The angel wasn’t moving.
She spun and sprinted away. Whatever had happened, a silence had risen from it, and it followed her. She could hear only her own breathing, weirdly amplified like she was in a tunnel. She rounded the bend in the alley at speed, skidding on her heel to avoid a donkey standing stubborn in the middle of the lane. The portal was in sight, a plain door in a row of plain doors, but something was different about it now. A large black handprint was burned into the wood.
Karou flung herself at it, hammering with her fists in a frenzy such as she had never unleashed on a portal before. “Issa!” she screamed. “Let me in!”
A long, awful moment, Karou looking back over her shoulder, and then the door finally swung open.
She started to dart forward, then let out a choked cry. It was not Issa or the vestibule, but a Moroccan woman with a broom. Oh no. The woman’s eyes narrowed and she opened her mouth to scold, but Karou didn’t wait. She pushed her back inside and shoved the door closed, staying outside. Frantically she knocked again. “Issa!”
She could hear the woman shouting and feel her trying to push the door open. Karou swore and held it shut. If it was open, the magic of the portal couldn’t connect. In Arabic she hollered, “Get away from the door!”
She looked over her shoulder. There was a commotion in the street, arms waving, people shouting. The donkey stood unimpressed. No angel. Had she killed him? No. Whatever had happened, she knew he wasn’t dead. He would come.
She pounded on the door again. “Issa, Brimstone, please!”
Nothing but irate Arabic. Karou held the door closed with her foot and kept pounding. “Issa! He’s going to kill me! Issa! Let me in!”
What was taking so long? Seconds hung like scuppies on a string, vanishing one after another. The door was jumping against her foot, someone trying to force it open—could it be Issa?—and then she felt a draft of heat at her back. She didn’t hesitate this time but turned, jamming her back up against the door to hold it closed, and raised her hands as if to let her tattoos see. There was no detonation this time, only a crackling of energy that raised her hair like Medusa’s serpents.
The angel was stalking toward her, head lowered so he was looking at her from the tops of his burning eyes. He didn’t move with ease, but as if against a wind. Whatever power in Karou’s tattoos had hurled him against that wall, it hindered him now but didn’t stop him. His hands were fists at his sides, and his face was ferocious, set to endure pain.
He stopped a few paces away and looked at her, really looked at her, his eyes no longer dead but roving over her face and neck, drawn back to her hamsas, and again to her face. Back and forth, as if something didn’t add up.
“Who are you?” he asked, and she almost didn’t recognize the language he spoke as Chimaera, it sounded so soft on his tongue.
Who was she? “Don’t you usually find that out before you try to kill someone?”
At her back, a renewed pressure at the door. If it wasn’t Issa, she was finished.
The angel came a step closer, and Karou moved aside so the door burst open.
“Karou!” Issa’s voice, sharp.
And she spun and leapt through the portal, pulling it shut behind her.
Akiva lunged after her and yanked it back open, only to come face-to-face with a hollering woman who blanched and dropped her broom at his feet.
The girl was already gone.
He stood there a moment, all but unaware of the madness around him. His thoughts were spinning. The girl would warn Brimstone. He should have stopped her, could easily have killed her. Instead he’d struck slowly, giving her time to spin clear, dance free. Why?
It was simple. He’d wanted to look at her.
Fool.
And what had he seen, or thought he’d seen? Some glimpse of a past that could never come again—the phantom of the girl who had taught him mercy, long ago, only to have her own fate undo all her gentle teaching? He’d thought every spark of mercy was dead in him now, but he hadn’t been able to kill the girl. And then, the unexpected: the hamsas.
A human marked with the devil’s eyes! Why?
There was only one possible answer, as plain as it was disturbing.
That she was not, in fact, human.
15
THE OTHER DOOR
In the vestibule, Karou fell to her knees. Breathing hard, she leaned into the coil of Issa’s serpent body.
“Karou!” Issa gathered her into an embrace that left them both sticky with blood. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
“You didn’t see him?” Karou was dazed.
“See who?”
“The angel…”
Issa’s reaction was profound. She reared back like a serpent ready to strike and hissed, “Angel?”All her snakes—in her hair, around her waist and shoulders—writhed along with her, hissing. Karou cried out, her wounds wrenched by the violent motion.
“Oh, my dear, my sweet girl. Forgive me.” Issa softened again, cradling Karou like a child. “What do you mean, angel? Surely not—”
Karou blinked up at her. Shadows were closing in. “Why did he want to kill me?”
“Darling, darling,” Issa fretted. She pulled away Karou’s sword-slashed coat and scarf to see her wounds, but the blood was heavy and still flowing, and the light in the vestibule was dim. “So much blood!”
Karou felt as if the walls were swinging in a slow arc around her. She was waiting for the inner door to unseal, but it didn’t. “Can’t we go in?” Her voice was faint. “I want Brimstone.” She remembered how he’d picked her up and held her when she came in bleeding from St. Petersburg. How she’d felt perfect trust and calm, knowing he would fix her. And he had, and would again….
