Days of Blood & Starlight (33 page)

Zuzana inhaled deeply in the direction of the window, and fanned air at Mik. “Do you smell that? It’s food. Excitingly shaped chocolate can be dessert. We can share it with the chimaera.”

Mik’s concern-crease appeared. “You don’t really want to go down there without Karou.”

“I do.”

“And share your chocolate.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Who are you, and what have you done with the real Zuzana?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, putting on a stiff affect and flat voice. “I am the human called Zuzana, and I am not trying to lure you out to the monsters. Trust me, meaty human—I mean Mik.”

Mik laughed. “I’m only not freaked out by that because you haven’t been out of my sight since we got here.” He took her hand. “Don’t go out of my sight, okay?”

She regarded him mildly. “What about the bathroom?”

“Ah. That.” They had made a pact never to be one of those couples who use the bathroom in front of each other. “I must maintain my mystique,” Mik had told her solemnly, holding her hand in both of his. Now he said, “Well, we should at least have a code word then, to determine whether the other one is an impostor. In case, you know, a monster steals my body in the five minutes I’m peeing.”

“You think they can steal bodies? And more importantly, you can pee for five minutes, and yet you wouldn’t even pee on Kaz for me?”

“I’ll be apologizing for that forever, won’t I? But seriously. Code word.”

“Fine. How about…
impostor
?”

Mik was expressionless. “Our impostor code word should be
impostor
?”

“Well, it’s easy to remember.”

“The whole point is to be sly. If I suspect you’re not really you, I need to find out without you knowing I know. Like in movies. I’ll have my back to you, you know, facing the camera, and I casually say, uh,
haberdasher
in conversation—”

“
Haberdasher?
That’s our code word?”

“Yes. And you fail to respond to it and my expression goes all bleak and horrible”—he demonstrated bleak and horrible—“because I’ve just found out your body has been taken over by hostile forces, but by the time I turn around I’m cool. I pretend to be fooled while I quietly plot my own escape.”

“Escape?” She stuck out her lower lip. “You mean you wouldn’t try to save me?”

“Are you kidding?” He pulled her against him. “I would stick my head down monster throats looking for you.”

“Yes. And hope that they’d conveniently swallowed me without chewing. Like in fairy tales.”

“Of course. And I cut them open and out you pop. Though they would be missing out on your amazing flavor if they didn’t chew.” He nibbled her neck and she squeaked and pushed him off. “Come on then, brave monster-throat-looker-downer, let’s go get some dinner. I am almost positive it will not be
us
on the menu.” She sniffed the air. “If only because they’re already cooking it.” When he started to renew his protest, she held up a hand. “What are you more afraid of: them, or me with low blood sugar?”

His stern caution-mouth twisted into a smile. “I’m not sure.”

“Bring your violin,” she said, and with a shrug, he did. Zuzana laid her hand on Karou’s forehead before leaving, and then they were out the door, skipping down the stairs on the trail of food.

Karou’s sleep was haunted and dangerously deep. She lost the thread of her days and nights, or her lives—human and chimaera—and wandered through tableaux of memory like they were rooms in a museum. She dreamed of Brimstone’s shop and her childhood there, of Issa and Yasri and Twiga, scorpion-mice and winged toads and… Brimstone. And even in her sleep she felt as if her vises were clamping down on her heart.

She dreamed of the battlefield at Bullfinch, the fog, and her first sight of Akiva as he lay dying.

Of the temple of Ellai. Love and pleasure and
hope
, the hugeness of the dream that had filled her in those weeks—she had never in either of her lives been as happy as that—and the delicacy of the wishbone that she and Akiva had held between them, their knuckles resting together in the moment before the snap.

And finally, Karou dreamed herself in a crypt, waking like a revenant—or like Juliet—on a stone slab. All around were bodies burned beyond recognition, and in their midst stood Akiva. His hands were on fire and his eyes were pits. He stared across the piled dead at her and said, “Help me.”

She came awake and upright in an instant, and day had again passed to night, and there was a warm presence at her side.

“Akiva,” she gasped. It spilled from the dream, this name that carved a piece out of her when she even so much as
thought
it. Spoken aloud it was sharp and cruel, a spike, a
slap
—and not only to herself but Ziri, if he heard. Because it was not Akiva beside her. Of course it wasn’t, and what ran through Karou’s mind in that instant was bitterness, a double pang: one for when she thought it was him.

