He reached out and laid his hand flat against the door. There was a soft glow and a smell of scorching, and when he took away his hand its print was scored into the wood.
That was all, for now.
He turned and walked away, and folk cringed close to walls to let him pass.
Certainly, they couldn’t see him as he truly was. His fiery wings were glamoured invisible, and he should have been able to pass as human, but he wasn’t quite pulling it off. What people saw was a tall young man, beautiful—truly, breath-stealingly beautiful, in a way one rarely beholds in real life—who moved among them with predatory grace, seeming no more mindful of them than if they were statuary in a garden of gods. On his back a pair of crossed swords were sheathed, and his sleeves were pushed up over forearms tanned and corded with muscle. His hands were a curiosity, etched both white with scars and black with the ink of tattoos—simple repeating black lines hatched across the tops of his fingers.
His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, with a hairline that dipped into a widow’s peak. His golden skin was bronzed darker across the planes of his face—high ridges of cheekbones, brow, bridge of the nose—as if he lived his life in drenching rich honey light.
Beautiful as he was, he was forbidding. It was difficult to imagine him breaking into a smile—which indeed Akiva hadn’t done in many years, and couldn’t imagine doing ever again.
But all of this was just fleeting impression. What people fixed on, stopping to watch him pass, were his eyes.
They were amber like a tiger’s, and like a tiger’s they were rimmed in black—the black both of heavy lashes and of kohl, which focused the gold of his irises like beams of light. They were pure and luminous, mesmerizing and achingly beautiful, but something was wrong, was missing. Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves. When, coming around a corner, an old woman found herself in his path, the full force of his gaze fell on her and she gasped.
There was live fire in his eyes. She was sure he would set her alight.
She gasped and stumbled, and he reached out a hand to steady her. She felt heat, and when he continued past, his unseen wings brushed against her. Sparks shivered from them and she was left gaping in breathless, paralyzed panic at his receding form. Plainly she saw his shadow wings fan open and then, with a gust of heat that blew her headscarf off, he was gone.
In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil’s magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint.
In far reaches of the world, Hazael and Liraz were doing the same. Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin.
And it would begin with fire.
10
HITHER-AND-THITHER GIRL
In general, Karou managed to keep her two lives in balance. On the one hand, she was a seventeen-year-old art student in Prague; on the other, errand girl to an inhuman creature who was the closest thing she had to family. For the most part, she’d found that there was time enough in a week for both lives. If not every week, at least most.
This did not turn out to be one of those weeks.
Tuesday she was still in class when Kishmish alighted on the window ledge and rapped at the glass with his beak. His note was even more succinct than yesterday’s and read only Come. Karou did, though if she’d known where Brimstone was sending her, she might not have.
The animal market in Saigon was one of her least favorite places in the world. The caged kittens and German shepherds, the bats and sun bears and langur monkeys, were not sold as pets, but food. An old crone of a butcher’s mother saved teeth in a funerary urn, and it was Karou who had to collect them every few months and seal the deal with a sour swig of rice wine that left her stomach churning.
Wednesday: Northern Canada. Two Athabascan hunters, a sickening haul of wolf teeth.
Thursday: San Francisco, a young blonde herpetologist with a cache of rattlesnake fangs left over from her unfortunate research subjects.
“You know, you could come into the shop yourself,” Karou told her, irritated because she had a self-portrait due the next day and could have used the extra hours to perfect it.
There were various reasons why traders might not come into the shop. Some had lost the privilege through misbehavior; others weren’t yet vetted; many were simply afraid to submit to the serpent collars, which shouldn’t have been a problem in this case, since this particular scientist spent her days with snakes by choice.
The herpetologist shuddered. “I came once. I thought the snake-woman was going to kill me.”
Karou smothered a smile. “Ah.” She understood. Issa was no friend to reptile killers, and had been known to coax her snakes into semi-strangulation as the mood arose. “Well, okay.” She counted out twenties into a decent stack. “But you know, if you do come in, Brimstone will pay you wishes worth much more than this.” He did not, to Karou’s bitterness, entrust her to dispense wishes on his behalf.
“Maybe next time.”
“Your choice.” Karou shrugged and left with a little wave, to head back to the portal and through it, taking note as she did that a black handprint was scorched into its surface. She was going to mention it to Brimstone, but he was with a trader and she had homework to get to, so she went on her way.
