Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [47]
She stepped uninvited into the cabin. She was dressed in black: slim-fitting wool trousers with boots, and a vintage leather trench belted at the waist. There was a satchel slung across her shoulder, her hair was smoothed back in a single braid, and she wore no makeup. She looked tired. She was tired. “Killed anything fun lately?”
“Do you know something?” Bain asked. “Have the doors opened back up?”
“Oh. No. Nothing like that.” Karou kept her voice light, as if she were paying a social call. It was a farce, of course. Even when she’d been running errands for Brimstone she had never visited here. Bain had always come into the shop himself.
“You weren’t easy to find,” she told him. He lived off the grid; as far as the Internet was concerned, he didn’t exist. Karou had spent several wishes to track him down—low-grade wishes that she’d liberated from other traders.
She looked around the room. A plaid couch, some glazed-eyed elk heads mounted on the wall, and a Naugahyde recliner held together with duct tape. A generator hummed outside the window, and the room was lit by a bare bulb. She shook her head. “Gavriels to play with, and you live in a dump like this? Men.”
“What do you want?” Bain asked, wary. “Do you want teeth?”
“Me? No.” She perched on the edge of the recliner. Still with that hard, bright smile, she said, “Teeth are not what I want.”
“What, then?”
Karou’s smile disappeared, like flipping a switch. “I think you can guess what I want.”
A beat. Then Bain said, “I don’t have any. I used them all.”
“Well. I don’t think I’ll take your word on that.”
He gestured around the room. “Have a look, then. Knock yourself out.”
“See, the thing is, I know where you keep them.”
The hunter went still, and Karou considered the shotgun on the table. It was disassembled, not a threat. The question was whether he had another gun within reach. Probably. He was not a one-gun kind of guy.
His fingers twitched almost imperceptibly.
Karou’s pulse jumped in her hands.
Bain lunged for the couch. She was already moving. Smooth as dance, she leapt over the coffee table, caught his head with the flat of her palm and drove it against the wall. With a croak he collapsed onto the couch, and for an instant he was free to scrabble with both hands in the sofa cushions, frantic, and then he found what he was looking for.
He whipped around, pistol raised. Karou caught his wrist with one hand and grabbed a fistful of beard with the other. A crack; a bullet blazed over her head. She braced one foot against the sofa, heaved him by the beard, and swung him to the floor. The table tipped and shotgun parts scattered. Keeping her grip on his wrist, pistol pointed away, she came down hard on his forearm with her knee and heard bones grind. He yelped and released the gun. Karou took it up and pressed its muzzle into his eye socket.
“I’m going to forgive you for that,” she said. “I do see, from your perspective, that this sucks. I just don’t feel all that bad about it.”
Bain was breathing hard and looking murder at her. Up close he smelled rancid. Still holding the gun to his eye, Karou steeled herself and reached into the greasy thatch of his beard to root around. Right away her hand encountered metal. So it was true. He kept his wishes in his beard.
She drew her knife from her boot.
“Do you want to know how I knew?” she asked him. He’d drilled holes in the wish coins and knotted his dirty hair right through them. She sliced them free one by one. “It was Avigeth. The snake? She had to circle your stinking neck, didn’t she? I did not envy her that. Did you think she wouldn’t tell Issa what you have hidden in this disgusting shrub of yours?”
It gave her a pang, remembering those casual nights in the shop, sitting cross-legged on the floor, sketching Issa and gossiping while Twiga’s tools droned in the corner and Brimstone strung his endless necklaces of teeth. What was happening there now?
What?
Bain’s wishes were mostly shings. There were a few lucknows, though, and best of all, heavy as hammers, there were two gavriels.