And the patrols had not yet returned from the first wave of the rebellion.
If anything had happened to them… Just the thought made Karou want to sag down and weep. Of those thirty soldiers, half were newly wrought—hard-earned flesh-and-blood bodies, her arms still blooming with bruises to show for them.
Of the rest, one was Ziri, the only chimaera in the company who, Karou was reasonably sure, had not cheered at her execution.
Ziri.
As Thiago said, it was early yet. Karou sighed and rubbed her temples, which Ten took as assent, her jaws doing their wolf version of a smile.
“Good,” she said. “We’ll start after dinner.”
What? No. Karou was trying to decide whether to retrieve the threads of the argument when, peripherally, she saw a large figure enter the room and stop hard. She knew that shape, even at the edge of sight. She should; she’d just made it.
It was Razor.
24
ANGEL-LOVER
All talk in the hall ceased. Heads swung to look at Razor, poised on the threshold and staring straight at Karou.
Her gut twisted. This was the worst part, always. There were the ones like Amzallag who walked to the pit and woke knowing where they were, with whom, and all that had happened in Eretz. And then there were the souls from the thuribles: the soldiers who had died at Cape Armasin and didn’t even know that Loramendi had fallen, let alone that they were in another world.
Without exception they blinked at Karou dully, not recognizing her. How could they? A blue-haired girl without wings or horns? She was a stranger.
And, of course, she never heard what was said later, when they were told the truth. She liked to imagine someone speaking on her behalf—She’s one of us; she’s the resurrectionist; she brought you back, she brought us here, and look: food!—but thought it was more likely something along the lines of: We have no choice; we need her. Or even, in her darker moments: Much as we’d all love to, we can’t kill her. Yet.
Though, by the look of things, no one had given Razor that message.
“You,” he snarled.
He leapt.
Fast—faster than Ten, who stumbled—Karou was on her feet and clear of the table. Razor landed on it just where she’d been sitting. It gave way under his weight with a powerful crack, its two ends shooting up in the air as it collapsed in a V beneath him. The water drum tipped, spilled, hit the ground with the warp clamor of a gong, and bodies were in motion, everyone a blur but the Heth, who was poised, focused. Vicious.
“Angel-lover,” he spat, and shame lit Karou like a flare.
It was a term of utter degradation; in all Karou’s human languages, there was no insult so loaded with disgust and contempt, no single word that cast such a pall of filth. It was that bad even when it was figurative, a slur.
Never, before her, had it been literal.
A flick of his tail, and Razor spilled forward. That was what the motion looked like. His body was reptilian—Komodo dragon and cobra—and even big as he was, he moved like the wind over grass.
Karou had done that. She had given him that grace, that speed. Note to self, she thought, and leapt clear. She was graceful, too, and fast. She danced backward. Her crescent-moon blades were in her hands. She hadn’t been conscious of drawing them. In front of her, the lion face that had been so beautiful in its resting state on her floor was made grotesque by Razor’s hatred. He opened his jaws, and the voice that came out was scraping, bitter, an anguished roar.
“Do you know what I have lost because of you?”
She did not know, and didn’t want to. Because of you, because of you. She wanted to cover her ears, but her hands were occupied holding blades. “I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice sounded so slight after his, and unconvincing even to her own ears.
Ten was there, saying something low and urgent to him; whatever it was, it had no effect. Razor lunged past her. And past Bast, who made no move to intervene. Granted, she was half his size, but Amzallag could easily have stopped him, and he seemed uncertain, looking back and forth between the two. Karou danced away again. The others just stood there, and in her breast a spark of anger leapt and caught. Ungrateful a**holes, she thought, which struck an unexpected nerve of humor. She and Zuzana used to call everything a**holes—kids, pigeons, fragile old ladies who scowled at Karou’s hair—and it had never stopped being funny. Assholes, crannies, orifii. Now, in the path of this lion-dragon, sticky-souled thing, Karou felt her face crimped by the unlikeliest of expressions: a smile.
It was as sharp as her crescent-moon blades. And with-Razor’s next move, she held her ground and held her knives. Gritting her teeth, she dragged one curved edge hard across the other in a shriek of steel that got his attention for an instant—a pause just long enough for Karou to consider What now? Will I have to kill him? Can I?
Yes.
And then: a flash of white and it was over. Thiago was between them, his back to Karou as he ordered Razor to stand down, and she didn’t have to kill anyone. The Heth obeyed, his restless tail upending chairs at every pace.
Lisseth and Nisk intercepted him and Karou stood there, poised between breaths, blades in her hands and blood thrumming up and down her arms, and for an instant she felt like Madrigal again—not the traitor but the soldier.
Just for an instant.
“Take her back to her room.”
That was Thiago to Ten, as if Karou were an escaped mental patient or something. Her smile vanished. “I’m not done eating,” she said.
“It looks like you are.” He glanced ruefully at the broken table and spilled food. “I’ll bring something up to you. You shouldn’t have to endure this.” His voice was kind, cloyingly so, and when he drew close to ask softly, “Are you all right?” Karou kind of wanted to scratch his face off.
