Wicked Like a Wildfire

by Lana Popovic

  I tried to raise my head, only to find my neck wouldn’t hold it before it thumped back down. “Fjolar, I think I need—I need to sleep.”

  He hummed a disapproving sound against my skin. “But it’s still early. Play a little more, hmm?”

  Biting my lip, I stared up at the sky, which was already bleeding into dawn. His mouth was searing on my stomach; I could hear and feel his quickened breath, and I strained up toward it despite myself as he traced his lips around each hip bone. The faintest stop stop stop echoed in my mind before I gave up, and I fell asleep with him still kissing me lightly, that hollow echo plaintive, like a stranded girl calling from a distant mountaintop.

  I DREAMED OF honey.

  There was a meadow first, alive with rippling waves of grass, a green sea bobbing with a regatta of wildflowers. Bees flitted between them, too fat, gold, and friendly for waking life; I could see the tiny dangle of their legs spotted with bright yellow pollen. Pines circled the clearing like guardian soldiers, tall and so densely needled they were nearly black, and behind them in the distance there were craggy mountains everywhere, sere and snowcapped and rolling with these same proud pines.

  It felt like a place I knew. And it smelled like the place I was born. Sunlit air and a cool breeze that still held a breath of the mountaintop snow it had swept over, the invisible ice crystals it had stolen in its wake. Sharp grass and wildflowers, too, and piercing evergreen.

  Somehow I watched it all from the Ostrog monastery ledge with Luka, a spoonful of honeyed apples sticky in my mouth.

  Even a batch from the same hive can taste completely different two weeks later. People who really know honey can tell exactly where each batch is from, and when.

  And then instead of honey, the skyr cake was back on my tongue, milk cultures and crushed biscuits melting.

  It tastes like home to me, more than anything else. The happiest of my home.

  Taste and smell together, like a time machine.

  I burst awake like a surfacing diver, gasping. Lina’s face was directly above mine, gorgeous with pallor in the unearthly bright early-morning light, her eyes nearly silver above plum shadows. Her cold hands were wrapped around my face.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered fiercely. “I knew you’d have come back here to see him. Did he do something to you? I’ll kill him if he did, I’ll—”

  “No,” I mumbled, trying to pry my tongue loose from the roof of my mouth. I was thirsty and starving and nauseous, all at once. I ran my shaking hands over my body, searching, a far-off panic beating inside me like a distant drum. But everything was where it should be, my shorts and tank top snugly on, bra straps digging comfortingly into my skin. In the simplest physical sense, my body felt undisturbed. “I don’t think so. I’m fine.”

  But even if he hadn’t touched me after I passed out, I was nowhere near fine. I’d seen Mama debone a whole duck once, and that was how I felt. Like a limp sack of muscles, a tangle of flaccid veins and tendons with no chassis to support them. Sitting up made me groan with pain, even with Lina’s arm behind my back.

  “Where’re Luka and Niko?” I forced out.

  “You were still gone when I woke up, and I didn’t want to wait for them.” Her nostrils flared with fury, exactly like Mama’s in high temper. “What’s wrong, Riss? What did that bastard do to you?”

  “He didn’t do anything, really, it wasn’t his fault. . . .”

  But he’d known I was tired; I’d told him over and over. And even then he’d wanted me to show him, to bloom fractals for him until I drained myself into exhaustion.

  I felt on the cusp of a very great rage, but I was still too tired to take the step. And there was something else we had to do, besides.

  I met Lina’s furious eyes, so grateful for her. She could do it for me while I rallied. She could cup my fury in her hands and blow on the embers when they guttered. “No, you’re right. He did do something to me. But that’s not the important thing right now, not the most important, anyway. I know what it means, Lina. I know why Mama’s perfume was called the Scent of Home. There was honey in it; we have to find out exactly where it came from.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE BUS JUDDERED BENEATH US, STRAINING ALONG THE narrow mountain roads. I sat next to the window so Lina wouldn’t have to look at the plunging depths beyond the mountainside, but both of us were too exhausted to care much either way. She held my hand in her lap, cradled in both of hers; my head was tucked into her neck. The pilled seats were so saggy I kept feeling like I was going to collapse right through mine, like falling down a rabbit hole, and the air was stale and warm from the feeble AC.

