by Laini Taylor
The police arrived. They hesitated in the face of this otherworldly tableau. Karou saw their baffled faces, their nervous guns, and she saw the way they looked at her. There were angels on the Charles Bridge, and she was their foe. She: enemy of angels, in her black coat and evil tattoos, with her lashing blue hair and black eyes. They: so golden, the very image of church frescoes come to life. She was the demon in this scene, and she half expected, glancing at her shadow sharp before her, to see that it had horns. It did not. Her shadow was a girl’s shadow, and seemed in that moment to have nothing at all to do with her.
Akiva, who a moment ago had pressed his face against her legs and wept, stood stock-still, and Karou felt fear for the first time since the two angels had come upon them. If he should take their side…
“Akiva,” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said, and when he moved, it was to her. There had never been any doubt, only a hope that somehow the choice wouldn’t be forced, that the moment could be backed away from, but it was too late for that. So he stepped into his future, coming between Karou and his brother and sister, and he said to them in a low but steady voice, “I won’t let you harm her. There are other ways to live. We have it in us to do else than kill.”
Hazael and Liraz stared at him. Unthinkably, he had chosen the girl. Liraz’s shock quickly turned to bitterness. “Do we?” she flung back at him. “That’s a convenient position to take now, isn’t it?”
Karou had lowered her hands when Akiva came before her. She reached out, just her fingertips to his back, because she couldn’t help it.
He told her, “Karou, you have to go.”
“Go? But—”
“Get away from here. I’ll keep them from following you.” His voice was grim with what that would mean, but his decision was made. He gave her a quick look over his shoulder; his face was strained but set. “I’ll meet you in the place we first saw each other. Promise me you’ll wait for me there.”
The place they first saw each other. The Jemaa el-Fna, heart of Marrakesh, where she had caught his burning gaze through the chaos of a crowd and been pierced through the soul by it. Akiva said, in a voice hoarse with urgency, “Promise me. Karou, promise you won’t go with Razgut until I find you. Until I explain.”
Karou wanted to promise. She saw that he had thrown his allegiance to her, even against his own kind. He had surely saved her life — could she have survived an attack by two armed seraphim? — in addition to which, he had chosen her. Wasn’t that what she had always wanted, to be chosen? Cherished? He had given up his place in his own world for her, and he was asking that she wait for him in Marrakesh.
But something unyielding in her shrank from the promise. He might have chosen her, but that didn’t mean that she would do the same if she were faced with the same choice — against Brimstone, Issa, Yasri, Twiga. She had told Brimstone, “I want you to know I would never just leave you,” and she wouldn’t. She would choose her family. Anything else was unthinkable, though even now the idea of turning and leaving Akiva behind brought on physical pain.
She said, “I’ll wait for you as long as I can. That’s the best I can do.”
And she thought the brilliance of his burning wings dimmed just a little. He said in a hollow voice, still faced away from her, “Then that will have to be good enough.”
Liraz drew her sword, and Hazael followed suit. The police responded by falling back, raising their guns, shouting in Czech for the angels to drop their weapons. The onlookers cried out in a kind of ecstatic terror. Zuzana, jostled among them, kept her eyes on Karou.
Akiva, whose swords were less obvious in their crossed sheaths between his wings, reached double-handed over his shoulders and drew them with a harmonic ringing. Without looking back, he urged, “Karou. Go.”
She gathered herself into a crouch, and just before she sprang skyward to vanish into the ether in a streak of blue and black she said, both choked and pleading, “Come and find me, Akiva.”
And then she was gone, and he was left alone to face the fallout of his shattering choice.
37
DREAM-LOST
Once upon a time,
an angel lay dying in the mist.
And a devil knelt over him and smiled
Akiva was helpless to keep his blood in his body. It pulsed up under his fingers and escaped, riding the tide of his heartbeat out in hot spurts. He couldn’t stop the bleeding. The wound was a mauling, and clutching at it was a little like gathering a fistful of meat scraps to fling to a dog.
