Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [2]
Maybe Zuzana was right. Maybe she should tase him.
“Sketchbook,” commanded Zuzana, holding out her hand like a surgeon for a scalpel.
Karou’s best friend was bossy in obverse proportion to her size. She only passed five feet in her platform boots, whereas Karou was five foot six but seemed taller in the same way that ballerinas do, with their long necks and willowy limbs. She wasn’t a ballerina, but she had the look, in figure if not in fashion. Not many ballerinas have bright blue hair or a constellation of tattoos on their limbs, and Karou had both.
The only tattoos visible as she dug out her sketchbook and handed it over were the ones on her wrists like bracelets—a single word on each: true and story.
As Zuzana took the book, a couple of other students, Pavel and Dina, crowded in to look over her shoulder. Karou’s sketchbooks had a cult following around school and were handed around and marveled at on a daily basis. This one—number ninety-two in a lifelong series—was bound with rubber bands, and as soon as Zuzana took them off it burst open, each page so coated in gesso and paint that the binding could scarcely contain them. As it fanned open, Karou’s trademark characters wavered on the pages, gorgeously rendered and deeply strange.
There was Issa, serpent from the waist down and woman from the waist up, with the bare, globe breasts of Kama Sutra carvings, the hood and fangs of a cobra, and the face of an angel.
Giraffe-necked Twiga, hunched over with his jeweler’s glass stuck in one squinting eye.
Yasri, parrot-beaked and human-eyed, a frill of orange curls escaping her kerchief. She was carrying a platter of fruit and a pitcher of wine.
And Brimstone, of course—he was the star of the sketchbooks. Here he was shown with Kishmish perched on the curl of one of his great ram’s horns. In the fantastical stories Karou told in her sketchbooks, Brimstone dealt in wishes. Sometimes she called him the Wishmonger; other times, simply “the grump.”
She’d been drawing these creatures since she was a little girl, and her friends tended to talk about them as if they were real. “What was Brimstone up to this weekend?” asked Zuzana.
“The usual,” said Karou. “Buying teeth from murderers. He got some Nile crocodile teeth yesterday from this awful Somali poacher, but the idiot tried to steal from him and got half strangled by his snake collar. He’s lucky to be alive.”
Zuzana found the story illustrated on the book’s last drawn pages: the Somali, his eyes rolling back in his head as the whip-thin snake around his neck cinched itself as tight as a garrote. Humans, Karou had explained before, had to submit to wearing one of Issa’s serpents around their necks before they could enter Brimstone’s shop. That way if they tried anything fishy they were easy to subdue—by strangulation, which wasn’t always fatal, or, if necessary, by a bite to the throat, which was.
“How do you make this stuff up, maniac?” Zuzana asked, all jealous wonderment.
“Who says I do? I keep telling you, it’s all real.”
“Uh-huh. And your hair grows out of your head that color, too.”
“What? It totally does,” said Karou, passing a long blue strand through her fingers.
“Right.”
Karou shrugged and gathered her hair back in a messy coil, stabbing a paintbrush through it to secure it at the nape of her neck. In fact, her hair did grow out of her head that color, pure as ultramarine straight from the paint tube, but that was a truth she told with a certain wry smile, as if she were being absurd. Over the years she’d found that that was all it took, that lazy smile, and she could tell the truth without risk of being believed. It was easier than keeping track of lies, and so it became part of who she was: Karou with her wry smile and crazy imagination.