  Even worse, that quivery, unstable feeling of emptiness refused to recede, as if Fjolar had sucked the marrow from my bones. I’d gone limp as a jellyfish washed out onto a beach. Even deadened with fatigue, it scared me badly how empty I felt.

  Still, I passed out almost as soon as we’d boarded and settled in, right after wolfing down two smoked-ham and cheese sandwiches that Lina pressed on me, washed down with a liter bottle of orange Fanta. I dreamed about him in jolts and flashes as I drowsed on Lina’s shoulder. Every time I woke up enough to be aware of her, I could hear her grinding her teeth in silent fury, jaw clicking.

  “You were right about him,” I whispered up to her, and even defenseless as I was, the words stuck like burrs in my mouth. “I shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s not your fault, Riss.”

  “But you warned me—”

  “It doesn’t matter. I can hear you hurting and tired, and still I can’t even tell what happened. So whatever it is, you couldn’t have been ready for it, okay? Whatever it is, it was his fault.”

  I grasped her hand tight, hoping she could hear my unspoken thanks.

  As I slipped in and out of sleep, my temple tilted against the window after Lina curled up away from me, my mind batted vaguely at the happenings of the morning. Niko had checked her mother’s book for us and confirmed that the honey in Mama’s perfume had been very specific—a batch harvested in Žabljak, in early spring. Žabljak was the highest-altitude town in all the Balkans, perched on the imposing Durmitor range; Lina and I had both known that much from school.

  It was far from the kind of cliffside-clinging village I’d always imagined from Mama’s story. But it felt, at least, like another version of the truth. As if everything she’d ever told us had been like a matryoshka nesting doll, and we had to crack open shell after shell to find the kernel of pure truth at the heart.

  Luka and Niko had raged in every way they could think of, but Lina and I had found our way back to each other and clasped tight. No amount of their battering against our seamless united front would budge us. We’d left Niko in raging tears, pounding her tiny clenched fist against the Prince’s bar top.

  “Why won’t you let us come?” Luka had asked me after she turned away from us to pour herself a shot of tequila, slamming both glass and bottle with abandon, refusing to talk or to accept a good-bye hug. “Or just me. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. You’ll need help.”

  “And that’s exactly why we have to do it alone,” I’d whispered back. It hurt so much to meet his eyes and see what I was doing to him, but I refused to spare myself by looking away. “We have no idea what we’re going to find and I—I can’t risk you like that. Or Niko. Whatever’s in those mountains, I can’t let it have you. You would do the same, if it were you and Niko instead of us, all tangled up in something this terrifying and invisible. You’d never let us come with you. You know it.”

  He kept his teeth clamped tight against everything he wanted to fling at me, his fists clenched on the bar top. “Okay, then,” he said finally. “Fine. But is there anything I can do for you? I need—just something to do, Iris. Anything.”

  “Could you tell Jovan that we had to go, please? If we say good-bye, he’ll never let us go, he’ll have the police hold us if he has to. Maybe if you could tell him that we found something to do with Jasmina, with
the people who made her—he’ll know what that means—and that we had to follow it all the way to the end. Maybe it’ll give him some comfort.”

  “Of course it won’t. But I’ll do it, and we’ll see him through this. I promise.”

  He nodded one last time, then caught me in a fierce hug. I could feel the hammering of his heart against my cheek. It would take me a long while to forget the carefully curated devastation in his eyes, especially because of how completely I deserved it. I’d let him down and broken his trust in every form, and now I wouldn’t even let him do the only thing he’d ever wanted—just to help me.

  Still, whatever was waiting for us in the mountains had to be cordoned off from everyone we loved, no matter how much those left behind us hurt.

  ABOUT AN HOUR and a half in, it was the ribbons that woke me fully.

  I peeled my face from the glass, squinting into the glare. My cheek was both numb and hot, and I’d left a charming snail-smear of drool on the window. Beyond it, the day was crystalline, a pennant of clear sky above even greener mountains on either side of us.

