Daughter of Smoke and Bone

36 TO DO ELSE THAN KILL

All it took was a lucknow from her pocket and a whispered wish, and the words of the seraphim swam from melodious flow into meaning — another language for Karou’s collection, and it was a prize. She already knew, from the hard, darting eyes of the female seraph and the protective stance of Akiva, that they were talking about her.

“Just tell us she isn’t…” said the male, letting his words trail into some unspoken horror, as if he were pleading with Akiva to disprove their suspicions about her.

Who did they think she was? Was she to stand here mute while they talked her over?

“What?” she asked. “What am I not?” She saw their faces freeze in shock as she stepped out from behind Akiva. The female angel was just paces away, staring. She had the dead eyes of a jihadist, and Karou felt a tremor of vulnerability with Akiva no longer between them. She thought of her crescent-moon knives sitting useless in her flat, and then she realized she didn’t need them. She had a weapon tailored just to seraphim.

She was a weapon tailored just to seraphim.

The smile rose unbidden from her phantom self, and she said, with a leaping, dark excitement, “If you want to see my hands, all you have to do is ask.”

And then, there on the Charles Bridge in full view of gawkers, their upheld phones and cameras capturing it for the world, and with the police approaching, wary and grim-faced, all hell broke loose.

“No!” cried Akiva, but it was too late.

Liraz moved first, like the slash of a knife, and she was fast, but Karou matched her with a knifelike speed of her own. She threw up her hands and the air rippled with the expulsion of magic. It made a slow-motion tracery, hanging there for a second like a warp, and then it hit. Its fringes shivered wide to catch Hazael and Akiva, and they both staggered. Liraz, though, was hurled back like a flicked bug. She twisted, acrobatic, and landed on her feet with a concussive force that shook the bridge. In the aftermath of the blast, only Karou stood straight. Her hair had been caught as in a backdraft, sucked forward and then turned loose, and it floated on the churning air.

She was still smiling, cold. With her drifting hair, and her palms outfaced with their staring ink eyes, she looked malevolent, even to Zuzana, like some species of fell goddess in the unconvincing guise of a girl. Zuzana, Mik, and the other onlookers faltered back. Liraz dropped her glamour, and it was as though the veil that had cloaked them was drawn away to reveal a raging fire. Hazael dropped his glamour, too, and moved to his sister’s side, and a battle line was drawn, the two angels facing Karou, their heads lowered against the misery her hamsas were pulsing at them.

Akiva stood between them, stricken. He had to move to one side or the other. A step or two in either direction, just that, and it was a choice that would define him forever. He looked rapidly back and forth between his comrades and Karou.

“Akiva,” hissed Liraz. She expected him to come to them. It had always been the three of them, advancing against the enemy, killing, and afterward drawing the rough tally marks on one another’s hands with knife tips and campfire soot. To them, Karou was just another tattoo waiting to happen, a line to be carved.

And then there was Karou, so ready to raise her hands and unleash Brimstone’s noxious magic.

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Akiva said, but his voice was thin, as if he didn’t believe it himself.

“It is like this,” said Liraz. “Don’t be a child, Akiva.”

He was still between them, straddling two possible futures.

Liraz said, “If you can’t kill her yourself, then go. You don’t have to see it. We’ll never speak of it again. It’s over. Do you hear me? Go home.”

She spoke with urgency and resolution. She really believed she was taking care of him, and that this — this thing with Karou, so beyond her ken — was some madness to be forcibly forgotten.

He said, “I’m not going home.”

Hazael. “What do you mean, you’re not going home? After all you’ve done? All you’ve fought for? It’s a new age, brother. Peace—”

“It’s not peace. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.”

“Harmony with beasts, you mean?” Mistrust shaded into Hazael’s expression, and disgust, and still, still, the hope that it was all a misunderstanding.

When Akiva answered, he knew he was crossing a final border, beyond all possibility of misinterpretation or return. It was a border he should have crossed a long time ago. Everything had gotten so twisted; he had gotten so twisted. “Yes. That’s what I mean.”

