daughter of smoke and bone

New York Boston
For Jane,
for a whole new world of possibilities

Once upon a time,
an angel and a devil fell in love.
It did not end well.

1
IMPOSSIBLE TO SCARE
Walking to school over the snow-muffled cobbles,
Karou had no sinister premonitions about the day. It
seemed like just another Monday, innocent but for its
essential Mondayness, not to mention its
Januaryness. It was cold, and it was dark—in the
dead of winter the sun didn’t rise until eight—but it
was also lovely. The falling snow and the early hour
conspired to paint Prague ghostly, like a tintype
photograph, all silver and haze.
On the riverfront thoroughfare, trams and buses
roared past, grounding the day in the twenty-first
century, but on the quieter lanes, the wintry peace
might have hailed from another time. Snow and
stone and ghostlight, Karou’s own footsteps and the
feather of steam from her coffee mug, and she was
alone and adrift in mundane thoughts: school,
errands. The occasional cheek-chew of bitterness
when a pang of heartache intruded, as pangs of
heartache will, but she pushed them aside, resolute,
ready to be done with all that.
She held her coffee mug in one hand and clutched
her coat closed with the other. An artist’s portfolio
was slung over her shoulder, and her hair—loose,
long, and peacock blue—was gathering a lace of
snowflakes.
Just another day.
And then.
A snarl, rushing footfall, and she was seized from
behind, pulled hard against a man’s broad chest as
hands yanked her scarf askew and she felt teeth
—teeth—against her neck.
Nibbling.
Her attacker was nibbling her.
Annoyed, she tried to shake him off without spilling
her coffee, but some sloshed out of her cup anyway,
into the dirty snow.
“Jesus, Kaz, get off,” she snapped, spinning to face
her ex-boyfriend. The lamplight was soft on his
beautiful face. Stupid beauty, she thought, shoving
him away. Stupid face.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked.
“It’s always you. And it never works.”
Kazimir made his living jumping out from behind
things, and it frustrated him that he could never get
even the slightest rise out of Karou. “You’re
impossible to scare,” he complained, giving her the
pout he thought was irresistible. Until recently, she
wouldn’t have resisted it. She would have risen on
tiptoe and licked his pout-puckered lower lip, licked
it languorously and then taken it between her teeth
and teased it before losing herself in a kiss that
made her melt against him like sun-warmed honey.
Those days were so over.
“Maybe you’re just not scary,” she said, and walked
on.
Kaz caught up and strolled at her side, hands in
pockets. “I am scary, though. The snarl? The bite?
Anyone normal would have a heart attack. Just not
you, ice water for blood.”
When she ignored him, he added, “Josef and I are
starting a new tour. Old Town vampire tour. The
tourists will eat it up.”
They would, thought Karou. They paid good money
for Kaz’s “ghost tours,” which consisted of being
herded through the tangled lanes of Prague in the
dark, pausing at sites of supposed murders so
“ghosts” could leap out of doorways and make them
shriek. She’d played a ghost herself on several
occasions, had held aloft a bloody head and
moaned while the tourists’ screams gave way to
laughter. It had been fun.
Kaz had been fun. Not anymore. “Good luck with
that,” she said, staring ahead, her voice colorless.
“We could use you,” Kaz said.
“No.”
“You could play a sexy vampire vixen—”
“No.”
“Lure in the men—”
“No.”
“You could wear your cape….”
Karou stiffened.
Softly, Kaz coaxed, “You still have it, don’t you,
baby? Most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, you with
that black silk against your white skin—”
“Shut up,” she hissed, coming to a halt in the middle
“Shut up,” she hissed, coming to a halt in the middle
of Maltese Square. God, she thought. How stupid
had she been to fall for this petty, pretty street actor,
dress up for him and give him memories like that?
Exquisitely stupid.
Lonely stupid.
Kaz lifted his hand to brush a snowflake from her
eyelashes. She said, “Touch me and you’ll get this
coffee in your face.”
He lowered his hand. “Roo, Roo, my fierce Karou.
When will you stop fighting me? I said I was sorry.”
“Be sorry, then. Just be sorry somewhere else.” They
spoke in Czech, and her acquired accent matched
his native one perfectly.
He sighed, irritated that Karou was still resisting his
apologies. This wasn’t in his script. “Come on,” he
coaxed. His voice was rough and soft at the same
time, like a blues singer’s mix of gravel and silk.
“We’re meant to be together, you and me.”
Meant. Karou sincerely hoped that if she were
“meant” for anyone, it wasn’t Kaz. She looked at him,
beautiful Kazimir whose smile used to work on her
like a summons, compelling her to his side. And that
had seemed a glorious place to be, as if colors were
brighter there, sensations more profound. It had also,
she’d discovered, been a popular place, other girls
occupying it when she did not.
“Get Svetla to be your vampire vixen,” she said.
“She’s got the vixen part down.”
He looked pained. “I don’t want Svetla. I want you.”
“Alas. I am not an option.”
“Don’t say that,” he said, reaching for her hand.
She pulled back, a pang of heartache surging in
spite of all her efforts at aloofness. Not worth it, she
told herself. Not even close. “This is the definition of
stalking, you realize.”
“Puh. I’m not stalking you. I happen to be going this
way.”
“Right,” said Karou. They were just a few doors from
her school now. The Art Lyceum of Bohemia was a
private high school housed in a pink Baroque palace
where famously, during the Nazi occupation, two
young Czech nationalists had slit the throat of a
Gestapo commander and scrawled liberty with his
blood. A brief, brave rebellion before they were
captured and impaled upon the finials of the
courtyard gate. Now students were milling around
that very gate, smoking, waiting for friends. But Kaz
wasn’t a student—at twenty, he was several years
older than Karou—and she had never known him to
be out of bed before noon. “Why are you even
awake?”
“I have a new job,” he said. “It starts early.”
“What, you’re doing morning vampire tours?”
“Not that. Something else. An… unveiling of sorts.”
He was grinning now. Gloating. He wanted her to
ask what his new job was.
She wouldn’t ask. With perfect disinterest she said,
“Well, have fun with that,” and walked away.
Kaz called after her, “Don’t you want to know what it
is?” The grin was still there. She could hear it in his
voice.
“Don’t care,” she called back, and went through the
gate.
She really should have asked.
2
AN UNVEILING OF SORTS
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Karou’s first class
was life drawing. When she walked into the studio,
her friend Zuzana was already there and had staked
out easels for them in front of the model’s platform.
Karou shrugged off her portfolio and coat, unwound
her scarf, and announced, “I’m being stalked.”
Zuzana arched an eyebrow. She was a master of the
eyebrow arch, and Karou envied her for it. Her own
eyebrows did not function independently of each
other, which handicapped her expressions of
suspicion and disdain.
Zuzana could do both perfectly, but this was milder
eyebrow action, mere cool curiosity. “Don’t tell me
Jackass tried to scare you again.”
Jackass tried to scare you again.”
“He’s going through a vampire phase. He bit my
neck.”
“Actors,” muttered Zuzana. “I’m telling you, you need
to tase the loser. Teach him to go jumping out at
people.”
“I don’t have a Taser.” Karou didn’t add that she
didn’t need a Taser; she was more than capable of
defending herself without electricity. She’d had an
unusual education.
“Well, get one. Seriously. Bad behavior should be
punished. Plus, it would be fun. Don’t you think? I’ve
always wanted to tase someone. Zap!” Zuzana
mimicked convulsions.
Karou shook her head. “No, tiny violent one, I don’t
think it would be fun. You’re terrible.”
“I am not terrible. Kaz is terrible. Tell me I don’t have
to remind you.” She gave Karou a sharp look. “Tell
me you’re not even considering forgiving him.”
“No,” declared Karou. “But try getting him to believe
that.” Kaz just couldn’t fathom any girl willfully
depriving herself of his charms. And what had she
done but strengthen his vanity those months they’d
been together, gazing at him starry-eyed, giving
him… everything? His wooing her now, she thought,
was a point of pride, to prove to himself that he could
have who he wanted. That it was up to him.
Maybe Zuzana was right. Maybe she should tase
him.
“Sketchbook,” commanded Zuzana, holding out her
hand like a surgeon for a scalpel.
Karou’s best friend was bossy in obverse proportion
to her size. She only passed five feet in her platform
boots, whereas Karou was five foot six but seemed
taller in the same way that ballerinas do, with their
long necks and willowy limbs. She wasn’t a ballerina,
but she had the look, in figure if not in fashion. Not
many ballerinas have bright blue hair or a
constellation of tattoos on their limbs, and Karou had
both.
The only tattoos visible as she dug out her
sketchbook and handed it over were the ones on her
wrists like bracelets—a single word on each: true
and story.
As Zuzana took the book, a couple of other students,
Pavel and Dina, crowded in to look over her
shoulder. Karou’s sketchbooks had a cult following
around school and were handed around and
marveled at on a daily basis. This one—number
ninety-two in a lifelong series—was bound with
rubber bands, and as soon as Zuzana took them off
it burst open, each page so coated in gesso and
paint that the binding could scarcely contain them.
As it fanned open, Karou’s trademark characters
wavered on the pages, gorgeously rendered and
deeply strange.
There was Issa, serpent from the waist down and
woman from the waist up, with the bare, globe
breasts of Kama Sutra carvings, the hood and fangs
of a cobra, and the face of an angel.
Giraffe-necked Twiga, hunched over with his
jeweler’s glass stuck in one squinting eye.
Yasri, parrot-beaked and human-eyed, a frill of
orange curls escaping her kerchief. She was
carrying a platter of fruit and a pitcher of wine.
And Brimstone, of course—he was the star of the
sketchbooks. Here he was shown with Kishmish
perched on the curl of one of his great ram’s horns.
In the fantastical stories Karou told in her
sketchbooks, Brimstone dealt in wishes. Sometimes
she called him the Wishmonger; other times, simply
“the grump.”
She’d been drawing these creatures since she was
a little girl, and her friends tended to talk about them
as if they were real. “What was Brimstone up to this
weekend?” asked Zuzana.
“The usual,” said Karou. “Buying teeth from
murderers. He got some Nile crocodile teeth
yesterday from this awful Somali poacher, but the
idiot tried to steal from him and got half strangled by
his snake collar. He’s lucky to be alive.”
Zuzana found the story illustrated on the book’s last
drawn pages: the Somali, his eyes rolling back in his
head as the whip-thin snake around his neck
cinched itself as tight as a garrote. Humans, Karou
had explained before, had to submit to wearing one
of Issa’s serpents around their necks before they
could enter Brimstone’s shop. That way if they tried
anything fishy they were easy to subdue—by
strangulation, which wasn’t always fatal, or, if
necessary, by a bite to the throat, which was.
“How do you make this stuff up, maniac?” Zuzana
asked, all jealous wonderment.
“Who says I do? I keep telling you, it’s all real.”
“Uh-huh. And your hair grows out of your head that
color, too.”
color, too.”
“What? It totally does,” said Karou, passing a long
blue strand through her fingers.
“Right.”
Karou shrugged and gathered her hair back in a
messy coil, stabbing a paintbrush through it to
secure it at the nape of her neck. In fact, her hair did
grow out of her head that color, pure as ultramarine
straight from the paint tube, but that was a truth she
told with a certain wry smile, as if she were being
absurd. Over the years she’d found that that was all it
took, that lazy smile, and she could tell the truth
without risk of being believed. It was easier than
keeping track of lies, and so it became part of who
she was: Karou with her wry smile and crazy
imagination.
In fact, it was not her imagination that was crazy. It
was her life—blue hair and Brimstone and all.
Zuzana handed the book to Pavel and started
flipping pages in her own oversize drawing pad,
searching for a fresh page. “I wonder who’s posing
today.”
“Probably Wiktor,” said Karou. “We haven’t had him
in a while.”
“I know. I’m hoping he’s dead.”
“Zuzana!”
“What? He’s eight million years old. We might as
well draw the anatomical skeleton as that creepy
bonesack.”
There were some dozen models, male and female,
all shapes and ages, who rotated through the class.
They ranged from enormous Madame Svobodnik,
whose flesh was more landscape than figure, to
pixie Eliska with her wasp waist, the favorite of the
male students. Ancient Wiktor was Zuzana’s least
favorite. She claimed to have nightmares whenever
she had to draw him.
“He looks like an unwrapped mummy.” She
shuddered. “I ask you, is staring at a naked old man
any way to start the day?”
“Better than getting attacked by a vampire,” said
Karou.
In fact, she didn’t mind drawing Wiktor. For one
thing, he was so nearsighted he never made eye
contact with the students, which was a bonus. No
matter that she had been drawing nudes for years;
she still found it unsettling, sketching one of the
younger male models, to look up from a study of his
penis—a necessary study; you couldn’t exactly leave
the area blank—and find him staring back at her.
Karou had felt her cheeks flame on plenty of
occasions and ducked behind her easel.
Those occasions, as it turned out, were about to
fade into insignificance next to the mortification of
today.
She was sharpening a pencil with a razor blade
when Zuzana blurted in a weird, choked voice, “Oh
my god, Karou!”
And before she even looked up, she knew.
An unveiling, he had said. Oh, how clever. She lifted
her gaze from her pencil and took in the sight of Kaz
standing beside Profesorka Fiala. He was barefoot
and wearing a robe, and his shoulder-length golden
hair, which had minutes before been wind-teased
and sparkling with snowflakes, was pulled back in a
ponytail. His face was a perfect blend of Slavic
angles and soft sensuality: cheekbones that might
have been turned on a diamond cutter’s lathe, lips
you wanted to touch with your fingertips to see if they
felt like velvet. Which, Karou knew, they did. Stupid
lips.
Murmurs went around the room. A new model, oh
my god, gorgeous…
One murmur cut through the others: “Isn’t that
Karou’s boyfriend?”
Ex, she wanted to snap. So very, very ex.
“I think it is. Look at him….”
Karou was looking at him, her face frozen in what
she hoped was a mask of impervious calm. Don’t
blush, she commanded herself. Do not blush. Kaz
looked right back at her, a smile dimpling one
cheek, eyes lazy and amused. And when he was
sure he held her gaze, he had the nerve to wink.
A flurry of giggles erupted around Karou.
“Oh, the evil bastard…” Zuzana breathed.
Kaz stepped up onto the model’s platform. He
looked straight at Karou as he untied his sash; he
looked at her as he shrugged off the robe. And then
Karou’s ex-boyfriend was standing before her entire
class, beautiful as heartbreak, naked as the David.
And on his chest, right over his heart, was a new
tattoo.
It was an elaborate cursive K.
More giggles burst forth. Students didn’t know who
to look at, Karou or Kazimir, and glanced from one
to the other, waiting for a drama to unfold. “Quiet!”
to the other, waiting for a drama to unfold. “Quiet!”
commanded Profesorka Fiala, appalled, clapping
her hands together until the laughter was stifled.
Karou’s blush came on then. She couldn’t stop it.
First her chest and neck went hot, then her face.
Kaz’s eyes were on her the whole time, and his
dimple deepened with satisfaction when he saw her
flustered.
“One-minute poses, please, Kazimir,” said Fiala.
