Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [79]
“Yes, I did,” piped Zuzana, and like a child who has gotten a reaction for naughty antics, she merrily repeated, “Mating! Seed!”
“Zuze, stop, please,” begged Karou, helpless and so very glad the two had no common language.
“Fine,” said her friend. “I can be polite. Observe.” She addressed Akiva directly. “Welcome to our world,” she said with exaggerated gestures. “I hope that you are enjoying your visit.”
Chewing on a smile, Karou translated.
Akiva nodded. “Thank you.” To Karou, “Would you tell her, please, that her performance was beautiful?”
Karou did. “I know,” agreed Zuzana. It was her standard acceptance of a compliment, but Karou could tell she was pleased. “It was Karou’s idea.”
Karou didn’t convey that. She said instead, “She’s an amazing artist.”
“So are you,” Akiva replied, and it was Karou’s turn to be pleased.
She told him they went to a school for the arts, and he said they had nothing like that in his world; only apprenticeships. She told him that Zuzana was kind of like an apprentice, that she came from a family of artisans, and she wondered if he was from a family of soldiers. “In a manner of speaking,” he replied. His siblings were soldiers, and so had his father been in his day. He said the word father with an edge, and Karou sensed animosity and didn’t press, and talk shifted back to art. The conversation, filtered through Karou—and Zuzana, even on her best behavior, required a high degree of filtering—was surprisingly easy. Too easy, she thought.
Why was it so easy for her to laugh with this seraph, and keep forgetting the image of the fiery portal, and Kishmish’s little raw body as his heartbeat went wild and then failed? She had to keep reminding herself, chastening herself, and even so, when she looked at Akiva, it all wanted to slip away—all her caution and self-control.
After a moment, he remarked, nodding toward Zuzana, “She’s not actually very scary. You had me worried.”
“Well, you disarm her. You have that effect.”
“I do? It didn’t seem to work on you, yesterday.”
“I had more reason to fight it,” she said. “I have to keep reminding myself we’re enemies.”
It was as if a shadow fell over them. Akiva’s expression turned remote again, and he put his hands under the table, removing his tattoos from her sight.
“What did you just say to him?” Zuzana asked.
“I reminded him that we’re enemies.”
“Tch. Whatever you are, Karou, you are not enemies.”
“But we are,” she said, and they were, no matter how powerfully her body was trying to convince her otherwise.
“Then what are you doing, watching sunrises and drinking tea with him?”
“You’re right. What am I doing? I don’t know what I’m doing.” She thought of what she should be doing: getting herself to Morocco to find Razgut; flying through that slash in the sky to… Eretz. A chill snaked through her. She’d been so focused on getting gavriels that she’d avoided thinking too much about what it would be like to actually go, and now with Akiva’s depiction of his world fresh in her mind—war-torn, bleak—dread crept over her; suddenly, she didn’t want to go anywhere.
What was she supposed to do when she got there, anyway? Fly up to the bars of that forbidding fortress and politely ask if Brimstone was at home?
“Speaking of enemies,” Zuzana said, “Jackass was on TV this morning.”
“Good for him,” said Karou, still in her own thoughts.
“No. Not good. Bad. Bad Jackass.”
“Oh no. What did he do?”
“Well, while you’ve been watching sunrises with your enemy, the news has been all over you, and a certain actor has been most helpful, preening for the camera and telling the world all about you. Like, um, bullet scars? He’s made you out to be some kind of gangster’s moll—”
“Moll? Please. If anything, I’m the gangster—”
“Anyway,” Zuzana cut her off. “I’m sorry to say that whatever anonymity you might have had, blue-haired girl, your flying stunt put an end to it. The police are probably at your flat—”
“What?”
“Yeah. They’re calling your fight a ‘disturbance’ and saying they just want to talk to the, er, people involved,