Karou broke her gaze away from the two intruders to glance at him. The hard smile had left her face already, and now, as she sensed his turmoil, even her upheld hands faltered. Thoughts of herself, her answers, her emptiness were forgotten, all overshadowed by Akiva’s anguish, which she felt like it was her own.

The police arrived. They hesitated in the face of this otherworldly tableau. Karou saw their baffled faces, their nervous guns, and she saw the way they looked at her. There were angels on the Charles Bridge, and she was their foe. She: enemy of angels, in her black coat and evil tattoos, with her lashing blue hair and black eyes. They: so golden, the very image of church frescoes come to life. She was the demon in this scene, and she half expected, glancing at her shadow sharp before her, to see that it had horns. It did not. Her shadow was a girl’s shadow, and seemed in that moment to have nothing at all to do with her.

Akiva, who a moment ago had pressed his face against her legs and wept, stood stock-still, and Karou felt fear for the first time since the two angels had come upon them. If he should take their side…

“Akiva,” she whispered.

“I’m here,” he said, and when he moved, it was to her. There had never been any doubt, only a hope that somehow the choice wouldn’t be forced, that the moment could be backed away from, but it was too late for that. So he stepped into his future, coming between Karou and his brother and sister, and he said to them in a low but steady voice, “I won’t let you harm her. There are other ways to live. We have it in us to do else than kill.”

Hazael and Liraz stared at him. Unthinkably, he had chosen the girl. Liraz’s shock quickly turned to bitterness. “Do we?” she flung back at him. “That’s a convenient position to take now, isn’t it?”

Karou had lowered her hands when Akiva came before her. She reached out, just her fingertips to his back, because she couldn’t help it.

He told her, “Karou, you have to go.”

“Go? But—”

“Get away from here. I’ll keep them from following you.” His voice was grim with what that would mean, but his decision was made. He gave her a quick look over his shoulder; his face was strained but set. “I’ll meet you in the place we first saw each other. Promise me you’ll wait for me there.”

The place they first saw each other. The Jemaa el-Fna, heart of Marrakesh, where she had caught his burning gaze through the chaos of a crowd and been pierced through the soul by it. Akiva said, in a voice hoarse with urgency, “Promise me. Karou, promise you won’t go with Razgut until I find you. Until I explain.”

Karou wanted to promise. She saw that he had thrown his allegiance to her, even against his own kind. He had surely saved her life — could she have survived an attack by two armed seraphim? — in addition to which, he had chosen her. Wasn’t that what she had always wanted, to be chosen? Cherished? He had given up his place in his own world for her, and he was asking that she wait for him in Marrakesh.

But something unyielding in her shrank from the promise. He might have chosen her, but that didn’t mean that she would do the same if she were faced with the same choice — against Brimstone, Issa, Yasri, Twiga. She had told Brimstone, “I want you to know I would never just leave you,” and she wouldn’t. She would choose her family. Anything else was unthinkable, though even now the idea of turning and leaving Akiva behind brought on physical pain.

She said, “I’ll wait for you as long as I can. That’s the best I can do.”

And she thought the brilliance of his burning wings dimmed just a little. He said in a hollow voice, still faced away from her, “Then that will have to be good enough.”

Liraz drew her sword, and Hazael followed suit. The police responded by falling back, raising their guns, shouting in Czech for the angels to drop their weapons. The onlookers cried out in a kind of ecstatic terror. Zuzana, jostled among them, kept her eyes on Karou.

Akiva, whose swords were less obvious in their crossed sheaths between his wings, reached double-handed over his shoulders and drew them with a harmonic ringing. Without looking back, he urged, “Karou. Go.”

She gathered herself into a crouch, and just before she sprang skyward to vanish into the ether in a streak of blue and black she said, both choked and pleading, “Come and find me, Akiva.”

And then she was gone, and he was left alone to face the fallout of his shattering choice.