81
THE WISH POLICE
What Zuzana actually said, crying out from the stormhunter’s back, was, “Oh my god! All mountains look the same!”
They were lost, though it was frankly astonishing that they’d made it this far, to say nothing of the style of the journey.
The first was owing chiefly to the maps buried in Eliza’s mind, and the second to music, and Mik’s having charmed, with his violin—a new and better one than he’d left in Esther’s bathtub—a flying creature the size of a small ship. Zuzana had no problem claiming her share of the credit, though. She was confident that her enthusiasm throughout had been the true driving force in this endeavor.
From the moment of Eliza’s revelation that she knew another portal—the one her many-greats grandmother had been exiled through a thousand years ago—Zuzana had been ready to go. Never mind that it was in Patagonia (wherever that was.… Oh. Hell. Really, really far. Seriously?), they had the means to get there.
Wishes were fun.
They were also rare, and irreplaceable, and sacred, having been made by Brimstone, and they were not to be spilled out like pocket change on a candy counter. Besides, Karou was likely to have far greater need of gavriels than they ever could, not that they would do her any good if they couldn’t get them to her, so the deal they had made amongst themselves was this: They would get them to her. Simple. And they would make every effort to do so without recourse to gavriels. Mik had joked about the “wish police” once, playing Three Wishes back at the caves, and now he teased Zuzana that she had become just that.
“No samurai skills?” He’d made puppy-dog eyes. “Or perhaps some other, more cautiously phrased superpower request?”
“We can get Virko or someone to teach us how to fight,” she’d said. “It’s a nonessential wish.”
“It’s a lazy wish. That’s its appeal. Learning stuff is hard.”
“Says the violinist to the artist.”
“Right. Right.” He’d beamed. “We totally know how to learn stuff.” He’d turned to Eliza. “Scientist and smart fellow learner-of-stuff, want to do samurai-monster training with us? We intend to become dangerous.”
“I’m in,” she’d said, that easy. Eliza Jones was what’s known in fruit parlance as: a peach.
Really. If they weren’t tied together by a quirk of fate and a crazy shared purpose, Zuzana would still have wanted to be friends with her. That didn’t happen often, and she was really, really glad it was the case. If Eliza had been a whiner, or a prima donna, or some kind of loud chewer or something, this journey could have been a nightmare.
What it had been, instead, was awesome.
First, getting to Patagonia (which turned out to be in Argentina, mainly, with a slice of Chile thrown in; who knew?). That only required money, which they had no shortage of, on account of Karou’s accounts being perfectly in order, apparently unmolested by Evil Esther. In your face again, fake grandma. Zuzana had lamented not being able to gloat at least, or better yet make good on her threat, but Mik, for his part, had been sanguine.
“Having to keep her own company for the rest of her life is vengeance enough,” he said.
Little imagining.
Eliza, it turned out, had a wicked yen for vengeance, too, which only made Zuzana like her more. She looked so sweet, with those big, beautiful eyes, but she knew how to nurse a grudge. She demurred from wasting a wish on her nemesis, though, who sounded like such a rancid little weenie, until Zuzana persuaded her that a shing—of which they had dozens, and which were far too modest to be of any real heroic value to Karou—could still wreak a satisfying morsel of revenge.
She’d told her about Karou’s most excellent torment of Kaz, and had her and Mik both in helpless laughter describing the sight of his nude Adonis body doing a spastic itch-dance on the model stand. But it was the companion piece to that revenge—Svetla’s ever-grow eyebrows—that had been Eliza’s inspiration.
She’d kissed the shing like lucky dice before pronouncing, “I wish that the hair just between Morgan Toth’s nose and upper lip will grow in at a rate of an inch per hour, beginning now, ending one month from now.”
There was always that moment of wondering if your wish exceeded the medallion’s power, but the shing vanished with her last syllable.
“You do realize,” Mik had said, “that you just described a Hitler mustache?”
By the glint in her eye, they gathered that she did. The revenge was not complete, however, if the subject didn’t know who was responsible, so she’d sent, to his work e-mail, a picture of herself, finger raised to her lip like a mustache. Subject line: Enjoy.
“We have to do that to Esther, too,” Zuzana had declared. “Right now.”
So they did, and began their journey in the best of all possible ways: imagining, in solidarity, the bewildered horror of their enemies.
A long flight, some shopping for cold-weather gear and supplies, a long drive, a long hike—in the snow; damn, it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere—and they were there. Near enough to the portal to contemplate a couple of gavriels for flight. They almost did it, too, but it had become a matter of honor by this point, to preserve them, so Mik said, “Let’s just see what’s on the other side before we decide. Eliza can carry us.”
