Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(98)

Her flawless face was bleak as she reached our clearing. “They’re coming,” she said grimly. “I can hear them gathering, the ground carrying their sound. It’s all of them now, full coven strength. Whatever we did yesterday must have accomplished something, and now they come to hunt us. I can hear Izkara baying.”

Luka dug his hands into my hair, as if he could feel the collapse of my heart in my chest. “Baying?” I asked faintly.

“Izkara is one of the first nine tiers. Mara’s great-great-granddaughter. She can gleam by taking on animal form, any combination that she dreams to life. Like a sphinx, or a griffin, but without limitation. Whatever menagerie suits her will.”

“Like Naisha?” Malina said.

“Not like Naisha. Her gleam is hollow, a pretty fancy, while Izkara’s is ancient enough to be real. If she grows claws of any kind, you had better flee before you think to test whether they can rend you from stem to stern.”

Niko twined her arms around Malina’s neck as if she had no intention of ever letting go, from where she sat tightly snuggled on my sister’s lap. “So, what do we do, then?” she demanded. “Now can we run?”

Dunja closed her eyes, and even in that inhuman, altered face, I saw the leaching of her stony strength. “I don’t know what to do. Jasmina—what we planned, the makeshift spell, that was the only hope. And now there’s nowhere to run from them.”

“How much time do we have?” Luka asked above my head.

She tilted her head, considering it. “An hour, maybe. Perhaps a little more. It’ll take them time to mass, and with so many abreast, they’ll have to scour the forest on foot.”

“So dance it for us,” Luka said above my head. I tipped my chin back, craning to look at him. His face had fallen so still and furious that it was terrifying, like rage somehow carved into rock. “That’s the one thing you haven’t done. Show us all what it was like, between you and Death.”

Her face shuttered. “Why would I do that?”

“Because it’s the one thing we’re missing,” he said. “You’re the only one who’s been there and back. Maybe there’s something we could learn from seeing it.”

“You can’t ask me to do that,” she spat back, lips skinned back from her teeth. “I nearly couldn’t stand it when he left me for the first time. I’ll have to feel it all again to dance it for you. I have to do it all a second time around.”

“Then maybe that’s the sacrifice you have to make,” Niko said. “For Lina and for Iris. Because if you abandon them now just to spare yourself that pain, when there might be another way, then you’re no better than Mara herself.”

Dunja hid her face in her hands, and for a moment she was just a girl again, nineteen years old and cold and lost. “How much do I have to give up,” she murmured into her hands. “Just how much.”

Then she gathered the final remnants of her poise, and stood.

Between one breath and another, Dunja went so still it was as if she held herself separate from the air, so even the breeze couldn’t touch her. The only sign of life was the pretty pulse beneath her chin, and with her head held high, I could see it ticking like a clock’s second hand beneath her skin.

When she finally began to move, it was in a single smooth, explosive moment, a lily unfurling in fast-forward. A series of delicate steps, ball to heel, took her out of our little campfire circle, where she became the centerpiece of a diorama against the pines—a glittering ice sculpture with flowing, snowy hair against the backdrop of brown and green. A glistening strand of a spiderweb came loose from where it spanned two branches above her, drifting lazily down until it settled into her hair.

“Sing with me, little niece, if you will,” she said to Malina. “I could use the accompaniment.”

She splayed her fingers once, and then again. Then she arranged her hands in front of her, back-to-back like a butterfly’s wings, to begin her dance.

SHE WAS ALONE when she woke, and the waking hurt. A cave loomed all around her, its stalactite teeth thicker than her arm, ice sparkling inside its every cranny from the faint light that filtered through the entrance. She hurt so much inside that as she rose up on her forearms, she expected them to quake beneath her weight. But they felt strong; so did her legs. Strong, and almost perfect, even when the furs—the ones they’d wrapped her in, after they’d climbed her up the mountain—fell away from her. She should have felt the cold, but there was no trembling, no spray of goose bumps, no feeling to her skin. Even the furs she clutched to her as she stood, rabbit and fox and ermine, felt like nothing as she held them.

At least Jasmina would never know any of this. Perhaps she was already well away, having fled as they had planned, while the others carried Dunja to her casket of ice.

She wandered the cave with pelts trailing behind her, feeling nothing beneath her feet. And nothing under her palm as she ran it over rough and frozen rock, then palmed the curves of fat, white icicles. At the entrance, she leaned outside into the gale; even the swirling white of icy flurries wouldn’t lash at her face.

The wall felt like nothing against her back, when she slid down against it to draw her knees up to her chest. And yet inside she felt just like herself, afraid and stubborn and so alone; and at least when she leaned her cheek on her knee, she could feel her own skin and how it was warm.