by Laini Taylor
“What are you doing here?” Svetla asked, her lip curling like she smelled something off. She was one of those beautiful girls with a knack for making herself ugly.
Karou glanced back to Karlova, then ahead to the next curve in the alley that could provide her with cover. It was too far down; she couldn’t chance it. She could almost feel her stalker drawing nearer.
Svetla drawled, “If you’re looking for Kaz, don’t bother. He told me what you did.”
Jesus, thought Karou. As if any of that mattered now. She said, “Svetla, shut up,” and thrust herself into the niche right along with her, shoving the other girl back against the stones.
Svetla gasped and tried to shove her out. “What are you doing, freak?”
“I said shut up,” Karou hissed, and when Svetla did not, she whipped her knife from her sleeve and held it up. It curved at the tip like the claw of a cat, and its edge caught a thread of light and glinted. Svetla gave a little gasp and fell silent, but not for long. “Oh, right. I’m so sure you’re going to stab me—”
“Listen,” said Karou, low. “Just be quiet for a minute and I’ll fix your stupid eyebrows.”
Shocked silence preceded a rasped “What?”
Svetla’s hair was cut in a long, hard bang, so low it brushed her eyes, and it was shellacked with hairspray so it scarcely moved, all in order to hide her eyebrows, on which Karou had wasted a shing in a fit of spite around Christmastime. Black and bushy under her hair, they were likely not working any wonders for her modeling career.
Svetla’s expression hovered somewhere between confusion and outrage. There was simply no way that Karou could know about her eyebrows, always kept so carefully covered. She would think Karou had been spying on her. Karou didn’t care what she thought. She just wanted silence. “I’m serious,” she breathed. “But only if I’m still alive to do it, so shut up.”
Voices drifted over from Karlova, along with strains of music from nearby cafes, and the purr of engines. She couldn’t hear footsteps, but that didn’t mean anything. Hunters understood stealth.
Svetla’s expression remained aghast, but for the moment, at least, she was quiet. Karou stood rigid and fierce-eyed, listening intently.
Someone was coming. Footsteps like the ghosts of footsteps. Out in the alley, a shadow seeped into view. Karou watched it lengthen on the ground in front of her as its source drew nearer. Her palms throbbed; she clasped her knife tighter and peered at the shadow, trying to make sense of it.
She blinked, and words spilled across her thoughts. Not Bain’s words, but Razgut’s.
My brother seraph was looking for you, lovely.
The shadow. The shadow had wings.
Oh god, the angel. Karou’s pulse went jagged. The distraction of Bain’s warning lifted like smoke to reveal what had been there all along: in her palms, a coursing energy. Her hamsas were on fire. How could she not have realized sooner? She turned a ferocious warning glare on Svetla and mouthed, Quiet. Svetla dropped the snarl. She looked afraid.
The shadow advanced, and behind it, the angel. He was peering ahead, intense. His wings were glamoured, his eyes glowed in the gloom, and Karou had a clear view of his profile. His beauty was as shocking as it had been the first time she’d seen him. Fiala, she invoked her drawing teacher, if you could see this. Though there was a pair of sheathed swords crossed on his back, his arms were passive at his sides, hands slightly raised and fingers splayed as if to demonstrate he was unarmed.
Good for you, thought Karou, tightening her grip on her knife. I’m not.
He drew even with the niche.
Karou gathered herself.
And leapt.
She had to launch herself upward to hook him around the neck — he was tall, six foot four at least — and she slammed into him hard and sent him staggering. She clung to him, feeling immediately what she couldn’t see: the heat and mass of wings, invisible but real. She felt too the warmth and breadth of his shoulders and arms, and was keenly aware of their powerful vitality as she brought her blade against his throat.
“Looking for me?”
“Wait—” he said, making no move to fight her or throw her off.
“Wait,” Karou scoffed, and, on impulse, she took the flat of her other hand and pressed its ink eye to the exposed skin of the angel’s neck.
