Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“No, oh no. No,” she murmured, her hand going to her mouth. “Oh, Karou. I didn’t want to believe it.” Her eyes filled up with tears.

“You didn’t tell her yet?” Zuzana asked.

Karou shook her head. So much for breaking it to her gently. Esther had lied to her. When the portals had just burned and she didn’t know anything, when she was battered and bruised from near-death encounters with both Akiva and Thiago, and no gentle treatment from Brimstone himself, she had gone to her for help. She’d been at the lowest point in her life so far, never mind that she was to sink steadily lower and oh so very muchlower over the next months, she hadn’t known that then. She’d trusted Esther, only to find out now that Esther had lied to her face.

She looked genuinely affected, though, and Karou felt some small remorse for telling her so harshly. “Issa’s well,” she said, to soften the blow, adding a silent prayer that it was so.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Esther’s voice was tremulous. “And Yasri? Twiga?”

There was no softening that. Twiga was dead. Yasri was, too, though Yasri’s soul, like Issa’s, had been preserved and left for Karou to find—another hope in a bottle, to relay Brimstone’s very important message. Karou hadn’t been able to go and retrieve her thurible yet, though she knew where it was: in the ruins of the temple of Ellai where she and Akiva had spent their month of sweet nights, a lifetime past.

To Esther, she just gave a small head shake. Resurrection was more than she was willing to go into. Esther no more knew what Brimstone had used the teeth for—and the gems that had been her own trade with him—than Karou had known before she broke the wishbone, and she wasn’t feeling inclined to be forthcoming just now.

“Very many are dead,” she said, trying and failing to keep the emotion out of her voice. “And very many more will die unless we stop these angels and close the portal.”

“And you think you can do that?” asked Esther.

I hope, thought Karou, but she said, simply, “Yes.”

Zuzana spoke up again, and whether she was matador or bull, she was clear-eyed, fixed, and focused. “Some of those wishes wouldn’t be unwelcome now.”

“Oh, well,” said Esther, flustered. “Now I truly don’thave any more. I’m so sorry. If I had only known, I might have conserved them better. Oh, my poor dear,” she said to Karou, clasping her hand.

Zuzana’s mouth was a straight line. “Uh-huh,” was all she said.

Perhaps feeling that some social grace was called for to spackle over Zuzana’s… lack thereof, Mik said, awkwardly, “Well, thanks for the, um, jet. And the hotel and everything.”

“You’re welcome,” said Esther, and Karou felt that the time for introductions and pleasantries—and unpleasantries—had come to an end. There was work to be done.

She turned to her friends. “The bathroom’s down the hall. It’s not too shabby. Clothes are in the big bedroom. Play dress-up.”

Zuzana’s brow creased. “And the others?” She hesitated. “Eliza? Is she… any better?”

A new tension clenched in Karou. What could she say about Eliza? Eliza Jones. What a strange business it was. They only knew her name because she had ID on her, not because she was capable of telling them. From there, a quick Google search had yielded startling results. Elazael, descended of an angel.As crazy as it all sounded—just the kind of thing Zuzana would, once upon a time, have made a T-shirt in mockery of—the fact that she was speaking fluent Seraphic did lend it an undeniable credibility.

As for the things she had saidin Seraphic, they were surpassingly creepy, and flowed out of her in some kind of fugue. And to Zuzana’s question: Wasshe any better? Karou didn’t know how to answer. She had tried, back in Morocco, to use her own gift of healing to mend her, but how could she, when she couldn’t begin to sense what was broken?

Akiva was trying now, in some way of his own, and Karou had hope, leading her friends to the sitting room door, that she might open it and find the two of them just sitting there, deep in conversation.

“In here,” she said, reaching for the doorknob. With a glance back at Esther, she made an effort to smile. She hated tension, and wished, not for the first time, that the older woman was a warmer fish. But she knew, as she had always known, that every time Esther had acted on her behalf—including the year she’d brought her home to Antwerp with her for Christmas, conjuring a magazine-worthy living room full of gifts, including a fantastical hand-carved rocking horse that Karou had had to leave there and had never seen again—she’d been compensated for her trouble.

That wasn’t friendship, or family. It was business, and smiles weren’t required.

But she smiled anyway, and Esther smiled back. There was sadness in her eyes, regret, maybe even penitence, and later Karou would remember thinking, Well, that’s something at least.

And it was.

Just not what she thought.

55

LUNATIC POETRY

Akiva had descended, many times now, through dark levels of mind to the place where he worked magic, and he was no closer to understanding where it was—internal or external. How deep or distant, or how far it went.

There was that sense—not exact, but near enough—of passing though a trapdoor to another realm, and as he had pushed farther and farther, never meeting any kind of boundary, he had begun to envision an ocean vastness, and then even that was insufficient. Space. Limitless.

He did believe that it was his. That it was him. But it seemed to go on forever—a private universe, a dimension whose infinity transcended the notion of “mind” that he’d always held—of thoughts as existing within the sphere of his own head, a function of his brain.

What hugeness was a mind? A spirit? A soul? And if it didn’t correlate to the physical space his body displaced, then where was it? It dizzied him. Each time he emerged, feeling vague and drained, it gnawed at him, his frustration with his own ignorance.

And that was before he attempted entering another person’s mind.

He sensed, at the threshold of Eliza’s mind, another trapdoor, another realm as expansive as his own, but distinct from it. Infinities are not for casual exploration. You could fall and keep falling. You could get lost. She had. Could he draw her back out? He wanted to try. For her, because the idea of such helplessness appalled him and he wanted to rescue her from it. And for himself, too, because of her ceaseless, plaintive streams of language. It was hislanguage, curiously both familiar and exotic—Seraphic, but spoken in tones and patterns he had never heard, and… godstars, the things she was saying…

Beasts and a blackening sky, the openers of doors and the lights in the darkness.

Chosen. Fallen.

Maps but I am lost. Skies but they are dead.

Cataclysm.

Meliz.

“Lunatic poetry,” Zuzana had dubbed it, and it was both: poetic and lunatic, but it struck a resonance within Akiva, like a tuning fork that matched his own pitch. It meant something, something important, and so he crossed from his own infinity to hers. He didn’t know if this could be done—or, if it could, whether it should. It felt wrong, like transgressing a border. There was resistance, but he penetrated it. He searched for her but couldn’t find her. He called for her and she didn’t answer. The space around him felt different from his own. It was dense and turbid. Kinetic. Aching, uncalm, and afraid. There was wrongness and torment here, but it was beyond his understanding, and he didn’t dare go deeper.