Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [44]
She woke often to imagined sounds and looked to her windows, hoping as she had never hoped to see Kishmish with a note, but he didn’t come, and the weekend went by with no one checking on her—not Kaz, whom she’d put through plate glass, and not Zuzana, whom she’d conditioned to accept her absences with wary silence. She had never felt so alone.
Monday came, and she still didn’t leave the apartment. Erratically she kept up with the tea and Tylenol. Sleep was a carousel of nightmares, the same creatures coming around again and again—the angel, the thing on Izîl’s back, the wolf chimaera, Brimstone in fury—and when she opened her eyes the light would have changed, but nothing else did except perhaps that her misery deepened.
It was dark when the buzzer rang. And rang. And rang. She pulled herself over to the console by the door and croaked, “Hello?”
“Karou?” It was Zuzana. “Karou, what the hell? Buzz me up, truant.”
Karou was so glad to hear her friend’s voice, so glad someone had come to check on her, that she burst into tears. When Zuzana came through the door she found Karou sitting on the edge of her bed, tears streaming down her battered face. She came to a halt, all five-almost-feet atop cartoonish platform boots, and said, “Oh. Oh. God. Karou.” She was across the tiny room in a streak. Her hands were cool from the wintry air, and her voice was soft, and Karou put her head on her friend’s shoulder and cried for long minutes without stopping.
Things got better after that.
Zuzana got her settled without asking questions, then went out for supplies: soup; bandages; a box of butterfly closures for sealing the split flesh along Karou’s collarbone, arm, and shoulder, where the angel’s sword had cut her.
“These are going to be some serious scars,” said Zuzana, bent over her doctoring with the same concentration she applied to building marionettes. “When did this happen? You should have gone to the hospital right away.”
“I did,” said Karou, thinking of Yasri’s balm. “Sort of.”
“And what—? Are these claw marks?” Both of Karou’s upper arms were livid purple, darkest where Brimstone’s fingers had sunk in, and pierced with scabbed puncture marks.
“Um,” said Karou.
Zuzana regarded her in silence, then got up and heated the soup she’d brought. She sat on a chair beside the bed, and when Karou finished eating, she kicked her feet—bootless now—up on the mattress and folded her hands in her lap. “Okay,” Zuzana said. “I’m ready.”
“For what?”
“For a really good story that I hope will be the truth.”
The truth. Karou attempted a subject change—“First tell me what happened Saturday with violin boy”—while she rolled the idea of truth around in her mind.
Zuzana snorted. “I don’t think so. Well, his name is Mik, but that’s all you’re getting until you do some talking.”
“His name! You got his name!” This morsel of normal life made Karou almost absurdly happy.
“Karou, I’m serious.” She was serious. Her dark Slavic eyes took on a no-nonsense intensity that Karou had told her in the past would stand her in good stead as an interrogator with the secret police. “Tell me what the hell happened to you.”
The thing was, Karou told the truth all the time, but she told it with that sardonic smile, as if she were being outrageous. Did she even have a facial expression that went with telling the truth in earnest? And what would she say? This wasn’t a story she could ease into gently, like dipping a toe in cold water. She had to just jump.
“An angel tried to kill me,” she said.
A beat, and then, “Uh-huh.”
“No, really.” Karou was conscious—too conscious—of her expression. She felt as if she were auditioning for the role of “truth teller” and trying way too hard.
“Did Jackass do this?”
Karou laughed, too quick and too hard, then winced and held her swollen cheek.