Up half the night working on her self-portrait, she was groggy on Friday and hopeful that Brimstone wouldn’t summon her again. He usually didn’t send for her more than twice a week, and it had already been four times. In the morning, while drawing old Wiktor in nothing but a feather boa—a sight Zuzana almost did not survive—she kept an eye on the window. All through afternoon painting studio, she kept fearing that Kishmish would appear, but he didn’t, and after school she waited for Zuzana under a ledge out of the drizzle.
“Well,” said her friend, “it’s a Karou. Get a good look, folks. Sightings of this elusive creature are getting rarer all the time.”
Karou noted the coolness in her voice. “Poison?” she suggested hopefully. After the week she’d had, she wanted to go to the cafe and sink into a couch, gossip and laugh and sketch and drink tea and make up for lost normal.
Zuzana gave her the eyebrow. “What, no errands?”
“No, thank god. Come on, I’m freezing.”
“I don’t know, Karou. Maybe I have secret errands today.”
Karou chewed the inside of her cheek and wondered what to say. She hated the way Brimstone kept secrets from her, and she hated even more having to do the same thing to Zuzana. What kind of friendship was based on evasions and lies? Growing up, she’d found it almost impossible to have friends; the need for lies always got in the way. It had been even worse then because she’d lived in the shop—forget about having a friend over to play! She would exit the portal in Manhattan each morning for school, followed by her lessons in karate and aikido, and go back to it each evening.
It was a boarded-up door of an abandoned building in the East Village, and when Karou was in fifth grade a friend named Belinda had seen her go in and had come to the conclusion that she was homeless. Word got around, parents and teachers got involved, and Karou, unable to produce Esther, her fake grandmother, on short notice, was taken into DHS custody. She was put into a group home, from which she escaped the first night, never to be seen again. After that: a new school in Hong Kong and extra caution that no one saw her using the portal. That meant more lies and secrecy, and no possibility of real friends.
She was old enough now that there was no risk of social services sniffing around, but as for friends, that was still a tightrope. Zuzana was the best friend she’d ever had, and she didn’t want to lose her.
She sighed. “I’m sorry about this week. It’s been crazy. It’s work—”
“Work? Since when do you work?”
“I work. What do you think I live on, rainwater and daydreams?”
She’d hoped to make Zuzana smile, but her friend just squinted at her. “How would I know what you live on, Karou? How long have we been friends, and you’ve never mentioned a job or a family or anything—”
Ignoring the “family or anything” part, Karou replied, “Well, it’s not exactly a job. I just run errands for this guy. Make pickups, meet with people.”
“What, like a drug dealer?”
“Come on, Zuze, really? He’s a… collector, I guess.”
“Oh? What does he collect?”
“Just stuff. Who cares?”
“I care. I’m interested. It just sounds weird, Karou. You’re not mixed up in something weird, are you?”
Oh no, thought Karou. Not at all. Taking a deep breath, she said, “I really can’t talk about it. It’s not my business, it’s his.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Zuzana spun on one platform heel and walked out into the rain.
“Wait!” Karou called after her. She wanted to talk about it. She wanted to tell Zuzana everything, to complain about her crappy week—the elephant tusks, the nightmarish animal market, how Brimstone only paid her in stupid shings, and the creepy banging on the other door. She could put it in her sketchbook, and that was something, but it wasn’t enough. She wanted to talk.
It was out of the question, of course. “Can we please go to Poison?” she asked, her voice coming out small and tired. Zuzana looked back and saw the expression that Karou sometimes got when she thought no one was watching. It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default—like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.
Zuzana relented. “Fine. Okay. I’m dying for some goulash. Get it? Dying. Ha ha.”
The poisoned goulash; it was an old groaner between them, and Karou knew everything was okay. For now. But what about next time?
They set out, umbrella-less and huddled together, hurrying through the drizzle.
“You should know,” Zuzana said, “Jackass has been hanging around Poison. I think he’s lying in wait for you.”
Karou groaned. “Great.” Kaz had been calling and texting, and she had been ignoring him.
“We could go somewhere else—”
“No. I’m not letting that rodent-loaf have Poison. Poison’s ours.”
“Rodent-loaf?” repeated Zuzana.
It was a favorite insult of Issa’s, and made sense in the context of the serpent-woman’s diet, which consisted mainly of small furry creatures. Karou said, “Yes. Loaf of rodent. Ground mouse-meat with bread crumbs and ketchup—”
“Ugh. Stop.”
“Or you could substitute hamsters, I suppose,” said Karou. “Or guinea pigs. You know they roast guinea pigs in Peru, skewered on little sticks, like marshmallows?”
“Stop,” said Zuzana.
“Mmm, guinea pig s’mores—”
“Stop now, before I throw up. Please.”