As in Morocco, when she had first directed the unknown magic of her hamsas at him, something happened. That time, it had hurled him through the air. Now, its awful force didn’t hit and throw him — it went into him. Where Karou’s tattoo touched him, she felt a shrieking in his skin that forced shudders down into his flesh and reverberated up her own arm, into the core of her, even the roots of her teeth. It was mind-splitting. Horrific. And that was her.
For him, it was much worse. Spasms wracked his powerful form, threatening to knock her loose. She hung on. He choked. The magic wracked him. It felt sick and wrong — what was it doing? He lurched, shaking violently, and tried to pry her hand away, but his fingers fumbled. Under Karou’s hand, his skin was smooth and hot, so hot, so hot, and the heat was rising. The heat of his wings, too, like a bonfire whipped into a frenzy.
Fire, invisible fire.
Karou couldn’t bear it. Her palm lost contact with his neck. As her hand came away, stinging with the heat, the angel rallied. He grabbed her wrist and pivoted hard, flinging her off.
She landed light and spun back to face him.
He stood slouched, breathing hard, one hand holding his neck as he stared at her with his tiger’s eyes. She felt pinned in place, and for a long beat she could only stare back. He looked pained. Puzzlement drew a crease in his brow, like he was divining a mystery.
Like she was his mystery.
Then he moved, and the moment unfroze. He raised his hands, placating. His nearness pulsed at Karou. Her hamsas pulsed. Her heart, her fingertip, her memories: a slashing sword, Kishmish on fire, torched portals, Izîl the last time she’d seen him, wailing, “Malak!”
And when she raised her hands, it was not in peace. One gripped her knife; the other flashed its eye.
The seraph flinched and the hamsa buffeted him back several steps. “Wait,” he said, straining against it. “I won’t hurt you.”
A laugh caught in Karou’s throat. Just who was in danger of being hurt here? She felt powerful. Her phantom life had stopped taunting her, had slipped instead into her skin and possessed her. This was who she was: not prey, but power.
She launched herself at him, and he fell back. She pursued, he retreated. In all the sparring she’d done in years of training, she’d always held a little something back. Not now. Feeling strong, feeling unleashed, she delivered a whirling kata, landing blows to his chest, his legs, even his upheld, peacemaking hands, and with every contact she was reminded of his solidity — his firmly rooted physical presence. Angel or not — whatever that even meant — there was nothing ethereal about him. He was flesh.
“Why are you following me?” she growled in Chimaera.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Karou laughed. It really was kind of funny. She felt light as air and bright as danger. She attacked in a cool fury and still he barely defended himself, only parrying knife jabs and cringing under the force of her outfaced hamsa.
“Fight,” she hissed at him when another kick hit home and he did nothing but absorb it.
He didn’t. Instead, the next time she came at him, he gathered the air beneath him and took flight, lifting off the cobbles and out of her reach. “I just want to talk to you,” he said from above her.
She threw her head back and looked up to where he hovered in the air. The draft of his wingbeats whipped her hair around her face in wild blue tendrils.
She smiled, savage, and sank into a crouch. “So talk,” she said, and sprang into the air to meet him.
28
ATTITUDE OF PRAYER
In her hiding place, the vampire Svetla momentarily forgot how to breathe.
Down the alley a
t the junction with Karlova, a small tour group rounded the corner and came to a shocked halt. Gum fell from slack mouths. Kaz, sporting a top hat and carrying a wooden stake jauntily under one arm, perceived that his ex-girlfriend was in midair.
Honestly, he wasn’t that surprised. There was something about Karou that activated an unusual credulity. Things you wouldn’t dream of believing of others seemed, where Karou was concerned, not such a stretch. Karou, flying? Well, why not?
What Kaz felt wasn’t surprise. It was jealousy. Karou was flying, sure, but she was not flying alone. She was with a man, a man who even Kaz — who claimed it was “gay” to recognize the attractiveness of other men — had to admit to himself was beautiful to the point of absurdity. Beautiful to the point of completely overdoing it.
