Daughter of Smoke and Bone - Laini Taylor [87]
Akiva, who a moment ago had pressed his face against her legs and wept, stood stock-still, and Karou felt fear for the first time since the two angels had come upon them. If he should take their side…
“Akiva,” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said, and when he moved, it was to her. There had never been any doubt, only a hope that somehow the choice wouldn’t be forced, that the moment could be backed away from, but it was too late for that. So he stepped into his future, coming between Karou and his brother and sister, and he said to them in a low but steady voice, “I won’t let you harm her. There are other ways to live. We have it in us to do else than kill.”
Hazael and Liraz stared at him. Unthinkably, he had chosen the girl. Liraz’s shock quickly turned to bitterness. “Do we?” she flung back at him. “That’s a convenient position to take now, isn’t it?”
Karou had lowered her hands when Akiva came before her. She reached out, just her fingertips to his back, because she couldn’t help it.
He told her, “Karou, you have to go.”
“Go? But—”
“Get away from here. I’ll keep them from following you.” His voice was grim with what that would mean, but his decision was made. He gave her a quick look over his shoulder; his face was strained but set. “I’ll meet you in the place we first saw each other. Promise me you’ll wait for me there.”
The place they first saw each other. The Jemaa el-Fna, heart of Marrakesh, where she had caught his burning gaze through the chaos of a crowd and been pierced through the soul by it. Akiva said, in a voice hoarse with urgency, “Promise me. Karou, promise you won’t go with Razgut until I find you. Until I explain.”
Karou wanted to promise. She saw that he had thrown his allegiance to her, even against his own kind. He had surely saved her life—could she have survived an attack by two armed seraphim?—in addition to which, he had chosen her. Wasn’t that what she had always wanted, to be chosen? Cherished? He had given up his place in his own world for her, and he was asking that she wait for him in Marrakesh.
But something unyielding in her shrank from the promise. He might have chosen her, but that didn’t mean that she would do the same if she were faced with the same choice—against Brimstone, Issa, Yasri, Twiga. She had told Brimstone, “I want you to know I would never just leave you,” and she wouldn’t. She would choose her family. Anything else was unthinkable, though even now the idea of turning and leaving Akiva behind brought on physical pain.
She said, “I’ll wait for you as long as I can. That’s the best I can do.”
And she thought the brilliance of his burning wings dimmed just a little. He said in a hollow voice, still faced away from her, “Then that will have to be good enough.”
Liraz drew her sword, and Hazael followed suit. The police responded by falling back, raising their guns, shouting in Czech for the angels to drop their weapons. The onlookers cried out in a kind of ecstatic terror. Zuzana, jostled among them, kept her eyes on Karou.
Akiva, whose swords were less obvious in their crossed sheaths between his wings, reached double-handed over his shoulders and drew them with a harmonic ringing. Without looking back, he urged, “Karou. Go.”
She gathered herself into a crouch, and just before she sprang skyward to vanish into the ether in a streak of blue and black she said, both choked and pleading, “Come and find me, Akiva.”
And then she was gone, and he was left alone to face the fallout of his shattering choice.
Once upon a time,
an angel lay dying in the mist.
And