Kaz stepped into his first pose. It was dynamic, as
the one-minute poses were meant to be—twisted
torso, taut muscles, limbs stretched in simulation of
action. These warm-up sketches were all about
movement and loose line, and Kaz was taking the
opportunity to flaunt himself. Karou thought she didn’t
hear a lot of pencils scratching. Were the other girls
in the class just staring stupidly, as she was?
She dipped her head, took up her sharp pencil—
thinking of other uses she would happily put it to—
and started to sketch. Quick, fluid lines, and all the
sketches on one page; she overlapped them so they
looked like an illustration of dance.
Kaz was graceful. He spent enough time looking in
the mirror that he knew how to use his body for
effect. It was his instrument, he’d have said. Along
with the voice, the body was an actor’s tool. Well,
Kaz was a lousy actor—which was why he got by on
ghost tours and the occasional low-budget
production of Faust—but he made a fine artist’s
model, as Karou knew, having drawn him many
times before.
His body had reminded Karou, from the first time
she saw it… unveiled… of a Michelangelo. Unlike
some Renaissance artists, who’d favored slim,
effete models, Michelangelo had gone for power,
drawing broad-shouldered quarry workers and
somehow managing to render them both carnal and
elegant at the same time. That was Kaz: carnal and
elegant.
And deceitful. And narcissistic. And, honestly, kind of
dumb.
“Karou!” The British girl Helen was whispering
harshly, trying to get her attention. “Is that him?”
Karou didn’t acknowledge her. She drew, pretending
everything was normal. Just another day in class.
And if the model had an insolent dimple and wouldn’t
take his eyes off her? She ignored it as best she
could.
When the timer rang, Kaz calmly gathered up his
robe and put it on. Karou hoped it wouldn’t occur to
him that he was free to walk around the studio. Stay
where you are, she willed him. But he didn’t. He
sauntered toward her.
“Hi, Jackass,” said Zuzana. “Modest much?”
Ignoring her, he asked Karou, “Like my new tattoo?”
Students were standing up to stretch, but rather than
dispersing for smoke or bathroom breaks, they
hovered casually within earshot.
“Sure,” Karou said, keeping her voice light. “K for
Kazimir, right?”
“Funny girl. You know what it’s for.”
“Well,” she mused in Thinker pose, “I know there’s
only one person you really love, and his name does
start with a K. But I can think of a better place for it
than your heart.” She took up her pencil and, on her
last drawing of Kaz, inscribed a K right over his
classically sculpted buttock.
Zuzana laughed, and Kaz’s jaw tightened. Like most
vain people, he hated to be mocked. “I’m not the only
one with a tattoo, am I, Karou?” he asked. He looked
to Zuzana. “Has she shown it to you?”
Zuzana gave Karou the suspicious rendition of the
eyebrow arch.
“I don’t know which you mean,” Karou lied calmly. “I
have lots of tattoos.” To demonstrate, she didn’t flash
true or story, or the serpent coiled around her ankle,
or any of her other concealed works of art. Rather,
she held up her hands in front of her face, palms out.
In the center of each was an eye inked in deepest
indigo, in effect turning her hands into hamsas, those
ancient symbols of warding against the evil eye.
Palm tattoos are notorious for fading, but Karou’s
never did. She’d had these eyes as long as she
could remember; for all she knew of their origin, she
could have been born with them.
“Not those,” said Kaz. “I mean the one that says
Kazimir, right over your heart.”
“I don’t have a tattoo like that.” She made herself
sound puzzled and unfastened the top few buttons of
her sweater. Beneath was a camisole, and she
lowered it by a few revealing inches to demonstrate
that indeed there was no tattoo above her breast.
The skin there was white as milk.
Kaz blinked. “What? How did you—?”
“Come with me.” Zuzana grabbed Karou’s hand and
pulled her away. As they wove among the easels, all
pulled her away. As they wove among the easels, all
eyes were on Karou, lit with curiosity.
“Karou, did you break up?” Helen whispered in
English, but Zuzana put up her hand in an imperious
gesture that silenced her, and she dragged Karou
out of the studio and into the girls’ bathroom. There,
eyebrow still arched, she asked, “What the hell was
that?”
“What?”
“What? You practically flashed the boy.”
“Please. I did not flash him.”
“Whatever. What’s this about a tattoo over your
heart?”
“I just showed you. There’s nothing there.” She saw
no reason to add that there had been something;
she preferred to pretend she had never been so
stupid. Plus, explaining how she’d gotten rid of it was
not exactly an option.
“Well, good. The last thing you need is that idiot’s
name on your body. Can you believe him? Does he
think if he just dangles his boy bits at you like a cat
toy you’ll go scampering after him?”
“Of course he thinks that,” said Karou. “This is his
idea of a romantic gesture.”
“All you have to do is tell Fiala he’s a stalker, and
she’ll throw his ass out.”
Karou had thought of that, but she shook her head.
Surely she could come up with a better way to get
Kaz out of her class and out of her life. She had
means at her disposal that most people didn’t.
She’d think of something.
“The boy is not terrible to draw, though.” Zuzana went
to the mirror and flipped wisps of dark hair across
her forehead. “Got to give him that.”
“Yeah. Too bad he’s such a gargantuan asshole.”
“A giant, stupid orifice,” Zuzana agreed.
“A walking, talking cranny.”
“Cranny.” Zuzana laughed. “I like.”
An idea came to Karou, and a faintly villainous smirk
crossed her face.
“What?” asked Zuzana, seeing it.
“Nothing. We’d better get back in there.”
“You’re sure? You don’t have to.”
Karou nodded. “Nothing to it.”
Kaz had gotten all the satisfaction he was going to
get from this cute little ploy of his. It was her turn now.
Walking back into the studio, she reached up and
touched the necklace she was wearing, a multistrand
loop of African trade beads in every color. At least
they looked like African trade beads. They were
more than that. Not much more, but enough for what
Karou had planned.
3
CRANNY
Profesorka Fiala asked Kaz for a reclining pose for
the rest of the period, and he draped himself back
across the daybed in a way that, if not quite lewd,
was certainly suggestive, knees just a bit too
skewed, smile bordering on bedroom. There were
no titters this time, but Karou imagined a surge of
heat in the atmosphere, as if the girls in the class—
and at least one of the boys—needed to fan
themselves. She herself was not affected. This time
when Kaz peered at her from under lazy eyelids, she
met his gaze straight on.
She started sketching and did her best, thinking it
fitting that, since their relationship had begun with a
drawing, it should end with one, too.
drawing, it should end with one, too.
He’d been sitting two tables away at Mustache Bar
the first time she saw him. He wore a villain’s twirled
mustache, which seemed like foreshadowing now,
but it was Mustache Bar after all. Everyone was
wearing mustaches—Karou was sporting a Fu
Manchu she’d gotten from the vending machine.
She’d pasted both mustaches into her sketchbook
later that night—sketchbook number ninety—and the
resulting lump made it easy to locate the exact page
where her story with Kaz began.
He’d been drinking beer with friends, and Karou,
unable to take her eyes off him, had drawn him. She
was always drawing, not just Brimstone and the
other creatures from her secret life, but scenes and
people from the common world. Falconers and
street musicians, Orthodox priests with beards to
their bellies, the occasional beautiful boy.
Usually she got away with it, her subjects none the
wiser, but this time the beautiful boy caught her
looking, and the next thing she knew he was smiling
under his fake mustache and coming over. How
flattered he’d been by her sketch! He’d shown it to
his friends, taken her hand to urge her to join them,
and kept hold of it, fingers laced with hers, even after
she’d settled at his table. That was the beginning:
her worshipping his beauty, him reveling in it. And
that was more or less how it had continued.
Of course, he’d told her she was beautiful, too, all the
time. If she hadn’t been, surely he’d never have
come over to talk to her in the first place. Kaz wasn’t
exactly one to look for inner beauty. Karou was,
simply, lovely. Creamy and leggy, with long azure
hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved
like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. Beyond merely
pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always
sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way
of cocking her head, her lips pressed together while
her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and
mysteries.
Karou was mysterious. She had no apparent family,
she never talked about herself, and she was expert
at evading questions—for all that her friends knew of
her background, she might have sprung whole from
the head of Zeus. And she was endlessly surprising.
Her pockets were always spilling out curious things:
ancient bronze coins, teeth, tiny jade tigers no bigger
than her thumbnail. She might reveal, while haggling
for sunglasses with an African street vendor, that she
spoke fluent Yoruba. Once, Kaz had undressed her
to discover a knife hidden in her boot. There was the
matter of her being impossible to scare and, of
course, there were the scars on her abdomen: three
shiny divots that could only have been made by
bullets.
“Who are you?” Kaz had sometimes asked,
enchanted, to which Karou would wistfully reply, “I
really don’t know.”
Because she really didn’t.
She drew quickly now, and didn’t shy away from
meeting Kaz’s eyes as she glanced up and down
between model and drawing. She wanted to see his
face.
She wanted to see the moment his expression
changed.
Only when she had captured his pose did she lift her
left hand—continuing to draw with her right—to the
beads of her necklace. She took one between her
thumb and forefinger and held it there.
And then she made a wish.
It was a very small wish. These beads were just
scuppies, after all. Like money, wishes came in
denominations, and scuppies were mere pennies.
Weaker even than pennies, because unlike coins,
wishes couldn’t be compounded. Pennies you could
add up to make dollars, but scuppies were only ever
just scuppies, and whole strands of them, like this
necklace, would never add up to a more potent wish,
just plenty of very small, nearly useless wishes.
Wishes, for example, for things like itches.
Karou wished Kaz an itch, and the bead vanished
between her fingers. Spent and gone. She’d never
wished an itch before, so, to make sure it would
work, she started with a spot he wouldn’t be shy to
scratch: his elbow. Sure enough, he nudged it
casually against a cushion, scarcely shifting his
pose. Karou smiled to herself and kept drawing.
A few seconds later, she took another bead between
her fingers and wished another itch, this time to
Kaz’s nose. Another bead disappeared, the
necklace shortened imperceptibly, and his face
twitched. For a few seconds he resisted moving, but
then gave in and rubbed his nose quickly with the
back of his hand before resuming his position. His
bedroom expression was gone, Karou couldn’t help
noticing. She had to bite her lip to keep her smile
noticing. She had to bite her lip to keep her smile
from broadening.
Oh, Kazimir, she thought, you shouldn’t have come
here today. You really should have slept in.
The next itch she wished to the hidden place of her
evil plan, and she met Kaz’s eyes at the moment it
hit. His brow creased with sudden strain. She
cocked her head slightly, as if to inquire, Something
wrong, dear?
Here was an itch that could not be scratched in
public. Kaz went pale. His hips shifted; he couldn’t
quite manage to hold still. Karou gave him a short
respite and kept drawing. As soon as he started to
relax and… unclench… she struck again and had to
stifle a laugh when his face went rigid.
Another bead vanished between her fingers.
Then another.
This, she thought, isn’t just for today. It’s for
everything. For the heartache that still felt like a
punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at
unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the
mental images she couldn’t shake; for the shame of
having been so naive.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it
after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on
a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the
irretrievable.
For her virginity.
That first time, the black cape and nothing under it,
she’d felt so grown up—like the Czech girls Kaz and
Josef hung out with, cool Slavic beauties with names
like Svetla and Frantiska, who looked like nothing
could ever shock them or make them laugh. Had she
really wanted to be like them? She’d pretended to
be, played the part of a girl—a woman—who didn’t
care. She’d treated her virginity like a trapping of
childhood, and then it was gone.
She hadn’t expected to be sorry, and at first she
wasn’t. The act itself was neither disappointing nor
magical; it was what it was: a new closeness. A
shared secret.
Or so she’d thought.
“You look different, Karou,” Kaz’s friend Josef had
said the next time she saw him. “Are you…
glowing?”
Kaz had punched him on the shoulder to silence him,
looking at once sheepish and smug, and Karou
knew he’d told. The girls, even. Their ruby lips had
curled knowingly. Svetla—the one she later caught
him with—even made a straight-faced comment
about capes coming back in fashion, and Kaz had
colored slightly and looked away, the only indication
that he knew he’d done wrong.
Karou had never even told Zuzana about it, at first
because it belonged to her and Kaz alone, and later
because she was ashamed. She hadn’t told anyone,
but Brimstone, in the inscrutable way he had of
knowing things, had guessed, and had taken the
opportunity to give her a rare lecture.
That had been interesting.
The Wishmonger’s voice was so deep it seemed
almost the shadow of sound: a dark sonance that
lurked in the lowest register of hearing. “I don’t know
many rules to live by,” he’d said. “But here’s one. It’s
simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself.
No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or
alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles—
drug or tattoo—and… no inessential penises,
either.”
“Inessential penises?” Karou had repeated,
delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. “Is
there any such thing as an essential one?”
“When an essential one comes along, you’ll know,”
he’d replied. “Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait
for love.”
“Love.” Her delight evaporated. She’d thought that
was love.
“It will come, and you will know it,” Brimstone had
promised, and she so wanted to believe him. He’d
been alive for hundreds of years, hadn’t he? Karou
had never before thought about Brimstone and love
—to look at him, he didn’t seem such a candidate for
it—but she hoped that in his centuries of life he’d
accrued some wisdom, and that he was right about
her.
Because, of all things in the world, that was her
orphan’s craving: love. And she certainly hadn’t
gotten it from Kaz.
Her pencil point snapped, so hard was she bearing
down on her drawing, and at the same moment a
burst of anger converted itself to a rapid-fire volley of
itches that shortened her necklace to a choker and
sent Kaz scrambling off the model stand. Karou
released her necklace and watched him. He was
already to the door, robe in hand, and he opened it
already to the door, robe in hand, and he opened it
and darted out, still naked in his haste to get away
and find a place where he could attend to his
humiliating misery.
The door swung shut and the class was left blinking
at the empty daybed. Profesorka Fiala was peering
over the rim of her glasses at the door, and Karou
was ashamed of herself.
Maybe that was too much.
“What’s with Jackass?” Zuzana asked.
“No idea,” said Karou, looking down at her drawing.
There on the paper was Kaz in all his carnality and
elegance, looking like he was waiting for a lover to
come to him. It could have been a good drawing, but
she’d ruined it. Her line work had darkened and lost
all subtlety, finally ending in a chaotic scribble that
blotted out his… inessential penis. She wondered
what Brimstone would think of her now. He was
always reprimanding her for injudicious use of
wishes—most recently the one that had made
Svetla’s eyebrows thicken overnight until they looked
like caterpillars and grew right back the moment they
were tweezed.
“Women have been burned at the stake for less,
Karou,” he’d said.
Lucky for me, she thought, this isn’t the Middle
Ages.
4
POISON KITCHEN
The rest of the school day was uneventful. A double
period of chemistry and color lab, followed by master
drawing and lunch, after which Zuzana went to
puppetry and Karou to painting, both three-hour
studio classes that released them into the same full
winter dark by which they’d arrived that morning.
“Poison?” inquired Zuzana as they stepped out the
door.
“You have to ask?” said Karou. “I’m starved.”
They bent their heads against the icy wind and
headed toward the river.
