Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [65]
Karou panicked.
When the angel made as if to move toward her, she threw up her hands between them, both hands at once, and at close range. His eyes went wide and he faltered in the air, a breach in his perfect grace. Karou’s breath caught. He tried to steady himself on the lintel of a fourth-story window, and failed.
His eyes rolled back and he dropped a few feet, sending up sparks. Was he losing consciousness? Karou spoke around a tight constriction in her throat. “Are you okay?”
But he wasn’t, and he fell.
Akiva was dimly aware that he was no longer in the air. Beneath him, stone. In flashes he saw faces peering at him. Consciousness strobed. Voices in languages he couldn’t understand, and at the edge of sight: blue. Karou was there. A roar rose up in his ears and he forced himself upright, and the roar was… applause.
Karou, her back to him, dropped a theatrical curtsy. With a flourish she plucked her knife from where it had embedded itself between cobbles, and sheathed it in her boot. She peered over her shoulder at him, seeming relieved to see him conscious, and then stepped back and… took his hand. Carefully, just her fingertips in his, so her marks wouldn’t burn him. She helped him stand, and said, low in his ear, “Bow.”
“What?”
“Just take a bow, okay? Let them think this was a performance. It’ll be easier to get away. Leave them trying to figure out how we did it.”
He gave an approximation of a bow and the applause thundered.
“Can you walk?” Karou asked.
He nodded.
It still wasn’t easy getting away. People stood in their way, wanting to talk to them. Karou spoke; he didn’t know what was said, didn’t understand the language, but her answers were clipped. The onlookers were awed and delighted—except one of them, a young man in a tall hat who glared at Akiva and tried to take Karou’s elbow. His proprietary air stirred old wrath in Akiva and made him want to throw the human into a wall, but Karou didn’t need his intervention. She brushed the man aside and led Akiva out of the crowd. Her fingers were still in his; they were cool and small, and he was sorry when, turning a corner into a plaza of empty market stalls, she pulled away.
“Are you okay?” she asked, putting distance between them.
He steadied himself against a wall in the shadows beneath an awning. “Not that I didn’t deserve it,” he said. “But I feel as though an army has marched over me.”
She paced, anxious energy fairly vibrating in her. “Razgut said you were looking for me. Why?”
“Razgut?” Akiva was startled. “But I thought he was—”
“Dead? He survived. Not Izîl, though.”
Akiva looked at the ground. “I didn’t know he would jump.”
“Well, he did. But that doesn’t answer my question. Why were you looking for me?”
Again, the helplessness. He groped for meaning. “I didn’t understand who you were. Are. A human, marked with the devil’s eyes.”
Karou looked at her palms, then up at him, a confused vulnerability in her expression. “Why do they… do that? To you?”
He narrowed his eyes. Could she not know?
The eye tattoos were just one example of Brimstone’s deviltry. The magic hit like a wall of wind, one that carried a fury of sickness and weakness, and Akiva had trained to resist it—all seraph soldiers did—but there was only so much he could take. If he’d been in battle, he’d have sliced off the enemy’s hands before letting them focus so much of their evil energy at him. But Karou… the last thing he wanted to do was hurt her again, so he had endured as much as he could.
Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale—a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion. The scorch of her touch on his neck felt like an acid