Something was happening to her.
Sometimes when she looked in the mirror now, she experienced a moment of blank unfamiliarity, as if she were meeting the gaze of a stranger. Her name, called out to her, didn’t always register, and even the lay of her shadow could strike her as foreign. Recently she’d caught herself testing it with quick gestures to see if it was hers. She was pretty sure this was not normal behavior.
Zuzana disagreed. “It’s probably post-traumatic stress disorder,” she’d said. “What would be weird is if you were fine. I mean, you lost your family.”
Karou still marveled at the way in which Zuzana had accepted her whole bizarre story. Her friend was not, in practice, someone who believed in things, but after seeing Kishmish and getting a little scuppy demonstration she’d bought it all, and it was a good thing. Karou needed her. Zuzana was her anchor to her normal life. What remained of it, anyway.
She was still in school, if only technically. After the angel arsons it had taken about a week for her injuries to heal, at least enough that the yellow-green stage of her bruises could be concealed with makeup. She’d gone back to class for a couple of days, but it was a lost cause. She couldn’t keep her focus, and her hand, clasping pencil or paintbrush, seemed incapable of delicacy. A furious energy built up in her, and more than ever before she was plagued by that phantom sense that she was meant to be doing something else.
Something else. Something else. Something else.
She made contact with Esther and other of Brimstone’s less-vile associates around the world to confirm that the phenomenon was global: The portals were gone, every last one.
She also, in the process, discovered something quite unexpected: She was rich. Brimstone, it turned out, had established bank accounts for her over the course of her life. Juicy bank accounts overflowing with zeroes. She even owned real estate, such as the buildings in which, until recently, the portals had been. And land. A swamp, of all things. An abandoned medieval hill town in the lava path of Mount Etna. A mountain flank in the Andes where an amateur paleontologist claimed—to widespread scientific merriment—to have unearthed a cache of “monster skeletons.”
Brimstone had seen to it that Karou would never worry about money, which was lucky, as she had to pay her “social calls” in the way of ordinary humans: airplanes, passport, overly friendly businessmen, and all.
She made it to school only sporadically after that, claiming family emergency. If not for all the extra work she did, the constant drawing in her new sketchbook—number ninety-three, which picked up where ninety-two, left behind in Brimstone’s shop, had so abruptly cut off—she would surely have gotten the boot by now. As it was, she was hanging by a thread.
The last time she was there, Profesorka Fiala had been all frowns and judgment. Leafing through Karou’s sketchbook, she paused on one drawing in particular, a rendering of the angel in Marrakesh, done from memory. It was of the moment Karou had first seen him up close in the alley. “This is life drawing class, Karou,” said Fiala. “Not fantasy drawing.”
Karou did a double take. She was pretty sure she’d left the wings out, and indeed, she saw, she had. “Fantasy?” she asked.
“No one is this perfect,” said the teacher, skimming dismissively past the page.
Karou didn’t argue, but later had said to Zuzana, “The funny thing is, I didn’t even do him justice. Those eyes. Maybe a painting could capture those eyes, but a drawing never could.”
“Yeah, well,” said Zuzana, “he’s one scary-looking beautiful bastard, is what he is.”
“I know. You should have seen him.”
“Well. I certainly hope I never do.”
“I kind of hope I do, actually,” said Karou, who no longer made the mistake of going out unarmed. She’d made a poor showing of herself in that fight, and cringed to think of the way she’d run away. If she were to see the angel again, she would stand her ground.
Where school was concerned, however, there was no ground to stand. She had no semester project to speak of and she couldn’t squeak by on her sketchbook and feverish last-minute catch-ups anymore, and as hard as it was to just let it go, she had bigger things to worry about.
After the fires, her first trip had been to Marrakesh. She kept remembering what Izîl had yelled to her: “You must get to Brimstone. Tell him the seraphim are here. They’ve gotten back in. You must warn him!”
He knew something. It was the whole point of his bruxis: knowledge. And while Karou had always wondered what he had learned, now she needed urgently to know. So she’d gone to find him, only to learn, to her great sadness, that he had thrown himself off the Koutoubia minaret later the same night she’d left him. Thrown himself? Not likely, she thought, vividly recalling the angel’s soul-dead countenance, the bite of his blade, and the scars he’d left her to remember him by.
Zuzana had actually screen-printed her a T-shirt on the press at school that read: I MET AN ANGEL IN MOROCCO AND ALL I GOT WERE THESE LOUSY SCARS. She’d made another one, too: I SAW AN ANGEL AND YOU DIDN’T. SUCK IT, RAPTURE-MONKEYS!
The sentiment was a response to the worldwide fervor in the wake of the angel sightings. Though accounts of the encounters were initially brushed off as the ravings of drunks and children, the evidence had become too intriguing to ignore. Grainy video and a few photographs had gone viral on the Web and even crossed over to the mainstream media, with headlines like ANGELS OF DEATH: HARBINGERS OR HOAX? announced in drippy prime-time voices. The best footage came from a carpet merchant’s phone and showed the attack on Karou, though she was, mercifully, just an unidentifiable silhouette in the background, blurred out by the heat shimmer of the angel’s wings.