The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely
touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth
or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of
or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of
alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles
once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall
houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell
blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and
capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas
were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic
steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The
wind carried the memory of magic, revolution,
violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like
creeks. Thugs wore Mozart wigs and pushed
chamber music on street corners, and marionettes
hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a
theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind
velvet.
Above it all loomed the castle on the hill, its
silhouette as sharp as thorns. By night it was floodlit,
bathed in eerie light, and this evening the sky hung
low, full-bellied with snow, making gauzy halos
around the street lamps.
Down by the Devil’s Stream, Poison Kitchen was a
place rarely stumbled upon by chance; you had to
know it was there, and duck under an unmarked
stone arch into a walled graveyard, beyond which
glowed the lamp-lit windowpanes of the cafe.
Unfortunately, tourists no longer had to rely on
chance to discover the place; the latest edition of the
Lonely Planet guide had outed it to the world—
The church once attached to this medieval
priory burned down some three hundred
years ago, but the monks’ quarters remain,
and have been converted to the strangest
cafe you’ll find anywhere, crowded with
classical statues all sporting the owner’s
collection of WWI gas masks. Legend has it
that back in the Middle Ages, the cook lost
his mind and murdered the whole priory with
a poisoned vat of goulash, hence the cafe’s
ghoulish name and signature dish: goulash,
of course. Sit on a velvet sofa and prop your
feet up on a coffin. The skulls behind the bar
may or may not belong to the murdered
monks….
—and for the past half year backpackers had been
poking their heads through the arch, looking for
some morbid Prague to write postcards about.
This evening, though, the girls found it quiet. In the
corner a foreign couple was taking pictures of their
children wearing gas masks, and a few men
hunched at the bar, but most of the tables—coffins,
flanked by low velvet settees—were unoccupied.
Roman statues were everywhere, life-size gods and
nymphs with missing arms and wings, and in the
middle of the room stood a copy of the huge
equestrian Marcus Aurelius from Capitoline Hill.
“Oh, good, Pestilence is free,” said Karou, heading
toward the sculpture. Massive emperor and horse
both wore gas masks, like every other statue in the
place, and it had always put Karou in mind of the first
horseman of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, sowing
plague with one outstretched arm. The girls’
preferred table was in its shadow, having the benefit
of both privacy and a view of the bar—through the
horse’s legs—so they could see if anyone interesting
came in.
They dropped their portfolios and hung their coats
from Marcus Aurelius’s stone fingertips. The oneeyed
owner raised his hand from behind the bar, and
they waved back.
They’d been coming here for two and a half years,
since they were fifteen and in their first year at the
Lyceum. Karou had been new to Prague and had
known no one. Her Czech was freshly acquired (by
wish, not study; Karou collected languages, and
that’s what Brimstone always gave her for her
birthday) and it had still tasted strange on her
tongue, like a new spice.
She’d been at a boarding school in England before
that, and though she was capable of a flawless
British accent, she had stuck with the American one
she’d developed as a child, so that was what her
classmates had thought she was. In truth, she had
claim to no nationality. Her papers were all forgeries,
and her accents—all except one, in her first
language, which was not of human origin—were all
fakes.
Zuzana was Czech, from a long line of marionette
artisans in Cˇ eský Krumlov, the little jewel box of a
city in southern Bohemia. Her older brother had
shocked the family by going into the army, but
Zuzana had puppets in the blood and was carrying
on the family tradition. Like Karou, she’d known no
one else at school and, as fortune would have it,
early in the first term they’d been paired up to paint a
mural for a local primary school. That had entailed a
week of evenings spent up ladders, and they’d taken
to going to Poison Kitchen afterward. This was
where their friendship had taken root, and when the
mural was finished, the owner had hired them to
paint a scene of skeletons on toilets in the cafe’s
bathroom. He’d paid them a month of suppers for
their labor, ensuring they would keep coming back,
and a couple of years later, they still were.
They ordered bowls of goulash, which they ate while
discussing Kaz’s stunt, their chemistry teacher’s
nose hair—which Zuzana asserted was braidable—
and ideas for their semester projects. Soon, talk
shifted to the handsome new violinist in the orchestra
of the Marionette Theatre of Prague.
“He has a girlfriend,” lamented Zuzana.
“What? How do you know?”
“He’s always texting on his breaks.”
“That’s your evidence? Flimsy. Maybe he secretly
fights crime, and he’s texting infuriating riddles to his
nemesis,” suggested Karou.
“Yes, I’m sure that’s it. Thank you.”
“I’m just saying, there could be other explanations
“I’m just saying, there could be other explanations
than a girlfriend. Anyway, since when are you shy?
Just talk to him already!”
“And say what? Nice fiddling, handsome man?”
“Absolutely.”
Zuzana snorted. She worked as an assistant to the
theater’s puppeteers on the weekends and had
developed a crush on the violinist some weeks
before Christmas. Though not usually bashful, she
had yet to even speak to him. “He probably thinks I’m
a kid,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like, being
child-size.”
“Marionette-size,” said Karou, who felt no pity
whatsoever. She thought Zuzana’s tininess was
perfect, like a fairy you found in the woods and
wanted to put in your pocket. Though in Zuzana’s
case the fairy was likely to be rabid, and bite.
“Yeah, Zuzana the marvelous human marionette.
Watch her dance.” Zuzana did a jerky, puppetlike
version of ballet arms.
Inspired, Karou said, “Hey! That’s what you should
do for your project. Make a giant puppeteer, and you
be the marionette. You know? You could make it so
that when you move, it’s like, I don’t know, reverse
puppetry. Has anyone done that before? You’re the
puppet, dancing from strings, but really it’s your
movements that are making the puppeteer’s hands
move?”
Zuzana had been lifting a piece of bread to her
mouth, and she paused. Karou knew by the way her
friend’s eyes went dreamy that she was envisioning
it. She said, “That would be a really big puppet.”
“I could do your makeup, like a little marionette
ballerina.”
“Are you sure you want to give it to me? It’s your
idea.”
“What, like I’m going to make a giant marionette? It’s
all yours.”
“Well, thanks. Do you have any ideas for yours yet?”
Karou didn’t. Last semester when she’d taken
costuming she had constructed angel wings that she
could wear on a harness, rigged to operate by a
pulley system so she could lift and lower them. Fully
unfolded, they gave her a wingspan of twelve
magnificent feet. She’d worn them to show
Brimstone, but had never even made it in to see him.
Issa had stopped her in the vestibule and—gentle
Issa!—had actually hissed at her, cobra hood flaring
open in a way Karou had seen only a couple of times
in her whole life. “An angel, of all abominations! Get
them off! Oh, sweet girl, I can’t stand the sight of you
like that.” It was all very odd. The wings hung above
the bed now in Karou’s tiny flat, taking up one entire
wall.
This semester she needed to come up with a theme
for a series of paintings, but so far nothing had set
her mind on fire. As she was pondering ideas, she
heard the tinkle of bells on the door. A few men
came in, and a darting shadow behind them caught
Karou’s eye. It was the size and shape of a crow, but
it was nothing so mundane.
It was Kishmish.
She straightened up and cast a quick glance at her
friend. Zuzana was sketching puppet ideas in her
notebook and barely responded when Karou
excused herself. She went into the bathroom and the
shadow followed, low and unseen.
Brimstone’s messenger had the body and beak of a
crow but the membranous wings of a bat, and his
tongue, when it flicked out, was forked. He looked
like an escapee from a Hieronymus Bosch painting,
and he was clutching a note with his feet. When
Karou took it, she saw that his little knifelike talons
had pierced the paper through.
She unfolded it and read the message, which took
all of two seconds, as it said only, Errand requiring
immediate attention. Come.
“He never says please,” she remarked to Kishmish.
The creature cocked his head to one side, crowstyle,
as if to inquire, Are you coming?
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” said Karou. “Don’t I
always?”
To Zuzana, a moment later, she said, “I have to go.”
“What?” Zuzana looked up from her sketchbook.
“But, dessert.” It was there on the coffin: two plates of
apple strudel, along with tea.
“Oh, damn,” said Karou. “I can’t. I have an errand.”
“You and your errands. What do you have to do, so
all of a sudden?” She glanced at Karou’s phone,
sitting on the coffin, and knew she had gotten no
phone call.
“Just things,” said Karou, and Zuzana let it drop,
knowing from experience that she’d get no specifics.
Karou had things to do. Sometimes they took a few
hours; other times, she was gone for days and
returned weary and disheveled, maybe pale, maybe
returned weary and disheveled, maybe pale, maybe
sunburned, or with a limp, or possibly a bite mark,
and once with an unshakable fever that had turned
out to be malaria.
“Just where did you happen to pick up a tropical
disease?” Zuzana had demanded, to which Karou
had replied, “Oh, I don’t know. On the tram, maybe?
This old woman did sneeze right in my face the other
day.”
“That is not how you get malaria.”
“I know. It was gross, though. I’m thinking of getting a
moped so I don’t have to take the tram anymore.”
And that was the end of that discussion. Part of
being friends with Karou was resignation to never
really knowing her. Now Zuzana sighed and said,
“Fine. Two strudels for me. Any resulting fat is your
fault,” and Karou left Poison Kitchen, the shadow of
an almost-crow darting out the door before her.
5
ELSEWHERE
Kishmish took to the sky and was gone in a flutter.
Karou watched, wishing she could follow. What
magnitude of wish, she wondered, would it take to
endow her with flight?
One far more powerful than she’d ever have access
to.
Brimstone wasn’t stingy with scuppies. He let her
refresh her necklace as often as she liked from his
chipped teacups full of beads, and he paid her in
bronze shings for the errands she ran for him. A
shing was the next denomination of wish, and it
could do more than a scuppy—Svetla’s caterpillar
eyebrows were a case in point, as were Karou’s
tattoo removal and her blue hair—but she had never
tattoo removal and her blue hair—but she had never
gotten her hands on a wish that could work any real
magic. She never would, either, unless she earned it,
and she knew too well how humans earned wishes.
Chiefly: hunting, graverobbing, and murder.
Oh, and there was one other way: a particular form of
self-mutilation involving pliers and a deep
commitment.
It wasn’t like in the storybooks. No witches lurked at
crossroads disguised as crones, waiting to reward
travelers who shared their bread. Genies didn’t burst
from lamps, and talking fish didn’t bargain for their
lives. In all the world, there was only one place
humans could get wishes: Brimstone’s shop. And
there was only one currency he accepted. It wasn’t
gold, or riddles, or kindness, or any other fairy-tale
nonsense, and no, it wasn’t souls, either. It was
weirder than any of that.
It was teeth.
Karou crossed the Charles Bridge and took the tram
north to the Jewish Quarter, a medieval ghetto that
had given way to a dense concentration of Art
Nouveau apartment buildings as pretty as cakes.
Her destination was the service entrance in the rear
of one of them. The plain metal door didn’t look like
anything special, and in and of itself, it wasn’t. If you
opened it from without, it revealed only a mildewed
laundry room. But Karou didn’t open it. She knocked
and waited, because when the door was opened
from within, it had the potential to lead someplace
quite different.
It swung open and there was Issa, looking just as she
did in Karou’s sketchbooks, like a snake goddess in
some ancient temple. Her serpent coils were
withdrawn into the shadows of a small vestibule.
“Blessings, darling.”
“Blessings,” Karou returned fondly, kissing her
cheek. “Did Kishmish make it back?”
“He did,” said Issa, “and he felt like an icicle on my
shoulder. Come in now. It’s freezing in your city.” She
was guardian of the threshold, and she ushered
Karou inside, closing the door behind her so the two
of them were alone in a space no bigger than a
closet. The outer door of the vestibule had to seal
completely before the inner one could be opened, in
the manner of safety doors at aviaries that prevent
birds from escaping. Only, in this case, it wasn’t for
birds.
“How was your day, sweet girl?” Issa had some half
dozen snakes on her person—wound around her
arms, roaming through her hair, and one encircling
her slim waist like a belly dancer’s chain. Anyone
seeking entry would have to submit to wearing one
around the neck before the inner door would unseal
—anyone but Karou, that is. She was the only human
who entered the shop uncollared. She was trusted.
After all, she’d grown up in this place.
“It’s been a day,” Karou sighed. “You won’t believe
what Kaz did. He showed up to be the model in my
drawing class.”
Issa had not met Kaz, of course, but she knew him
the same way Kaz knew her: from Karou’s
sketchbooks. The difference was that while Kaz
thought Issa and her perfect breasts were an erotic
figment of Karou’s imagination, Issa knew Kaz was
real.
She and Twiga and Yasri were as hooked on
Karou’s sketchbooks as her human friends were, but
for the opposite reason. They liked to see the normal
things: tourists huddled under umbrellas, chickens on
balconies, children playing in the park. And Issa
especially was fascinated by the nudes. To her, the
human form—plain as it was, and not spliced
together with other species—was a missed
opportunity. She was always scrutinizing Karou and
making such pronouncements as, “I think antlers
would suit you, sweet girl,” or “You’d make a lovely
serpent,” in just the way a human might suggest a
new hairstyle or shade of lipstick.
Now, Issa’s eyes lit up with ferocity. “You mean he
came to your school? The scandalous rodent-loaf!
Did you draw him? Show me.” Outraged or not, she
wouldn’t miss an opportunity to see Kaz naked.
Karou pulled out her pad and flipped it open.
“You scribbled out the best part,” Issa accused.
“Trust me, it’s not that great.”
Issa giggled into her hand as the shop door creaked
open to admit them, and Karou stepped across the
threshold. As always, she felt the slightest wave of
nausea at the transition.
She was no longer in Prague.
Even though she had lived in Brimstone’s shop, she
still didn’t understand where it was, only that you
could enter through doorways all over the world and
end up right here. As a child she used to ask
Brimstone where exactly “here” was, only to be told
Brimstone where exactly “here” was, only to be told
brusquely, “Elsewhere.”
Brimstone was not a fan of questions.
Wherever it was, the shop was a windowless clutter
of shelves that looked like some kind of tooth fairy’s
dumping ground—if, that is, the tooth fairy trafficked
in all species. Viper fangs, canines, grooved
elephant molars, overgrown orange incisors from
exotic jungle rodents—they were all collected in bins
and apothecary chests, strung in garlands that
draped from hooks, and sealed in hundreds of jars
you could shake like maracas.
The ceiling was vaulted like a crypt’s, and small
things scurried in the shadows, their tiny claws
scritch-scritching on stone. Like Kishmish, these
were creatures of disparate parts: scorpion-mice,
gecko-crabs, beetle-rats. In the damp around the
drains were snails with the heads of bullfrogs, and
overhead, the ubiquitous moth-winged
hummingbirds hurled themselves at lanterns, setting
them swaying with the creak of copper chains.
In the corner, Twiga was bent over his work, his
ungainly long neck bowed like a horseshoe as he
cleaned teeth and banded them with gold to be
strung onto catgut. A clatter came from the kitchen
nook that was Yasri’s domain.
