Лэйни Тейлор - Days of Blood & Starlight

And… the chance to change the course of the rebellion and claim the future. That was enormous, too, but right now the deception felt like everything.

What was already done—the dying—was the easy part. Now he had to be Thiago. If this was going to work, he had to be convincing, starting right here with these seraphim. Which was why he was so immeasurably relieved when Akiva lost consciousness and he could put a quick end to the encounter, at least forestall the inevitable and try to think what to do.

“Take them to the granary,” he told Ten, with what he hoped was the Wolf’s gentle and authoritative contempt. And after she obeyed, with Issa assisting the female seraph with Akiva’s body, and Nisk and Lisseth carrying the dead one between them, he closed the door behind them and fell back against it, squeezed his eyes shut and raised his hands to his face. But oh, how he hated the touch of them. He let them fall. He hated the touch of his own hands. His hands? He held them apart from his body— his body?—and in the tension of his misery they were rigid as rigor mortis, like the hands of the angel whose death he had made himself mock.

There was no escape from the vileness, because the vileness was him .

“I am Thiago,” he heard himself say in low, choked horror. “I am the White Wolf.”

And then, first at one hated hand, then both, Ziri felt a light touch and opened his eyes. Karou was right before him, pale and weeping, bruised and shaking, black-eyed and blue-haired and beautiful and very near, and she was looking at him— into him, to him —and holding both his hands in both of hers.

“ I know who you are,” she said in a fierce sweet whisper. “ I know. And I’m with you. Ziri, Ziri. I see you.”

And then she laid her head on his chest and let him hold her in his murderer’s arms. She smelled of the river and trembled like a breeze on a butterfly’s wing, and Ziri cradled her as if she were their world’s last hope.

And maybe she was.

A sound and it was near and it was wings.

Karou had been sure it must be Thiago’s cohorts returning, and she had neither fled nor hidden. She had frozen like a prey thing, on her knees in the dirt and rocks and blood and vomit and flies and horror, waiting to be found.

And when she saw who it was, when he dropped down before her, his Kirin hooves scattering stones, there had been no room in her shock to be glad—Ziri was alive and he was here —because the undone way he stared at her only sharpened her shock. He looked to the Wolf and back at her. His jaw was loose with disbelief; he actually took a halting step backward, and Karou saw the grotesque tableau as he was seeing it. The indignity of the Wolf’s pose, clothes twisted and wrenched asunder in an unmistakable display, and the little knife lying where he’d dropped it, looking like a letter opener, or a toy.

And her. Shaking. Bloody. Guilty.

She had killed the White Wolf. If she had been thinking at all, she wouldn’t have believed that it could get any worse than that.

But, oh, it had.

Now, in her room, she laid her head on his chest and felt his heart beating against her cheek—fast and faster; she knew it was Ziri’s heart now, not Thiago’s, and she knew, too, that its rushing was for her —and she tried to quell her revulsion for his sake.

She had hoped that her little Kirin shadow might prove an ally, but she had never imagined… this.

After that first instant of slack astonishment he had lunged to her side and he had been so careful with her, so present and good and unfaltering—none of his shyness now; he was all focus and strength. He had held her shoulders, carefully but firmly, and made her look at him.

“You’re all right,” he had told her when he was sure that the blood that painted her wasn’t her own. “Karou. Look at me. You’re all right. He can’t hurt you anymore.”

“He can, he will,” she had said, near hysteria. “He can’t be dead, it can’t stand. They’ll make me bring him back. He’s the White Wolf. He’s the White Wolf .”

That was it, all there was to say. Ziri knew it, too; they didn’t have to talk what-ifs. It was Ziri who saw what to do and who did it. Karou grasped his intent when he drew his crescent-moon blade; she gasped, tried to stop him. He said he was sorry. “But not for myself. That part’s all right. I’m just sorry to leave you alone, for the time between.”

Between. Between bodies.

“No! No!” No no no no no no no. “We’ll think of something else. Ziri, you can’t do this —”

But he did, and with a practiced hand, and his blade was very sharp.

She held him while he died, and his round brown eyes were wide and unafraid, and they were sweet, in the instant before they dulled, they were sweet and hopeful as they’d been when he was a boy following her around Loramendi. That was who she thought of as she held him dead in her arms—the boy he had been—and again now, as he held her in his new arms. She thought of the boy so that she wouldn’t betray him by shuddering. It was so unfair, after the magnitude of his sacrifice, and so cruel, but it was all she could do not to wrench herself away, because though he was Ziri, his arms were the Wolf’s, and his embrace was anathema.

When she couldn’t stand it another moment, she used a pretense to draw back. She reached into her pocket, stepping away, and drew out the thing that she had put there days earlier and half forgotten.

“I have this,” she said. “It’s… I don’t know.” It seemed stupid now. Ridiculous, even—what was he supposed to do with it? It was the tip of his horn, a couple of inches long, that had snapped off in the court when he’d fallen unconscious. She wasn’t sure what had made her take it, and now, as he reached for it, she wished she hadn’t. Because there was a shyness in his voice when he said, “You kept this,” that made it clear he was reading too much into it.

“For you,” she said. “I thought you might want it. That was before…” Before she had buried the rest of him in a shallow grave? Again, her stomach felt like a clenching fist. It had been the best she could do, and at least it wasn’t the pit. Not the pit for the last true Kirin flesh, dear Ellai, be it only so much stardust gathered fleetingly into form. It had been hard enough to shovel dry dirt onto his face. She’d kept thinking she should change her mind. After all, it was up to her. She had two bodies freshly dead. She could mend either one. She could have put Ziri’s soul back where it belonged; he’d done what he’d done and it was so brave, but then it was in her hands. His soul was in her hands.

Ziri’s soul felt like the high roaming wind of the Adelphas Mountains and the beat of stormhunters’ wings, like the beautiful, mournful, eternal song of the wind flutes that had filled their caves with music he could not possibly remember. It felt like home .

And she had put it in such a vessel. Because he was right, after all. This was the only way to take control of the chimaera’s fate. Through such a deception.

If they could pull it off.

It wouldn’t be easy even under ordinary circumstances, but so soon, while they were both still reeling and hadn’t even been able to talk or plan, to come to such a test. The angels must be dealt with.

Karou turned away and went to her table. She righted the chair that she had toppled when Akiva fell through her window, and eased herself into it. The backs of her legs were so torn up from thrashing under Thiago’s weight, and her whole body pretty much felt like it had been clamped in vises. But that would all pass in a day or two; the rest was here to stay. The problems, the terrible responsibility, and the lie that at all costs must go no further than this room.