I met Niko’s eyes with an effort. I was saggingly tired, exhausted to my marrow, but it wasn’t time to stop yet. “But without talking to her, to Dunja, we have no idea what she’s trying to do, or what it has to do with Mama and us. And we don’t know how to find her. So that’s a dead end. Did you find anything else while you were looking?”
“Just one thing,” Niko replied. “It’s one of Mama’s original tincture recipes—it looks like Jasmina asked Mama to craft a scent for her.”
“Why couldn’t Jasmina have done that for herself?” I asked. “She used fragrances and essentials all the time in her cooking.”
“But she didn’t blend tinctures on her own, and Mama and I did,” Niko said, sounding a little miffed. “It’s not like it’s a witch-exclusive skill, last I heard. The rest of us can muddle through making nice things, too.”
“Fair enough, peace,” I said wearily, holding up a hand. “What’s in the one Ko?tana made for Jasmina?”
“Orange blossom absolute, lots of it,” Niko said. Lina’s eyes flicked to mine, and I knew she was thinking of the vial we’d found in Mama’s treasure chessboard. “Also amber, myrrh, a touch of honey, and three different kinds of musk—pink, skin, and Egyptian.”
Something about that list niggled at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “And that was it? Just the recipe?”
“There was the name of the perfume, too. Mama called it ‘the Scent of Home.’ And below it said, ‘for Jasmina.’ But that was it.”
I huffed out a frustrated breath. “So it would have reminded Mama of home, somehow, but what are we supposed to do with that? Go to Egypt? The Middle East, maybe? And I don’t even know where orange blossom absolute usually comes from.”
Luka drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “We have a big enough data set here. Maybe we’re just not looking at it from the right angle.”
I dragged my spoon despondently through the beans, tracing swirls in the cooling, gluey mess. “Or maybe the problem is that our data set contains things like ‘dreams’ and ‘possession’ and ‘memories stolen from Iris and Malina.’ Not exactly the stuff deductions are made of.”
“Maybe that’s our missing variable,” Luka said, hazel eyes sharpening. “That one memory. It’s the only thing you have that none of the rest of us can see, Iris. And you said it seemed deliberate. Like that woman let you have it back. Why? Maybe there’s something important in it, something you’re not seeing.”
“But I’ve already retold it four times,” I groused. “What else could possibly be in there?”
“Just one more time, Missy,” Luka coaxed. “The last days have been such a whirlwind for you. None of us are thinking clearly. Maybe play it out again, methodically, step by step. Remember the smell of the perfume, if you can. It’ll trigger the memories like nothing else.”
I let out a whoosh of air, working my jaw back and forth. My fingers worried at the band around my wrist. “I’m just so tired. But I’ll try.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to resurrect the layers of the perfume—and not just the blood orange, honeysuckle, and bergamot, but the smell of the Arms Square as it had been that day. I spoke it as I went; the dry warmth of sun on stone, suntan lotion from the tourists who swarmed blindly around us like schools of fish, foamy cappuccino from one of the cafés in the square. With every added layer, the memory expanded in scope and breadth, fleshing out as I spoke it aloud like a city being built in fast-forward. I focused especially on Naisha’s exhibition, the animals chasing across her skin like a shadow play and the careful movements of her hands, the swishing of her hair, the briefly blinding glint as the sun caught the diamond piercing in her wrist—
“Riss!” Malina broke in breathlessly. “You didn’t tell me about that!”
I squinted one eye open. “What, the piercing? It didn’t seem that important, what with all the shape-shifting and such going on around it. And regular people have body piercings, sometimes.”
“But Mama had one like that too!”
“What?” I frowned. “No, she didn’t.”
“She didn’t before.” Malina wrung her hands together. “But that morning when I found you both in the café, I saw it. It was just a sparkle under all the blood—I saw it because I felt something there when I went to take her pulse—and I forgot about it after. I only remember it at all because I’d only ever seen something like that on one other person.”
My hands flattened on the rough wood of the table, fingertips sinking in. “Who?”
“Natalija. My violin teacher.”
The room seemed to shift around me. “That’s it. I couldn’t place it, and she looked so different, but that’s what it was. That’s who Naisha sounded like. Natalija.”
“SHE ISN’T ANSWERING.”
“Try again.”
“I’ve already called her six times, and texted,” Malina said, leaning against the stone wall beside Natalija’s music shop, the light from the lantern above spilling through her curls. “She’s not going to answer. Either it’s too late, or she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
The storefront was in one of the Old Town’s narrowest alleys, hemmed in by apartments. Lines of laundry strung between buildings fluttered over our heads like spirits in the dark, bringing faint, clean whiffs of detergent. We were far enough away from the three main squares that we could barely hear the nighttime hubbub of tourists partying in the cafés and clubs, just distant, wispy snatches of music and laughter, like sounds drifting distorted across a pond.
“I bet she doesn’t,” I muttered, jiggling the doorknob. Locked. “If she’s been here this whole time, it must have been to watch us. Like a spy. Like a sleeper agent.”
“But she didn’t look anything like that woman,” Lina protested. “Like what you said. Natalija’s a brunette, and at least forty. You’ve seen her yourself. Even if she’d dyed her hair, she wasn’t exactly a beauty queen.”
I thought of Natalija’s plain, warm face; I hadn’t seen her very often, and she never came to the café, but we’d run into each other enough times that I recognized her bright, crystalline voice, ice cubes clinking in sweet water. The voice was unmistakably Naisha’s, and now that I thought about it, even those unremarkable features—wide-set, small brown eyes, squinted and muddy, and a lumpy nose—held a slight but compelling echo of the icy beauty I had seen. As if she’d purposely constructed the opposite of her own face, a photograph negative of herself.
“If she could mimic animals, change her own coloring and features, why couldn’t she make herself look like someone else?” I asked. “We have no idea how this works. If she’s related to us at all, if that’s what this is, maybe her version of the gleam is still completely different from ours. Either way, we need to get in here, see what we can find.”
Niko stepped between us. “I could help with that, if I may.” She held a hand out to Lina, palm up. “Pie, can I have two of your pins?”
Lina worked her fingers through her curls, plucking out the hairpins that swept the front section away from her face. She handed them to Niko, who pried one open and bent it into an L.