Daughter of Smoke and Bone (24 page)

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

A
TTITUDE OF
P
RAYER

In her hiding place, the vampire Svetla momentarily forgot how to breathe.

Down the alley at 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

S
TARLIGHT TO THE
S
UN

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.