Issa bunched up Karou’s blood-soaked scarf and tried to stanch her wounds. “He’s not here right now, sweet girl.”
“Where is he?”
“He… he can’t be disturbed.”
Karou whimpered. She wanted Brimstone. Needed him. She said, “Disturb him,” and then she was losing herself, drifting.
Falling.
Issa’s voice, far away.
And then nothing.
By and by, flickering images like badly spliced film: Issa’s eyes and Yasri’s, close, anxious. Soft hands, cool water. Dreams: Izîl and the thing on his back, its bloated face the brown-purple of bruised fruit, and the angel staring straight at Karou like he could ignite her with his eyes.
Issa’s voice, hushed and secretive. “What can it mean, that they are in the human world?”
Yasri. “They must have found a way back in. It took them long enough, for all their high opinion of themselves.”
This was not part of the dream. Karou had come back into consciousness like swimming to a distant shore—effortfully—and she lay silent, listening. She was on her childhood cot in the back of the shop; she knew that without opening her eyes. Her wounds stung, and the smell of healing salve was pungent in the air. The two chimaera stood at the end of the aisle of bookcases, whispering.
“But why attack Karou?” Issa hissed.
Yasri. “You don’t think…? They couldn’t know about her.”
Issa. “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No, no, of course not.” Yasri sighed. “Oh, I wish Brimstone would come back. Do you think we should go and get him?”
“You know he can’t be interrupted. But it shouldn’t be long now.”
“No.”
After a fraught pause, Issa ventured, “He’ll be very angry.”
“Yes,” agreed Yasri, a tremor of fear in her voice. “Oh, yes.”
Karou felt the two chimaera looking at her and tried her best to appear unconscious. It wasn’t hard. She felt sluggish, and pain blossomed across her chest, arm, and collarbone. Slash wounds to keep her bullet scars company. She was thirsty, and knew she had only to let out a murmur for Yasri to scurry toward her with water and a soothing hand, but she kept silent. There was too much to think about.
Yasri had said, “They couldn’t know about her.”
Know what?
It was maddening, this secrecy. She wanted to sit up and scream, “Who am I?” but she didn’t. She feigned sleep, because there was something else nudging at her thoughts.
Brimstone wasn’t here.
He was always here. She had never before been granted admittance to the shop in his absence, and only the extraordinary circumstance of her nearly dying accounted for this breach.
This opportunity.
Karou waited until she heard Yasri and Issa moving away, peering through her lashes to be certain they had gone. She knew that as soon as she shifted her weight to stand the springs of the cot would creak and give her away, so she reached for the strand of scuppies around her wrist.
Yet another use for nearly useless wishes: to silence creaking bedsprings.
She stood and steadied herself, head spinning, wounds burning, without making a sound. Yasri and Issa had taken her boots off, along with her coat and sweater, so she was wearing only bandages and a blood-streaked camisole and jeans. She went barefoot around a pair of cabinets and under hanging strings of camel and giraffe teeth, then paused, listened, and peered out into the shop.
Brimstone’s desk was dark, and so was Twiga’s, no lanterns lit for the hummingbird-moths to flutter to. Issa and Yasri were in the kitchen, out of sight, and the whole shop was cast in gloom, which made the other door stand out all the more, a crack of light giving away its edge.
For the first time in Karou’s life, it was ajar.
Heart pounding, she approached it. She paused for a beat with her hand on the knob, then eased the door open a fraction and peered through it.
16
FALLEN
Akiva found Izîl cowering behind a garbage pile in the Jemaa el-Fna, his creature still clinging to his back. A half circle of frightened humans crowded in on them, menacing, but when Akiva dropped from the sky in an explosion of sparks, they fled in all directions, squealing like slapped pigs.
The creature reached out to Akiva. “My brother,” it crooned. “I knew you’d come back for me.”
Akiva’s jaw clenched. He forced himself to look at the thing. Bloated as its face was, its features held an echo of long-ago beauty: almond eyes, a fine, high-bridged nose, and sensuous lips that were perverse on such a wretched face. But the key to its true nature was at its back. From its shoulder blades protruded the splintered remnants of wing joints.
Incredibly, this thing was a seraph. It could only be one of the Fallen.
Akiva knew the story as legend and had never wondered whether it was true, not until this moment, faced with the proof of it. That there were seraphim, exiled in another age for treason and collaborating with the enemy, cast into the human world forever. Well, here was one of them, and indeed, he had fallen far from what he once had been. Time had curved his spine, and his flesh, pulled taut, seemed to snag on every ridge of vertebrae. His legs dangled uselessly behind him—that was not the work of time, but of violence. They had been pulverized with cruel purpose, that he should never walk again. As if it were not punishment enough that his wings were torn away—not even cut, but torn—his legs were destroyed, too, leaving him a crawling thing on the surface of an alien world.