Daughter of Smoke and Bone (18 page)

Zuzana said nothing. She scraped back her chair and pulled on her boots, setting each foot down with a
clomp
, and she surely would have left then—probably forever—if not for the
thunk
that rattled the glass panes of the balcony door.

Karou gave a strangled cry and jumped out of bed, mindless of her many hurts. She lunged for the door. It was Kishmish.

It was Kishmish, and he was on fire.

He died in her hands. She smothered the flames and cradled him, and he was raw and charred, the hummingbird fury of his heartbeat giving way to long pauses as she hunched over him saying, “No no no no no—” His forked tongue worked in and out of his beak, and his frantic chirrups tapered away with his heartbeat. “No no no. Kishmish, no—” And then he died. Karou stayed hunched there, on her balcony, holding him. Her string of
no
s faded to whispers, but she didn’t stop saying them until Zuzana spoke.

Her voice was weak. “Karou?”

Karou looked up.

“Is that…?” Zuzana gestured a jittery hand at Kishmish’s lifeless form. She looked perplexed. “That’s… um. That looks like—”

Karou didn’t help her out. She looked back down at Kishmish and tried to make sense of this sudden intrusion of death.
He flew here on fire,
she thought.
He came to me.

She saw that something was tied to his foot: a piece of Brimstone’s thick notepaper, charred, which crumbled to ashes when she touched it, and… something else. Her fingers shook as she untied it, and then she held the object in her palm. Her heartbeat jumped with a child’s ingrained fear: She wasn’t supposed to touch it.

It was Brimstone’s wishbone.

Kishmish had brought it to her.
On fire
he had brought it.

Out in the city a siren wailed, and it hurried a connection her mind had been slow to make. Burning. Black handprint. The portal. She struggled to her feet and rushed inside, pulled on a jacket and boots. Zuzana was there, asking, “What is it, Karou? What is that? What—?” but Karou barely heard her.

She went out the door and down the stairs, Kishmish still cradled in her arm, the wishbone tucked in her palm. Zuzana followed her into the street and all the way to Josefov, to the service door that had been Brimstone’s Prague portal.

It was now a blue-white inferno impervious to the jets of the fire hoses.

At the same moment, though Karou didn’t know it, across the world, at every door emblazoned with the black handprint, fires raged. They couldn’t be doused, and yet they didn’t spread. Flame ate away the doors and the magic that clung to them and then swallowed itself, leaving charred holes in dozens of buildings. Metal doors melted, so hot was the fire, and witnesses who stared at the flames saw, in the nimbus of their dazzled retinas, the silhouettes of wings.

Karou saw them and understood. The way to Elsewhere had been severed, and she was cast adrift.

Once upon a time,
a little girl was raised by monsters
.

But angels burned the doorways to their world, and she was all alone
.

21

H
OPE
M
AKES
I
TS
O
WN
M
AGIC

Once, when Karou was a little girl, she used a handful of scuppies to flatten the wrinkles out of a drawing that Yasri had sat on. Wrinkle by wrinkle, wish by wish—a painstaking procedure accomplished with total concentration, tongue peeking out at the corner of her lips.

“There!” She held it up, proud.

Brimstone made a sound that put her in mind of a disappointed bear.

“What?” she demanded, eight years old, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and skinny as the shadow of a sapling. “It’s a good drawing. It deserved to be rescued.”

It
was
a good drawing. It was a rendering of herself as a chimaera, with bat wings and a fox’s tail.

Issa clapped with delight. “Oh, you’d look darling with a fox tail. Brimstone, can’t she have a tail, just for today?”

Karou would rather have had the wings, but neither was to be. The Wishmonger, looking put-upon, breathed a weary
no
.

Issa didn’t beg. She just shrugged, kissed Karou on the forehead, and tacked up the drawing in a place of honor. But Karou was taken with the idea, so she asked, “Why not? It would only take a lucknow.”

“Only?” he echoed. “And what do you know of the value of wishes?”

She recited the scale in a single breath. “Scuppy shing lucknow gavriel bruxis!”

But that was not, apparently, what he meant. More disappointed bear sounds, like growls routed through the nose, and he said, “Wishes are not for foolery, child.”

“Well, what do
you
use them for?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I do not wish.”