He was going to die.
Around him, the world had lost its horizons. Sea mist choked Bullfinch beach, and Akiva heard waves breaking but could see only as far as the nearest corpses: gray hummocks obscured by the fog. They might have been chimaera or seraphim — except for the nearest one, he couldn’t tell. That one lay only a few yards away, with his own sword embedded in it. The beast had been part hyena, part lizard, a monstrosity, and it had raked him open from collarbone to biceps, rending his mail as easily as cloth. It had clung to him, its teeth meeting through the flesh of his shoulder, even after he’d skewered it through its barrel chest. He’d twisted his blade, thrust deeper, twisted again. The beast had screamed deep in its throat, but didn’t let him go until it died.
Now, as Akiva lay waiting to die, the post-battle silence was split by a roar. He stiffened and clasped his wound tighter. Later, he would wonder why he’d done that. He should have let go, tried to die before they could reach him.
The enemy was stalking the field, killing the wounded. They had taken the day, driven the seraphim back to the fortifications at Morwen Bay, and they had no interest in prisoners. Akiva should have hurried his dying, slipped away in the calm of blood loss, like falling asleep. The enemy would be far less kind.
What made him wait? The hope of killing one more chimaera? But if that was it, why didn’t he try to drag himself over to retrieve his sword? He just lay there, holding his wound, living those extra few minutes for no reason that he could fathom.
And then he saw her.
She was just a silhouette at first. Vast bat wings, long ridged gazelle horns as sharp as pikes — the bestial parts of the enemy. Black loathing filled Akiva and he watched her pause beside first one corpse and then the next. She came to the body of the hyena-lizard and stood there a long moment — what was she doing? Death rites?
She turned and prowled toward Akiva.
She came clearer with every step. She was slender, her legs long — lean human thighs that gave way, below the knee, to the sleek taper of gazelle’s legs, the fine cloven hooves making her seem to balance on pins. Her wings were folded, her gait both graceful and tense with suppressed power. In one hand she held a crescent-moon blade; another just like it was sheathed at her thigh. With the other hand she raised a long staff that was not a weapon. It was curved like a shepherd’s crook, with something silver — a lantern? — suspended from the end.
No, not a lantern. It gave off not light, but smoke.
A few steps, hooves sinking into the sand, then the mist revealed her face to him, and his to her. She stopped abruptly when she saw he was alive. He braced for a snarl, a sudden lunge, and new pain as he was gutted by her blade, but the chimaera girl didn’t move. For a long moment they just looked at each other. She cocked her head to one side, a quizzical, birdlike gesture that spoke not of savagery, but curiosity. There was no snarl on her lips. Her face was solemn.
Unaccountably, she was beautiful.
She took a step closer. He watched her face as she drew nearer. His gaze slipped down her long neck to the ridges of her collarbones. She was finely made, elegant and spare. Her hair was short as swan’s down, soft and dark and close as a cap, so the architecture of her face was unobscured; perfect. Black greasepaint made a mask around her eyes, which Akiva could see were large — brown and bright, vivid and sorrowful.
He knew the sorrow was for her fallen comrades and not for him, but he still found himself transfi
xed by the compassion in her gaze. It made him think that perhaps he had never really looked at a chimaera before. He saw slaves often enough, but they kept their eyes on the ground, and warriors like this he only ever met while dodging a killing blow or dealing one, half-blind with the blood rage of battle. If he ignored the fact of her bloodied blade and her closely fitted black armor, her devilish wings and horns, if he focused just on her face — so unexpectedly lovely — she looked like a girl, a girl who had found a young man dying on the beach.
For a moment, that’s what he was. Not a soldier, not anyone’s enemy, and the death that was upon him seemed meaningless. That they lived as they did, angels and monsters locked in a volley of killing and dying, dying and killing, seemed an arbitrary choice.
As if they might just as well choose not to kill and die.
But no. That was all there was between them. And this girl was here for the same reason he was: to slay the enemy. And that meant him.
