by Lana Popovic
Malina reached across the table and grasped my hand. “I felt it too. A shadow of it, at least, nothing as strong as you. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t there, but I’m still plugged in somehow, like you are. Do you think it’s these?” She reached tentatively for her hair, stopping short before her fingers grazed the ribbons, as if they might singe her. “I don’t think they have anything to do with Mama, anymore. I think someone else put these in for us. Maybe we should take them out, Riss? I hate it, I hate it so much thinking that something at the other end can feel us through them.”
A violent shudder ripped through me at the thought of a stranger creeping over our windowsill, bending over us as we slept the way I’d imagined Mama had. “We can’t do that,” I murmured. “What if we do, and they don’t work anymore? We need to know what they do, and what they have to do with the thefts. Maybe they can bring us to wherever Mama is.”
“I was thinking about that,” Niko said. Her dark eyes had taken on that hawk focus she shared with Luka. “It could be that these are two separate things—a bifurcation of what was once a single process or event. Ribbons aside, think of all the objects this Dunja has been taking. So far, it’s your belongings, a votive gift, and a saint’s bone.”
“That we know of,” Malina added.
“Right. Looking through Mama’s recipes and cantrips today reminded me of why it was bothering me. For spellwork—at least the small kind Mama did, sympathetic magic—you need symbolic ingredients that have specific connections with whatever you’re trying to achieve. Like parts to represent the whole. I have no idea what that would be in this case, obviously, but that’s what this reminded me of. Someone gathering ingredients for a spell.”
I met Niko’s eyes with an effort. I was saggingly tired, exhausted to my marrow, but it wasn’t time to stop yet. “But without talking to her, to Dunja, we have no idea what she’s trying to do, or what it has to do with Mama and us. And we don’t know how to find her. So that’s a dead end. Did you find anything else while you were looking?”
“Just one thing,” Niko replied. “It’s one of Mama’s original tincture recipes—it looks like Jasmina asked Mama to craft a scent for her.”
“Why couldn’t Jasmina have done that for herself?” I asked. “She used fragrances and essentials all the time in her cooking.”
“But she didn’t blend tinctures on her own, and Mama and I did,” Niko said, sounding a little miffed. “It’s not like it’s a witch-exclusive skill, last I heard. The rest of us can muddle through making nice things, too.”
“Fair enough, peace,” I said wearily, holding up a hand. “What’s in the one Koštana made for Jasmina?”
“Orange blossom absolute, lots of it,” Niko said. Lina’s eyes flicked to mine, and I knew she was thinking of the vial we’d found in Mama’s treasure chessboard. “Also amber, myrrh, a touch of honey, and three different kinds of musk—pink, skin, and Egyptian.”
Something about that list niggled at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “And that was it? Just the recipe?”
“There was the name of the perfume, too. Mama called it ‘the Scent of Home.’ And below it said, ‘for Jasmina.’ But that was it.”
I huffed out a frustrated breath. “So it would have reminded Mama of home, somehow, but what are we supposed to do with that? Go to Egypt? The Middle East, maybe? And I don’t even know where orange blossom absolute usually comes from.”
Luka drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “We have a big enough data set here. Maybe we’re just not looking at it from the right angle.”
I dragged my spoon despondently through the beans, tracing swirls in the cooling, gluey mess. “Or maybe the problem is that our data set contains things like ‘dreams’ and ‘possession’ and ‘memories stolen from Iris and Malina.’ Not exactly the stuff deductions are made of.”
“Maybe that’s our missing variable,” Luka said, hazel eyes sharpening. “That one memory. It’s the only thing you have that none of the rest of us can see, Iris. And you said it seemed deliberate. Like that woman let you have it back. Why? Maybe there’s something important in it, something you’re not seeing.”
“But I’ve already retold it four times,” I groused. “What else could possibly be in there?”
“Just one more time, Missy,” Luka coaxed. “The last days have been such a whirlwind for you. None of us are thinking clearly. Maybe play it out again, methodically, step by step. Remember the smell of the perfume, if you can. It’ll trigger the memories like nothing else.”
