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His voice low and hoarse, the angel said, “I’m not going to hurt you. What happened before, I’m sorry. Please believe me, Karou. I didn’t come here to hurt you.”
She startled at the sound of her name and stopped struggling. How did he know her name? “Why did you come?”
On his face, a helpless look. He said again, “I don’t know,” and this time it didn’t strike her as fu
“I can’t withstand more of your magic,” he said, and she was aware again of his strain. She had really hurt him. As she should, she told herself. He was her enemy. The heat in her hands told her that. Her scars told it, and her severed life. But her body wasn’t listening. It was focused on the contact of their skin, his hands on hers.
“But I won’t hold you,” he said. “If you want to hurt me, it’s no more than I deserve.”
He released her. His heat deserted her and the night rushed between them, colder than it had been before.
Clasping her hamsas in her fists, Karou backed away, barely aware that she was still floating.
Holy. What was that?
Remotely, she was conscious that she was flying in plain view of a gathered mass of people, and that more gawkers were coming in droves, as if the tourist route of Karlova had been diverted into this side cha
She was on the cusp of something ineffable. When the seraph had held her hands, and when he had let her go, it was as if she had been filled and didn’t realize it until he pulled away and the absence rushed back in. It pounded inside her now, cold and aching, void and wanting—wanting—and a desperate part of her had to be stilled from darting forward to grab his hands again. Wary of the extraordinary compulsion beating in her, she forced herself to resist. It was like fighting a tide, and in the fight was the same terror: of being swept into deep water, beyond all safety.
Karou panicked.
When the angel made as if to move toward her, she threw up her hands between them, both hands at once, and at close range. His eyes went wide and he faltered in the air, a breach in his perfect grace. Karou’s breath caught. He tried to steady himself on the lintel of a fourth-story window, and failed.
His eyes rolled back and he dropped a few feet, sending up sparks. Was he losing consciousness? Karou spoke around a tight constriction in her throat. “Are you okay?”
But he wasn’t, and he fell.
Akiva was dimly aware that he was no longer in the air. Beneath him, stone. In flashes he saw faces peering at him. Consciousness strobed. Voices in languages he couldn’t understand, and at the edge of sight: blue. Karou was there. A roar rose up in his ears and he forced himself upright, and the roar was… applause.
Karou, her back to him, dropped a theatrical curtsy. With a flourish she plucked her knife from where it had embedded itself between cobbles, and sheathed it in her boot. She peered over her shoulder at him, seeming relieved to see him conscious, and then stepped back and… took his hand. Carefully, just her fingertips in his, so her marks wouldn’t burn him. She helped him stand, and said, low in his ear, “Bow.”
“What?”
“Just take a bow, okay? Let them think this was a performance. It’ll be easier to get away. Leave them trying to figure out how we did it.”
He gave an approximation of a bow and the applause thundered.
“Can you walk?” Karou asked.
He nodded.
It still wasn’t easy getting away. People stood in their way, wanting to talk to them. Karou spoke; he didn’t know what was said, didn’t understand the language, but her answers were clipped. The onlookers were awed and delighted—except one of them, a young man in a tall hat who glared at Akiva and tried to take Karou’s elbow. His proprietary air stirred old wrath in Akiva and made him want to throw the human into a wall, but Karou didn’t need his intervention. She brushed the man aside and led Akiva out of the crowd. Her fingers were still in his; they were cool and small, and he was sorry when, turning a corner into a plaza of empty market stalls, she pulled away.
“Are you okay?” she asked, putting distance between them.
He steadied himself against a wall in the shadows beneath an awning. “Not that I didn’t deserve it,” he said. “But I feel as though an army has marched over me.”
She paced, anxious energy fairly vibrating in her. “Razgut said you were looking for me. Why?”
“Razgut?” Akiva was startled. “But I thought he was—”
“Dead? He survived. Not Izîl, though.”
Akiva looked at the ground. “I didn’t know he would jump.”
“Well, he did. But that doesn’t answer my question. Why were you looking for me?”
Again, the helplessness. He groped for meaning. “I didn’t understand who you were. Are. A human, marked with the devil’s eyes.”
Karou looked at her palms, then up at him, a confused vulnerability in her expression. “Why do they… do that? To you?”
He narrowed his eyes. Could she not know?
The eye tattoos were just one example of Brimstone’s deviltry. The magic hit like a wall of wind, one that carried a fury of sickness and weakness, and Akiva had trained to resist it—all seraph soldiers did—but there was only so much he could take. If he’d been in battle, he’d have sliced off the enemy’s hands before letting them focus so much of their evil energy at him. But Karou… the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her again, so he had endured as much as he could.
Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale—a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion. The scorch of her touch on his neck felt like an acid splash, accompanying the dull, roiling nausea from her relentless assault. He felt enfeebled, and feared he might collapse again.
He said carefully, “They’re the revenants’ marks. You must know that.”
“Revenant?”
He studied her face. “Do you really not know?”
“Know what? What’s a revenant? Isn’t it a ghost?”
“It’s a chimaera soldier,” he said, which was part of the truth. “The hamsas are for them.” Pause. “Only.”
She made tight, sudden fists. “Obviously not only.”
He didn’t answer.
Everything was between them, everything he’d felt suffuse the air while they faced each other over the rooftops. Being near her was like balancing on a tipping world, trying to keep your footing as the ground wanted to roll you forward, hurl you into a spiral from which there was no recovery, only impact, and it was a longed-for impact, a sweet and beckoning collision.
He’d felt this before and never wanted to feel it again. It could only diminish the memory of Madrigal; it already was. Again his memory failed to conjure her face. It was like trying to call up a melody while another song played. Karou’s face was all he could see—shining eyes, smooth cheeks, the arc of soft lips pressed together in consternation.
He’d cut out feeling; it shouldn’t even have been possible to feel this—this welter, this urgency and tumult, this thrum. And under it all, a crippled twist of thought he held prisoner in the shadows of his mind, so warped he didn’t recognize it for what it was: a hope. A very small hope. And at its center: Karou.
She was a wingspan away, still pacing. They were prowling on the edges of their mutual compulsion, both afraid to draw nearer together. “Why did you burn the portals?” she asked.