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“So what’s real?” she’d wanted to know.
“If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it’s real.”
By that definition, this angel was real enough.
He raised his sword, and she just watched him do it, her attention catching for a moment on the bars of black ink tattooed across his fingers—they were fleetingly familiar but then not, the feeling gone as soon as it registered—and she just stared up at her killer and wondered numbly why. It seemed impossible that this was the final moment of her life. She cocked her head to the side, desperately searching his features for some hint of… soul… and then, she saw it.
He hesitated. Only for a split second did his mask slip, but Karou saw some urgent pathos surface, a wave of feeling that softened his rigid and ridiculously perfect features. His jaw unclenched, his lips parted, his brow furrowed in an instant of confusion.
At the same moment, she became aware of the pulse in her palms that had made her curl her hands into fists at her first sight of him. It thrummed there still, a pent-up energy, and she was jolted by the certainty that it emanated from her tattoos. An impulse overcame her to throw up her hands, and she did, not in cringing surrender, but with palms powerfully outthrust, inked with the eyes she’d worn all her life without ever knowing why.
And something happened.
It was like a detonation—a sharp intake, all air sucked into a tight core and then expelled. It was silent, lightless—to the gape-jawed witnesses it was nothing at all, just a girl throwing up her hands—but Karou felt it, and the angel did, too. His eyes went wide with recognition in the instant before he was flung back with devastating force to hit a wall some twenty feet behind him. He crumpled to the ground, wings askew, sword skittering away. Karou scrambled to her feet.
The angel wasn’t moving.
She spun and sprinted away. Whatever had happened, a silence had risen from it, and it followed her. She could hear only her own breathing, weirdly amplified like she was in a tu
Karou flung herself at it, hammering with her fists in a frenzy such as she had never unleashed on a portal before. “Issa!” she screamed. “Let me in!”
A long, awful moment, Karou looking back over her shoulder, and then the door finally swung open.
She started to dart forward, then let out a choked cry. It was not Issa or the vestibule, but a Moroccan woman with a broom. Oh no. The woman’s eyes narrowed and she opened her mouth to scold, but Karou didn’t wait. She pushed her back inside and shoved the door closed, staying outside. Frantically she knocked again. “Issa!”
She could hear the woman shouting and feel her trying to push the door open. Karou swore and held it shut. If it was open, the magic of the portal couldn’t co
She looked over her shoulder. There was a commotion in the street, arms waving, people shouting. The donkey stood unimpressed. No angel. Had she killed him? No. Whatever had happened, she knew he wasn’t dead. He would come.
She pounded on the door again. “Issa, Brimstone, please!”
Nothing but irate Arabic. Karou held the door closed with her foot and kept pounding. “Issa! He’s going to kill me! Issa! Let me in!”
What was taking so long? Seconds hung like scuppies on a string, vanishing one after another. The door was jumping against her foot, someone trying to force it open—could it be Issa?—and then she felt a draft of heat at her back. She didn’t hesitate this time but turned, jamming her back up against the door to hold it closed, and raised her hands as if to let her tattoos see. There was no detonation this time, only a crackling of energy that raised her hair like Medusa’s serpents.
The angel was stalking toward her, head lowered so he was looking at her from the tops of his burning eyes. He didn’t move with ease, but as if against a wind. Whatever power in Karou’s tattoos had hurled him against that wall, it hindered him now but didn’t stop him. His hands were fists at his sides, and his face was ferocious, set to endure pain.
He stopped a few paces away and looked at her, really looked at her, his eyes no longer dead but roving over her face and neck, drawn back to her hamsas, and again to her face. Back and forth, as if something didn’t add up.
“Who are you?” he asked, and she almost didn’t recognize the language he spoke as Chimaera, it sounded so soft on his tongue.
Who was she? “Don’t you usually find that out before you try to kill someone?”
At her back, a renewed pressure at the door. If it wasn’t Issa, she was finished.
The angel came a step closer, and Karou moved aside so the door burst open.
“Karou!” Issa’s voice, sharp.
And she spun and leapt through the portal, pulling it shut behind her.
Akiva lunged after her and yanked it back open, only to come face-to-face with a hollering woman who blanched and dropped her broom at his feet.
The girl was already gone.
He stood there a moment, all but unaware of the madness around him. His thoughts were spi
It was simple. He’d wanted to look at her.
Fool.
And what had he seen, or thought he’d seen? Some glimpse of a past that could never come again—the phantom of the girl who had taught him mercy, long ago, only to have her own fate undo all her gentle teaching? He’d thought every spark of mercy was dead in him now, but he hadn’t been able to kill the girl. And then, the unexpected: the hamsas.
A human marked with the devil’s eyes! Why?
There was only one possible answer, as plain as it was disturbing.
That she was not, in fact, human.
15
T HE O THER D OOR
In the vestibule, Karou fell to her knees. Breathing hard, she leaned into the coil of Issa’s serpent body.
“Karou!” Issa gathered her into an embrace that left them both sticky with blood. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
“You didn’t see him?” Karou was dazed.
“See who?”
“The angel…”
Issa’s reaction was profound. She reared back like a serpent ready to strike and hissed, “Angel?”All her snakes—in her hair, around her waist and shoulders—writhed along with her, hissing. Karou cried out, her wounds wrenched by the violent motion.
“Oh, my dear, my sweet girl. Forgive me.” Issa softened again, cradling Karou like a child. “What do you mean, angel? Surely not—”
Karou blinked up at her. Shadows were closing in. “Why did he want to kill me?”
“Darling, darling,” Issa fretted. She pulled away Karou’s sword-slashed coat and scarf to see her wounds, but the blood was heavy and still flowing, and the light in the vestibule was dim. “So much blood!”