And one for when she realized it wasn’t.

Akiva started at the sound of his name, the sound of Karou’s voice, the sight of her upright, awake, and so near. He couldn’t stop the surge of heat that answered her cry, a flare that must surely have rolled off his wings and touched her across the room. Touched her and… the one lying beside her, who didn’t move or open his eyes even when she cried out.

Akiva held himself still, glamoured, and Karou didn’t so much as look around; her eyes were on the Kirin, and Akiva couldn’t guess what had made her call
his
name, but whatever it was, it seemed already forgotten. She stared down at the Kirin and Akiva closed his eyes. He quieted his breathing and reassured himself that she couldn’t hear his heartbeat as he moved toward the window.

He wanted to stay. He never wanted to take his eyes off Karou again, but now that she had awakened—he’d just had to know that she
would
—he couldn’t stomach spying on her like
this. And he wasn’t sure he could handle what might come next, when the Kirin woke.

He wouldn’t wonder what there was between the two of them. He had no right to wonder.

She was alive, that was what mattered.

That, and…
she
was the resurrectionist. That realization carried a numbness that blotted out nearly everything else.

Nearly.

Seeing her sleeping at another man’s side was too big to blot out. It was too like the sight of her friends through her window in Prague, and Akiva was shaken by the same absurd jealousy as he had been then, when for a moment he’d thought it was her. If he had any decency in him he would wish her happiness with one of her own kind, because whatever else was uncertain in these terrible days, one thing was sure: There was no hope that she could still love
him
.

Karou reached for the Kirin’s hand and it was more than Akiva could bear. He hurled himself out the window and was gone.

51

Karou bent to examine Ziri’s hands and see more closely the healing that she had worked on them. She felt the disturbance in the air behind her, but Ziri’s fingers closed on hers in the moment she would have turned, and the sparks that gusted in the window skittered across the dirt floor and spent themselves unseen.

“You’re awake,” Karou said. Had he heard what name she called out?

“I’m glad we’re alone,” Ziri said, and her reaction was to pull her fingers free and shift away from him.
What did he mean?
But he looked stricken by her response and seemed to become aware all at once of the unexpected intimacy of the scene. “No, not…” He broke off, flushed, sat up and back, putting space between them on the bed. His blush made him look very young. He added with haste, “I mean, because I have to tell you what happened. Before he comes back.”

He?
Who?
For a breathless instant Akiva’s name came again to Karou’s mind and she pushed it away in frustration. “Thiago?”

Ziri nodded. “I can’t tell him what really happened, Karou. But I need to tell
you
. And I… I need your help.”

Karou just looked at him.
What did he mean? What kind of help?
She felt slow, still wrapped in the haunting spell of her dreams, and there was something nagging at her that she couldn’t seem to focus on.

Ziri rushed to fill the silence. “I know I don’t deserve your help, not with the way I’ve treated you.” He swallowed, peered down at his hands, and flexed his fingers. “I don’t deserve
this
. I shouldn’t have listened to him.” Shame weighed heavily on his expression. He said, “I wanted to speak to you, and I should have. He ordered us not to, but it always felt wrong.”

Karou processed this. “You mean… Thiago ordered you not to speak to me? All of you?”

Ziri nodded, tense and miserable.

“What reason did he give?”

With reluctance, he told her, “He said we couldn’t trust you. But I do. Karou—”

“He said that?” She felt slapped. She felt stupid. “He told
me
he was working on you all, that you’d come to trust me as he did.”

Ziri said nothing, but the message was clear. Thiago had been lying to her all along, and how could it even surprise her? “What else did he say?” she demanded.

Ziri looked helpless. “He reminded us, often, of your… treason.” His voice was soft, his posture hunched. “That you sold our secret to the seraphim.”

She blinked. “Sold—?”
What?
This did surprise her, the magnitude of this lie. “He said
that
?”

Ziri nodded and Karou reeled. Thiago had been telling the chimaera that she sold secrets to the seraphim? No wonder they hissed
traitor
at her. “I never sold anything,” she said, and it occurred to her: She hadn’t sold anything, and she hadn’t
told
anything, either. She’d been so busy wallowing in her shame these past weeks that she hadn’t even questioned whether it was justified. What exactly was her crime? Loving the enemy, that was a grave thing; setting him free, graver still, but they didn’t
know
she had done that, and anyway…
she
had not told Akiva the chimaera’s deepest secret.

Thiago had.