And off to the left, behind a huge oak desk, was
Brimstone himself. Kishmish was perched in his
usual place on his master’s right horn, and spread
out on the desk were trays of teeth and small chests
of gems. Brimstone was stringing them into a
necklace and did not look up. “Karou,” he said. “I
believe I wrote ‘errand requiring immediate
attention.’ ”
“Which is exactly why I came immediately.”
“It’s been”—he consulted his pocket watch—“forty
minutes.”
“I was across town. If you want me to travel faster,
give me wings, and I’ll race Kishmish back. Or just
give me a gavriel, and I’ll wish for flight myself.”
A gavriel was the second most powerful wish,
certainly sufficient to grant the power of flight. Still
bent over his work, Brimstone replied, “I think a flying
girl would not go unnoticed in your city.”
“Easily solved,” said Karou. “Give me two gavriels,
and I’ll wish for invisibility, too.”
Brimstone looked up. His eyes were those of a
crocodile, luteous gold with vertical slit pupils, and
they were not amused. He would not, Karou knew,
give her any gavriels. She didn’t ask out of hope, but
because his complaint was so unfair. Hadn’t she
come running as soon as he’d called?
“I could trust you with gavriels, could I?” he asked.
“Of course you could. What kind of question is that?”
She felt his appraisal, as if he were mentally
reviewing every wish she’d ever made.
Blue hair: frivolous.
Erasing pimples: vain.
Wishing off the light switch so she didn’t have to get
out of bed: lazy.
He said, “Your necklace is looking quite short. Have
you had a busy day?”
Her hand flew to cover it. Too late. “Why do you have
to notice everything?” No doubt the old devil
somehow knew exactly what she’d used these
scuppies for and was adding it to his mental list:
Making ex-boyfriend’s cranny itch: vindictive.
“Such pettiness is beneath you, Karou.”
“He deserved it,” she replied, forgetting her earlier
shame. Like Zuzana had said, bad behavior should
be punished. She added, “Besides, it’s not like you
ask your traders what they’re going to use their
wishes for, and I’m sure they do a hell of a lot worse
than make people itch.”
“I expect you to be better than them,” Brimstone said
simply.
“Are you suggesting that I’m not?”
The tooth-traders who came to the shop were, with
few exceptions, about the worst specimens humanity
had to offer. Though Brimstone did have a small
coterie of longtime associates who did not turn
Karou’s stomach—such as the retired diamond
dealer who had on a number of occasions posed as
her grandmother to enroll her in schools—mostly
they were a stinking, soul-dead lot with crescents of
gore under their fingernails. They killed and maimed.
They carried pliers in their pockets for extracting the
teeth of the dead—and sometimes the living. Karou
loathed them, and she was certainly better than
them.
Brimstone said, “Prove that you are, by using wishes
for good.”
Nettled, she asked, “Who are you to talk about good,
anyway?” She gestured to the necklace clutched in
his huge clawed hands. Crocodile teeth—those
would be from the Somali. Also wolf fangs, horse
would be from the Somali. Also wolf fangs, horse
molars, and hematite beads. “I wonder how many
animals died in the world today because of you. Not
to mention people.”
She heard Issa suck in a surprised breath, and she
knew she should shut up, but her mouth kept moving.
“No, really. You do business with killers, and you
don’t even have to see the corpses they leave
behind. You lurk in here like a troll—”
“Karou,” Brimstone said.
“But I’ve seen them, piles of dead creatures with
bloody mouths. Those girls with their bloody mouths;
I’ll never forget as long as I live. What’s it all for?
What do you do with these teeth? If you would just tell
me, maybe I could understand. There must be a
reason—”
“Karou,” Brimstone said again. He did not say “shut
up.” He didn’t have to. His voice conveyed it clearly
enough, on top of which he rose suddenly from his
chair.
Karou shut up.
Sometimes, maybe most of the time, she forgot to
see Brimstone. He was so familiar that when she
looked at him she saw not a beast but the creature
who, for reasons unknown, had raised her from a
baby, and not without tenderness. But he could still
strike her speechless at times, such as when he
used that tone of voice. It slithered like a hiss to the
core of her consciousness and opened her eyes to
the full, fearsome truth of him.
Brimstone was a monster.
If he and Issa, Twiga, and Yasri were to stray from
the shop, that’s what humans would call them:
monsters. Demons, maybe, or devils. They called
themselves chimaera.
Brimstone’s arms and massive torso were the only
human parts of him, though the tough flesh that
covered them was more hide than skin. His square
pectorals were riven with ancient scar tissue, one
nipple entirely obliterated by it, and his shoulders
and back were etched in more scars: a network of
puckered white cross-hatchings. Below the waist he
became elsething. His haunches, covered in faded,
off-gold fur, rippled with leonine muscle, but instead
of the padded paws of a lion, they tapered to
wicked, clawed feet that could have been either
raptor or lizard—or perhaps, Karou fancied, dragon.
And then there was his head. Roughly that of a ram,
it wasn’t furred, but fleshed in the same tough brown
hide as the rest of him. It gave way to scales around
his flat ovine nose and reptilian eyes, and giant,
yellowed ram horns spiraled on either side of his
face.
He wore a set of jeweler’s lenses on a chain, and
their dark gold rims were the only ornament on his
person, if you didn’t count the other thing he wore
around his neck, which had no sparkle to catch the
eye. It was just an old wishbone, sitting in the hollow
of his throat. Karou didn’t know why he wore it, only
that she was forbidden to touch it, which, of course,
had always made her long to do so. When she was a
baby and he used to rock her on his knee, she would
make little lightning grabs for it, but Brimstone was
always faster. Karou had never succeeded in laying
so much as a fingertip to it.
Now that she was grown she showed more
decorum, but she still sometimes found herself
itching to reach for the thing. Not now, though.
Cowed by Brimstone’s abrupt rising, she felt her
rebelliousness subside. Taking a step back, she
asked in a small voice, “So, um, what about this
urgent errand? Where do you need me to go?”
He tossed her a case filled with colorful banknotes
that turned out to be euros. A lot of euros.
“Paris,” said Brimstone. “Have fun.”
6
THE ANGEL OF EXTINCTION
Fun?
“Oh, yes,” Karou muttered to herself later that night
as she dragged three hundred pounds of illegal
elephant ivory down the steps of the Paris Metro.
“This is just so much fun.”
When she’d left Brimstone’s shop, Issa had let her
out through the same door by which she’d entered,
but when she stepped onto the street she was not
back in Prague. She was in Paris, just like that.
No matter how many times she went through the
portal, the thrill never wore off. It opened onto dozens
of cities, and Karou had been to them all, on errands
like this one and sometimes for pleasure. Brimstone
let her go out and draw anywhere in the world where
let her go out and draw anywhere in the world where
there wasn’t a war, and when she had a craving for
mangoes he opened the door to India, on the
condition that she bring some back for him, too. She
had even wheedled her way into shopping
expeditions to exotic bazaars, and right here, to the
Paris flea markets, to furnish her flat.
Wherever she went, when the door closed behind
her, its connection to the shop was severed.
Whatever magic was at work, it existed in that other
place—Elsewhere, as she thought of it—and could
not be conjured from this side. No one would ever
force his way into the shop. One would only succeed
in breaking through an earthly door that didn’t lead
where he hoped to go.
Even Karou was dependent on the whim of
Brimstone to admit her. Sometimes he didn’t,
however much she knocked, though he had never yet
stranded her on the far side of an errand, and she
hoped he never would.
This errand turned out to be a black-market auction
in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. Karou had
attended several such, and they were always the
same. Cash only, of course, and attended by sundry
underworld types like exiled dictators and crime
lords with pretensions to culture. The auction items
were a mixed salad of stolen museum pieces—a
Chagall drawing, the dried uvula of some beheaded
saint, a matched set of tusks from a mature African
bull elephant.
Yes. A matched set of tusks from a mature African
bull elephant.
Karou sighed when she saw them. Brimstone hadn’t
told her what she was after, only that she would know
it when she saw it, and she did. Oh, and wouldn’t
they be a delight to wrangle on public transportation?
Unlike the other bidders, she didn’t have a long
black car waiting, or a pair of thug bodyguards to do
her heavy lifting. She had only a string of scuppies
and her charm, neither of which proved sufficient to
persuade a cab driver to hang seven-foot-long
elephant tusks out the back of his taxi. So,
grumbling, Karou had to drag them six blocks to the
nearest Metro station, down the stairs, and through
the turnstile. They were wrapped in canvas and ducttaped,
and when a street musician lowered his violin
to inquire, “Hey lovely, what you got there?” she said,
“Musicians who asked questions,” and kept on
dragging.
It could have been worse, certainly, and often was.
Brimstone sent her to some god-awful places in
pursuit of teeth. After the incident in St. Petersburg,
when she was recovering from being shot, she’d
demanded, “Is my life really worth so little to you?”
As soon as the question was out of her mouth, she’d
regretted it. If her life was worth so little to him, she
didn’t want him to admit it. Brimstone had his faults,
but he was all she had for a family, along with Issa
and Twiga and Yasri. If she was just some kind of
expendable slave girl, she didn’t want to know.
His answer had neither confirmed nor denied her
fear. “Your life? You mean, your body? Your body is
nothing but an envelope, Karou. Your soul is another
matter, and is not, as far as I know, in any immediate
danger.”
“An envelope?” She didn’t like to think of her body
as an envelope—something others might be able to
open up and rifle through, remove things from like so
many clipped coupons.
“I assumed you felt the same way,” he’d said. “The
way you scribble on it.”
Brimstone didn’t approve of her tattoos, which was
funny, since he was responsible for her first, the eyes
on her palms. At least Karou suspected he was,
though she didn’t know for sure, since he was
incapable of answering even the most basic
questions.
“Whatever,” she’d said with a pained sigh. Really:
pained. Getting shot hurt, no surprise there. Of
course, she couldn’t argue that Brimstone shoved
her unprepared into danger. He’d seen to it that she
was trained from a young age in martial arts. She
never mentioned it to her friends—it was not, her
sensei had taught her early, a bragging matter—and
they would have been surprised to learn that Karou’s
gliding, straight-spined grace went hand in hand with
deadly skill. Deadly or not, she’d had the misfortune
to discover that karate went only so far against guns.
She’d healed quickly with the help of a pungent salve
and, she suspected, magic, but her youthful
fearlessness had been shaken, and she went on
errands with more trepidation now.
Her train came, and she wrestled her burden through
the doors, trying not to think too much about what
was in it, or the magnificent life that had been ended
somewhere in Africa, though probably not recently.
somewhere in Africa, though probably not recently.
These tusks were massive, and Karou happened to
know that elephant tusks rarely grew so big anymore
—poachers had seen to that. By killing all the
biggest bulls, they’d altered the elephant gene pool.
It was sickening, and here she was, part of that
blood trade, hauling endangered species
contraband on the freaking Paris Metro.
She shut the thought away in a dark room in her
mind and stared out the window as the train sped
through its black tunnels. She couldn’t let herself
think about it. Whenever she did, her life felt gorestreaked
and nasty.
Last semester, when she’d made her wings, she’d
dubbed herself “the Angel of Extinction,” and it was
entirely appropriate. The wings were made of real
feathers she’d “borrowed” from Brimstone—
hundreds of them, brought to him over the years by
traders. She used to play with them when she was
little, before she understood that birds had been
killed for them, whole species driven extinct.
She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with
feathers on the floor of a devil’s lair. She wasn’t
innocent now, but she didn’t know what to do about
it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets
and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center
of herself where something was most certainly
missing.
Karou was plagued by the notion that she wasn’t
whole. She didn’t know what this meant, but it was a
lifelong feeling, a sensation akin to having forgotten
something. She’d tried describing it to Issa once,
when she was a girl. “It’s like you’re standing in the
kitchen, and you know you went in there for a reason,
but you can’t think of what that reason is, no matter
what.”
“And that’s how you feel?” asked Issa, frowning.
“All the time.”
Issa had only drawn her close and stroked her hair—
then its natural near-black—and said,
unconvincingly, “I’m sure it’s nothing, lovely. Try not to
worry.”
Right.
Well. Getting the tusks up the Metro steps at her
destination was a lot harder than dragging them
down had been, and by the top Karou was
exhausted, sweating under her winter coat, and
extremely peevish. The portal was a couple more
blocks away, linked to the doorway of a synagogue’s
small storage outbuilding, and when she finally
reached it she found two Orthodox rabbis in deep
conversation right in front of it.
“Perfect,” she muttered. She continued past them
and leaned against an iron gate, just out of sight, to
wait while they discussed some act of vandalism in
mystified tones. At last they left, and Karou wrangled
the tusks to the little door and knocked. As she
always did while waiting at a portal in some back
alley of the world, she imagined being stranded.
Sometimes it took long minutes for Issa to open the
door, and each and every time, Karou considered
the possibility that it might not open. There was
always a twinge of fear of being locked out, not just
for the night, but forever. The scenario made her
hyperaware of her powerlessness. If, some day, the
door didn’t open, she would be alone.
The moment stretched, and Karou, leaning wearily
against the doorframe, noticed something. She
straightened. On the surface of the door was a large
black handprint. That wouldn’t have been so very
strange, except that it gave every appearance of
having been burned into the wood. Burned, but in the
perfect contours of a hand. This must be what the
rabbis were talking about. She traced it with her
fingertips, finding that it was actually scored into the
wood, so that her own hand fit inside it, though
dwarfed by it, and came away dusted with fine ash.
She brushed off her fingers, puzzled.
What had made the print? A cleverly shaped brand?
It sometimes happened that Brimstone’s traders left
a mark by which to find portals on their next visit, but
that was usually just a smear of paint or a knifegouged
X-marks-the-spot. This was a bit
sophisticated for them.
The door creaked open, to Karou’s deep relief.
“Did everything go all right?” Issa asked.
Karou heaved the tusks into the vestibule, having to
wedge them at an angle to fit them inside. “Sure.”
She slumped against the wall. “I’d drag tusks across
Paris every night if I could, it was such a treat.”
7
BLACK HANDPRINTS
Around the world, over a space of days, black
handprints appeared on many doors, each scorched
deep into wood or metal. Nairobi, Delhi, St.
Petersburg, a handful of other cities. It was a
phenomenon. In Cairo, the owner of a shisha den
painted over the mark on his back door only to find,
hours later, that the handprint had smoldered through
the paint and showed just as black as when he’d
discovered it.
There were some witnesses to the acts of
vandalism, but no one believed what they claimed to
have seen.
“With his bare hand,” a child in New York told his
mother, pointing out the window. “He just put his
mother, pointing out the window. “He just put his
hand there, and it glowed and smoked.”
His mother sighed and went back to bed. The boy
was an established fibber, worse luck for him,
because this time he was not lying. He had seen a
tall man lay his hand on the door and scorch the
mark into it. “His shadow was wrong,” he told his
mother’s retreating back. “It didn’t match.”
A drunken tourist in Bangkok witnessed a similar
scene, though this time the handprint was made by a
woman of such impossible beauty that he followed
her, spellbound, only to see her—as he claimed—fly
away.
“She didn’t have wings,” he told his friends, “but her
shadow did.”
“His eyes were like fire,” said an old man who caught
sight of one of the strangers from his rooftop pigeon
coop. “Sparks rained down when he flew away.”
