Daughter of Smoke & Bone

19





NOT WHO, BUT WHAT



The cathedral conducted Karou’s scream and splintered it into a symphony of screams that echoed and collided so the vast vaulted space was alive with her voice. And then it wasn’t. The chimaera silenced her with a backhand and she skidded off the stone slab, knocking down the metal crook and thurible, which sent up a clangor. He sprang down after her, and she thought he would tear out her throat with his teeth, his face was so close to hers, but then… he was dragged back as if plucked, and thrust away.

And Brimstone was there.

Karou had never been so happy to see him. “Brimstone…” she choked out, and then stopped. Her relief faltered. His crocodile pupils closed to black slashes, as they always did when he was angry, but if Karou thought she had seen him angry before, this was to be an education in rage.

The moment froze as he mastered his shock at seeing her there, while for Karou, an eternity revolved in the space between heartbeats.

“Karou?” He snarled his incredulity, lips peeling back in a terrible grimace. His breath, fast, hissed through his teeth as he reached for her, claws flexed.

Behind him, the white-haired wolf chimaera demanded, “Who is that?”

Brimstone growled. “That is no one.”

Karou thought maybe she should run.

Too late.

A lunge, and Brimstone caught her arm right over the blood-tinged bandage of her last angel slash, and crushed it in his grip. Light trembled behind Karou’s eyelids and she gasped. He grabbed her other arm and picked her up, raising her so that her face was just inches from his own. Her bare feet paddled for purchase and found none. Her arms were pinned, his claws piercing her skin. She couldn’t move. She could only stare back into his eyes, which had never in her life seemed so alien, so animal, as they did now.

“Give her to me,” said the man.

Brimstone said, “You need rest, Thiago. You should still be sleeping. I’ll take care of her.”

“Take care of her? How?” Thiago demanded.

“She won’t trouble us again.”

Peripherally, Karou saw the familiar shape of Twiga with his long, hunched neck on sloping shoulders, and she turned to him, but the look on his face was worse than Brimstone’s, because it was both appalled and afraid, as if he were about to witness something that he would rather not see. Karou started to panic.

“Wait,” she gasped, writhing in Brimstone’s grasp. “Wait, wait—”

But he was already moving, carrying her to the stairs, taking them fast, in leaps and lunges. He wasn’t careful with her, and she felt what it must be like for a doll in a toddler’s hands, whipped around corners and drubbed against walls, dropped and tossed like an inanimate thing. Sooner than she would have thought possible—or maybe she lost consciousness for a time—they were back at the shop door, and he hurled her through it. She didn’t land on her feet but went sprawling, catching a chair with her cheek so that a firework detonated behind her eyes.

Brimstone slammed the door behind him and loomed over her. “What were you thinking?” he thundered. “You could not have done worse. Foolish child! And you!” He spun on Yasri and Issa, who had rushed out of the kitchen and were gaping, horrified. They flinched. “If we were going to keep her here, we said, there would be rules. Inviolable rules. Did we not all agree?”

Issa attempted an answer. “Yes, but—”

But Brimstone had rounded on Karou again and grabbed her up off the floor. “Did he see your hands?” he demanded. She had never heard his voice raised to this pitch. It was like stone grating against stone. She felt it in her skull. He was gripping her arms so hard. A whiteness washed across her vision, and she feared she was going to faint.

“Did he?” he repeated, louder.

She knew that no was the right answer, but she couldn’t lie. She gasped, “Yes. Yes!”

He gave a kind of howl that chilled her worse than anything had during this whole terrible night. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

Karou did not know.

“Brimstone!” Yasri squawked. “Brimstone, she’s injured!” The parrot-woman’s arms were flapping like wings. She tried to pry the Wishmonger’s hands from Karou’s wound, but he shook her off.

He dragged Karou to the front door and wrenched it open, shoving her ahead of him into the vestibule.

“Wait!” cried Issa. “You can’t put her out like that—”

But he wouldn’t hear it. “Get out, now!” he snarled at Karou. “Get away!” He wrenched open the outer door of the vestibule—another measure of his rage; the doors were never opened together, never, it was a fail-safe against intrusion—and the last thing she saw was his face contorted with fury before he shoved her hard and slammed the door.

