“As equals?” Karou asked. “You keep calling them ‘beasts,’ so I have to wonder.”
He didn’t answer right away. “What have you seen of them, Karou? Did you say four chimaera, and none of them warriors? When you have seen your brothers and sisters gored by minotaurs, mauled by lion-dogs, ripped to pieces by dragons, when you have seen your—” Whatever he was about to say, he bit it off hard, with a look of agony. “When you have been tortured and forced to witness the execution of… loved ones… then you can speak to me of what makes a beast.”
Loved ones? He didn’t mean brothers and sisters, the way he said that. Karou felt a pang of… surely it wasn’t jealousy. What did it matter who he loved, or had loved? She swallowed. What could she say? She couldn’t contradict a thing he’d told her. Her ignorance was entire, but that didn’t mean she had to just believe him, either. “I’d like to hear Brimstone’s side,” she said quietly. Something occurred to her then, something big. “You could take me there. You could take me back.”
He blinked, startled, then shook his head. “No. It’s no place for humans.”
“And this is a place for angels?”
“It’s not the same. It’s safe here.”
“Oh, really? Tell my scars how safe it is here.” She pulled the collar of her shirt out of shape to reveal the puckered slash of scar tissue across her collarbone. Akiva winced at the sight of it, ugly and of his own making, and Karou set her collar back in place. “Besides,” she argued, “there are more important things than safety. Like… loved ones.” She felt cruel, using his words, like she was twisting a knife.
“Loved ones,” he repeated.
“I told Brimstone I would never just leave him, and I won’t. I’m going, even without your help.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
“There are ways,” she said, cagey. “But it would be easier if you would take me.” Easier indeed. What a preferable traveling companion Akiva would be to Razgut.
But he said, “I can’t take you. The portal is guarded. You’d be killed on sight.”
“You seraphim do a lot of that, killing on sight.”
“The monsters have made us who we are.”
“Monsters.” Karou thought of Issa’s laughing eyes, Yasri’s excitable flutter and soothing touch. She called them monsters herself sometimes, but fondly, the same way she called Zuzana rabid. From Akiva’s mouth, the word was just ugly. “Beasts, devils, monsters. If you’d ever known any chimaera, you couldn’t dismiss them like that.”
He dropped his eyes and didn’t answer, and the thread of their conversation was lost in a tense silence. She thought he looked pale, still unwell. The tea mugs were big earthen affairs without handles, and Karou cupped hers with both hands. She kept her palms flat against it, both to warm them up after the frigid hours atop the cathedral and to prevent herself from inadvertently flashing any painful magic at Akiva. Across the table, his pose mirrored her own, his hands also wrapped around his mug, so that she couldn’t help seeing his tattoos: the repeating black bars across the tops of his fingers.
Each one was slightly raised, like scar tissue, and Karou thought that, unlike hers, they were just cuts rubbed in lampblack—a primitive procedure. The longer she looked at them, the more she was seized with a strange sense of knowing something, or almost knowing it. It was as if she was at the cusp of an awareness, vibrating between knowing and not knowing, so fast that she couldn’t quite register what it was—like trying to see the wings of a bee in flight. She couldn’t fix on it.
Akiva saw her staring, and it made him self-conscious. He shifted, covering one hand with the other, as if he could blot out the tattoos.
“Do yours have magic in them, too?” Karou asked.
“No,” he said, she thought, a little gruffly.
“What, then? Do they mean something?”
He didn’t answer and she reached out, unthinking, to trace them with her fingertip. They were in a classic five-count pattern: For every four lines, the fifth was a diagonal strike-through. “It’s a count,” she said, as her fingertip moved lightly from one five-count to the next on his right index finger—five, ten, fifteen, twenty—and each time she touched him it was like a leaping spark and a call, a call to entwine her fingers in his, and even—god, what was wrong with her?—to lift his hands to her lips and kiss the marks there….
And then, out of nowhere, she knew. She knew what they tallied, and snatched back her hand. She stared at him and he sat there, unguarded, ready to accept whatever judgment she would lash at him.
“They’re kills,” she said, faint. “They’re chimaera.”
He didn’t deny it. As when she had attacked him, he wouldn’t defend himself. His hands stayed where they were, still as bones, and Karou knew he was fighting the urge to hide them.
She was shaking, staring at those marks, thinking of the ones she’d touched—twenty on one index finger alone. “So many,” she said. “You’ve killed so many.”
“I’m a soldier.”
Karou imagined her own four chimaera dead and put a hand over her mouth, afraid she might be sick. When he’d been telling her of the war, it was a world away. But Akiva was real and right in front of her, and the fact that he was a killer was real now, too. Like teeth spilled across Brimstone’s desk, all those marks stood for blood, death—not of wolves and tigers, but the blood and death of chimaera.
She was looking at him, fixed on him, and… she saw something. As if the moment split like an eggshell to reveal another moment inside it, almost indistinguishable from it—almost—and then it was gone, and time stood intact. Akiva was just as he had been and nothing at all had happened, but that glimpse…
Karou heard herself say, in a vague voice that might have emanated from within that eggshell moment, “You have more now.”
“What?” Akiva regarded her, blank—then, like lightning strike, not blank. He sat sharply forward, his eyes wide and flashing, the sudden movement upsetting his tea. “What?” he said again, louder.
Karou drew back. Akiva seized her hand. “What do you mean, I have more now?”
She shook her head. More marks, she’d meant. She had seen something in that spliced moment. There was the real Akiva, sitting before her, and there was a flash of the impossible, too: Akiva smiling. No grim twist of the lips but, warm with wonderment, a smile so beautiful it ached. There were crinkles at the corners of his eyes, which were merry and asquint with unselfconscious happiness. The change was profound. If he was beautiful when grave—and he was—smiling, he was nothing short of glorious.
But Karou would swear that he had not smiled.
And that impossible Akiva, who had existed for that instant—there had been something else: his hands had carried fewer marks, some of his fingers entirely bare of them.
Her hand was still in his, resting in the puddle of his spilled tea. The waitress came out from behind the counter and stood poised with a towel, uncertain. Karou extricated her hand and sat back to let her wipe up the mess, which she did, still glancing back and forth between them. When she was finished she asked, hesitantly, “I was just wondering… I was wondering how you did it.”
Karou looked at her, uncomprehending. The waitress was a girl about her own age, full-cheeked and flushed. “Last night,” she clarified. “The flying.”
Ah. The flying. “You were there?” Karou asked. It seemed a strange coincidence.
“I wish,” said the girl. “I saw it on TV. It’s been on the news all morning.”
Oh, thought Karou. Oh. Her hand went to her phone, which had been giving off snippy snorts and buzzes for the past hour or so, and she checked its screen. Missed calls and texts spooled across it, most from Zuzana and Kaz. Damn.