Dreams of Gods & Monsters

Esther breathed out a sigh. “Are you an idiot? What do you think?”

“I think you’re a backstabbing sociopath, that’s what I think.”

Esther just shook her head, a blaze of scorn displacing her apathy. “Do you suppose I wanted it this way? I was happy with the way things were. It’s not my fault Brimstone is dead.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Zuzana demanded.

“Come now. I know you’re not the little doll you look like. Life is choices, and only fools choose their allies with their heart.”

“ Choose their allies? What is this, Survivor?” Zuzana was overcome with disgust of her own. Esther had “chosen” the angels, clearly. Because Brimstone was dead, and she was looking only to her own advantage. In that moment, and knowing what she did about Esther’s true age, she had a flash of insight about her. “You,” she said, and her disgust made a thick coating around the word. “I bet you were a Nazi collaborator, weren’t you?”

To her surprise, Esther laughed. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Anyone with sense would choose to live. Do you know what’s foolish? Dying for a belief. Look where we are. Rome. Think of the Christians fed to the lions because they wouldn’t renounce their faith. As if their god wouldn’t forgive them their desire to live? If you have no more self-preservation instinct than that, maybe you don’t deservelife.”

“Are you kidding me? You’re going to blame the Christians, not the Romans? How about they just don’t throw them to the goddamn lions in the first place? Don’t delude yourself. You’re the monster here.”

Esther, abruptly, had had enough. “It’s time for you to go now,” she said, brisk. “And you should know that upon her decease, all of Karou’s assets go to her next of kin.” A thin and joyless smile. “Her devoted grandmother, of course. So don’t bother trying to access those accounts.”

Upon her decease, upon her decease.Zuzana wouldn’t hear it. Her mind batted the words away.

Esther motioned to the hallway and the knob-knuckled paws of the security guards hoisted them toward it. “You can keep the clothes,” Esther added. “You’re welcome. Oh, and don’t forget the vegetable.”

Vegetable.

She meant Eliza. All this while, Eliza had remained quiet. She was catatonic, and Esther was going to throw her out on the street, and Mik and Zuzana, too, with nothing.

Upon her decease.The tornado had gone from Zuzana’s mind, leaving whispers in its wake. What had happened? Could they be…?

Shut up.

“Let me get our bags, at least,” Mik asked, sounding so calm and reasonable that Zuzana was almost incensed. How dare he be calm and reasonable?

“I gave you a chance,” said Esther. “You elected to stand here insulting me instead. As I said before, life is choices.”

“Let me at least get my violin,” he pleaded. “We’ve got nothing, and no way to get home. At least I’ll be able to play in a piazza for train fare.”

The mental image of them panhandling must have appealed to her sense of class stratification, not to mention degradation. “Fine.” She flicked her wrist, and Mik took off down the hall, fast. When he came back he was holding his violin case in his arms like a baby, not swinging it by its handle. “Thank you,” he actually said, as if Esther had done them a kindness. Zuzana glared at him.

Had he lost his mind?

“Get Eliza,” he said to her, and she did, and Eliza came along like a sleepwalker. Zuzana halted just once, to face Esther across the living room.

“I’ve said this before, but I was always kidding.” She wasn’t kidding now. She’d never been more serious. “I will get you for this. I promise you.”

Esther laughed. “That’s not how the world works, dear. But you can try, if it makes you happy. Do your worst.”

“Wait for it,” Zuzana seethed, and the security guard shoved, and she was propelled down the passage, Eliza at her side, and out into the grand hall to the elevator. Subsequently de-elevated. And, at last, frog-marched through that gleaming lobby, subject to stares and whispers and, most stingingly, the haughty amusement of her eyebrow challenger—who again dared, in light of this shift in circumstances, to raise one of her overplucked, starved-looking amateur brows in a crude but effective I told you so.

The burn of mortification was like passing through a field of nettles—a thousand small pains merging into a haze—but it was nothing next to Zuzana’s heartsickness and panic at the thought of their friends, even now at the mercy of their enemies.

What was happening to them?

Esther must have warned the angels. What had they promised her? Zuzana wondered. And more important, how could she and Mik prevent her from getting it? How? They had nothing. Nothing but a violin.

“I can’t believe you thanked her,” she muttered as they were shoved through the doors and out into the street. Rome came crashing in on them, its vitality and sultry air a marked change from the artificial calm and cool of the interior.

“She let me get my violin,” he said with a shrug, still holding it to his chest like it was a baby or a puppy. He sounded… pleased. It was too much. Zuzana stopped walking—they had no destination but “away” anyway—and swung to face him. He didn’t just soundpleased. He looked it. Or keyed-up, at least. Practically vibrating.

“What’s with you?” she asked him, at a loss and ready to just sit down and cry.

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Come on. We can’t stay here.”

“Yeah. I think that’s been established.”

“No. I mean we can’t stay anywhere that she can find us, and she willcome looking. Come on.” There was urgency in his voice now, puzzling her even more. He hooked his arm around her to steer her, and she drew Eliza along with them—a dreamlike figure who seemed, almost ethereally, to drift, and the crowd subsumed them, parade-thick and easy to get lost in. And so the human density that they’d earlier cursed became their refuge, and they escaped.

58

THE WRONG UGLINESS

All was as it should be. The heavy window shutter was unlatched, as promised, and now Karou had only to get it open in silence. It wanted to creak; its resistance dared her to push it faster and let it squeal. It had been a while since she’d lamented the lack of the “nearly useless wishes” she used to take for granted—scuppies she’d plundered from a teacup in Brimstone’s shop and worn as a necklace—but she found herself wanting one now. A bead between her fingers, a wish for the window’s silence.

There. She didn’t need it. It took patience to open a window with such excruciating slowness while her heart thundered, but she did it. The chamber was open to them, dark but for a rectangle of moonlight stretched out like a welcome mat.

They passed inside one by one, their shapes cutting the moonspill to shards. It re-formed in its entirety as they stepped out of the way. They paused. There was a sense of letting the darkness settle, like water sinking beneath oil.

One last breath before approach.

The bed looked out of place. This was a reception hall, the most famous in the palace. The bed had been brought in, and you had to give them credit for finding a Baroque monstrosity that almost held its own in the fanciful chamber. It was a big four-poster, carved with saints and angels. Twisted blankets traced a form. The form breathed. On the bedside table sat the helm Jael wore to conceal his hideousness from humanity. He shifted slightly as they watched, turning. His breath sounded even and deep.