Лэйни Тейлор - Days of Blood & Starlight

“We are going. But there’s something I have to tell you.” Akiva paused, seeing Karou tense. What did she think he was going to say? Was she afraid that he’d come to speak of love? He shook his head, wanting to assure her that those days were over, that she had no more such torment to fear from him. Tonight he brought a new torment. Again he was the bearer of an impossible choice. He said, “I am going to seal the portals.”

Whatever she was braced for, it wasn’t that. Her voice was a gasp. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I wanted to warn you,” he said, “so you could decide which side you’ll be on.”

Which side: Eretz or the human world? Which life will you give up?

“Which side ?” She came out from behind her table. “You can’t. Not this portal. I need it. We need it.” What began as astonishment was becoming outrage, edged with panic. Issa moved to her side in a ripple. “Haven’t you burned enough? Why would you even try—?”

“To save both worlds,” said Liraz, “from corrupting each other.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Weapons,” said Akiva simply. He paused. He couldn’t begin to imagine compressing all that had happened in the Tower of Conquest into a neat explanation to offer her. “Jael. He may be dead, but if he’s not, he’ll be coming here for weapons. With the Dominion.”

The whites of Karou’s eyes were rings around her black irises, and she put out a hand to steady herself on her table. “How could he even know about human weapons?” A flash of fury. “Did you tell him?”

Another stab, that she could believe that Akiva would arm Jael, but it was no satisfaction to him to tell her the truth. He wished he could lie and spare her. “Razgut,” he said.

She stayed frozen a moment in her stare, then shut her eyes. All the rose-flush that had colored her cheeks drained away, and she made a small, anguished moan. At her side, Issa whispered, “It is not your fault, sweet girl.”

“It is,” she said, opening her eyes. “Whatever else isn’t, this is .”

“And mine,” said Akiva. “I found a portal for the Empire.” The portals—and hence the human world—had been lost to seraphim for a millenium; Akiva had changed that. He had found one portal, the one in Central Asia, above Uzbekistan. Razgut had shown Karou the other. “They could come by either portal. Jael planned it as a pageant, to play on all that humans believe angels to be.”

Karou was clutching Issa’s hand and taking long, shallow breaths. “Because things weren’t bad enough already,” she said, and began to laugh a broken laugh that Akiva could feel in his heart.

He wanted to fold her in his arms and tell her it would be all right, but he couldn’t promise that, and, of course, he couldn’t touch her. “The portals must be closed,” he said. “If you need time to decide—”

“To decide what? Which world I’ll be in?” She stared at him. “How can you ask that?”

And Akiva knew that Karou would choose Eretz. Of course, he had known it already. If he hadn’t, he thought that no magnitude of threat—worlds at stake and lives—could have induced him to close the doors between them and trap himself forever in a world where she was not. “You have a life here,” he said. “There may never be a way back.”

“Back?” She cocked her head in that bird way that was pure Madrigal. She was bruised and shadowed, standing before him, breathing fast and summoning courage like a glamour. With her hair pulled back, the line of her neck was exaggerated, like an artist’s rendering of elegance. The planes of her face were also exaggerated—too thin—but they still vied with softness, and that interplay seemed the very essence of beauty. Her dark eyes drank the candlelight and shone like a creature’s, and there was no question in that moment that, whatever body it was sleeved in, her soul belonged to the great wild world of Eretz, terrible and beautiful, so much still unmapped and untamed, home to beasts and angels, stormhunters and sea serpents, its story still to be written.

She said, in a voice that was hiss and purr and the rasp of the blade to the sharpening stone, “ I am chimaera. My life is there.”

Akiva felt something course through him, or many things: a tremor of love and a chill of awe, a wave of power and a surge of hope. Hope. Truly, hope was as unkillable as the great shield beetles that lay inert for years beneath the desert sands, waiting for prey to happen near. What possible grounds had he for hope?

As long as you’re alive , he had told Liraz, only half believing it himself, there is always a chance .

Well, he was alive, and so was Karou, and they would be in the same world. It was possibly the thinnest grounds for hope that he had ever heard of— we are alive and in the same world —but he clung to it as he told her his plan to fly to the Samarkand portal and burn it first, before doubling back for this one. He wanted to ask her where the rebels would go now, but he couldn’t. It wasn’t for him to know. They were enemies still, and once he left here, Karou would vanish from his life again, for long or forever, he couldn’t know.

“How much time do you need?” he asked through the tightness in his throat. “To retreat?”

Again she glanced toward the door, and Akiva felt the burn of fury and envy, knowing that she would go to the Wolf as soon as he was gone, and that they would plan their next move together, and that wherever the chimaera rebels went, Karou would still be with Thiago, and not—and never—with him. All his restraint broke. He took a heavy step toward her. “Karou, how…? After what he’s done to you?” He started to reach toward her, but she shrank back, gave a single sharp shake of her head.

“Don’t.”

His hand fell.

“You don’t get to judge,” she said in a violent half whisper. Her eyes were wet and wide and desperately unhappy, and he saw her hand lift by old instinct to her throat, where once upon a time she had worn a wishbone on a cord. She had been wearing it their first night together; they had broken it when the sun threatened dawn and they knew they must part, and in the days that followed it had become their ritual. Always in parting. And if the wish had blossomed over the days and weeks to become their grand dream of a world remade, it had begun much more humbly. That first night, the wish had been simple: that they might see each other again.

But Karou’s hand found nothing at her throat and fell away again, and she faced Akiva squarely and spoke coolly, and what she said was, “Good-bye.”

It felt like a final tether snapping. As long as you’re alive, there is always a chance. A chance of what? Akiva wondered, throwing a glamour over himself and his sister together, and pushing himself out into the night. That things will get better? How had the rest of the conversation gone, back at that grim battle camp?

Or worse. That was it. Usually worse.

Karou felt Akiva’s departure as she always had: as cold. His warmth was like a gift given and snatched away, and she stood there with her back to the window, feeling chilled, bereft, and undone. And angry . It was a childish, cartoonish anger—facing Akiva, she had wanted to beat her fists at his chest and then fall against him and feel his arms close around her.

As if he might be the place of safety that she was always seeking and never finding.

Karou breathed. She imagined she could feel him growing farther away and farther, and the distance hurt more with every phantom wingbeat. She took gulps of breath to fight back sobs. Issa’s arm was around her. Be your own place of safety , she told herself, straightening. No crossbar in the world could protect her from what lay ahead, and neither could a tiny knife tucked in her boot—though there her tiny knife would most certainly remain—and neither could a man, not even Akiva. She had to be her own strength, complete unto herself.