I let out a whoosh of air, working my jaw back and forth. My fingers worried at the band around my wrist. “I’m just so tired. But I’ll try.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to resurrect the layers of the perfume—and not just the blood orange, honeysuckle, and bergamot, but the smell of the Arms Square as it had been that day. I spoke it as I went; the dry warmth of sun on stone, suntan lotion from the tourists who swarmed blindly around us like schools of fish, foamy cappuccino from one of the cafés in the square. With every added layer, the memory expanded in scope and breadth, fleshing out as I spoke it aloud like a city being built in fast-forward. I focused especially on Naisha’s exhibition, the animals chasing across her skin like a shadow play and the careful movements of her hands, the swishing of her hair, the briefly blinding glint as the sun caught the diamond piercing in her wrist—
“Riss!” Malina broke in breathlessly. “You didn’t tell me about that!”
I squinted one eye open. “What, the piercing? It didn’t seem that important, what with all the shape-shifting and such going on around it. And regular people have body piercings, sometimes.”
“But Mama had one like that too!”
“What?” I frowned. “No, she didn’t.”
“She didn’t before.” Malina wrung her hands together. “But that morning when I found you both in the café, I saw it. It was just a sparkle under all the blood—I saw it because I felt something there when I went to take her pulse—and I forgot about it after. I only remember it at all because I’d only ever seen something like that on one other person.”
My hands flattened on the rough wood of the table, fingertips sinking in. “Who?”
“Natalija. My violin teacher.”
The room seemed to shift around me. “That’s it. I couldn’t place it, and she looked so different, but that’s what it was. That’s who Naisha sounded like. Natalija.”
“SHE ISN’T ANSWERING.”
“Try again.”
“I’ve already called her six times, and texted,” Malina said, leaning against the stone wall beside Natalija’s music shop, the light from the lantern above spilling through her curls. “She’s not going to answer. Either it’s too late, or she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
The storefront was in one of the Old Town’s narrowest alleys, hemmed in by apartments. Lines of laundry strung between buildings fluttered over our heads like spirits in the dark, bringing faint, clean whiffs of detergent. We were far enough away from the three main squares that we could barely hear the nighttime hubbub of tourists partying in the cafés and clubs, just distant, wispy snatches of music and laughter, like sounds drifting distorted across a pond.
“I bet she doesn’t,” I muttered, jiggling the doorknob. Locked. “If she’s been here this whole time, it must have been to watch us. Like a spy. Like a sleeper agent.”
“But she didn’t look anything like that woman,” Lina protested. “Like what you said. Natalija’s a brunette, and at least forty. You’ve seen her yourself. Even if she’d dyed her hair, she wasn’t exactly a beauty queen.”
I thought of Natalija’s plain, warm face; I hadn’t seen her very often, and she never came to the café, but we’d run into each other enough times that I recognized her bright, crystalline voice, ice cubes clinking in sweet water. The voice was unmistakably Naisha’s, and now that I thought about it, even those unremarkable features—wide-set, small brown eyes, squinted and muddy, and a
lumpy nose—held a slight but compelling echo of the icy beauty I had seen. As if she’d purposely constructed the opposite of her own face, a photograph negative of herself.
“If she could mimic animals, change her own coloring and features, why couldn’t she make herself look like someone else?” I asked. “We have no idea how this works. If she’s related to us at all, if that’s what this is, maybe her version of the gleam is still completely different from ours. Either way, we need to get in here, see what we can find.”
Niko stepped between us. “I could help with that, if I may.” She held a hand out to Lina, palm up. “Pie, can I have two of your pins?”
Lina worked her fingers through her curls, plucking out the hairpins that swept the front section away from her face. She handed them to Niko, who pried one open and bent it into an L.
“Nikoleta!” Luka hissed beside me. “Are you trying to get us all arrested? More to the point, do you think they’re going to let you into law school with a record?”
