Daughter of Smoke and Bone

right away.”

“I did,” said Karou, thinking of Yasri’s balm. “Sort of.”

“And what—? Are these claw marks?” Both of Karou’s upper arms were livid purple, darkest where Brimstone’s fingers had sunk in, and pierced with scabbed puncture marks.

“Um,” said Karou.

Zuzana regarded her in silence, then got up and heated the soup she’d brought. She sat on a chair beside the bed, and when Karou finished eating, she kicked her feet — bootless now — up on the mattress and folded her hands in her lap. “Okay,” Zuzana said. “I’m ready.”

“For what?”

“For a really good story that I hope will be the truth.”

The truth. Karou attempted a subject change—“First tell me what happened Saturday with violin boy”—while she rolled the idea of truth around in her mind.

Zuzana snorted. “I don’t think so. Well, his name is Mik, but that’s all you’re getting until you do some talking.”

“His name! You got his name!” This morsel of normal life made Karou almost absurdly happy.

“Karou, I’m serious.” She was serious. Her dark Slavic eyes took on a no-nonsense intensity that Karou had told her in the past would stand her in good stead as an interrogator with the secret police. “Tell me what the hell happened to you.”

The thing was, Karou told the truth all the time, but she told it with that sardonic smile, as if she were being outrageous. Did she even have a facial expression that went with telling the truth in earnest? And what would she say? This wasn’t a story she could ease into gently, like dipping a toe in cold water. She had to just jump.

“An angel tried to kill me,” she said.

A beat, and then, “Uh-huh.”

“No, really.” Karou was conscious — too conscious — of her expression. She felt as if she were auditioning for the role of “truth teller” and trying way too hard.

“Did Jackass do this?”

Karou laughed, too quick and too hard, then winced and held her swollen cheek. The idea of Kaz hurting her was just silly. Well, hurting her physically, though now even the idea that he could have hurt her heart seemed silly, with everything else she had to worry about. “No. It wasn’t Kaz. The cuts were made by a sword, when an angel tried to kill me Friday night. In Morocco. God, it was probably on the news. Then there was this wolf guy who I thought was dead but was most definitely not. The rest was Brimstone. And, oh. Um, everything in my sketchbooks is true.” She held her wrists out, lined up so her tattoos spelled out true story. “See? It’s a hint.”

Zuzana was not amused. “Jesus, Karou—”

Karou plunged ahead. The truth, she found, felt smooth, like a skipping stone in the palm of your hand. “And my hair? I don’t dye it. I wished it this color. And I speak twenty-six languages, and those were mostly wishes, too. Didn’t you ever think it was weird that I speak Czech? I mean, who speaks Czech but Czechs? Brimstone gave it to me for my fifteenth birthday, right before I came here. Oh, and remember the malaria? I got it in Papua New Guinea, and it sucked. And I’ve been shot, too, and I think I killed the bastard, and I’m not sorry, and for some reason an angel tried to kill me, and he was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and also the scariest, though that wolf guy was pretty freaking scary, too, and last night I pissed off Brimstone really bad and he threw me out, and when I got back here Kaz was waiting and I threw him through glass, which worked out great actually because I didn’t have my key.” Pause. “So I don’t think he’ll try scaring me again, which is about the only good thing to come of all this.”

Zuzana said nothing. She scraped back her chair and pulled on her boots, setting each foot down with a clomp, and she surely would have left then — probably forever — if not for the thunk that rattled the glass panes of the balcony door.

Karou gave a strangled cry and jumped out of bed, mindless of her many hurts. She lunged for the door. It was Kishmish.

It was Kishmish, and he was on fire.

* * *

He died in her hands. She smothered the flames and cradled him, and he was raw and charred, the hummingbird fury of his heartbeat giving way to long pauses as she hunched over him saying, “No no no no no—” His forked tongue worked in and out of his beak, and his frantic chirrups tapered away with his heartbeat. “No no no. Kishmish, no—” And then he died. Karou stayed hunched there, on her balcony, holding him. Her string of nos faded to whispers, but she didn’t stop saying them until Zuzana spoke.

Her voice was weak. “Karou?”

Karou looked up.

“Is that…?” Zuzana gestured a jittery hand at Kishmish’s lifeless form. She looked perplexed. “That’s… um. That looks like—”

Karou didn’t help her out. She looked back down at Kishmish and tried to make sense of this sudden intrusion of death. He flew here on fire, she thought. He came to me.

She saw that something was tied to his foot: a piece of Brimstone’s thick notepaper, charred, which crumbled to ashes when she touched it, and… something else. Her fingers shook as she untied it, and then she held the object in her palm. Her heartbeat jumped with a child’s ingrained fear: She wasn’t supposed to touch it.

It was Brimstone’s wishbone.

Kishmish had brought it to her. On fire he had brought it.

Out in the city a siren wailed, and it hurried a connection her mind had been slow to make. Burning. Black handprint. The portal. She struggled to her feet and rushed inside, pulled on a jacket and boots. Zuzana was there, asking, “What is it, Karou? What is that? What—?” but Karou barely heard her.

She went out the door and down the stairs, Kishmish still cradled in her arm, the wishbone tucked in her palm. Zuzana followed her into the street and all the way to Josefov, to the service door that had been Brimstone’s Prague portal.

It was now a blue-white inferno impervious to the jets of the fire hoses.

At the same moment, though Karou didn’t know it, across the world, at every door emblazoned with the black handprint, fires raged. They couldn’t be doused, and yet they didn’t spread. Flame ate away the doors and the magic that clung to them and then swallowed itself, leaving charred holes in dozens of buildings. Metal doors melted, so hot was the fire, and witnesses who stared at the flames saw, in the nimbus of their dazzled retinas, the silhouettes of wings.

Karou saw them and understood. The way to Elsewhere had been severed, and she was cast adrift.

21 HOPE MAKES ITS OWN MAGIC

Once upon a time,

a little girl was raised by monsters

But angels burned the doorways to their world, and she was all alone

Once, when Karou was a little girl, she used a handful of scuppies to flatten the wrinkles out of a drawing that Yasri had sat on. Wrinkle by wrinkle, wish by wish — a painstaking procedure accomplished with total concentration, tongue peeking out at the corner of her lips.

“There!” She held it up, proud.

Brimstone made a sound that put her in mind of a disappointed bear.

“What?” she demanded, eight years old, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and skinny as the shadow of a sapling. “It’s a good drawing. It deserved to be rescued.”