She did, and that was how they found out what no one in all of Eretz knew:
Where stormhunters nested.
And what none could have guessed:
They liked music.
And it was official: Mik’s three fairy-tale tasks were accomplished. And the ring burning a hole in his pocket? The one that had seemed so crude in the light of the Royal Suite’s shining marble bathroom?
It happened to look just perfect on stormhunter-back, with a northerly sea rolling beneath them, dotted with icebergs and breaching sea creatures that were not in any way whales. He couldn’t go down on one knee without risk of falling off, but that was entirely okay, under the circumstances. “Will you marry me?” he asked.
The answer was yes.
“Am I glad to see you,” Zuzana cried now, crowing at the sight of Liraz and Ziri. Ziri! Not the White Wolf, but Ziri! Oh. That meant he must have… But it was okay, wasn’t it, because here he was in Kirin form again, and he looked pretty nearly exactly the same as he had in his natural flesh. He was smiling broadly, so very handsome, and Liraz at his side was smiling broadly, too, and beautiful, laughing in unbridled amazement, laughing. Laughing like a person who laughs. Liraz.
That seemed almost more amazing than showing up on a freaking stormhunter. But wasn’t.
Because nothing was as amazing as that.
“Can you tell them,” Zuzana asked Eliza, after the initial jag of laughing and exclaiming in mutually non-understandable languages had begun to subside, “that we can’t find the caves?”
Eliza spoke Seraphic, which was handy, but also mildly irritating, as it undercut any sound argument Zuzana might have made for spending a wish to acquire an Eretz language herself. It would have been Chimaera, though, because come on.
“We’ll just have to learn that, too,” Mik had said with a sigh that didn’t fool her for a second. “Resurrection and invisibility and fighting and now non-human languages, too? What is this, school?”
But Eliza wasn’t translating, and Zuzana realized she was staring at Ziri agog. Oh! Right. His body. She’d seen his body at the pit. That was going to take some explaining. “It’s him,” Zuzana confirmed. “We’ll tell you later.”
And so translations were given—to Liraz, who in turn translated to Ziri in Chimaera—and then they were guiding them back south, asking things like where they’d come from and whether the stormhunter had a name, and when Zuzana spotted the crescent, she realized a flaw in her grand vision of sweeping in and bowling everyone over with amazement and tornado-force wingbeats.
The stormhunter—who did not have a name—wasn’t going to fit through the crescent. Well, damn.
She had to put a halt to small talk and make herself understood. “We need an audience. This needs to be witnessed, and spoken of far and wide. Sung. I want songs to be written about this. Do you mind? Could you go get everyone? And Karou?”
At which point Ziri and Liraz both got all bashful and weird, and Mik suggested, delicately, that perhaps Karou and Akiva were… busy.
Collision of emotions! Thrill at the thought that at last Karou and Akiva were “busy”! And injustice, that it should coincide with her own moment of glory. “We can interrupt them for this, though, right?” she begged. They were coasting in circles now, forestalling the moment they would have to disembark and enter the caves on foot.
“No,” spake Mik, voice of sanity.
“But—”
“No.”
“Fine. But I want someone to see us.”
Everyone saw them. Liraz went to fetch them, and they crowded into the crescent, and there were gratifying gasps and shouts. Zuzana heard Virko’s affectionate bellow of “Neek-neek!” and then felt, finally, that it was okay to bring this ride to an end.
They brought the huge creature as close as they could to the rock face and jump-scrambled from its back, hugging its vast neck first in thanks and farewell. They supposed it would go now and leave them, but hoped that it wouldn’t (“If it doesn’t, we’re naming it.”), and they paused to watch, wistful, as it rose higher and higher until it was just a shape cut from the glittering vault of the sky.
Only then, turning toward the gathered chimaera and seraphim, did they realize that something was wrong. There was a pall over their manner, and… Karou was there. Not busy. Why not? And why was she standing way back there? And where was Akiva?
Karou gave them a wave, and a brief marveling smile and head shake, and her eyes popped at the sight of Eliza’s wings, of course, but even that didn’t draw her forward to greet them. She was talking to Liraz, and Liraz was no longer laughing like a person who laughs. She was back to her most terrible self. Tight-lipped and white-nostrilled with ire, more savage than ever the White Wolf had looked.
Zuzana forgot all her glory and rushed to her friend. “What? What what what? God, Karou, what?”
“Akiva.” So lost. Karou looked so lost. That wasn’t how she was supposed to look. “He’s gone.”