56
MY SWEET BARBARIAN
Cleanliness, at last. Mik and Zuzana took turns in the bathroom, so that one of them could sit with Eliza, while also keeping a vigil for breaking angel news. The TV was on low, and Esther’s laptop was open with several feeds constantly refreshing, but nothing had happened yet, and wouldn’t be likely to for a while
Karou, Zuzana knew, had a stop to make before the Vatican: the Museo Civico di Zoologia. It was a natural history museum, and there had been a calm defiance in her when she declared her intention to go there. It had half broken Zuzana’s heart, knowing what it was for—to replenish her store of teeth, in case souls had been saved, at least, in the battle—and that she wouldn’t be there to help, whatever it was they found when they got back to Eretz.
Damned helplessness. Zuzana sensed a T-shirt design coming on.
BE A SAMURAI.
BECAUSE YOU JUST NEVER KNOW WHAT’S BEHIND
THE FREAKING SKY.
No one would understand it, but who cares? She’d just glare at them until they went away. That worked in almost any situation.
No, she chided herself. It did not. Because if it did, there would be no need to be a samurai, would there?
She looked at Eliza, beside her, and sighed. Eliza didn’t seem to need or register company, but the idea of leaving her alone in the corner like a piece of softly murmuring furniture just didn’t sit right. Zuzana was no nurse, and had no instincts for it, but she was mindful that the young woman needed someone to take care of her basic human needs for her—food and drink just for starters—and she was more docile now, at least, whatever Akiva had done. Less agitated, and that made it easier.
What they were going to do about her after today, Zuzana couldn’t think about right now. Tomorrow was soon enough. When all the tension of today was a thing of the past, and they’d had a full night’s sleep in an actual bed, and a meal that had never even been on the same continent as couscous.
Tomorrow.
But for now, it was good to be clean. It felt like rebirth—Venus emerging from a layer of crud—and the clothes Esther’s shopper had chosen were elegant and understated, of fine materials and nearly a perfect fit. Zuzana’s filthy stuff, zebra sneakers included, she’d stacked neatly and wrapped in several layers of plastic bags; it felt like a betrayal, especially after her old shoes sat next to her new ones on the floor and she got the idea that they were being forced to train their replacements. She scuffs a bit, they’d tell the new leather numbers, fond tears seeping from their rheumy old-shoe eyes. And she stands on tiptoe a lot, so be ready for that.
“Sentimental of you,” Mik had commented when she came back into the sitting room and shoved the bundle into her backpack.
“Not at all,” she’d airily declared. “I’m saving them for the Museum of Otherworldly Adventure that I’m going to found. Exhibit title: ‘What not to wear camping in freezing mountains while forging an alliance between enemy armies.’ ”
“Uh-huh.”
Mik, taking his turn in the bathroom, felt no such sentimentality for his dirty clothes. He was happy to drop them in the trash, though before he could do that, he fished furtively into the pocket of his old jeans and withdrew…
… the ring.
The maybe-silver, maybe-antique ring he’d been in the act of purchasing when the world went crazy. He turned it over in his fingers, looking at it closely for the first time since. Zuzana was always in proximity (and thank god for that); he hadn’t had a chance to take it out. It seemed to him a rough thing now, especially in the context of this ridiculous hotel. Back at A?t Benhaddou it had fit right in: primitive and tarnished, maybe a little lopsided. Here it looked like something that had fallen off a Visigoth’s pinkie during the Sack of Rome. Barbarian jewelry.
Perfect.
For my sweet barbarian, he thought, and as he went to tuck it into the pocket of his posh new Italian trousers, he fumbled and it spun from his fingers. It rang against the marble floor and rolled like it was trying to escape. Mik followed, thinking maybe it was real silver after all, because supposedly real silver makes that chime sound, and then it escaped into a three-finger gap beneath the marble vanity.
“Come back here,” he whispered. “I have plans for you.”
He dropped to his knees to grope for it as, in the sitting room, his sweet barbarian held water to Eliza Jones’s ever-murmuring lips to coax her to drink, and, in the smaller bedroom in the back of the suite, with the door closed and music playing to mask her voice, Esther Van de Vloet made a phone call.