  We’d worried about what we’d even do once we got to Žabljak, but as we looped around the hairpin turns that seemed impossibly narrow for the unwieldy lumber of the bus, I could feel the ribbons surging against my scalp, glowing with a sweet, lovely warmth nothing like the spitting-cobra tingle I’d felt at the churches.

  It must have been a slow burn, like the gradual turning of a dial, because neither of us could tell when it had begun. But now it felt purely wonderful, like the pull of home after such a long, long time away. Like the idea of crawling into your own bed after the hardest day.

  We didn’t talk about it. Lina could hear that I felt what she felt, a madcap thrill strong enough to revive me from my stupor. As the bus groaned into its Žabljak stop, we were the first to pile out and rush into the station. A leathery woman with windburned cheeks and wiry hair signed a yellow Fiat into our custody without even bothering to check my license, though her eyes narrowed as she scanned our faces.

  Outside, a single shared glance confirmed that Lina would drive. I’d gotten the most practice with Luka, but there was no way I could have managed it, not with my limbs still feeling like kindling. As she pulled carefully out of the lot, easing back into the motions of driving stick, it didn’t seem to matter that all we had was a tourist guidebook and map the woman at the station had given us. The ribbons didn’t just warm and soothe; they tugged in a gentle, possessive way, like fingers wound lovingly into our hair, massaging away the qualms. Straining like a compass needle. We were going home. And maybe there, we’d finally find our mother again—or at least understand enough about what had happened to her to learn how to let her go.

  We drove past the Žabljak township, bare of people in its off season. We passed empty streets lined with domed streetlamps, wooden chalets with long, slanted eaves that shed snow during the heavy winters, and ski hotels shaped like wedges for the same reason. For a while, a sheepdog puppy trailed the car, barking like a beast, his coat shaggy and his eyes a startling, milky blue. We reached a glacier lake ringed with soaring pines—Zmijsko Jezero, I found on the map, the Lake of Serpents—and still we climbed higher into the dense, evergreen woods.

  “This is the way, isn’t it?” I asked her. “You feel it, too?”

  “Oh, yes.” She jiggled her shoulders with pleasure. “It’s definitely the way.”

  Checking the guidebook, I pointed out the mountain summits silhouetted above us as we drove deeper and higher into the forest. The humped outline of Veliki Medjed, named “Big Bear” for its bear-snout shape, roared into the sky next to the crisp, near-perfect triangle of Savin Kuk.

  When the forest finally widened into a clearing that held a dark, massive chalet the size of a hotel, the ribbons pealed like soundless bells, all homecoming and jubilance. As Lina pulled us into the gravel driveway, neither of us had any doubt that we’d arrived.

  We stepped out into the clearing together, the chalet looming in front of us, hewn from deep mahogany logs. It was at least five stories tall, its eaves nearly brushing the ground, wide glass windows opening into what looked like a ballroom. The clearing itself looked like something out of a fairy tale, the kind that Malina and I had read to each other once Mama could no longer be bothered. Clouds of midges whirled like snowflakes in the golden shafts of afternoon sunlight, and silken spiderwebs glinted, strung between the pines. Some even floated through the air in glimmering strands, untethered, clipped from their moorings by the briskness of the breeze.

  “It’s so pretty here,” Malina murmured, echoing my thoughts.

  I was still nodding when the giant door swung open on silent hinges. A woman stepped out, and for a moment the world shifted sideways.

  In the slanting light, and still shadowed by the inside of the chalet, she looked exactly like our mother.

  The illusion shattered as soon as she came forth to meet us, each step delicate and deliberate, like a cat walking along a sill. A jade tulip dress parted above long, bronzed legs, and a simple silver lariat looped around her slender throat. My mind flashed back to the photo of Anais, the smiling girl with the valley behind her. Something about this woman called her up. The bright, curling fall of her sorrel hair, threaded with ribbons like our own, was darker than that fiery copper but close enough, though her jawline was much squarer than the girl’s had been, more like Mama’s.

  “Faisali’s girls,” she murmured, her frost-pane eyes welling. Her full lips pressed into a smile so much like Mama’s that my eyes filled instantly, too, like a reflex. “Finally. It’s so good to meet you, after all these years.”