Released so suddenly, she took three or four reeling steps backward before tripping off the curb and collapsing, and there she sat, stunned, barefoot, and bleeding, light-headed and gasping, in a gutter stream of melting snow. She was torn between relief that he’d let her go—for a moment she’d feared far worse than this—and disbelief that he had thrown her out injured and barely dressed into the cold.

Dazed and dizzy, she hardly knew what to do. Shivering was setting in. It was frigid out, and she was soaked with gutter slush now in addition to blood. She picked herself up and stood there, uncertain. Her flat was a ten-minute walk. Already her feet burned with the cold. She stared at the door—unsurprised now to see a black handprint on its surface—and thought surely it must open. At the very least Issa would bring her coat and shoes.

Surely.

But the door didn’t and didn’t and still didn’t open.

A car rumbled past at the end of the block, and here and there laughter and arguments drifted out windows, but no one was near. Karou’s teeth chattered. She clutched her arms around herself, for all the good it did, and stayed fixed on the door, unable to believe that Brimstone would just leave her out here. Cold, awful moments ticked by and finally, outraged tears springing to her eyes, Karou turned away, hugging herself, and began to limp on numb feet in the direction of her flat. She got a few wide-eyed looks along the way, and some offers of help, which she ignored, and it wasn’t until she reached her door, shivering convulsively, and reached for a coat pocket that wasn’t there that she realized she didn’t have her keys. No coat, no keys, and no shings, either, with which she would have been able to wish open the door.

“Damn damn damn,” Karou cursed, tears icy on her cheeks. All she had were the scuppies around her wrist. She took one between her fingers and wished, but nothing happened. Unlocking doors exceeded a scuppy’s small power.

She was about to buzz a neighbor awake when she sensed, behind her, a furtive movement.

She was beyond thinking. A hand came down on her shoulder, and she was all nerve and impulse. She seized the hand and threw her weight forward. The figure behind her was lifted—Karou registered a second too late the voice, concerned, saying, “Jesus, Roo, are you okay?”—to catapult over her shoulder and through the plate glass of the door.

The glass shattered as Kaz sailed through it and hit the ground with an explosive grunt. Karou stood still, the awareness catching up to her that he hadn’t even been trying to scare her this time, and now he was lying across the threshold in a litter of glass. She thought she should feel something—regret?—but she felt nothing at all.

The problem of the locked door, at least, was solved.

“Are you hurt?” she asked him, flat.

He just blinked, stunned, and she skimmed the scene with a cursory glance. No blood. The glass had broken into rectangular chunks. He was fine. She stepped over him and picked her way to the elevator. Throwing Kaz had cost her what little strength she had left, and she doubted she could walk up the six flights of stairs. The elevator doors opened and she got in, turning to face Kaz, who still hadn’t moved. He was staring after her.

“What are you?” he asked.

Not who, but what.

She didn’t answer. The elevator doors closed and she was alone with her reflection, in which she saw what Kaz had seen. She was wearing nothing but soaked jeans and a filmy white camisole gone see-through where it clung to her skin. Her hair clumped in blue coils around her neck, like Issa’s serpents, and rust-streaked bandages hung loose from her shoulders. Against the blood, her skin looked translucent, almost blue, and she was curled over, clutching herself and shaking like some kind of junkie. All of that was bad enough, but it was her face that caught her. Her cheek was swelling from when Brimstone had flung her into the chair, and her head was set in a hard-jawed downward tilt so that her eyes were hooded in shadow. She looked like someone you’d go a long way to avoid walking past, she thought. She looked… not entirely human.

The elevator doors pinged open and she dragged herself down the hall. She had to climb out a window to get onto her balcony, and break a pane out of her balcony door to get into her apartment, and she managed it before her strength gave out or her shivering incapacitated her, and finally she was inside, stripping off her wet clothes. She dragged herself onto her bed, tugged a quilt around her, curled up in a ball, and sobbed.

Who are you? she asked herself, remembering the angel’s question, and the wolf’s. But it was Kaz’s that reverberated through her, an echo that wouldn’t die.

What are you?

What?