So it was in slum alleys and dark courtyards in Kuala
Lumpur, Istanbul, San Francisco, Paris. Beautiful
men and women with distorted shadows came and
scorched their handprints onto doors before
vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind
them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and
there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white
fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched
the ground. In Delhi, a Sister of Mercy reached out
and caught one on her palm like a raindrop, but
unlike a raindrop it burned, and left the perfect
outline of a feather seared into her flesh.
“Angel,” she whispered, relishing the pain.
She was not exactly wrong.
8
GAVRIELS
When Karou stepped back into the shop, she found
that Brimstone was not alone. A trader sat opposite
him, a loathsome American hunter whose slab-ofmeat
face was garnished by the biggest, filthiest
beard she had ever seen.
She turned to Issa and grimaced.
“I know,” agreed Issa, coming across the threshold in
a ripple of serpentine muscle. “I gave him Avigeth.
She’s about to molt.”
Karou laughed.
Avigeth was the coral snake wound around the
hunter’s thick throat, forming a collar far too beautiful
for the likes of him. Her bands of black, yellow, and
crimson looked, even in their dulled state, like fine
crimson looked, even in their dulled state, like fine
Chinese cloisonné. But for all her beauty, Avigeth
was deadly, and never more so than when the itch of
impending molt made her peevish. She was
wending now in and out of the massive beard, a
constant reminder to the trader that he must behave
if he hoped to live.
“On behalf of the animals of North America,”
whispered Karou, “can’t you just make her bite him?”
“I could, but Brimstone wouldn’t be happy. As well
you know, Bain is one of his most valued traders.”
Karou sighed. “I know.” For longer than she had even
been alive, Bain had been supplying Brimstone with
bear teeth—grizzly, black, and polar—and lynx, fox,
mountain lion, wolf, and sometimes even dog. He
specialized in predators, always of premium value
down here. They were also, Karou had pointed out to
Brimstone on many occasions, of premium value to
the world. How many beautiful carcasses did that
pile of teeth amount to?
She watched, dismayed, as Brimstone took two
large gold medallions out of his strongbox, each the
size of a saucer and engraved with his own likeness.
Gavriels. Enough to buy her flight and invisibility, and
he pushed them across the desk to the hunter. Karou
scowled as Bain pocketed them and rose from his
chair, moving slowly so as not to irritate Avigeth. Out
of the corner of one soulless eye, he cut Karou a
look that she could almost swear was a gloat, and
then had the gall to wink.
Karou clenched her teeth and said nothing as Issa
escorted Bain out. Had it been only that morning that
Kaz had winked at her from the model stand? What
a day.
The door closed, and Brimstone gestured Karou
forward. She heaved the canvas-wrapped tusks
toward him and let the bundle collapse on the shop
floor.
“Be careful,” he barked. “Do you know the value of
these?”
“Indeed I do, since I just paid it.”
“That’s the human value. The idiots would carve
them to bits to make trinkets and baubles.”
“And what will you do with them?” asked Karou. She
kept her voice casual, as if Brimstone might forget
himself and reveal, at last, the mystery at the core of
everything: what in the hell he did with all these teeth.
He only gave her a weary look, as if to say, Nice try.
“What? You brought it up. And no, I don’t know the
inhuman value of tusks. I have no idea.”
“Beyond price.” He started sawing at the duct tape
with a curved knife.
“It’s a good thing I had some scuppies on me, then,”
said Karou, flopping into the chair Bain had just
vacated. “Otherwise you’d have lost your priceless
tusks to another bidder.”
“What?”
“You didn’t give me enough money. This little bastard
war criminal kept bidding them up and—well, I’m not
sure he was a war criminal, but he had this certain
indefinable war-criminaliness about him—and I
could see he was determined to get them, so I…
maybe I shouldn’t have, though, since you don’t
approve of my… pettiness, did you call it?” She
smiled sweetly and dangled the remaining beads of
her necklace. It was more of a bracelet now.
She’d used her new itch trick on the man, wishing a
relentless onslaught of cranny itches on him until he
fled the room. Surely Brimstone knew; he always
knew. It would be nice, she thought, if he would say
thank you. Instead, he just slapped a coin onto the
table.
A measly shing.
“That’s it? I dragged those things across Paris for
you for a shing, while beardy gets away with double
gavriels?”
Brimstone ignored her and extricated the tusks from
their shroud. Twiga came to consult with him, and
they muttered in undertones in their own language,
which Karou had learned from the cradle in the
natural way, and not by wish. It was a harsh tongue,
growlsome and full of fricatives, with much of it rising
from the throat. By comparison, even German or
Hebrew seemed melodious.
While they talked about tooth configurations, Karou
helped herself to the scuppy teacups and set about
replenishing her string of nearly useless wishes,
which she decided to keep as a multistrand bracelet
for now. Twiga hauled the tusks over to his corner for
cleaning, and Karou contemplated going home.
Home. The word always had air quotes around it in
her mind. She’d done what she could to make her
flat cozy, filling it with art, books, ornate lanterns, and
a Persian carpet as soft as lynx fur, and of course
there were her angel wings taking up one whole wall.
But there was no help for its real emptiness; its close
But there was no help for its real emptiness; its close
air was stirred by no breath but her own. When she
was alone, the empty place within her, the
missingness as she thought of it, seemed to swell.
Even being with Kaz had done something to keep it
at bay, though not enough. Never enough.
She thought of the little cot that used to be hers,
tucked behind the tall bookcases in the back of the
shop, and wished whimsically that she could stay
here tonight. She could fall asleep like she used to,
to the sound of murmured voices, Issa’s soft slither,
the scritch of wee elsething beasties scampering in
the shadows.
“Sweet girl.” Yasri bustled out of the kitchen with a
tea tray. Beside the teapot was a plate of the
custard-filled pastries in the shape of horns that were
her specialty. “You must be hungry,” she said in her
parrot voice. With a sideward glance at Brimstone,
she added, “It’s not healthy for a growing girl, always
running off hither and thither at not a moment’s
notice.”
“That’s me, hither-and-thither girl,” said Karou. She
grabbed a pastry and slumped in her chair to eat it.
Brimstone spared her a glance, then said to Yasri,
“And I suppose it’s healthy for a growing girl to live
on pastry?”
Yasri tutted. “I’d be happy to fix her a proper meal if
you ever gave me warning, you great brute.” She
turned to Karou. “You’re too thin, lovely. It isn’t
becoming.”
“Mmm,” agreed Issa, caressing Karou’s hair. “She
should be leopard, don’t you think? Sleek and lazy,
fur hot from the sun, and not too lean. A well-fed
leopard-girl, lapping from a bowl of cream.”
Karou smiled and ate. Yasri poured tea for them all,
just how they liked it, which meant four sugars for
Brimstone. After all these years, Karou still thought it
was funny that the Wishmonger had a sweet tooth.
She watched as he bent back to his never-ending
work, stringing teeth into necklaces.
“Oryx leucoryx,” she identified as he selected a
tooth from his tray.
He was unimpressed. “Antelopes are child’s play.”
“Give me a hard one, then.”
He handed her a shark’s tooth, and Karou was
reminded of the hours she’d sat here with him as a
child, learning teeth. “Mako,” she said.
“Longfin or shortfin?”
“Oh. Uh.” She went still, holding the tooth between
her thumb and forefinger. Brimstone had trained her
in this art since she was small, and she could read
the origin and integrity of teeth from their subtle
vibrations. She declared, “Short.”
He grunted, which was about as close as he came to
praise.
“Did you know,” Karou asked him, “that mako shark
fetuses eat each other in the womb?”
Issa, who was stroking Avigeth, gave a tch of
disgust.
“It’s true. Only cannibal fetuses survive to be born.
Can you imagine if people were like that?” She put
her feet up on the desk and, two seconds later, at a
dark look from Brimstone, took them down again.
The shop’s warmth was making her drowsy. The cot
in its little nook called to her, as did the quilt Yasri
had made her, so soft from years of snuggling.
“Brimstone,” she said, hesitant. “Do you think—?”
At that moment, a thudding sounded, violent.
“Oh, dear,” said Yasri, clicking her beak in agitation
as she gathered up the tea things.
It was the shop’s other door.
Back behind Twiga’s workspace, in the shadowed
reaches of the shop where no lantern ever hung,
there was a second door. In all Karou’s life, it had
never been opened in her presence. She had no
idea what was behind it.
The thudding came again, so hard it rattled the teeth
in their jars. Brimstone rose, and Karou knew what
was expected of her—that she rise, too, and leave at
once—but she slouched down in her chair. “Let me
stay,” she said. “I’ll be quiet. I’ll go back to my cot. I
won’t look—”
“Karou,” said Brimstone. “You know the rules.”
“I hate the rules.”
He took a step toward her, prepared to help her out
of the chair if she didn’t obey, and she shot to her
feet, hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay.” She put on
her coat as the banging continued, and grabbed
another pastry from Yasri’s tray before letting Issa
usher her into the vestibule. The door closed behind
them, sealing out sound.
She didn’t bother asking Issa who was at the other
door—Issa never gave away Brimstone’s secrets.
But she said, a little pitifully, “I was just about to ask
Brimstone if I could sleep in my old cot.”
Issa leaned forward to kiss her cheek and said, “Oh,
Issa leaned forward to kiss her cheek and said, “Oh,
sweet girl, wouldn’t that be nice? We can wait right
here, the way we did when you were small.”
Ah, yes. When Karou was too small to shove out into
the world’s streets on her own, Issa had kept her
here. Hours they had sometimes crouched in this
tiny space, Issa trying to keep her entertained by
singing songs or drawing—in fact, it was Issa who
had started her drawing—or crowning her with
venomous snakes, while inside Brimstone
confronted whatever lurked on the other side of that
door.
“You can come back in,” Issa continued, “after.”
“That’s okay,” Karou said with a sigh. “I’ll just go.”
Issa squeezed her arm and said, “Sweet dreams,
sweet girl,” and Karou hunched her shoulders and
stepped back out into the cold. As she walked, clock
towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and
the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close.
9
THE DEVIL’S DOORWAYS
Akiva stood at the edge of a rooftop terrace in
Riyadh, peering down at a doorway in the lane
below. It was as nondescript as the others, but he
knew it for what it was. He could feel its bitter aura of
magic as an ache behind his eyes.
It was one of the devil’s portals into the human world.
Spreading vast wings that were visible only in his
shadow, he glided down to it, landing in a rain of
sparks. A street sweeper saw him and dropped to
his knees, but Akiva ignored him and faced the door,
his hands curling into fists. He wanted nothing so
much as to draw his blade and storm inside, end
things quick right there in Brimstone’s shop, end
them bloody, but the magic of the portals was
them bloody, but the magic of the portals was
cunning and he knew better than to attempt it, so he
did what he had come here to do.
He reached out and laid his hand flat against the
door. There was a soft glow and a smell of
scorching, and when he took away his hand its print
was scored into the wood.
That was all, for now.
He turned and walked away, and folk cringed close
to walls to let him pass.
Certainly, they couldn’t see him as he truly was. His
fiery wings were glamoured invisible, and he should
have been able to pass as human, but he wasn’t
quite pulling it off. What people saw was a tall young
man, beautiful—truly, breath-stealingly beautiful, in a
way one rarely beholds in real life—who moved
among them with predatory grace, seeming no more
mindful of them than if they were statuary in a garden
of gods. On his back a pair of crossed swords were
sheathed, and his sleeves were pushed up over
forearms tanned and corded with muscle. His hands
were a curiosity, etched both white with scars and
black with the ink of tattoos—simple repeating black
lines hatched across the tops of his fingers.
His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, with a
hairline that dipped into a widow’s peak. His golden
skin was bronzed darker across the planes of his
face—high ridges of cheekbones, brow, bridge of
the nose—as if he lived his life in drenching rich
honey light.
Beautiful as he was, he was forbidding. It was
difficult to imagine him breaking into a smile—which
indeed Akiva hadn’t done in many years, and
couldn’t imagine doing ever again.
But all of this was just fleeting impression. What
people fixed on, stopping to watch him pass, were
his eyes.
They were amber like a tiger’s, and like a tiger’s they
were rimmed in black—the black both of heavy
lashes and of kohl, which focused the gold of his
irises like beams of light. They were pure and
luminous, mesmerizing and achingly beautiful, but
something was wrong, was missing. Humanity,
perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans
have, without irony, named after themselves. When,
coming around a corner, an old woman found herself
in his path, the full force of his gaze fell on her and
she gasped.
There was live fire in his eyes. She was sure he
would set her alight.
She gasped and stumbled, and he reached out a
hand to steady her. She felt heat, and when he
continued past, his unseen wings brushed against
her. Sparks shivered from them and she was left
gaping in breathless, paralyzed panic at his
receding form. Plainly she saw his shadow wings fan
open and then, with a gust of heat that blew her
headscarf off, he was gone.
In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely
feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let
his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets
of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved
at speed, onward toward another human city to find
another doorway bitter with the devil’s magic, and
after that another, until all bore the black handprint.
In far reaches of the world, Hazael and Liraz were
doing the same. Once all the doors were marked,
the end would begin.
And it would begin with fire.
10
HITHER-AND-THITHER GIRL
In general, Karou managed to keep her two lives in
balance. On the one hand, she was a seventeenyear-
old art student in Prague; on the other, errand
girl to an inhuman creature who was the closest thing
she had to family. For the most part, she’d found that
there was time enough in a week for both lives. If not
every week, at least most.
This did not turn out to be one of those weeks.
Tuesday she was still in class when Kishmish
alighted on the window ledge and rapped at the
glass with his beak. His note was even more
succinct than yesterday’s and read only Come.
Karou did, though if she’d known where Brimstone
was sending her, she might not have.
was sending her, she might not have.
The animal market in Saigon was one of her least
favorite places in the world. The caged kittens and
German shepherds, the bats and sun bears and
langur monkeys, were not sold as pets, but food. An
old crone of a butcher’s mother saved teeth in a
funerary urn, and it was Karou who had to collect
them every few months and seal the deal with a sour
swig of rice wine that left her stomach churning.
Wednesday: Northern Canada. Two Athabascan
hunters, a sickening haul of wolf teeth.
Thursday: San Francisco, a young blonde
herpetologist with a cache of rattlesnake fangs left
over from her unfortunate research subjects.
“You know, you could come into the shop yourself,”
Karou told her, irritated because she had a selfportrait
due the next day and could have used the
extra hours to perfect it.
There were various reasons why traders might not
come into the shop. Some had lost the privilege
through misbehavior; others weren’t yet vetted; many
were simply afraid to submit to the serpent collars,
which shouldn’t have been a problem in this case,
since this particular scientist spent her days with
snakes by choice.
The herpetologist shuddered. “I came once. I thought
the snake-woman was going to kill me.”
Karou smothered a smile. “Ah.” She understood.
Issa was no friend to reptile killers, and had been
known to coax her snakes into semi-strangulation as
the mood arose. “Well, okay.” She counted out
twenties into a decent stack. “But you know, if you do
come in, Brimstone will pay you wishes worth much
more than this.” He did not, to Karou’s bitterness,
entrust her to dispense wishes on his behalf.
