In the slanting light, and still shadowed by the inside of the chalet, she looked exactly like our mother.
The illusion shattered as soon as she came forth to meet us, each step delicate and deliberate, like a cat walking along a sill. A jade tulip dress parted above long, bronzed legs, and a simple silver lariat looped around her slender throat. My mind flashed back to the photo of Anais, the smiling girl with the valley behind her. Something about this woman called her up. The bright, curling fall of her sorrel hair, threaded with ribbons like our own, was darker than that fiery copper but close enough, though her jawline was much squarer than the girl’s had been, more like Mama’s.
“Faisali’s girls,” she murmured, her frost-pane eyes welling. Her full lips pressed into a smile so much like Mama’s that my eyes filled instantly, too, like a reflex. “Finally. It’s so good to meet you, after all these years.”
“Who are you?” Malina asked, her voice trembling.
“I’m Shimora, dear heart. Your grandmother.”
Before we knew it she’d drawn us against her, sinewy arms wrapped around us both. She was surprisingly warm and solid, all muscle beneath that silken, amber skin, and her perfume lapped over me like a fragrant tide, like how the air must have smelled in the Garden of Eden. Pomegranate, cinnamon, fig, and calla lily, and something else too sweet and unusual for me to know its name, yet familiar all the same.
“But how is that possible?” I whispered into her neck, struggling to understand how I could believe her so readily when nothing made sense. “You—you’re dead. You died before we were born. Mama said that our grandfather killed you and her sister, that you died trying to protect our aunt. And even if she lied about that, look at you. You’re young. You’re Mama’s age, if that.”
Sadness flickered prettily across her face. “Is that what she told you? My poor Fai. She was hurting badly when she left us, and I suppose the truth wouldn’t have done, not when she was trying so terribly hard to protect you from it all.”
“Protect us from what? And do you have her? Do you have our mother?”
She sighed deeply and stepped back, trailing her long fingers down our arms until she held our hands in a warm, smooth grip. From this close, she was somehow even more flawless. A faint spray of freckles speckled the tanned bridge of her falcon’s nose, and even that seemed deliberate, a subtle, natural enhancement rather than a flaw. She wore the lightest makeup, flicks of mascara to bring out the ice glint of her eyes, high sweeps of blush on her cheekbones, and a peachy, near-transparent lip gloss. Her hair fell in sculpted curls, loose ringlets that gleamed as if each had been carved from cherrywood, like the mermaids on ships’ prows.
From that simple dress to the long muscles in her bare arms, and even down to the nude-painted toes, everything about her was so precisely, near-painfully right. An elegance so sleek and Spartan it felt like the privilege of looking at her must have a price.
That thought drove a tiny pinprick of recognition through the blanketing warmth of her presence and her scent—it reminded me of what Luka had said about me and Malina. That we were too beautiful, near unnerving to the eye.
But the slight sense of quailing vanished immediately as she moved back toward the chalet, drawing us with her, stepping deeper into the perfume.
“We’ll tell you everything as soon as you’re properly back with us,” she said, her gaze shifting warmly between us. “Everything you want to know, and everything you need. But you’ll let us welcome you first, yes? We’ve missed you for so many years—and you’ve missed us even if you didn’t know it.”
“Who is ‘us,’ exactly?” Malina asked. “We don’t have anyone to miss.”
Shimora hummed mournfully, deep in her throat. “Your whole family, of course, dear heart. Will you come inside with me, meet some of your kin?”
I nodded immediately, without thinking. Beside me, Malina took a beat longer before she bit her lip and nodded too. Together, we let Shimora lead us across the threshold.
TWENTY-TWO
FROM THE INSIDE, THE CHALET’S GROUND FLOOR WAS even grander, vast and wide as a ballroom. The four stories above us formed an atrium, ringing a glass-and-steel chandelier strung from the highest eaves, each piece dangling down to a different level—hollow spheres and onion bulbs like Christmas ornaments, and long cylinders scored with patterns, like the metal rolls of sheet music I’d seen inside self-playing pianos. A row of silken white bolts trailed down from the ceiling as well, ends pooled on the floor behind a round dais made of gleaming black marble, forked with veins of amethyst.
All those fascinating patterns, a lattice of glass, metal, and fabric, swam in and out of focus as soon as I looked up, straining brutally to fracture into a mosaic of itself. The gleam bucked inside me as if I’d swallowed a living thing, and I doubled over, eyes squinched shut.
“What’s happening to me?” I managed, before clamping my lips shut. Words were going to lead directly to vomit, that much was for sure.
I heard Malina’s squeak of alarm even as Shimora laid a light hand on the back of my head, rubbing gently until the spasm loosened and the bile stopped lapping at my throat.
“Easy, dear heart,” she soothed. “It’s that you’re back where you belong, is all. The gleam in your blood feels mine, feels all of us.”
Faintly, I remembered Mama telling us of home. That’s what it’s like, when women in our family eat the moon, she had said. We’re bound to each other, braided together. And when we catch fire, we burn as one.
“It merely wants you to let it loose,” Shimora continued. “And you will, but for now, just breathe. I’ll help a little, too.”
“Help how?” I gasped.
“I ply scents, the way your mother plies flavor. You’ve smelled it already, the perfume of my welcome to you both. Scent can mean so many things—it can make one feel, or even see, such a great deal.”
As if she could sense my nausea and mental churn, her distinctive perfume shifted by a single note, fresh and cool as a zephyr, and I relaxed before I even fully registered the change.
So that part of Mama’s story had been another pyrite fleck of truth, then, I thought as I leaned on my thighs, sipping air through parted lips. Our grandmother did make perfumes that swayed the mind, though I wondered if she even needed the physical trappings of essentials and absolutes.
Or if she herself was somehow enough.
“There, that’s better, isn’t it?” she cooed. “It’ll be better still the more you breathe. It’s not just me you’ll smell in here. It’s all of us, the scent of how content we are together. And of how much love there is between us.”