Why, then, didn’t she do it?
She knelt at his side, doing nothing to protect herself from any sudden move he might make. He remembered the knife at his hip. It was small, nothing like her own fantastical double-crescent, but it could kill her. In one motion he could embed it in the soft curve of her throat. Her perfect throat.
He made no move.
He was dream-lost by then. Blood-lost. Gazing up at the face above him, he was beyond wondering whether this was real. It could be a dying dream, or she could be a reaper sent from the next life to cull his soul. The silver censer hung on its crook, exhaling a fume of smoke that was both herbal and sulfurous, and as its scent wafted down to him, Akiva felt a tug, a lure. Dizzy, he thought he wouldn’t mind following this messenger into the next realm.
He imagined her guiding him by the hand, and with that serene image cradled in his mind, he let go of his wound to reach for her fingers, caught them in his, which were slippery with blood.
Her eyes went wide and she snatched her hand away.
He’d startled her; he hadn’t meant to. “I’ll go with you,” he said, speaking in Chimaera, which he knew enough of to give orders to slaves. It was a rough tongue, a cobbling together of many tribal dialects that the Empire had brought under one roof, and which had been melded over time into a common language. He could scarcely hear his own voice, but she made out his words well enough.
She glanced at her censer, then back at him. “That’s not for you,” she said, taking it away and planting it in the mud where the breeze would tease the smoke downwind. “I don’t think you want to go where I’m going.” Even under the animal inflections of the language, her voice was as pretty as a song.
“Death,” said Akiva. His life was leaving him fast now that he no longer held his wound. His eyes just wanted to drift closed. “I’m ready.”
“Well, I’m not. I hear it’s dull, being dead.”
She said it lightly, amused, and he peered up at her. Had she just made a joke? She smiled.
Smiled.
He did, too. Amazed, he felt it happening, as if her smile had triggered a reflex in him. “Dull sounds nice,” he said, letting his eyes flutter closed. “Maybe I can catch up on my reading.”
She muffled a laugh, and Akiva, drifting, began to believe that he was dead. It would be less strange than if this were really happening. He could no longer feel his torn shoulder, so he didn’t realize that she was touching him until he felt a tight pain. He gasped as his eyes flew open. Had she stabbed him after all?
No. She had winched a tourniquet above his wound. That was the pain. He looked wonderingly up at her.
She said, “I recommend living.”
“I’ll try.”
Then, voices nearby, guttural. Chimaera. The girl froze, held a finger to her lips and breathed, “Shhh.”
One last look passed between them. The fog diffused the sun behind her, limning her horns and wings in radiance. Her shorn hair was velvet nap — it looked as soft as a foal’s throat — and her horns were oiled, gleaming like polished jet. In spite of her wicked greasepaint mask, her face was sweet, her smile sweet. Akiva was unfamiliar with sweetness; it pierced him in the center of his chest, in some deep place that had never given any hint before that it was a locus of feeling. It was as new and strange as if an eye had suddenly peeled itself open in the back of his head, seeing in a new dimension.
He wanted to touch her face but held back because his hand was covered with blood, and besides, even his uninjured arm felt so heavy he didn’t think he could lift it.
But she had the same impulse. She reached out, hesitated, then trailed the tips of cool, cool fingers down his fever-hot brow, over the ridge of his cheek to rest against the soft pulse point of his throat. She left them there a moment, as if reassuring herself that life still beat in his blood.
Did she feel how his pulse quickened at her touch?
And then, in a bound, she was up and gone. Those long legs with their gazelle hooves and lean long muscles propelled her away through the mist in fluid leaps that were nearly flight, her wings half-folded and held aloft like kites so her descent from each leap was a balletic drift. At a distance, Akiva saw her shadow-shape meet others in the fog — hulking beasts with none of her lithe grace. Voices carried toward him, full of snarls, and hers in their midst, calming. He trusted that she would lead them away from him, and she did.
Akiva lived, and was changed.