“Maybe next time.”
“Your choice.” Karou shrugged and left with a little
wave, to head back to the portal and through it,
taking note as she did that a black handprint was
scorched into its surface. She was going to mention
it to Brimstone, but he was with a trader and she had
homework to get to, so she went on her way.
Up half the night working on her self-portrait, she was
groggy on Friday and hopeful that Brimstone
wouldn’t summon her again. He usually didn’t send
for her more than twice a week, and it had already
been four times. In the morning, while drawing old
Wiktor in nothing but a feather boa—a sight Zuzana
almost did not survive—she kept an eye on the
window. All through afternoon painting studio, she
kept fearing that Kishmish would appear, but he
didn’t, and after school she waited for Zuzana under
a ledge out of the drizzle.
“Well,” said her friend, “it’s a Karou. Get a good look,
folks. Sightings of this elusive creature are getting
rarer all the time.”
Karou noted the coolness in her voice. “Poison?”
she suggested hopefully. After the week she’d had,
she wanted to go to the cafe and sink into a couch,
gossip and laugh and sketch and drink tea and
make up for lost normal.
Zuzana gave her the eyebrow. “What, no errands?”
“No, thank god. Come on, I’m freezing.”
“I don’t know, Karou. Maybe I have secret errands
today.”
Karou chewed the inside of her cheek and
wondered what to say. She hated the way Brimstone
kept secrets from her, and she hated even more
having to do the same thing to Zuzana. What kind of
friendship was based on evasions and lies?
Growing up, she’d found it almost impossible to
have friends; the need for lies always got in the way.
It had been even worse then because she’d lived in
the shop—forget about having a friend over to play!
She would exit the portal in Manhattan each morning
for school, followed by her lessons in karate and
aikido, and go back to it each evening.
It was a boarded-up door of an abandoned building
in the East Village, and when Karou was in fifth
grade a friend named Belinda had seen her go in
and had come to the conclusion that she was
homeless. Word got around, parents and teachers
got involved, and Karou, unable to produce Esther,
her fake grandmother, on short notice, was taken
into DHS custody. She was put into a group home,
from which she escaped the first night, never to be
seen again. After that: a new school in Hong Kong
and extra caution that no one saw her using the
portal. That meant more lies and secrecy, and no
possibility of real friends.
She was old enough now that there was no risk of
social services sniffing around, but as for friends,
that was still a tightrope. Zuzana was the best friend
she’d ever had, and she didn’t want to lose her.
She sighed. “I’m sorry about this week. It’s been
crazy. It’s work—”
crazy. It’s work—”
“Work? Since when do you work?”
“I work. What do you think I live on, rainwater and
daydreams?”
She’d hoped to make Zuzana smile, but her friend
just squinted at her. “How would I know what you live
on, Karou? How long have we been friends, and
you’ve never mentioned a job or a family or anything
—”
Ignoring the “family or anything” part, Karou replied,
“Well, it’s not exactly a job. I just run errands for this
guy. Make pickups, meet with people.”
“What, like a drug dealer?”
“Come on, Zuze, really? He’s a… collector, I guess.”
“Oh? What does he collect?”
“Just stuff. Who cares?”
“I care. I’m interested. It just sounds weird, Karou.
You’re not mixed up in something weird, are you?”
Oh no, thought Karou. Not at all. Taking a deep
breath, she said, “I really can’t talk about it. It’s not
my business, it’s his.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Zuzana spun on one platform heel
and walked out into the rain.
“Wait!” Karou called after her. She wanted to talk
about it. She wanted to tell Zuzana everything, to
complain about her crappy week—the elephant
tusks, the nightmarish animal market, how Brimstone
only paid her in stupid shings, and the creepy
banging on the other door. She could put it in her
sketchbook, and that was something, but it wasn’t
enough. She wanted to talk.
It was out of the question, of course. “Can we please
go to Poison?” she asked, her voice coming out
small and tired. Zuzana looked back and saw the
expression that Karou sometimes got when she
thought no one was watching. It was sadness,
lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it
seemed like a default—like it was there all the time,
and all her other expressions were just an array of
masks she used to cover it up.
Zuzana relented. “Fine. Okay. I’m dying for some
goulash. Get it? Dying. Ha ha.”
The poisoned goulash; it was an old groaner
between them, and Karou knew everything was
okay. For now. But what about next time?
They set out, umbrella-less and huddled together,
hurrying through the drizzle.
“You should know,” Zuzana said, “Jackass has been
hanging around Poison. I think he’s lying in wait for
you.”
Karou groaned. “Great.” Kaz had been calling and
texting, and she had been ignoring him.
“We could go somewhere else—”
“No. I’m not letting that rodent-loaf have Poison.
Poison’s ours.”
“Rodent-loaf?” repeated Zuzana.
It was a favorite insult of Issa’s, and made sense in
the context of the serpent-woman’s diet, which
consisted mainly of small furry creatures. Karou said,
“Yes. Loaf of rodent. Ground mouse-meat with bread
crumbs and ketchup—”
“Ugh. Stop.”
“Or you could substitute hamsters, I suppose,” said
Karou. “Or guinea pigs. You know they roast guinea
pigs in Peru, skewered on little sticks, like
marshmallows?”
“Stop,” said Zuzana.
“Mmm, guinea pig s’mores—”
“Stop now, before I throw up. Please.”
And Karou did stop, not because of Zuzana’s plea,
but because she caught a familiar flutter in the corner
of her eye. No no no, she said to herself. She didn’t
—wouldn’t—turn her head. Not Kishmish, not
tonight.
Noting her sudden silence, Zuzana asked, “You
okay?”
The flutter again, in a circle of lamplight in Karou’s
line of sight. Too far off to draw special attention to
itself, but unmistakably Kishmish.
Damn.
“I’m fine,” Karou said, and she kept on resolutely in
the direction of Poison Kitchen. What was she
supposed to do, smack her forehead and claim to
have remembered an errand, after all that? She
wondered what Zuzana would say if she could see
Brimstone’s little beast messenger, his bat wings so
bizarre on his feathered body. Being Zuzana, she’d
probably want to make a marionette version of him.
“How’s the puppet project coming?” Karou asked,
trying to act normal.
Zuzana brightened and started to tell her. Karou half
listened, but she was distracted by her jumbled
defiance and anxiety. What would Brimstone do if
she didn’t come? What could he do, come out and
get her?
She was aware of Kishmish following, and as she
She was aware of Kishmish following, and as she
ducked under the arch into the courtyard of Poison
Kitchen, she gave him a pointed look as if to say, I
see you. And I’m not coming. He cocked his head
at her, perplexed, and she left him there and went
inside.
The cafe was crowded, though Kaz, blessedly, was
nowhere to be seen. A mix of local laborers,
backpackers, expat artist types, and students hung
out at the coffins, the fume of their cigarettes so
heavy the Roman statues seemed to loom from a
fog, ghoulish in their gas masks.
“Damn,” said Karou, seeing a trio of scruffy
backpackers lounging at their favorite table.
“Pestilence is taken.”
“Everything is taken,” said Zuzana. “Stupid Lonely
Planet book. I want to go back in time and mug that
damn travel writer at the end of the alley, make sure
he never finds this place.”
“So violent. You want to mug and tase everybody
these days.”
“I do,” Zuzana agreed. “I swear I hate more people
every day. Everyone annoys me. If I’m like this now,
what am I going to be like when I’m old?”
“You’ll be the mean old biddy who fires a BB gun at
kids from her balcony.”
“Nah. BBs just rile ’em up. More like a crossbow. Or
a bazooka.”
“You’re a brute.”
Zuzana dropped a curtsy, then took another
frustrated look around at the crowded cafe. “Suck.
Want to go somewhere else?”
Karou shook her head. Their hair was already
soaked; she didn’t want to go back out. She just
wanted her favorite table in her favorite cafe. In her
jacket pocket, her fingers toyed with the store of
shings from the week’s errands. “I think those guys
are about to leave.” She nodded to the backpackers
at Pestilence.
“I don’t think so,” said Zuzana. “They have full beers.”
“No, I think they are.” Between Karou’s fingers, one
of the shings dematerialized. A second later, the
backpackers rose to their feet. “Told you.”
In her head, she fancied she heard Brimstone’s
commentary:
Evicting strangers from cafe tables: selfish.
“Weird,” was Zuzana’s response as the girls slipped
behind the giant horse statue to claim their table.
Looking bewildered, the backpackers left. “They
were kind of cute,” said Zuzana.
“Oh? You want to call them back?”
“As if.” They had a rule against backpacker boys,
who blew through with the wind, and started to all
look the same after a while, with their stubbly chins
and wrinkled shirts. “I was simply making a
diagnosis of cuteness. Plus, they looked kind of lost.
Like puppies.”
Karou felt a pang of guilt. What was she doing,
defying Brimstone, spending wishes on mean things
like forcing innocent backpackers out into the rain?
She flopped onto the couch. Her head ached, her
hair was clammy, she was tired, and she couldn’t
stop worrying about the Wishmonger. What would he
say?
The entire time she and Zuzana were eating their
goulash, her gaze kept straying to the door.
“Watching for someone?” Zuzana asked.
“Oh. Just… just afraid Kaz might turn up.”
“Yeah, well, if he does, we can wrestle him into this
coffin and nail it shut.”
“Sounds good.”
They ordered tea, which came in an antique silver
service, the sugar and creamer dishes engraved
with the words arsenic and strychnine.
“So,” said Karou, “you’ll see violin boy tomorrow at
the theater. What’s your strategy?”
“I have no strategy,” said Zuzana. “I just want to skip
all this and get to the part where he’s my boyfriend.
Not to mention, you know, the part where he’s aware
I exist.”
“Come on, you wouldn’t really want to skip this part.”
“Yes I would.”
“Skip meeting him? The butterflies, the pounding
heart, the blushing? The part where you enter each
other’s magnetic fields for the first time, and it’s like
invisible lines of energy are drawing you together—”
“Invisible lines of energy?” Zuzana repeated. “Are
you turning into one of those New Age weirdos who
wear crystals and read people’s auras?”
“You know what I mean. First date, holding hands,
first kiss, all the smoldering and yearning?”
“Oh, Karou, you poor little romantic.”
“Hardly. I was going to say the beginning is the good
part, when it’s all sparks and sparkles, before they
are inevitably unmasked as assholes.”
Zuzana grimaced. “They can’t all be assholes, can
Zuzana grimaced. “They can’t all be assholes, can
they?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe just the pretty ones.”
“But he is pretty. God, I hope he’s not an asshole. Do
you think there’s any chance he’s both a non-orifice
and single? I mean, seriously. What are the
chances?”
“Slim.”
“I know.” Zuzana slumped dramatically back and lay
crumpled like a discarded marionette.
“Pavel likes you, you know,” said Karou. “He’s a
certified non-orifice.”
“Yes, well, Pavel’s sweet, but he does not give of the
butterflies.”
“The butterflies in the belly.” Karou sighed. “I know.
You know what I think? I think the butterflies are
always there in your belly, in everyone, all the time—”
“Like bacteria?”
“No, not like bacteria, like butterflies, and some
people’s butterflies react to other people’s, on a
chemical level, like pheromones, so that when
they’re nearby, your butterflies start to dance. They
can’t help it—it’s chemical.”
“Chemical. Now that’s romantic.”
“I know, right? Stupid butterflies.” Liking the idea,
Karou opened her sketchbook and started to draw it:
cartoon intestines and a stomach crowded with
butterflies. Papilio stomachus would be their Latin
name.
Zuzana asked, “So, if it’s all chemical and you have
no say in the matter, does that mean Jackass still
makes your butterflies dance?”
Karou looked up. “God no. I think he makes my
butterflies barf.”
Zuzana had just taken a sip of tea and her hand flew
to her mouth in an effort to keep it in. She laughed,
doubled over, until she managed to swallow. “Oh,
gross. Your stomach is full of butterfly barf!”
Karou laughed, too, and kept sketching. “Actually, I
think my stomach is full of dead butterflies. Kaz killed
them.”
She wrote, Papilio stomachus: fragile creatures,
vulnerable to frost and betrayal.
“So what,” said Zuzana. “They had to be pretty stupid
butterflies to fall for him anyway. You’ll grow new
ones with more sense. New wise butterflies.”
Karou loved Zuzana for her willingness to play out
such silliness on a long kite string. “Right.” She
raised her teacup in a toast. “To a new generation of
butterflies, hopefully less stupid than the last.” Maybe
they were burgeoning even now in fat little cocoons.
Or maybe not. It was hard to imagine feeling that
magical tingling sensation in the pit of her belly
anytime soon. Best not to worry about it, she thought.
She didn’t need it. Well. She didn’t want to need it.
Yearning for love made her feel like a cat that was
always twining around ankles, meowing Pet me, pet
me, look at me, love me.
Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high
wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned
petting, that needed no one. Why couldn’t she be
that cat?
Be that cat!!! she wrote, drawing it into the corner of
her page, cool and aloof.
Karou wished she could be the kind of girl who was
complete unto herself, comfortable in solitude,
serene. But she wasn’t. She was lonely, and she
feared the missingness within her as if it might
expand and… cancel her. She craved a presence
beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her
neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark.
Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk
her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when
he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on
her balcony, keep his promises and know her
secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was,
with just her and his arms and his whisper and her
trust.
The door opened. She looked in the mirror and
suppressed a curse. Slipping in behind some
tourists, that winged shadow was back again. Karou
rose and made for the bathroom, where she took the
note that Kishmish had come to deliver.
Again it bore a single word. But this time the word
was Please.
11
PLEASE
Please? Brimstone never said please. Hurrying
across town, Karou found herself more troubled than
if the note had said something menacing, like: Now,
or else.
Letting her in, Issa was uncharacteristically silent.
“What is it, Issa? Am I in trouble?”
“Hush. Just come in and try not to berate him today.”
“Berate him?” Karou blinked. She’d have thought if
anyone was in danger of being berated, it was
herself.
“You’re very hard on him sometimes, as if it’s not
hard enough already.”
“As if what’s not hard enough?”
“His life. His work. His life is work. It’s joyless, it’s
“His life. His work. His life is work. It’s joyless, it’s
relentless, and sometimes you make it harder than it
already is.”
“Me?” Karou was stunned. “Did I just come in on the
middle of a conversation, Issa? I have no idea what
you’re talking about—”
“Hush, I said. I’m just asking that you try to be kind,
like when you were little. You were such a joy to us
all, Karou. I know it’s not easy for you, living this life,
but try to remember, always try to remember, you’re
not the only one with troubles.”
And with that the inner door unsealed and Karou
stepped across the threshold. She was confused,
ready to defend herself, but when she saw
Brimstone, she forgot all that.
He was leaning heavily on his desk, his great head
resting in one hand, while the other cupped the
wishbone he wore around his neck. Kishmish
hopped in agitation from one of his master’s horns to
the other, uttering crickety chirrups of concern, and
Karou faltered to a halt. “Are… are you okay?” It felt
odd asking, and she realized that of all the questions
she had barraged him with in her life, she had never
asked him that. She’d never had reason to—he’d
scarcely ever shown a hint of emotion, let alone
weakness or weariness.