Uncool, he thought, crossing his arms.
It couldn’t exactly be described as flying, what the two were doing. They were up even with the roofline, but they were barely moving — circling like cats, staring at each other with extraordinary intensity. The air fairly throbbed between them, and Kaz felt it like a punch in the gut.
Then Karou attacked the guy, and he felt much better.
Later he would claim the airborne fight was part of his tour, and he’d rake in record tips. He’d refer to Karou as his girlfriend, infuriating Svetla, who would stalk home to glare at her eyebrows — still caterpillar-fat — in the mirror. But for now, they all just gawked at the two beautiful creatures fighting in the air with the rooftops of Prague behind them.
Well, Karou was fighting, anyway. Her opponent only dodged, with great grace and a strange kind of… gentleness?… and he seemed to shy away from her and flinch as if struck even when she hadn’t touched him.
It went on like that for a few minutes as the crowd thickened on the ground, and then it happened that when she came at him, the guy seized her hands so she dropped her knife — it fell a long way and landed point down between cobblestones and stuck there — and he held her. It was strange: He held her palms pressed together in an attitude of prayer. She struggled, but he was clearly much stronger and held her with ease, his hands pressed over hers, like he was forcing her to pray.
He spoke to her and his words drifted down to the onlookers, foreign and richly tonal, rough and somehow a little… animal. Whatever he said to her, she gradually stopped struggling. Still, he kept her hands folded in his own for a long moment. Over in Old Town Square, the bells of Týn Church tolled nine, and it was only when the ninth hour echoed into silence that he released her and sculled backward in the air, tense and watchful, like one who has released a wild thing from a cage and doesn’t know if it’s going to turn on him.
Karou didn’t turn on him. She drew away. The two spoke, gestured. Karou’s movements in the air were languid, her long legs curled up beneath her, arms moving with a tidal rhythm, as if she were keeping herself afloat. It all looked so effortless — so possible — that several tourists cautiously tested the air with their own arms, wondering if they hadn’t strayed into some pocket of the world where… well, where people could fly.
And then, just when they were becoming accustomed to the startling sight of the blue-haired girl and black-haired man floating overhead like a piece of magnificent performance art, the girl made a sudden move. The man sagged in the air and started to fall in fits and starts, struggling to stay aloft.
He lost the struggle and went limp. His head rolled back, loose on his neck, and, in a sizzle of sparks that gave the brief impression of the tail of a comet, he plunged to earth.
29
STARLIGHT TO THE SUN
When the angel thought he could get away simply by lifting ten feet off the ground, Karou took a devilish pleasure in surprising him. But if he was surprised, he didn’t show it. She rose up into the air in front of him, and he looked at her. Just looked. His gaze was heat across her cheeks, her lips. It was touch. His eyes were hypnotic, his brows black and velvet. He was copper and shadow, honey and menace, the severity of knife-blade cheekbones and a widow’s peak like the point of a dagger. All that and the muted snap of invisible fire, and facing him, Karou was jolted into the hum of blood and magic, and something else.
In her belly: a flutter of winged things shaking themselves fervently to life.
It brought a flush to her cheeks. The temerity of butterflies to trouble her now. What was she, some giddy girl to swoon at beauty?
“Beauty,” Brimstone had scoffed once. “Humans are fools for it. As helpless as moths who hurl themselves at fire.”
Karou would not be a moth. For the moments that they circled each other, she reminded herself that though the seraph wouldn’t fight her now, he had spilled her blood before. He had left her scarred. Worse, he had burned the portals and left her alone.
She put on her anger like armor and attacked him again, surging at him in the air, and for a few minutes she was able to fool herself that she was a match for him, that she could… what? Kill him? She was barely even trying to use her knife. She didn’t want to kill him.
What did she want? What did he want?