A far as she could tell, that was the only time that the angels—and there had been more than the one—had revealed their wings, but a number of witnesses claimed to have seen them fly, or at least to have seen their winged shadows. A nun in India had a burn in the shape of a feather on her palm, which was drawing throngs of pilgrims from around the world, hoping to be blessed by her. Rapture cults had packed their suitcases and were massing together in great vigils, waiting for the end. Online message boards were daily filled with new angel sightings, none of which rang true to Karou.
“All bogus,” she’d told Zuzana. “Just crackpots waiting for the Apocalypse.”
“Because how fun, right?” Zuzana had rubbed her hands together in mock glee. “Oh, boy, the Apocalypse!”
“Right? I know. How much does your life have to suck to want the Apocalypse?”
And with that, they had spent an entire evening at Poison—with Mik, incidentally, Zuzana’s “violin boy” and now official boyfriend—drinking apple tea and playing the game How much would your life have to suck to want the Apocalypse?
“It would have to suck so much that your bunny slippers are your only friends.”
“It would have to suck so much that your dog wags its tail when you leave.”
“That you know all Celine Dion’s lyrics.”
“That you wish the entire world would end so you don’t have to wake up one more day in your crappy house—which, by the way, has no art in it whatsoever—feed your surly kids, and go to a mind-numbing job where someone is sure to have brought doughnuts to make your ass even fatter. That is how much your life has to suck to want the Apocalypse.”
That, for the win, was Zuzana.
Ah, Zuzana.
Out in the wilderness of Idaho now, as Karou spent her first-ever gavriel in the fulfillment of a lifelong wish—the gavriel vanished, and she rose smoothly off the ground—her first thought was, Zuzana has got to see this.
She was floating. She gave a delighted hoot and put her arms out for balance, sculling at the air as if she were floating in the sea, but… it wasn’t the sea. It was the air. She was flying. Well, maybe not quite flying—yet—but floating at the threshold of the whole freaking sky. Which happened to wrap around the whole freaking world. Above her, night was huge and everywhere, full of stars and wild things—an infinitely deep, infinitely penetrable sphere, and she rose up higher and higher, claiming it.
She could see the roof of Bain’s cabin from over the treetops now. Breezes whispered in her ears, cold but playful, seeming to welcome her to the high places. She couldn’t help laughing. Once she started, she couldn’t stop. It was a helpless, incredulous stream of giggles that sounded a little nuts, but who wouldn’t sound a little nuts at a moment like this?
She was flying.
God, she wished there was someone here to share it with.
She would soon be sharing it with someone, but it was not, to say the least, the… er, individual… she would choose to share anything with, if all else were equal. But all else was not equal. There was only one individual in the entire world who could help her do what she needed to do, and that, unfortunately, was Razgut.
The thought of Izîl’s creature made Karou shudder, but her fate was now tied up with his.
In Marrakesh, after learning of Izîl’s death, she had wandered the lanes around the mosque in a desolation of disappointment. She’d been so sure Izîl would be able to tell her what was going on. She’d been counting on it with such intensity. She crumpled against a wall and gave in to tears that were a mixture of grief over the death of the poor, tortured man, and frustration for herself.
And then, echoing over the ground, came an unholy chuckle. Beneath a broken donkey cart something shifted, and Razgut dragged himself into the light. “Hello, lovely,” he purred, and it was a testament to Karou’s mental state that she was actually glad to see him.
“You survived the fall,” she said.
But not unscathed. Bereft of his human, he was splayed out over the ground. One arm had been crushed; he cradled it to his chest and dragged himself with the other, legs limp behind him. And his head, his awful purple head, was flattened at the temple, crusted with dried blood, and still embedded with rocks and broken glass.
He gave an impatient flick of the hand. “I’ve fallen farther.”
Karou was skeptical. The minaret towered overhead, the tallest structure in the city.
Seeing her glance up at it, Razgut chuckled again. It was a curdled sound: mingled misery and spite. “That’s nothing, blue lovely. A thousand years ago, I fell from heaven.”
“Heaven. There is no heaven.”
“Quibble, quibble. The sky, then, if you know so much. And I didn’t exactly fall. That makes me sound clumsy, doesn’t it? As though I tripped and fell into your world. No. I was thrown. Cast out. Exiled.”
And that was how Karou had learned of Razgut’s origin. It was hard to believe, looking at him and remembering the angel—that mythic, perfect being—that they were kin, but when she forced herself to really look at Razgut, she began to see it. And the splintered joints of his lost wings could not be denied. He was not a creature of this world.
She had also understood, finally, the twisted fulfillment of Izîl’s bruxis. In wishing for knowledge of the other world, he had gotten himself saddled with Razgut, who could tell him everything that Brimstone would not.