He raised his head, released the wishbone, and
said simply, “You came.” He sounded surprised and,
Karou thought guiltily, relieved.
Striving for lightness, she said, “Well, please is the
magic word, you know.”
“I thought perhaps we had lost you.”
“Lost me? You mean you thought I’d died?”
“No, Karou. I thought that you had taken your
freedom.”
“My…” She trailed off. Taken her freedom? “What
does that even mean?”
“I’ve always imagined that one day the path of your
life would unroll at your feet and carry you away from
us. As it should, as it must. But I am glad that day is
not today.”
Karou stood staring at him. “Seriously? I blow off one
errand and you think that’s it, I’m gone forever?
Jesus. What do you think of me, that you think I’d just
vanish like that?”
“Letting you go, Karou, will be like opening the
window for a butterfly. One does not hope for the
butterfly’s return.”
“I’m not a freaking butterfly.”
“No. You’re human. Your place is in the human world.
Your childhood is nearly over—”
“So… what? You don’t need me anymore?”
“On the contrary. I need you now more than ever. As I
said, I’m glad that today is not the day you leave us.”
This was all news to Karou, that there would come a
day when she would leave her chimaera family, that
she even possessed the freedom to do so if she
wished. She didn’t wish. Well, maybe she wished not
to go on some of the creepier errands, but that didn’t
mean she was a butterfly fluttering against glass,
trying to get out and away. She didn’t even know
what to say.
Brimstone pushed a wallet across the desk to her.
The errand. She’d almost forgotten why she was
here. Angry, she grabbed the wallet and flipped it
open. Dirhams. Morocco, then. Her brow furrowed.
“Izîl?” she asked, and Brimstone nodded.
“But it’s not time.” Karou had a standing appointment
with a graverobber in Marrakesh the last Sunday of
every month, and this was Friday, and a week early.
“It is time,” said Brimstone. He gestured to a tall
apothecary jar on the shelf behind him. Karou knew it
well; usually it was full of human teeth. Now it stood
nearly empty.
“Oh.” Her gaze roved along the shelf, and she saw,
to her surprise, that many of the jars were likewise
dwindling. She couldn’t remember a time when the
tooth supply had been so low. “Wow. You’re really
burning through teeth. Something going on?”
It was an inane question. As if she could understand
what it meant that he was using more teeth, when
she didn’t know what they were for to begin with.
“See what Izîl has,” Brimstone said. “I’d rather not
send you anywhere else for human teeth, if it can be
helped.”
“Yeah, me, too.” Karou ran her fingers lightly over the
bullet scars on her belly, remembering St.
Petersburg, the errand gone horribly wrong. Human
teeth, despite being in such abundant supply in the
world, could be… interesting… to procure.
She would never forget the sight of those girls, still
alive in the cargo hold, mouths bloody, other fates
awaiting them next.
They may have gotten away. When Karou thought of
them now, she always added a made-up ending, the
way Issa had taught her to do with nightmares so she
way Issa had taught her to do with nightmares so she
could fall back to sleep. She could only bear the
memory if she believed she’d given those girls time
to escape their traffickers, and maybe she even had.
She’d tried.
How strange it had been, being shot. How
unalarmed she’d found herself, how quick to
unsheathe her hidden knife and use it.
And use it. And use it.
She had trained in fighting for years, but she had
never before had to defend her life. In the flash of a
moment, she had discovered that she knew just what
to do.
“Try the Jemaa el-Fna,” Brimstone said. “Kishmish
spotted Izîl there, but that was hours ago, when I first
summoned you. If you’re lucky, he might still be
there.” And with that, he bent back over his tray of
monkey teeth, and Karou was apparently dismissed.
Now there was the old Brimstone, and she was glad.
This new creature who said “please” and talked
about her like she was a butterfly—he was unsettling.
“I’ll find him,” Karou said. “And I’ll be back soon, with
my pockets full of human teeth. Ha. I bet that
sentence hasn’t been said anywhere else in the
world today.”
The Wishmonger didn’t respond, and Karou
hesitated in the vestibule. “Brimstone,” she said,
looking back, “I want you to know I would never just…
leave you.”
When he raised his reptilian eyes, they were bleary
with exhaustion. “You can’t know what you will do,” he
said, and his hand went again to his wishbone. “I
won’t hold you to that.”
Issa closed the door, and even after Karou stepped
out into Morocco, she couldn’t shake the image of
him like that, and the uneasy feeling that something
was terribly wrong.
12
SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY
Akiva saw her come out. He was approaching the
doorway, was just steps from it when it swung open,
letting loose an acrid flood of magic that set his teeth
on edge. Through the portal stepped a girl with hair
the improbable color of lapis lazuli. She didn’t see
him, seeming lost in thought as she hurried past.
He said nothing but stood looking after her as she
moved away, the curve of the alley soon robbing him
of the sight of her and her swaying blue hair. He
shook himself, turned back to the portal, and laid his
hand on it. The hiss of the scorch, his hand limned in
smoke, and it was done: the last of the doorways
that were his to mark. In other quarters of the world,
Hazael and Liraz would be finishing, too, and
Hazael and Liraz would be finishing, too, and
winging their way toward Samarkand.
Akiva was poised to spring skyward and begin the
last leg of his journey, to meet them there before
returning home, but a heartbeat passed, then
another, and still he stood with his feet on the earth,
looking in the direction the girl had gone.
Without quite deciding to do it, he found himself
following her.
How, he wondered, when he caught the lamp-lit
shimmer of her hair up ahead, had a girl like that
gotten mixed up with the chimaera? From what he’d
seen of Brimstone’s other traders, they were rank
brutes with dead eyes, stinking of the
slaughterhouse. But her? She was a shining beauty,
lithe and vivid, though surely this wasn’t what
intrigued him. All of his own kind were beautiful, to
such an extent that beauty was next to meaningless
among them. What, then, compelled him to follow
her, when he should have taken at once to the sky,
the mission so near completion? He couldn’t have
said. It was almost as if a whisper beckoned him
onward.
The medina of Marrakesh was labyrinthine, some
three thousand blind alleys intertwined like a drawer
full of snakes, but the girl seemed to know her route
cold. She paused once to run a finger over the
weave of a textile, and Akiva slowed his steps,
veering off to one side so he could see her better.
There was a look of unguarded wistfulness on her
pale, pretty face—a kind of lostness—but the
moment the vendor spoke to her, it transmuted to a
smile like light. She answered easily, making the
man laugh, and they bantered back and forth, her
Arabic rich and throaty, with an edge like a purr.
Akiva watched her with hawklike fixedness. Until a
few days ago, humans had been little more than
legend to him, and now here he was in their world. It
was like stepping into the pages of a book—a book
alive with color and fragrance, filth and chaos—and
the blue-haired girl moved through it all like a fairy
through a story, the light treating her differently than it
did others, the air seeming to gather around her like
held breath. As if this whole place were a story about
her.
Who was she?
He didn’t know, but some intuition sang in him that,
whoever she was, she was not just another of
Brimstone’s street-level grim reapers. She was, he
was sure, something else entirely.
His gaze unwavering, he prowled after her as she
made her way through the medina.
13
THE GRAVEROBBER
Karou walked with her hands in her pockets, trying to
shake her uneasiness about Brimstone. That stuff
about “taking her freedom”—what was that about? It
gave her a creeping sense of impending aloneness,
like she was some orphaned animal raised by dogooders,
soon to be released into the wild.
She didn’t want to be released into the wild. She
wanted to be held dear. To belong to a place and a
family, irrevocably.
“Magic healings here, Miss Lady, for the melancholy
bowels,” someone called out to her, and she couldn’t
help smiling as she shook her head in demurral. How
about melancholy hearts? she thought. Was there a
cure for that? Probably. There was real magic here
cure for that? Probably. There was real magic here
among the quacks and touts. She knew of a scribe
dressed all in white who penned letters to the dead
(and delivered them), and an old storyteller who sold
ideas to writers at the price of a year of their lives.
Karou had seen tourists laugh as they signed his
contract, not believing it for a second, but she
believed it. Hadn’t she seen stranger things?
As she made her way, the city began to distract her
from her mood. It was hard to be glum in such a
place. In some derbs, as the wending alleyways
were called, the world seemed draped in carpets. In
others, freshly dyed silks dripped scarlet and cobalt
on the heads of passersby. Languages crowded the
air like exotic birds: Arabic, French, the tribal
tongues. Women chivvied children home to bed, and
old men in tarboosh caps leaned together in
doorways, smoking.
A trill of laughter, the scent of cinnamon and
donkeys, and color, everywhere color.
Karou made her way toward the Jemaa el-Fna, the
square that was the city’s nerve center, a mad,
teeming carnival of humanity: snake charmers and
dancers, dusty barefoot boys, pickpockets, hapless
tourists, and food stalls selling everything from
orange juice to roasted sheep’s heads. On some
errands, Karou couldn’t get back to the portal fast
enough, but in Marrakesh she liked to linger and
wander, sip mint tea, sketch, browse through the
souks for pointy slippers and silver bracelets.
She would not be lingering tonight, however.
Brimstone was clearly anxious to have his teeth. She
thought again of the empty jars, and furious curiosity
strummed at her mind. What was it all about? What?
She tried to stop wondering. She was going to find
the graverobber, after all, and Izîl was nothing if not a
cautionary tale.
“Don’t be curious” was one of Brimstone’s prime
rules, and Izîl had not obeyed it. Karou pitied him,
because she understood him. In her, too, curiosity
was a perverse fire, stoked by any effort to
extinguish it. The more Brimstone ignored her
questions, the more she yearned to know. And she
had a lot of questions.
The teeth, of course: What the hell were they all for?
What of the other door? Where did it lead?
What exactly were the chimaera, and where had they
come from? Were there more of them?
And what about her? Who were her parents, and
how had she fallen into Brimstone’s care? Was she
a fairy-tale cliché, like the firstborn child in
“Rumpelstiltskin,” the settlement of some debt? Or
perhaps her mother had been a trader strangled by
her serpent collar, leaving a baby squalling on the
floor of the shop. Karou had thought of a hundred
scenarios, but the truth remained a mystery.
Was there another life she was meant to be living?
At times she felt a keen certainty that there was—a
phantom life, taunting her from just out of reach. A
sense would come over her while she was drawing
or walking, and once when she was dancing slow
and close with Kaz, that she was supposed to be
doing something else with her hands, with her legs,
with her body. Something else. Something else.
Something else.
But what?
She reached the square and wandered through the
chaos, her movements synchronizing themselves to
the rhythms of mystical Gnawa music as she dodged
motorbikes and acrobats. Billows of grilled-meat
smoke gusted thick as houses on fire, teenage boys
whispered “hashish,” and costumed water-sellers
clamored “Photo! Photo!” At a distance, she spotted
the hunchback shape of Izîl among the henna artists
and street dentists.
Seeing him at one-month intervals was like watching
a time-lapse of decline. When Karou was a child, he
was a doctor and a scholar—a straight and genteel
man with mild brown eyes and a silky mustache he
preened like plumage. He had come to the shop
himself and done business at Brimstone’s desk,
and, unlike the other traders, he always made it
seem like a social call. He flirted with Issa, brought
her little gifts—snakes carved from seedpods, jadedrop
earrings, almonds. He brought dolls for Karou,
and a tiny silver tea service for them, and he didn’t
neglect Brimstone, either, casually leaving
chocolates or jars of honey on the desk when he left.
But that was before he’d been warped by the weight
of a terrible choice he’d made, bent and twisted and
driven mad. He wasn’t welcome in the shop
anymore, so Karou came out to meet him here.
Seeing him now, tender pity overcame her. He was
bent nearly double, his gnarled olivewood walking
stick all that kept him from collapsing on his face. His
eyes were sunk in bruises, and his teeth, which were
eyes were sunk in bruises, and his teeth, which were
not his own, were overlarge in his shrunken face. The
mustache that had been his pride hung lank and
tangled. Any passerby would be taken with pity, but
to Karou, who knew how he had looked only a few
years earlier, he was a tragedy to behold.
His face lit up when he saw her. “Look who it is! The
Wishmonger’s beautiful daughter, sweet
ambassadress of teeth. Have you come to buy a sad
old man a cup of tea?”
“Hello, Izîl. A cup of tea sounds perfect,” she said,
and led him to the cafe where they usually met.
“My dear, has the month passed me by? I’m afraid
I’d quite forgotten our appointment.”
“Oh, you haven’t. I’ve come early.”
“Ah, well, it’s always a pleasure to see you, but I
haven’t got much for the old devil, I’m afraid.”
“But you have some?”
“Some.”
Unlike most of the other traders, Izîl neither hunted
nor murdered; he didn’t kill at all. Before, as a doctor
working in conflict zones, he’d had access to war
dead whose teeth wouldn’t be missed. Now that
madness had lost him his livelihood, he had to dig
up graves.
Quite abruptly, he snapped, “Hush, thing! Behave,
and then we’ll see.”
Karou knew he was not speaking to her, and politely
pretended not to have heard.
They reached the cafe. When Izîl dropped into his
chair, it strained and groaned, its legs bowing as if
beneath a weight far greater than this one wasted
man. “So,” he asked, settling in, “how are my old
friends? Issa?”
“She’s well.”
“I do so miss her face. Do you have any new
drawings of her?”
Karou did, and she showed them to him.
“Beautiful.” He traced Issa’s cheek with his fingertip.
“So beautiful. The subject and the work. You are very
talented, my dear.” Seeing the episode with the
Somali poacher, he snorted, “Fools. What Brimstone
has to endure, dealing with humans.”
Karou’s eyebrows went up. “Come on, their problem
isn’t that they’re human. It’s that they’re subhuman.”
“True enough. Every race has its bad seeds, one
supposes. Isn’t that right, beast of mine?” This last
bit he said over his shoulder, and this time a soft
response seemed to emanate from the air.
Karou couldn’t help herself. She glanced at the
ground, where Izîl’s shadow was cast crisp across
the tiles. It seemed impolite to peek, as if Izîl’s…
condition… ought to be ignored, like a lazy eye or
birthmark. His shadow revealed what looking at him
directly did not.
Shadows told the truth, and Izîl’s told that a creature
clung to his back, invisible to the eye. It was a
hulking, barrel-chested thing, its arms clenched tight
around his neck. This was what curiosity had gotten
him: The thing was riding him like a mule. Karou
didn’t understand how it had come about; she only
knew that Izîl had made a wish for knowledge, and
this had been the form of its fulfillment. Brimstone
warned her that powerful wishes could go powerfully
awry, and here was the evidence.
She supposed that the invisible thing, who was
called Razgut, had held the secrets Izîl had hungered
to know. Whatever they were, surely this price was
far too high.
Razgut was talking. Karou could make out only the
faintest whisper, and a sound like a soft smack of
fleshy lips.
“No,” Izîl said. “I will not ask her that. She’ll only say
no.”
Karou watched, repelled, as Izîl argued with the
thing, which she could see only in shadow. Finally the
graverobber said, “All right, all right, hush! I’ll ask.”