Dropping to her knees, Niko slid the shorter end into the lock, fumbling it around. “There’s no one around at this hour, and I’ll be quick about it. Relax, brother. You just say that because you hate yourself and spit in the eye of our culture.”
“Our culture does not have to include breaking and entering, that’s some very convenient cherry-picking you’re doing for a future lawyer. We could just wait until morning and—”
“Oh, be quiet, you self-loather. You’re distracting me from my creative process.” She squinched her eyes shut, tipping her head forward as she pressed her cheek against the door. “Yes,” she crowed a moment later. “It’s just a pin-and-tumbler lock. Give me the other one, Lina. I have to keep holding this one to apply torque to the cylinder.”
Luka snorted through his nose. “Torque to the cylinder, dear God. I still can’t believe Mama thought it would somehow be a good thing to teach you this.”
Niko flipped her hair over one shoulder and tilted her face up to give him a stark look. Her dark eyes glittered in the dim light. “It’s a good thing at this moment, isn’t it? And she’d have taught you too, if you hadn’t been exactly like this with her. Nothing but judgment, all the time.”
Luka went quiet, hurt flitting across his face. Niko turned back to the lock, mumbling, “Sorry, beast. I didn’t need to say that. This isn’t the time.”
Just then, the lock gave way with a neat click. Niko released a victorious hiss, all of us crowding behind her as she cracked the door open. We spilled together into the dark, quiet store. Racks of violins and guitars took up the lengthwise center of the room, and the walls were lined with shining woodwinds. In the dark, and with the lantern light washing in from the street, the instruments cast shadows like some grotesquely enchanted wood, everything too bulbous, elongated, or sprouting strings like curled, spiky ferns. Lina must have caught my unease—or maybe all four of us felt it—and the melody she began to hum wound around the room like the encroaching creep of vines, as if the instruments could crawl toward us on twisted roots. Stalk us until they drove us out.
Niko growled low in irritation, her bow mouth pursed. “Does anyone else feel like the cellos are plotting murder?”
“Oh, good,” I said under my breath, stepping closer to Luka. My arm brushed against his, and I could feel the raised pattern of goose bumps on his skin. “Not just me, then.”
“Definitely not just you,” Niko confirmed through clenched teeth. “Pie, can you stop that? It’s a little too on point for in here.”
“Sorry,” Lina said, cutting herself off. “I didn’t mean to do that. It’s the smell in here. It’s slight, but definitely there. I think it’s meant to disturb? It’s never smelled like this during the day here, ever.”
Now that she had mentioned it, I could catch it too: a low-level, pungent reek, metallic and astringent, that smelled nothing like Lina’s rosin or the materials of the instruments themselves. It smelled vividly like death still too fresh for rotting, as if a slit-throated body might be sprawled behind the counter, eyes gelled and staring into nothing. My skin crawled at the idea, but now that it had come to me I couldn’t shake it.
“Maybe it’s like a protective spell,” I mused. “An olfactory Do Not Enter. Better than a burglar alarm.”
“If it is, it’s effective as hell,” Luka observed. “I can’t wait to get out of here.”
Niko snorted loudly.
“What?”
“Nothing, brother. You’re just so manly, is all. I’m overwhelmed with awe.”
“Don’t make me smack you, brat. I’m not trying to die to prove my manhood to you.”
Their banter dispelled the ominous miasma a little, but we all continued to cluster together, huddling for comfort. “So,” I said, “if someone thought it was necessary to protect this place, we must be on the right track. Obviously, next step, we split up and explore.”
Niko burst into her raspy, two-pack-a-day laughter. “Oh, good one. Or the alternative—we hold hands at all times and go everywhere together.”
We poked around the store in a pack, touching one another like a kindergarten class clinging to a shared rope. The strobe of our phone flashlights revealed nothing other than the instruments and music tools on display. A jaw-clenching foray behind the counter turned up only the cash register, guitar picks and strings and pens, and drawers full of paper scraps: the same daily detritus of running a small business I’d seen at Mama’s café and Jovan’s small gallery.
“We could try Natalija’s apartment?” Lina offered. “It’s right above here. That’s where I took my lessons with her.”
