Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [45]
Zuzana was not amused. “Jesus, Karou—”
Karou plunged ahead. The truth, she found, felt smooth, like a skipping stone in the palm of your hand. “And my hair? I don’t dye it. I wished it this color. And I speak twenty-six languages, and those were mostly wishes, too. Didn’t you ever think it was weird that I speak Czech? I mean, who speaks Czech but Czechs? Brimstone gave it to me for my fifteenth birthday, right before I came here. Oh, and remember the malaria? I got it in Papua New Guinea, and it sucked. And I’ve been shot, too, and I think I killed the bastard, and I’m not sorry, and for some reason an angel tried to kill me, and he was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and also the scariest, though that wolf guy was pretty freaking scary, too, and last night I pissed off Brimstone really bad and he threw me out, and when I got back here Kaz was waiting and I threw him through glass, which worked out great actually because I didn’t have my key.” Pause. “So I don’t think he’ll try scaring me again, which is about the only good thing to come of all this.”
Zuzana said nothing. She scraped back her chair and pulled on her boots, setting each foot down with a clomp, and she surely would have left then—probably forever—if not for the thunk that rattled the glass panes of the balcony door.
Karou gave a strangled cry and jumped out of bed, mindless of her many hurts. She lunged for the door. It was Kishmish.
It was Kishmish, and he was on fire.
He died in her hands. She smothered the flames and cradled him, and he was raw and charred, the hummingbird fury of his heartbeat giving way to long pauses as she hunched over him saying, “No no no no no—” His forked tongue worked in and out of his beak, and his frantic chirrups tapered away with his heartbeat. “No no no. Kishmish, no—” And then he died. Karou stayed hunched there, on her balcony, holding him. Her string of nos faded to whispers, but she didn’t stop saying them until Zuzana spoke.
Her voice was weak. “Karou?”
Karou looked up.
“Is that…?” Zuzana gestured a jittery hand at Kishmish’s lifeless form. She looked perplexed. “That’s… um. That looks like—”
Karou didn’t help her out. She looked back down at Kishmish and tried to make sense of this sudden intrusion of death. He flew here on fire, she thought. He came to me.
She saw that something was tied to his foot: a piece of Brimstone’s thick notepaper, charred, which crumbled to ashes when she touched it, and… something else. Her fingers shook as she untied it, and then she held the object in her palm. Her heartbeat jumped with a child’s ingrained fear: She wasn’t supposed to touch it.
It was Brimstone’s wishbone.
Kishmish had brought it to her. On fire he had brought it.
Out in the city a siren wailed, and it hurried a connection her mind had been slow to make. Burning. Black handprint. The portal. She struggled to her feet and rushed inside, pulled on a jacket and boots. Zuzana was there, asking, “What is it, Karou? What is that? What—?” but Karou barely heard her.
She went out the door and down the stairs, Kishmish still cradled in her arm, the wishbone tucked in her palm. Zuzana followed her into the street and all the way to Josefov, to the service door that had been Brimstone’s Prague portal.
It was now a blue-white inferno impervious to the jets of the fire hoses.
At the same moment, though Karou didn’t know it, across the world, at every door emblazoned with the black handprint, fires raged. They couldn’t be doused, and