“And then I came here, and humans…” A dreamlike wonder shaded into his tone. “Humans were walking freely, weaponless, gathering in the open, sitting in plazas, laughing, growing old. And I saw a girl… a girl with black eyes and gemstone hair, and… sadness. She had a sadness that was so deep, but it still could turn to light in a second, and when I saw her smile I wondered what it would be like to make her smile. I thought… I thought it would be like the discovery of smiling. She was connected to the enemy, and though the only thing I wanted to do was look at her, I did what I was trained to do and I… I hurt her. And when I went home, I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and I was so grateful that you had defended yourself. That you didn’t let me kill you.”
You. Karou did not miss the pronoun shift. She sat unblinking, barely breathing.
“I came back to find you,” Akiva said. “I don’t know why. Karou. Karou. I don’t know why.” His voice was so faint she could barely hear him. “Just to find you and be in the world that you’re in…”
Karou waited, but he didn’t say any more, and then… something happened in the air around him.
A shimmer, like an aura at first, brightening to light and becoming wings—open and upthrust from his shoulder blades to sprawl over the armchair and sweep the carpet in great arabesques of fire. His glamour had given way, and Karou almost gasped to see his wings revealed, but the flame didn’t catch. It was smokeless, somehow self-contained. The subtle shifts of the fire-feathers were hypnotic, and Karou breathed again, deeply, and sat watching them for minutes as Akiva’s features relaxed into something like peacefulness. This time he was truly asleep.
She got up and took the water glass from his hands. She turned off the light. His wings were sufficient illumination, even for drawing. She got out her sketchbook and a pencil, and she drew Akiva asleep at the locus of his vast wings, and then from memory, with his eyes open. She tried to capture the precise shape of them; she used charcoal for the heavy black kohl that rimmed them and made him look so exotic, and she couldn’t take leaving his fiery irises colorless. She grabbed a watercolor box and painted. She drew and painted for a long time, and he didn’t move except for the soft rise and fall of his chest and the glimmer of his wings, which cast the room in a firelight glow.
Karou didn’t plan to sleep, but some time after midnight she subsided, still half on the landslide of her sketchbooks, to “rest her eyes” for a moment. She fell into dreams, and when she woke just before dawn—something woke her, a quick, bright sound—the room around her was, for a blink, entirely unfamiliar. Only the wings on the wall over her were not, and gave her a surge of pleasure, and then it all slid away as dreams do. She was in her flat, of course, on her bed, and the sound that had awakened her was Akiva.
He was standing over her, and his eyes were molten. They were wide, his orange irises ringed around in white, and he was holding, one in each hand, her crescent-moon knives.
R IGHT
Karou sat up with a suddenness that sent sketchbooks skidding off the bed. Her pencil was still in her hand, and the thought struck her: always with the ridiculous weapon, where this angel was concerned. But even as she adjusted her grip on it, ready to stab, Akiva was backing away, lowering the knives.
He set them where he had found them, where she had left them, in their case, atop the nesting tables. They would have been practically under his nose when he woke.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Just then, lit only by the flicker of his wings, the sight of him was so… right, somehow. He was right. It made no sense at all, but the feeling flooded through Karou, and whatever it was, it was as sweet as a patch of sun on a glossy floor and, like a cat, she just wanted to curl up in it.
She tried to pretend she hadn’t been about to stab him with a pencil. “Well,” she said, stretching and letting it drop casually out of her hand. “I don’t know your customs, but here, if you don’t want to frighten someone, you don’t go looming over their sleeping body with knives.”
Was that a smile? No. A twitch at the corners of his stern mouth; it didn’t qualify.
She caught sight of the sketchbook open before her, the evidence of her late-night portrait session right there for him to see. She flipped it quickly shut, though he’d of course have seen it while she was still sleeping.
How could she have fallen asleep with this stranger in her flat? How could she have brought this stranger to her flat?
He didn’t feel like a stranger.
“They’re unusual,” Akiva said, gesturing to the knife case.
“I just got them. Beautiful, aren’t they?”
“Beautiful,” he agreed, and he might have been talking about the knives, but he was looking straight at her.
She flushed, suddenly conscious of her appearance—mussed hair, sleep drool?—then got angry. What did it matter what she looked like? What exactly was going on here? She shook herself and climbed off the bed, trying to find a space in the tiny room outside his radiant aura. It was impossible.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and stepped into the hall and then the tiny bathroom. Separated from him, she experienced a sharp fear that she would return to find him gone. She relieved herself, wondering if seraphim were above such mundane needs—though judging from the duskiness of his jaw, Akiva was not above the need for a razor—then splashed water on her face and brushed her teeth. She ran a brush through her hair, and every moment she lingered, her anxiety grew that when she returned she would find just an empty room, balcony door standing open and the whole universe of sky above, giving no hint which way he’d gone.
But he was still there. His wings were glamoured gone again, his swords strapped in place at his back, innocuous in their decorative leather sheaths.
“Um,” she said, “bathroom’s in there, if, uh…”
He nodded and went past her, awkward as he tried to wedge his invisible wings into the tiny space and get the door closed.
Karou hurriedly changed into clean clothes, then went to the window. It was still dark out. The clock said five. She was starving, and knew from her previous morning’s foraging that there was nothing even remotely edible in the kitchen. When Akiva emerged, she asked, “Are you hungry?”
“As if I might die of it.”
“Come on, then.” She picked up her coat and keys and started toward the door, then paused and changed direction. She went out onto the balcony instead, climbed up onto the balustrade, glanced back over her shoulder at Akiva, and stepped right off.
Six stories to the street, she landed light as hopscotch, unable to suppress a smile. Akiva was right beside her, unsmiling as ever. She couldn’t quite imagine him smiling; he was so somber, but wasn’t there something in the way he looked at her? There, in that sidelong glance: a hint of wonder? She recalled the things he’d said in the night, and now, seeing flickers of feeling interrupt the sad gravity of his face, it shot a pang through her heart. What had his life been like, given over so young to war? War. It was an abstraction to her. She couldn’t conceptualize its reality, not even the edges of its reality, but the way Akiva had been—dead-eyed—and the way he looked at her now, it made her feel as if he was coming back from the dead for her, and that seemed a tremendous thing, and an intimate one. The next time their eyes met, she had to look away.