“Yes,” I said. “And if she’s there, even better. She can’t hide from us knocking on her door. Lina, do we have to go back outside, or can we get up there from here?”
“I’ve gone up from in here, I know the way.”
Lina led us to the back door, which opened onto a low-ceilinged, winding stone stairway leading directly into Natalija’s penthouse apartment. The door at the top was unlocked—she really didn’t expect unwelcome visitors coming through her shop, and no wonder, if it smelled like a haunted horror show every night—and when Luka’s series of sharp raps faded into silence, he eased the door open and led the way through.
Natalija’s living room was as black and deserted as the shop below, dappled with yellow light from the street. It was spare and utilitarian, a few pieces of simple, modern furniture of wood and glass on bare parquet, but it smelled marvelous—a rich, complex fruit scent like an orchard that had caught a frost out of season, crisp apples and soft peaches with glittering, frozen skin, their leaves chips of fresh emerald suspended above them.
Behind me, I could hear Lina breathing deeply. “I forgot how nice it always smelled in here,” she said. “She smelled just like this, too, even when I met her downstairs.”
Luka flicked on the lights, and we all stood squinting blearily at each other for a moment.
“Why don’t Lina and I take the kitchen,” Niko suggested. “And you two can have the bedroom.”
Lina smothered a giggle at that, biting her lip when Luka glared at her.
“Oh, that’s hysterical, coming from you, Nikoleta,” he muttered, turning on his heel and stalking toward the bedroom. “Riss, let’s go take a look while the children play.”
I trailed after him, nearly gasping as we stepped across the threshold. The bedroom was as opulent as the rest of the apartment had been sparse. A massive four-poster bed beckoned, with a sweeping canopy, looping sheets of white silk embroidered with fat golden roses that echoed the heavy duvet. A glass chessboard with figures hewn from crystal sat on one bedside table, and the vanity was white and gold, carved with a scene from the Garden of Eden—except that both Adam and Eve were biting the apple, entwined together beneath a tree like a weeping willow, drooping fronds of branches sheltering them. A trio of massive, intricately flowered courtesan’s fans splayed over one of the walls. Paintings hung all over, too, night skies and glittering cityscapes, an
d blossoms drifting in shining pools of water. Little curiosities dangled everywhere from the ceiling, a suspended constellation made from sea glass here, a set of wooden oddments there that resolved into the skeleton of a rocking horse when you looked at it from just the right angle.
Luka whistled low. “I would never have guessed it, from all the times I’ve bought guitar strings and picks from her, that Natalija would live in a place like this. How much would all this have cost?”
“I don’t think ‘Natalija’ would,” I said, picking up an ivory-backed brush with blond hair wound around the bristles like silk thread on a spindle. “But another woman pretending to be her might.”
“Riss.” His tone had changed. “Come look at this.”
I laid the brush down and joined him, sitting on the edge of the bed. He’d tugged open one of the bedside table drawers, and even from where I was sitting I could smell the rolling waves of that icy orchard scent, as if distilled to its essence. It didn’t smell just like frozen fruits, I realized as I breathed it in; the smell of it brought Naisha’s face to vivid life in my mind, the foxy finesse of her small, sharp features. As if the perfume projected her like a picture onto the strung canvas of my mind.
Leaning over Luka’s shoulder, I saw a spool of fine ribbons in the drawer, like the ones Malina and I had in our hair. Luka plunged his hand into them and offered them to me—I flinched back as soon as my fingers closed around them, feeling a jolt like a static shock as a flash of Mara’s face imprinted in front of my eyes.
Hands shaking, I dropped the ribbons on the bed. Lina and Niko had crept in, kneeling at the bedside in front of us, and as the full force of the scent broke over her, I could see Lina’s eyes turn so glassy they looked almost metallic. “They smell like Natalija,” she said, brow furrowing. “But they somehow . . . look like someone else?”
“I know. I see it, too. Don’t touch them!” I rushed as she reached for the ribbons. “They’re very . . . aggressive.”