It wasn’t an easy phone call for her to make, but the most that could be said in her defense was that she had hoped not to make it. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, and though a shadow of her true age may have haunted her face, no indecision did. She forced out a harsh breath and got on with it.
After all, power doesn’t maintain itself.
Karou and her companions cut over the rooftops of Rome, their errand at the natural history museum behind them and only Jael ahead. The night air was thick with Italian summer, the cityscape below them a muted canvas of rooftops and monuments, lights and domes, cut by a snake of dark that was the Tiber River. Honking of horns filtered up as they flew, and traffic whistles, along with snatches of music, and—growing louder the nearer they drew to the Vatican—chanting. It was unintelligible, but followed the rhythm of liturgy.
There was a stink, too—the unmistakable aroma of humans packed too close for too long. Judging by its acrid edge, Karou figured that once pilgrims achieved a spot near the barrier, they didn’t want to give it up for something so temporal as bodily function.
Nice.
The news had reported a public health crisis, as people were bringing elderly and infirm loved ones to the perimeter in the hope that the mere proximity of angels might cure their diseases—or, scarcely to be hoped, that the angels might actually come out to bless them. Claims of miracles had been made, and though they were unproven, they nevertheless overshadowed the documented number of deaths resulting from this practice.
Miracles will do that.
Seen from the sky, the Vatican was a wedge—if a lumpy wedge, like a collapsing slice of pie. Within the boundary, its vast circular plaza was its most visible feature, enclosed by Michelangelo’s famous curved colonnades. It was incongruously choked with military vehicles, tanks dozing like ugly beetles, jeeps coming and going, even troop transports.
Just beyond the north colonnade lay their destination: the Papal Palace. Karou led the way.
Esther had been able to provide them, thanks to her “pocket cardinal,” with the precise location of the chambers Jael had been given for his use, and the three of them swung in a broad circle above the cluster of buildings—the palace was not one, but several, grown together—scanning the rooftops for signs of seraph presence.
They expected guards. Human soldiers were concentrated on the ground—they could see soldiers patrolling with dogs—and certainly at the entrances to the building, both inside and out. But they still expected to find Dominion posted to the rooftop, too, because this was standard operating procedure in Eretz, where an attack was as likely to come from the sky as the ground.
And there they were. Two.
Easy.
“Don’t harm them,” Karou reminded Akiva and Virko—needlessly, she hoped—and felt them move off. She watched the guards, and saw Akiva’s and Virko’s moon-cast shadows descend on them. Vividly she recalled the tidal wave of shadow chased by fire that had engulfed the company back in the Adelphas, and felt no pity as the soldiers, in unison, stiffened and then slumped.
Quick blows to the head. They went limp but didn’t collapse. Their bodies seemed to drift in slow motion to the rooftop, as Akiva and Virko caught them and laid them quietly down. They’d have goose eggs and headaches later, but no more than that. It wasn’t a matter of whether they deserved mercy so much as the parameters of this mission: no blood.
Swift and bloodless, that was the point. No carnage, no crime scene, just persuasion. They should be in and out before these two soldiers even woke up and rubbed their aching heads.
Karou set down lightly and cast a brief glance at one of them. Unconscious, he looked like any number of the Misbegotten from the Kirin caves. Handsome, young, fair. Villain and victim both, she thought, and she recalled Liraz’s proposal that fingers be taken instead of lives, and wondered: Was it possible even Dominion soldiers could learn to live in the new world, if ever there was one? Did they deserve the choice? Looking at him like this, to all appearances asleep and innocent, it was easy to think: yes.
Maybe when he woke, his eyes would fill with hate, and he would be beyond hope.
This was a worry for another day. They were here. Jael’s windows were in sight. The chanting at the perimeter enclosed them like the roar of the sea, but the effect was a seeming sphere of quiet within.
“I’ve thought of a better idea,” Karou had announced back at the Kirin caves, so certain that this was the way to avoid an apocalypse. A quick and quiet end to this drama. No clash, no weapons, no “monsters.”
The angels just melt away.
Simple.
“Okay,” she said, pausing to text Zuzana before turning off her phone and tucking it away. “Let’s do it.”