“She’s not dead, Luka. Someone hurt her, enough that she should be dead, but isn’t. They have no idea who did it. And they don’t understand why she’s even still alive, if you can call it that.”
He hissed in a breath, then stepped away from Lina to lean back against the counter, arms crossed and eyes heavy-lidded. “Explain.”
He listened as I frantically described Dunja, Mama’s drunken night—Niko had already filled him in on that—what I’d seen at the café in the morning, and the moaning ruin of our mother in the hospital. His narrowed gaze stayed focused somewhere over my shoulder as I talked. Luka always did that, the sideways, thousand-yard stare when he was concentrating deeply, as if gesturing and facial expressions distracted him from absorbing the useful core of information he needed.
“So Jasmina should be dead,” he murmured. “No vital signs, no functioning heart or lungs. But she has brain activity. She’s alive, and not even just technically.” He finally met my eyes, and I nearly buckled beneath their intensity, dropping my own in reflex. “Iris. How would that be possible?”
“I don’t know,” I nearly whispered, clasping my hands in front of me. I hated how easily he’d always done this to me in all the years we’d been friends. Lowering my volume, making me calm even when I didn’t want to be. “But it is. Lina and I think there’s some sort of . . . magic happening.”
“Magic,” he repeated quietly. “You think that’s what’s keeping Jasmina from dying. Or keeping her alive when she should be dead, rather.”
“Yes,” I said, bristling. “Like what Lina and I have.”
“Magic, like what you and Lina have.”
I flung up my hands. “What are you, a mountain valley now? Are you going to just echo everything back at me? Yes, magic. We’ve always called it a gleam. Mama has—had, I don’t know—something like it, too.”
“All right.” He tilted his head. “Well, then. Show me yours.”
I gritted my teeth. “The thing is, I can’t. I used to be able to, but years ago Mama stopped teaching us, and—you know what, fine. I knew you’d be this way. Well, see about this, then.” I turned to Lina, who was watching us nervously, eyes flicking back and forth between us like a fencing-match spectator. “Sing something for him. Whatever he’s feeling. All the way through.”
She cleared her throat, shifting from foot to foot and winding her hair around her wrist as Luka’s implacable gaze settled on her like an alighting hawk. For all that he was so restrained, Luka could be unnerving as hell, his attention like a wide-winged shadow circling a grassy field.
With an encouraging nod from me, she sang a low, clear note, the fundamental. Then she layered it with overtones, first one and then the second, an unsettling melody of warm empathy twining around stark skepticism, bolstered by a harmony so simple, elegant, and soul-stirring it sounded like the beginning of a Russian balalaika love song.
I could see Luka’s face wavering, and Lina’s song fleshed out even further, taking on the dissonance of his shock. He staggered back, bracing himself against the bar behind him, his face paling and knuckles turning white where he gripped its lip. Abruptly I became aware of a percussive beat accompanying her song, and I looked over to one of the nooks; Niko had stolen in silently at some point, and now she held one of the darabukka drums tucked beneath her arm, her palm striking the center of the drum’s head and then its edge. She nodded at me once, her eyes dark and intent with Lina’s song.
She knew. There was no shock written on her anywhere, not even a footnote of surprise.
Lina had told her. I’d kept our secret all these years, locked inside me like a treasure trapped within a puzzle box, and Lina had told her.
As my fury rose like a juggernaut and my sister felt it, Lina’s song shifted, churning into a tempest driven by the wild beat of Niko’s answering drum. The surge of it was so powerful that my head fell back, and my gaze landed on the café’s mad quilt of a ceiling—a series of overlapping Turkish carpets that Ko?tana had thought would be more fun there than on the floor.
The repeating designs of the rugs leaped out at me all at once, blocky, angular fauna and flora: a gridded fractal like the Minotaur’s maze, cream and crimson, scarlet and royal blue, reaching down toward me as if to swallow me up. I wanted to tamp it down, but then also I didn’t; it had been so many years since anything other than a flower bloomed for me, and this was glorious, so lush and complex—like the universe was giving me a Technicolor schematic of what these designs had looked like before they’d been born into physical being. My heart hammering against my ribs, I pulled even harder, made them multiply over and over as they echoed each other.
Abruptly, all that color began fading at the edges into black, and my insides boiled with nausea. I could hear myself make a miserable noise, a gag like a retching cat, along with the incongruously cheery tinkle of the bells strung above the café door behind me.
I staggered backward, sinking onto my knees on the scuffed parquet. My stomach heaved even as my head floated somewhere above me like a balloon with a snipped string. There was a warm, spicy smell—whiskey and chocolate, and just a hint of smoke—and a broad hand cupped the back of my head before it could strike the floor.
TWELVE
A FACE HOVERED ABOVE MINE, BLURRY AND OVERBRIGHT, as if I’d stared too long into sunlit water. I blinked a few times, waiting for it to resolve itself: a man, maybe twenty years old, with broad and bony Nordic features like a Viking’s, white-blond hair swept back, and gas-flame-blue eyes lined with smudged black. His nose was long and ridged, and his mouth wide and soft, the lower lip much fuller than the top. Following the lines of his lips, I licked my own in reflex. His cleft chin was stubbled with blond, and through my haze he looked somehow foggily familiar.
Blinking, I reached up at him, trying to touch his face like a groping child.
“So handsy,” he chided playfully, catching my hand. His long, blunt fingers wrapped around mine; they were very warm, with wide rings on almost every finger, the metal much colder than his skin. He flipped my hand over and brought it to his lips, brushing them over my knuckles. I felt the heat of the breath, and the shocking sear of something even warmer. From my very horizontal vantage point against his thigh, my belly bottomed out in the sweetest way. “Just like I remember. I told you next we met, I’d greet you properly, didn’t I? Though you do seem very inclined to pass out on me. Wonder how I should take that.”
“And where are you from, exactly, that a ‘proper’ greeting involves a girl lain out on her back?” Luka snapped from somewhere above us.