“What?”
It had astonished her. “Never?” All that magic at his fingertips! “But you could have anything you wanted—”

“Not anything. There are things bigger than any wish.”

“Like what?”

“Most things that matter.”

“But a bruxis—”

“A bruxis has its limits, just like any wish.”

A moth-winged hummingbird stuttered into the light and Kishmish launched off Brimstone’s horn, plucked it from the air, and swallowed it whole—and just like that, the creature un-was. It was, and then it wasn’t. Karou’s stomach roiled as she contemplated the possibility of being so suddenly
not
.

Watching her, Brimstone added, “I
hope
, child, but I don’t wish. There’s a difference.”

She turned this over in her mind, thinking that if she could come up with the difference, it might impress him. Something occurred to her, and she struggled to put it into words. “Because hope comes from
in
you, and wishes are just magic.”

“Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.”

She’d nodded as if she understood, but she hadn’t then, and she didn’t now, three months after the portals burned and amputated half her life. She’d been back to the doorway in Josefov at least a dozen times. It had been replaced, along with the wall around it, and they looked too clean, too new for their surroundings. She’d knocked and she’d hoped; she’d worn herself out hoping, and nothing. Again and again: nothing.

Whatever magic there was in hoping, she thought, it had nothing on a good, solid wish.

Now she stood at another door, this one belonging to a hunting cabin in nowhere, Idaho, and she didn’t bother knocking. She just kicked it open. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was bright and hard, and so was her smile. “It’s been a while.”

Inside, the hunter Bain looked up in surprise. He was cleaning a shotgun at his coffee table, and rose swiftly to his feet. “You. What do you want?”

Abominably, he was shirtless, showing an abundance of loose white gut, and his extraordinary beard bushed around his shoulders in clumps. Karou could smell it from across the room, sour as a mouse’s nest.

She stepped uninvited into the cabin. She was dressed in black: slim-fitting wool trousers with boots, and a vintage leather trench belted at the waist. There was a satchel slung across her shoulder, her hair was smoothed back in a single braid, and she wore no makeup. She looked tired. She
was
tired. “Killed anything fun lately?”

“Do you know something?” Bain asked. “Have the doors opened back up?”

“Oh. No. Nothing like that.” Karou kept her voice light, as if she were paying a social call. It was a farce, of course. Even when she’d been running errands for Brimstone she had never visited here. Bain had always come into the shop himself.

“You weren’t easy to find,” she told him. He lived off the grid; as far as the Internet was concerned, he didn’t exist. Karou had spent several wishes to track him down—low-grade wishes that she’d liberated from other traders.

She looked around the room. A plaid couch, some glazed-eyed elk heads mounted on the wall, and a Naugahyde recliner held together with duct tape. A generator hummed outside the window, and the room was lit by a bare bulb. She shook her head. “Gavriels to play with, and you live in a dump like this? Men.”

“What do you want?” Bain asked, wary. “Do you want teeth?”

“Me? No.” She perched on the edge of the recliner. Still with that hard, bright smile, she said, “
Teeth
are not what I want.”

“What, then?”

Karou’s smile disappeared, like flipping a switch. “I think you can guess what I want.”

A beat. Then Bain said, “I don’t have any. I used them all.”

“Well. I don’t think I’ll take your word on that.”

He gestured around the room. “Have a look, then. Knock yourself out.”

“See, the thing is, I know where you keep them.”

The hunter went still, and Karou considered the shotgun on the table. It was disassembled, not a threat. The question was whether he had another gun within reach. Probably. He was not a one-gun kind of guy.

His fingers twitched almost imperceptibly.

Karou’s pulse jumped in her hands.

Bain lunged for the couch. She was already moving. Smooth as dance, she leapt over the coffee table, caught his head with the flat of her palm and drove it against the wall. With a croak he collapsed onto the couch, and for an instant he was free to scrabble with both hands in the sofa cushions, frantic, and then he found what he was looking for.

He whipped around, pistol raised. Karou caught his wrist with one hand and grabbed a fistful of beard with the other. A crack; a bullet blazed over her head. She braced one foot against the sofa, heaved him by the beard, and swung him to the floor. The table tipped and shotgun parts scattered. Keeping her grip on his wrist, pistol pointed away, she came down hard on his forearm with her knee and heard bones grind. He yelped and released the gun. Karou took it up and pressed its muzzle into his eye socket.