Then he turned to Karou and said, apologetically,
“He just wants a taste. Just a tiny taste.”
“A taste?” She blinked. Their tea had not yet arrived.
“Of what?”
“Of you, wish-daughter. Just a lick. He promises not
to bite.”
Karou’s stomach turned. “Uh, no.”
“I told you,” Izîl muttered. “Now will you be quiet,
please?”
A low hiss came in response.
A waiter in a white djellaba came and poured mint
tea, raising the pot to head height and expertly
aiming the long stream of tea into etched glasses.
Karou, eyeing the hollows of the graverobber’s
cheeks, ordered pastries, too, and she let him eat
and drink for a while before asking, “So, what have
you got?”
He dug into his pockets and produced a fistful of
teeth, which he dropped on the table.
teeth, which he dropped on the table.
Watching from the shadow of a nearby doorway,
Akiva straightened up. All went still and silent around
him, and he saw nothing but those teeth, and the girl
sorting through them in just the way he knew the old
beast sorcerer did.
Teeth. How harmless they looked on that tabletop—
just tiny, dirty things, plundered from the dead. And if
they stayed in this world where they belonged, that
was all they’d ever be. In Brimstone’s hands, though,
they became so much more than that.
It was Akiva’s mission to end this foul trade, and with
it, the devil’s dark magic.
He watched as the girl inspected the teeth with what
was clearly a practiced hand, as if she did this all the
time. Mixed with his disgust was something like
disappointment. She had seemed too clean for this
business, but apparently she was not. He’d been
right, though, in his guess that she was no mere
trader. She was more than that, sitting there doing
Brimstone’s work. But what?
“God, Izîl,” said Karou. “These are nasty. Did you
bring them straight from the cemetery?”
“Mass grave. It was hidden, but Razgut sniffed it out.
He can always find the dead.”
“What a talent.” Karou got a chill, imagining Razgut
leering at her, hoping for a taste. She turned her
attention to the teeth. Scraps of dried flesh clung to
their roots, along with the dirt they’d been exhumed
from. Even through the filth, it was easy to see that
they were not of high quality, but were the teeth of a
people who had gnawed at tough food, smoked
pipes, and been unacquainted with toothpaste.
She scooped them off the table and dropped them
into the dregs of her tea, swishing it around before
dumping it out in a sodden pile of mint leaves and
teeth, now only slightly less filthy. One by one, she
picked them up. Incisors, molars, canines, adult and
child alike. “Izîl. You know Brimstone doesn’t take
baby teeth.”
“You don’t know everything, girl,” he snapped.
“Excuse me?”
“Sometimes he does. Once. Once he wanted
some.”
Karou didn’t believe him. Brimstone strictly did not
buy immature teeth, not animal, not human, but she
saw no point in arguing. “Well”—she pushed the tiny
teeth aside and tried not to think about small
corpses in mass graves—“he didn’t ask for any, so
I’ll have to pass.”
She held each of the adult teeth, listening to what
their hum told her, and sorted them into two piles.
Izîl watched anxiously, his gaze darting from one pile
to the other. “They chewed too much, didn’t they?
Greedy gypsies! They kept chewing after they were
dead. No manners. No table manners at all.”
Most of the teeth were worn blunt, riddled with decay,
and no good to Brimstone. By the time Karou was
through sorting, one pile was larger than the other,
but Izîl didn’t know which was which. He pointed
hopefully to the larger pile.
She shook her head and fished some dirham notes
out of the wallet Brimstone had given her. It was an
overly generous payment for these sorry few teeth,
but it was still not what Izîl was hoping for.
“So much digging,” he moaned. “And for what?
Paper with pictures of the dead king? Always the
dead staring at me.” His voice dropped. “I can’t keep
it up, Karou. I’m broken. I can barely hold a shovel
anymore. I scrabble at the hard earth, digging like a
dog. I’m through.”
Pity hit her hard. “Surely there are other ways to live
—”
“No. Only death remains. One should die proudly
when it is no longer possible to live proudly.
Nietzsche said that, you know. Wise man. Large
mustache.” He tugged at his own bedraggled
mustache and attempted a smile.
“Izîl, you can’t mean you want to die.”
“If only there was a way to be free…”
“Isn’t there?” she asked earnestly. “There must be
something you can do.”
His fingers twitched, fidgeting with his mustache. “I
don’t like to think of it, my dear, but… there is a way,
if you would help me. You’re the only one I know
who’s brave enough and good enough—Ow!” His
hand flew to his ear, and Karou saw blood seep
through his fingers. She shrank back. Razgut must
have bitten him. “I’ll ask her if I want, monster!” cried
the graverobber. “Yes, you are a monster! I don’t
care what you once were. You’re a monster now!”
A peculiar tussle ensued; it looked as if the old man
were wrestling with himself. The waiter flapped
nearby, agitated, and Karou scraped her chair back
clear of flailing limbs both visible and invisible.
“Stop it. Stop!” Izîl cried, wild-eyed. He braced
himself, raised his walking stick, and brought it back
hard against his own shoulder and the thing that
perched there. Again and again he struck, seeming
to smite himself, and then he let out a shriek and fell
to his knees. His walking stick clattered away as
both hands flew to his neck. Blood was wicking into
the collar of his djellaba—the thing must have bitten
him again. The misery on his face was more than
Karou could bear and, without stopping to consider,
she dropped to his side, taking his elbow to help him
up.
A mistake.
At once she felt it on her neck: a slithering touch.
Revulsion juddered through her. It was a tongue.
Razgut had gotten his taste. She heard a loathsome
gobbling sound as she lurched away, leaving the
graverobber on his knees.
That was enough for her. She gathered up the teeth
and her sketchbook.
“Wait, please,” Izîl cried. “Karou. Please.”
His plea was so desperate that she hesitated.
Scrabbling, he dug something from his pocket and
held it out. A pair of pliers. They looked rusted, but
Karou knew it wasn’t rust. These were the tools of
his trade, and they were covered in the residue of
dead mouths. “Please, my dear,” he said. “There
isn’t anyone else.”
She understood at once what he meant and took a
step back in shock. “No, Izîl! God. The answer is no.”
“A bruxis would save me! I can’t save myself. I’ve
already used mine. It would take another bruxis to
undo my fool wish. You could wish him off me.
Please. Please!”
A bruxis. That was the one wish more powerful than
a gavriel, and its trade value was singular: The only
way to purchase one was with one’s own teeth. All of
them, self-extracted.
The thought of pulling her own teeth out one by one
made Karou feel woozy. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she
whispered, appalled that he would even ask it. But
then, he was a madman, and right now he certainly
then, he was a madman, and right now he certainly
looked it.
She retreated.
“I wouldn’t ask, you know I wouldn’t, but it’s the only
way!”
Karou walked rapidly away, head down, and she
would have kept walking and not looked back but for
a cry that erupted behind her. It burst from the chaos
of the Jemaa el-Fna and instantly dwarfed all other
noise. It was some mad kind of keening, a high, thin
river of sound unlike anything she had ever heard.
It was definitely not Izîl.
Unearthly, the wail rose, wavering and violent, to
break like a wave and become language—
susurrous, without hard consonants. The
modulations suggested words, but the language was
alien even to Karou, who had more than twenty in her
collection. She turned, seeing as she did that the
people around her were turning, too, craning their
necks, and that their expressions of alarm were
turning to horror when they perceived the source of
the sound.
Then she saw it, too.
The thing on Izîl’s back was invisible no more.
14
DEADLY BIRD OF THE SOUL
If the language was alien to Karou, it was not so to
Akiva.
“Seraph, I see you!” rang the voice. “I know you!
Brother, brother, I have served my sentence. I will do
anything! I have repented, I have been punished
enough—”
Akiva stared in blank incomprehension at the thing
that materialized on the old man’s back.
It was all but naked, a bloated torso with reedy arms
wrapped tight around the human’s neck. Useless
legs dangled behind, and its head was swollen taut
and purple, as if it were engorged with blood and
ready to pop in a great, wet burst. It was hideous.
That it should speak the language of the seraphim
That it should speak the language of the seraphim
was an abomination.
The absolute wrongness of it held Akiva immobile,
staring, before the amazement at hearing his own
language turned to shock at what was being said in
it.
“They tore off my wings, my brother!” The thing was
staring at Akiva. It unwound one arm from the old
man’s neck and reached toward him, imploring.
“Twisted my legs so I would have to crawl, like the
insects of the earth! It has been a thousand years
since I was cast out, a thousand years of torment, but
now you’ve come, you’ve come to take me home!”
Home?
No. It was impossible.
People were shrinking away from the sight of the
creature. Others had turned, following the direction of
its supplication to fix their eyes on Akiva. He
became aware of their notice and swept the crowd
with his burning gaze. Some fell back, murmuring
prayers. And then his eyes came to rest on the bluehaired
girl, some twenty yards distant. She was a
calm, shining figure in the moiling crowd.
And she was staring back.
Into kohl-rimmed eyes in a sun-bronzed face.
Fire-colored eyes with a charge like sparks that
seared a path through the air and kindled it. It gave
Karou a jolt—no mere startle but a chain reaction
that lashed through her body with a rush of
adrenaline. Her limbs came into the lightness and
power of sudden awakening, fight or flight, chemical
and wild.
Who? she thought, her mind racing to catch up to the
fervor in her body.
And: What?
Because clearly he was not human, the man
standing amid the tumult in absolute stillness. A
pulse beat in the palms of her hands and she curled
them into fists, feeling a wild hum in her blood.
Enemy. Enemy. Enemy. The knowledge pounded
through her on the rhythm of her heartbeat: the fireeyed
stranger was the enemy. His face—oh, beauty,
he was perfect, he was mythic—was absolutely
cold. She was caught between the urge to flee and
the fear of turning her back on him.
the fear of turning her back on him.
It was Izîl who decided her.
“Malak!” he screamed, pointing at the man. “Malak!”
Angel.
Angel?
“I know you, deadly bird of the soul! I know what you
are!” Izîl turned to Karou and said urgently, “Karou,
wish-daughter, you must get to Brimstone. Tell him
the seraphim are here. They’ve gotten back in. You
must warn him! Run, child. Run!”
And run she did.
Across the Jemaa el-Fna, where those attempting to
flee were being hampered by those drawn to the
commotion. She shouldered her way through them,
knocked someone aside, spun off a camel’s flank
and leapt over a coiled cobra, which struck out at
her, defanged and harmless. Hazarding a glance
over her shoulder, she could see no sign of pursuit—
no sign of him—but she felt it.
A thrill along every nerve ending. Her body, alert and
alive. She was hunted, she was prey, and she didn’t
even have her knife tucked into her boot, little
thinking she’d need it on a visit to the graverobber.
She ran, leaving the square by one of the many
alleys that fed into it like tributaries. The crowds in
the souks had thinned and many lights had been
snuffed, and she raced in and out of pools of
darkness, her stride long and measured and light,
her footfall nearly silent. She took turns wide to avoid
collisions, glanced behind again and again and saw
no one.
Angel. The word kept sounding in her mind.
She was nearing the portal—just one more turn, the
length of another blind alley, and she would be there,
if she made it that far.
Rushing from above. Heat and the bass whumph of
wingbeats.
Overhead, darkness massed where a shape blotted
out the moon. Something was hurtling down at Karou
on huge, impossible wings. Heat and wingbeats and
the skirr of air parted by a blade. A blade. She leapt
aside, felt steel bite her shoulder as she slammed
into a carved door, splintering slats. She seized one,
a jagged spear of wood, and spun to face her
attacker.
He stood a mere body’s length away, the point of his
sword resting on the ground.
Oh, thought Karou, staring at him.
Oh.
Angel indeed.
He stood revealed. The blade of his long sword
gleamed white from the incandescence of his wings
—vast shimmering wings, their reach so great they
swept the walls on either side of the alley, each
feather like the wind-tugged lick of a candle flame.
Those eyes.
His gaze was like a lit fuse, scorching the air
between them. He was the most beautiful thing
Karou had ever seen. Her first thought, incongruous
but overpowering, was to memorize him so she
could draw him later.
Her second thought was that there wasn’t going to
be a later, because he was going to kill her.
He came at her so fast that his wings painted blurs
of light on the air, and even as Karou leapt aside
again she was seeing his fiery imprint seared into
her vision. His sword bit her again, her arm this time,
but she twisted clear of a killing thrust. She was
quick. She kept space around her; he tried to close
it, and she danced clear, lissome, fluid. Their eyes
met again, and Karou saw past his shocking beauty
to the inhumanity there, the absolute absence of
mercy.
He attacked again. As quick as Karou was, she
couldn’t get clear of the reach of his sword. A strike
aimed at her throat glanced off her scapula instead.
There was no pain—that would come later, unless
she was dead—only spreading heat that she knew
was blood. Another strike, and she parried it with her
slat of wood, which split like kindling, half of it falling
away so she held a mere dagger’s length of old
wood, a ridiculous excuse for a weapon. Yet when
the angel came at her again she dodged in close to
him and thrust, felt the wood catch flesh and sink in.
Karou had stabbed men before, and she hated it,
the gruesome feeling of penetrating living flesh. She
pulled back, leaving her makeshift weapon in his
side. His face registered neither pain nor surprise. It
was, Karou thought as he closed in, a dead face. Or
rather, the living face of a dead soul.
It was utterly terrifying.
He had her cornered now, and they both knew she
wouldn’t get away. She was vaguely aware of shouts
of amazement and fear up the alley and from
windows, but all of her focus was on the angel. What
did it even mean, angel? What had Izîl said? The
did it even mean, angel? What had Izîl said? The
seraphim are here.
She’d heard the word before; seraphim were some
high order of angels, at least according to the
Christian mythos, for which Brimstone had utter
contempt, as he did for all religion. “Humans have
gotten glimpses of things over time,” he’d said. “Just
enough to make the rest up. It’s all a quilt of fairy
tales with a patch here and there of truth.”
“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 tunnel. She rounded the
bend in the alley at speed, skidding on her heel to
avoid a donkey standing stubborn in the middle of
the lane. The portal was in sight, a plain door in a
row of plain doors, but something was different
about it now. A large black handprint was burned
into the wood.
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
connect. In Arabic she hollered, “Get away from the
door!”
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.
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 spinning.
The girl would warn Brimstone. He should have
stopped her, could easily have killed her. Instead
he’d struck slowly, giving her time to spin clear,
dance free. Why?
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.


Contents
FRONT COVER IMAGE
DEDICATION
1: IMPOSSIBLE TO SCARE
2: AN UNVEILING OF SORTS
3: CRANNY
4: POISON KITCHEN
5: ELSEWHERE
6: THE ANGEL OF EXTINCTION
7: BLACK HANDPRINTS
8: GAVRIELS
9: THE DEVIL’S DOORWAYS
10: HITHER-AND-THITHER GIRL
11: PLEASE
12: SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY
13: THE GRAVEROBBER
14: DEADLY BIRD OF THE SOUL
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Laini Taylor
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U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
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First eBook Edition: August 2011
The characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or
dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-20142-1