Days of Blood & Starlight

22 The Tooth Phantom

“But why teeth?” Mik asked Zuzana. “I don’t get it.”

Zuzana, marching up the sidewalk ahead of him, stopped dead and whirled to face him. He was pulling her giant marionette on its wheeled cart and had to lurch to a halt to avoid running her over. She stood there tiny and imperious, a pout and a scowl vying for dominance of her expression. She said, “I don’t know why. That’s not the point. The point is that she was here. In Prague.”

She left the rest unsaid, the pout winning out so that for a moment she looked unguardedly wounded. Karou—the “Tooth Phantom,” as they were calling her, little guessing that she and “the Girl on the Bridge” were one and the same—had apparently, at some point in her string of crimes, hit the National Museum. The local news had featured a curator shining a penlight into the jaws of a slightly moth-eaten Siberian tiger.

“As you see, she didn’t take the fangs—only the molars,” the man had said, defensive. “That’s why we didn’t notice. We have no reason to look inside specimens’ mouths.”

Clearly, the Phantom was Karou. Even if the glimpse of footage wasn’t enough to positively identify her, Zuzana had a resource that the various police forces of the world did not: her friend’s sketchbooks. They were piled in a corner of Mik’s room, all ninety of them. From the time Karou was old enough to hold a pencil, she had been drawing this story of monsters and mystical doorways and teeth. Always teeth.

Mik’s question was a good one: Why? Well, Zuzana had no idea. Right now, however, that was not her primary concern.

“How could she be here and not come see us?” she demanded. One eyebrow was up, cool and furious, and her scowl muscled her pout into submission. In her platform boots and vintage tutu, with her face upturned and fierce, in doll makeup with pink-dot cheeks and fluttery foil lashes, she looked every inch the “rabid fairy” that Karou had dubbed her.

Mik reached out to cup her shoulders. “We don’t know what’s going on with her. Maybe she was in a hurry. Or she was being followed. I mean, it could be anything, right?”

“That’s what pisses me off the most,” Zuzana said. “That it could be anything, and I know nothing. I’m her best friend. Why won’t she let me know what she’s doing?”

“I don’t know, Zuze,” said Mik, his voice soft. “She said she feels happy. That’s good, right?”

They were poised at the verge of the Charles Bridge on their way to stake out their spot for the day’s performances. They’d gotten a late start this morning and the medieval bridge was fast filling with artists and musicians, not to mention more than a fair share of the world’s apocalyptic weirdos. Anxiously, Mik watched an old-man jazz band trundle by carrying battered instrument cases.

Zuzana was oblivious. “Ugh! Don’t get me started on that e-mail. I want to kill her a little bit. Was it a riddle? Monty Python references? Sandcastles? What the hell? And she didn’t even mention Akiva. What does that mean?”

“It’s not promising,” Mik acknowledged.

“I know. I mean, are they together? She would mention him, right?”

“Well, yeah. Like you write her all about me, telling her all the funny things I say, and how every day I get more handsome and clever. And you use smileys—”

Zuzana snorted. “Of course. And I sign everything Mrs. Mikolas Vavra, with a heart dotting the i.”

Mik said, “Huh. I like the sound of that.”

She punched his shoulder. “Please. If you ever did ask me to marry you, don’t even think I would identify myself as some addendum of you, like an old lady signing her rent check with perfect penmanship as Mrs. Husband Name—”

“But you’d say yes, is that what you’re saying?” Mik’s blue eyes twinkled.

“What?”

“That sounded like the only quibble is what you’d call yourself, not whether or not you’d say yes.”

Zuzana blushed. “I didn’t say that.”

“So you wouldn’t marry me?”

“Ridiculous question. I’m eighteen!”

“Oh, it’s an age thing?” He frowned. “You don’t mean wild oats, do you? We’re not going to have to take some stupid break so you can experience other—”

Zuzana put a hand over his mouth. “Gross. Don’t even say it.”

Mollified, Mik kissed her palm. “Good.”

She spun on her heel and walked on. Mik gave the huge puppet a tug to get it rolling again, and followed. “So,” he called to her back, “just out of curiosity, you know, purely conversation and all, at what age will you be entertaining offers of marriage?”

“You think it’ll be so easy?” she called back over her shoulder. “No way. There will be tasks. Like in a fairy tale.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Very. So think twice.”

“No need,” he said. “You’re worth it.” And Zuzana’s face warmed with pleasure.

They managed to find a wedge of unclaimed space on the Old Town end of the bridge, where they parked the marionette. It towered there in its black trench coat like some sinister bridge guardian, a dark counterpoint to the clutch of white-robed figures beyond. Angel-cult rabble. They were loitering, lighting their vigil candles and chanting—at least until the next police sweep, which would temporarily scatter them. How unflagging they were in their belief that the angels would return here to the scene of their most dramatic sighting.

You know nothing, Zuzana thought with scorn, but her superiority was wearing thin. So she had met one of the angels. So what? She was just as ignorant now as everyone else.

Karou, Karou. What could it mean that she had been here and not even said hello? And that e-mail! Yes, it was absurd, mysterious to the point of clubbing her on the head, but… there was just something so off about it.

It struck Zuzana then: a lightning flash of memory.

I feel happy…. I feel happy….

Karou did not feel happy. Zuzana was suddenly sick. She pulled out her phone to make sure she was right. The clip was easy to find online; it was a classic. “Don’t want to go on the cart!” That was the clue. Monty Python and the Holy Grail: She and Karou had gone through a phase when they were fifteen, they must have watched it twenty times. And there it was, at the end of the “Bring out your dead” scene.

“I feel happy…. I feel happy….”

Desperate singsong. It was what the old man said to convince them he was all right just before they clubbed him on the head and threw his body on the plague cart. Jesus. Leave it to Karou to communicate in Holy Grail. Was she trying to say that she was in danger? But what could Zuzana possibly do about it? Her heart was beating fast now.

“Mik,” she called. He was tuning his violin. “Mik!”

Priestess of a sandcastle? In a land of dust and starlight?

Was that a clue, too?

Did Karou want to be found?