, a lattice of glass, metal, and fabric, swam in and out of focus as soon as I looked up, straining brutally to fracture into a mosaic of itself. The gleam bucked inside me as if I’d swallowed a living thing, and I doubled over, eyes squinched shut.
“What’s happening to me?” I managed, before clamping my lips shut. Words were going to lead directly to vomit, that much was for sure.
I heard Malina’s squeak of alarm even as Shimora laid a light hand on the back of my head, rubbing gently until the spasm loosened and the bile stopped lapping at my throat.
“Easy, dear heart,” she soothed. “It’s that you’re back where you belong, is all. The gleam in your blood feels mine, feels all of us.”
Faintly, I remembered Mama telling us of home. That’s what it’s like, when women in our family eat the moon, she had said. We’re bound to each other, braided together. And when we catch fire, we burn as one.
“It merely wants you to let it loose,” Shimora continued. “And you will, but for now, just breathe. I’ll help a little, too.”
“Help how?” I gasped.
“I ply scents, the way your mother plies flavor. You’ve smelled it already, the perfume of my welcome to you both. Scent can mean so many things—it can make one feel, or even see, such a great deal.”
As if she could sense my nausea and mental churn, her distinctive perfume shifted by a single note, fresh and cool as a zephyr, and I relaxed before I even fully registered the change.
So that part of Mama’s story had been another pyrite fleck of truth, then, I thought as I leaned on my thighs, sipping air through parted lips. Our grandmother did make perfumes that swayed the mind, though I wondered if she even needed the physical trappings of essentials and absolutes.
Or if she herself was somehow enough.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it?” she cooed. “It’ll be better still the more you breathe. It’s not just me you’ll smell in here. It’s all of us, the scent of how content we are together. And of how much love there is between us.”
I took a few questing breaths. The air did smell powerfully of that unnameable sweetness that suffused Shimora’s scent, so rich it must have leached into the building’s planks. It still smelled somehow familiar, and I found myself breathing as deeply as I could, until I felt not only recovered but giddy and light-headed from the sweetness of the sting.
Beside me, Malina grinned as soon as I straightened, her lips pink and bright against her teeth, her silvery eyes glazed like glass.
“It does smell so good in here, doesn’t it?” she said breathlessly. “It’s . . . wow. It smells like when I first realized . . .”
“When you first realized what?”
She gave herself a little shake. “Nothing. I—nothing.”
I gave her a slantwise frown, but before I had a chance to pry into what she had meant, Shimora trailed her hand over the hobnailed back of a velveteen black-cherry love seat close to the marbled podium.
“Will you come sit, Iris, Malina?” She wrinkled her fine nose a bit. “We’ll have proper names for you soon, but we thought the naming and the scenting could wait until after. You have your ribbons already, after all, and that’s most important. Faisali saw to that, at least.”
“Naming?” I echoed dumbly as Lina and I settled back into the plush contours; there were even two ottomans for us each to rest our feet. “We already have names, too.”