“Who tied this tourniquet?” Liraz asked him later, when she found him and got him to safety. He said he didn’t know.
He felt as if his life to that point had been spent wandering in a labyrinth, and on the battlefield at Bullfinch he’d finally found its center. His own center — that place where feeling had pulsed up from numbness. He’d never even suspected the place existed until the enemy knelt beside him and saved his life. He remembered her with the softness of a dream, but she was not a dream.
She was real, and she existed in the world. Like animal eyes shining from a nighttime wood, she was out there, a brief shimmer of radiance in the all-encompassing dark.
She was out there.
38
UNGODLY
After Bullfinch, Madrigal’s existence — it would be two years before he learned her name — had called to Akiva like a voice adrift in a great silence. As he lay near death in the battle encampment at Morwen Bay, he dreamed again and again that the enemy girl was kneeling over him, smiling. Each time he woke to her absence, to see instead the faces of his kith and kin, they seemed less real than this eidolon who haunted him. Even as Liraz fended off the doctor who wanted to amputate his arm, his mind was called back to the mist-shrouded beach at Bullfinch, to brown eyes and oiled horns and that shock of sweetness.
He had trained to withstand the devil marks, but not this. Against this, he found he had no defense.
Of course, he told no one.
Hazael came to his bedside with his kit of tattoo tools to mark Akiva’s hands with his Bullfinch kills. “How many?” he asked, heating up his knife blade to sterilize it.
Akiva had slain six chimaera at Bullfinch, including the hyena monstrosity that had taken him down. Six new ticks would fill out his right hand, which, thanks to Liraz, was still attached to his body. The arm lay useless at his side. Severed nerves and muscles had been reattached; he wouldn’t know for some time if it would ever function again.
When Hazael picked up the lifeless hand, knife at the ready, all Akiva could think of was the enemy girl, and how she might end up a black mark on some seraph’s knuckle. The thought was unendurable. With his good hand, he wrested his arm from Hazael and was immediately swamped with pain. “None,” he gasped. “I didn’t kill any.”
Hazael squinted. “You did. I was with you against that phalanx of bull centaurs.”
But Akiva wouldn’t take the marks, and Hazael went away.
Thus, had begun the secret that, over the years, grew into a rift between them, and that, in the skies of the human world, threatened to tear them apart foreve
r.
* * *
When Karou exploded off the bridge, Liraz followed, and Akiva surged up to block her. Their blades clashed. He crossed his two swords close to the hilt and put his strength behind them with a steady pressure that forced his sister back. He kept Hazael in sight, afraid he would pursue Karou, but his brother was still standing on the bridge, staring up at the unimaginable sight of Akiva and Liraz with swords crossed.
Liraz’s arms trembled with the effort at holding her ground — her air — and her wings worked at furious backbeats. Her face was livid, clench-jawed and lurid with striving, and her eyes were so wide that her irises were spots in staring white orbs.
With a banshee wail she threw Akiva off, swung her freed sword in a cyclone around her head, and brought it hacking down.
He blocked it. Its force jarred his bones. She wasn’t holding back. The ferocity of her attack shocked him — would she really try to kill him? She hacked again, and he blocked, and Hazael finally came unfrozen and leapt toward them.
“Stop,” he cried, aghast. He started to dart in but had to dodge when Liraz swung wild. Akiva parried the blow, knocking her off balance, and she whirled around before fumbling to a hover. She gave him a look that glittered with malice, and instead of coming at him again, she surged upward. Her wings gave off a fireball burst that brought a collective gasp from the onlookers, and then she was speeding in the direction Karou had gone.
The sky gave no hint of Karou, but Akiva didn’t doubt that Liraz could track her. He sped after her. Precipitously, the rooftops receded, and humanity with them. There was just the rushing air, the flare of wings, and — he caught up to his sister and grabbed her arm — strife.
She spun on him again, slashing, and their swords rang out, again and again. As in Prague, when Karou had attacked him, Akiva only parried, dodged, and did not return attack.