“I’m fine. What do you think I am?”
“I think that you are our most valuable asset. And I think that you need to let me protect you.” He reached for her arm; she jerked it away, and he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.
“I can protect myself,” she said, trying to recapture the brief vibration of power that had possessed her. I am Madrigal, she told herself, but faced with the White Wolf, all she could think was that Madrigal had been a victim, and she couldn’t hold on to the sensation of power. “Whatever you might think,” she said, “I’m not helpless.” But she sounded like she was trying to convince herself as much as him, and without even thinking about it, she wrapped her arms around her middle in a childish gesture of self-protection. She unwrapped them instantly, but that just made her look fidgety.
Thiago’s voice was soft. “I never said you were helpless. But Karou, if anything happened to you we’d be finished. I need you safe. It’s that simple.”
Safe. Not from the enemy but from her own kind—into whom she poured all her care, her health, her pain, day after night after day. Karou gave a hard laugh.
“They need time,” Thiago said. “That’s all. They’ll come to trust you. As I do.”
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
“Of course I do, Karou. Karou.” He looked sad. “I thought we were moving past all of that. There’s no room for petty grudges in these times. We need all of our focus, all of our energy, on the cause.”
Karou might have argued that her execution wasn’t exactly a petty grudge, but she didn’t, because she knew he was right. They did need all their energy on the cause, and she hated that he had had to remind her of it like she was some schoolgirl acting up, and even more, she hated the shaky feeling that was hitting her now that her adrenaline rush was drying up. As much as she resented being packed off to her room at Thiago’s command, it was her room that she wanted, its solitude and safety, so she put her crescent-moon blades back in their sheaths and, trying to act like it was her own idea, she turned and went. She held her head high, but she knew, every step of the way, that she wasn’t fooling anyone.
25
ENEMY QUEUE FORMS HERE
Ten escorted Karou to her room, and she must have taken Karou’s quiet for complaisance, because she chatted away, offering unwelcome critique on recent resurrections, and was caught completely off guard at the top of the stairs when Karou shut the door in her face and slammed down the crossbar.
A moment of stunned silence, and then the thumping began. “Karou! I’m supposed to help you. Let me in. Karou.”
“I love you, crossbar,” whispered Karou, and petted it.
Ten’s voice rose steadily, scolding, huffing. Unbuckling her knife belt, Karou ignored her. On her table lay a half-strung necklace, but she didn’t want to pick it up, and she didn’t want company—or babysitting. She wanted a pencil and a page, and to render the exact look on Razor’s face as he came at her, the V of the broken table and the blur of figures at the periphery who’d done nothing to help her. Drawing had always been how she processed things. Once they were on paper they were hers, and she could decide what power they would hold over her.
She took up her sketchbook and smoothed it open. In the margin she saw the ragged remnants of a torn-out page and recalled, as vividly as if she were looking at it, the sketch of Akiva that had been there. He’d been asleep in her flat. She had destroyed that sketch, of course. She had destroyed them all.
If only she could do the same with her memories.
Angel-lover.
Even the thought of the word brought on shame. How could she have done it: loved Akiva—or rather, thought she had? Because now, whatever there had been between them wore that pall of filth—angel-lover—and looked nothing like love. Lust, maybe. Youth, rebellion, self-destructiveness, perversity. She’d barely known him; how could she have thought it was love? But whatever it had been… could it ever be forgiven?
How many chimaera would Karou have to resurrect before they accepted her?
All of them. That was how many. Every last one who had died because of her. Hundreds of thousands. More.
Which was, of course, impossible. Those souls had evanesced, including the ones dearest to her. They were lost. Was that it, then? No possibility of redemption?
This was her life, and it was her nightmare, too, and sometimes the only way she could bear it was by telling herself it would end. If it was a nightmare, she would wake up and Brimstone would be alive; everyone would be alive. And if it wasn’t a nightmare? Well then, it would end in one of the very many ways that lives end. Sooner or later.
She drew, and captured Razor’s snarl with awful vitality.
You really want to know what I’m up to, Zuzana? Here it is. I’m trapped in a sandcastle with dead monsters, forced to resurrect them one after the next, all while trying to avoid getting eaten.
It sounded like a pitch for a Japanese game show, and Karou couldn’t help laughing again, though only for a second, because Ten heard from the other side of the door and let out a soft snarl. Great. The she-wolf probably thought she was laughing at her.
Enemy queue forms here, wrote Karou below her sketch.
Oh, Zuze.
She cast an eye over her tooth trays and damned them for being so full. She’d been too efficient on her collecting trip; it would be some time before she could plead the necessity of going out again. The faster she worked, though, the faster the time would come, and when it did, she would do more than e-mail Zuzana. She would find her. She would slouch down for tea and goulash with her and Mik at Poison Kitchen and tell them everything, then bask in their outrage on her behalf.