Daughter of Smoke and Bone

something strange about that fight, wasn’t there, Hazael?”

“Strange,” agreed Hazael.

“We weren’t close enough to feel any… magic… but it certainly seemed as though you were feeling it.”

Akiva’s thoughts spun furiously. How could he get Karou away from here?

“You seem to have forgiven her for it, though.” Liraz came a step closer. “Is there anything you want to tell us?”

Akiva retreated, keeping Karou behind him. “Leave her alone,” he said.

Liraz advanced. “If you have nothing to hide, let us see her.”

In a sorrowful voice that was worse than Liraz’s sharp tone, Hazael said, “Akiva, just tell us it isn’t what it looks like. Just tell us she isn’t…”

Akiva felt a kind of rushing around him, years of secrets catching him up like a wind — a wind, he wished with a wild kind of surrender, that could just bear him away, with Karou, to a place without seraphim and chimaera and their talent for hate, without humans to stand around and gape, without anyone to come between them, ever again. “Of course she isn’t,” he said. It came out as a snarl, and Liraz took it as a challenge to prove it — what Karou was and what she wasn’t — and her eyes flashed with a look Akiva knew too well, a hard fury she harnessed on the battlefield. She came closer.

Adrenaline surged hot as his hands seized into fists, the wishbone bowing under the pressure, and he braced himself for what must come next. Sick incredulity washed over him, that it had come to this.

But whatever he expected to happen, it was not for Karou to speak up in a clear, cool voice and ask, “What? What am I not?”

Liraz halted, her fury blinking to shock. Hazael looked startled, too, and it took Akiva a beat to realize why, but, with a start, he did.

Karou’s words. They were as smooth as falling water. They were in his language. She had spoken the tongue of angels, which she had no way, earthly or elsewise, of knowing. In the hesitation wrought by her question, she stepped out from the shelter of his wings and stood exposed before Liraz and Hazael.

Then, with the same bright savagery she had smiled at Akiva when she attacked him the night before, she said to Liraz, “If you want to see my hands, all you have to do is ask.”

36 TO DO ELSE THAN KILL

All it took was a lucknow from her pocket and a whispered wish, and the words of the seraphim swam from melodious flow into meaning — another language for Karou’s collection, and it was a prize. She already knew, from the hard, darting eyes of the female seraph and the protective stance of Akiva, that they were talking about her.

“Just tell us she isn’t…” said the male, letting his words trail into some unspoken horror, as if he were pleading with Akiva to disprove their suspicions about her.

Who did they think she was? Was she to stand here mute while they talked her over?

“What?” she asked. “What am I not?” She saw their faces freeze in shock as she stepped out from behind Akiva. The female angel was just paces away, staring. She had the dead eyes of a jihadist, and Karou felt a tremor of vulnerability with Akiva no longer between them. She thought of her crescent-moon knives sitting useless in her flat, and then she realized she didn’t need them. She had a weapon tailored just to seraphim.

She was a weapon tailored just to seraphim.

The smile rose unbidden from her phantom self, and she said, with a leaping, dark excitement, “If you want to see my hands, all you have to do is ask.”

And then, there on the Charles Bridge in full view of gawkers, their upheld phones and cameras capturing it for the world, and with the police approaching, wary and grim-faced, all hell broke loose.

* * *

“No!” cried Akiva, but it was too late.

Liraz moved first, like the slash of a knife, and she was fast, but Karou matched her with a knifelike speed of her own. She threw up her hands and the air rippled with the expulsion of magic. It made a slow-motion tracery, hanging there for a second like a warp, and then it hit. Its fringes shivered wide to catch Hazael and Akiva, and they both staggered. Liraz, though, was hurled back like a flicked bug. She twisted, acrobatic, and landed on her feet with a concussive force that shook the bridge. In the aftermath of the blast, only Karou stood straight. Her hair had been caught as in a backdraft, sucked forward and then turned loose, and it floated on the churning air.

She was still smiling, cold. With her drifting hair, and her palms outfaced with their staring ink eyes, she looked malevolent, even to Zuzana, like some species of fell goddess in the unconvincing guise of a girl. Zuzana, Mik, and the other onlookers faltered back. Liraz dropped her glamour, and it was as though the veil that had cloaked them was drawn away to reveal a raging fire. Hazael dropped his glamour, too, and moved to his sister’s side, and a battle line was drawn, the two angels facing Karou, their heads lowered against the misery her hamsas were pulsing at them.

Akiva stood between them, stricken. He had to move to one side or the other. A step or two in either direction, just that, and it was a choice that would define him forever. He looked rapidly back and forth between his comrades and Karou.

“Akiva,” hissed Liraz. She expected him to come to them. It had always been the three of them, advancing against the enemy, killing, and afterward drawing the rough tally marks on one another’s hands with knife tips and campfire soot. To them, Karou was just another tattoo waiting to happen, a line to be carved.

And then there was Karou, so ready to raise her hands and unleash Brimstone’s noxious magic.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Akiva said, but his voice was thin, as if he didn’t believe it himself.

“It is like this,” said Liraz. “Don’t be a child, Akiva.”

He was still between them, straddling two possible futures.

Liraz said, “If you can’t kill her yourself, then go. You don’t have to see it. We’ll never speak of it again. It’s over. Do you hear me? Go home.”

She spoke with urgency and resolution. She really believed she was taking care of him, and that this — this thing with Karou, so beyond her ken — was some madness to be forcibly forgotten.

He said, “I’m not going home.”

Hazael. “What do you mean, you’re not going home? After all you’ve done? All you’ve fought for? It’s a new age, brother. Peace—”

“It’s not peace. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.”

“Harmony with beasts, you mean?” Mistrust shaded into Hazael’s expression, and disgust, and still, still, the hope that it was all a misunderstanding.

When Akiva answered, he knew he was crossing a final border, beyond all possibility of misinterpretation or return. It was a border he should have crossed a long time ago. Everything had gotten so twisted; he had gotten so twisted. “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

Karou broke her gaze away from the two intruders to glance at him. The hard smile had left her face already, and now, as she sensed his turmoil, even her upheld hands faltered. Thoughts of herself, her answers, her emptiness were forgotten, all overshadowed by Akiva’s anguish, which she felt like it was her own.

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…