And then he grabbed her hands and in one smooth movement disarmed her and disabused her of any notion she might have had that she was winning. He pressed her palms together so she couldn’t lash out with her hamsas again — up close she saw that his neck was welted white where she had touched him — and he was so strong, she couldn’t break free. His hands were warm and enclosed hers completely. Her magic was trapped in her palms, one tattoo hot against the other, and her knife had fallen to the street below. She was caught. She experienced a frantic moment, remembering the way he had stood over her in Morocco, the deadness of his expression. But it wasn’t dead now. Far from it.
He might have been someone else entirely, his look was so full of feeling. What feeling? Pain. He glistened with a fever sheen. His face bore the strain of endured agony, and his breathing was uneven. But that wasn’t all. He blazed with intensity, leaning toward Karou in the air, looking, looking, alive with a searing, wide-eyed searching.
His touch, his heat, his gaze washed over her and, in an instant, it was not butterflies she felt. That was small, the flutterings of a giddy girl.
This new thing that sprang up between them, it was… astral. It reshaped the air, and it was in her, too — a warming and softening, a pull—and for that moment, her hands in his, Karou felt as powerless as starlight tugged toward the sun in the huge, strange warp of space. She fought against it, trying to get away.
His voice low and hoarse, the angel said, “I’m not going to hurt you. What happened before, I’m sorry. Please believe me, Karou. I didn’t come here to hurt you.”
She startled at the sound of her name and stopped struggling. How did he know her name? “Why did you come?”
On his face, a helpless look. He said again, “I don’t know,” and this time it didn’t strike her as funny. “Just… just to talk,” he said. “To try to understand this… this…” He fumbled for words and trailed away, at a loss, but Karou thought she knew what he meant, because she was trying to understand it, too.
“I can’t withstand more of your magic,” he said, and she was aware again of his strain. She had really hurt him. As she should, she told herself. He was her enemy. The heat in her hands told her that. Her scars told it, and her severed life. But her body wasn’t listening. It was focused on the contact of their skin, his hands on hers.
“But I won’t hold you,” he said. “If you want to hurt me, it’s no more than I deserve.”
He released her. His heat deserted her and the night rushed between them, colder than it had been before.
Clasping her hamsas in her fists, Karou backed away, barely aware that she was still floating.
Holy. What was that?
Remotely, she was conscious that she was flying in plain view of a gathered mass of people, and that more gawkers were coming in droves, as if the tourist route of Karlova had been diverted into this side channel. She sensed their pointing and amazemen
t, saw the camera flashes, heard the shouts, but it was all muted muted muted, like it was playing on a screen, less real than the moment she was living.
She was on the cusp of something ineffable. When the seraph had held her hands, and when he had let her go, it was as if she had been filled and didn’t realize it until he pulled away and the absence rushed back in. It pounded inside her now, cold and aching, void and wanting—wanting—and a desperate part of her had to be stilled from darting forward to grab his hands again. Wary of the extraordinary compulsion beating in her, she forced herself to resist. It was like fighting a tide, and in the fight was the same terror: of being swept into deep water, beyond all safety.
Karou panicked.
When the angel made as if to move toward her, she threw up her hands between them, both hands at once, and at close range. His eyes went wide and he faltered in the air, a breach in his perfect grace. Karou’s breath caught. He tried to steady himself on the lintel of a fourth-story window, and failed.
His eyes rolled back and he dropped a few feet, sending up sparks. Was he losing consciousness? Karou spoke around a tight constriction in her throat. “Are you okay?”
But he wasn’t, and he fell.
* * *
Akiva was dimly aware that he was no longer in the air. Beneath him, stone. In flashes he saw faces peering at him. Consciousness strobed. Voices in languages he couldn’t understand, and at the edge of sight: blue. Karou was there. A roar rose up in his ears and he forced himself upright, and the roar was… applause.
Karou, her back to him, dropped a theatrical curtsy. With a flourish she plucked her knife from where it had embedded itself between cobbles, and sheathed it in her boot. She peered over her shoulder at him, seeming relieved to see him conscious, and then stepped back and… took his hand. Carefully, just her fingertips in his, so her marks wouldn’t burn him. She helped him stand, and said, low in his ear, “Bow.”