  “Who are you?” Malina asked, her voice trembling.

  “I’m Shimora, dear heart. Your grandmother.”

  Before we knew it she’d drawn us against her, sinewy arms wrapped around us both. She was surprisingly warm and solid, all muscle beneath that silken, amber skin, and her perfume lapped over me like a fragrant tide, like how the air must have smelled in the Garden of Eden. Pomegranate, cinnamon, fig, and calla lily, and something else too sweet and unusual for me to know its name, yet familiar all the same.

  “But how is that possible?” I whispered into her neck, struggling to understand how I could believe her so readily when nothing made sense. “You—you’re dead. You died before we were born. Mama said that our grandfather killed you and her sister, that you died trying to protect our aunt. And even if she lied about that, look at you. You’re young. You’re Mama’s age, if that.”

  Sadness flickered prettily across her face. “Is that what she told you? My poor Fai. She was hurting badly when she left us, and I suppose the truth wouldn’t have done, not when she was trying so terribly hard to protect you from it all.”

  “Protect us from what? And do you have her? Do you have our mother?”

  She sighed deeply and stepped back, trailing her long fingers down our arms until she held our hands in a warm, smooth grip. From this close, she was somehow even more flawless. A faint spray of freckles speckled the tanned bridge of her falcon’s nose, and even that seemed deliberate, a subtle, natural enhancement rather than a flaw. She wore the lightest makeup, flicks of mascara to bring out the ice glint of her eyes, high sweeps of blush on her cheekbones, and a peachy, near-transparent lip gloss. Her hair fell in sculpted curls, loose ringlets that gleamed as if each had been carved from cherrywood, like the mermaids on ships’ prows.

  From that simple dress to the long muscles in her bare arms, and even down to the nude-painted toes, everything about her was so precisely, near-painfully right. An elegance so sleek and Spartan it felt like the privilege of looking at her must have a price.

  That thought drove a tiny pinprick of recognition through the blanketing warmth of her presence and her scent—it reminded me of what Luka had said about me and Malina. That we were too beautiful, near unnerving to the eye.

  But the slight sense of quailing vanished immediately as she moved back toward the chalet, drawing
us with her, stepping deeper into the perfume.

  “We’ll tell you everything as soon as you’re properly back with us,” she said, her gaze shifting warmly between us. “Everything you want to know, and everything you need. But you’ll let us welcome you first, yes? We’ve missed you for so many years—and you’ve missed us even if you didn’t know it.”

  “Who is ‘us,’ exactly?” Malina asked. “We don’t have anyone to miss.”

  Shimora hummed mournfully, deep in her throat. “Your whole family, of course, dear heart. Will you come inside with me, meet some of your kin?”

  I nodded immediately, without thinking. Beside me, Malina took a beat longer before she bit her lip and nodded too. Together, we let Shimora lead us across the threshold.

  TWENTY-TWO

  FROM THE INSIDE, THE CHALET’S GROUND FLOOR WAS even grander, vast and wide as a ballroom. The four stories above us formed an atrium, ringing a glass-and-steel chandelier strung from the highest eaves, each piece dangling down to a different level—hollow spheres and onion bulbs like Christmas ornaments, and long cylinders scored with patterns, like the metal rolls of sheet music I’d seen inside self-playing pianos. A row of silken white bolts trailed down from the ceiling as well, ends pooled on the floor behind a round dais made of gleaming black marble, forked with veins of amethyst.

  All those fascinating patterns, a lattice of glass, metal, and fabric, swam in and out of focus as soon as I looked up, straining brutally to fracture into a mosaic of itself. The gleam bucked inside me as if I’d swallowed a living thing, and I doubled over, eyes squinched shut.

  “What’s happening to me?” I managed, before clamping my lips shut. Words were going to lead directly to vomit, that much was for sure.

  I heard Malina’s squeak of alarm even as Shimora laid a light hand on the back of my head, rubbing gently until the spasm loosened and the bile stopped lapping at my throat.

  “Easy, dear heart,” she soothed. “It’s that you’re back where you belong, is all. The gleam in your blood feels mine, feels all of us.”