Days of Blood & Starlight (62 page)
Read Days of Blood & Starlight Online
Authors: Laini Taylor
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction / Girls - Women, #Juvenile Fiction / Love & Romance, #Juvenile Fiction / Paranormal, #Juvenile Fiction / Fantasy & Magic, #Juvenile Fiction / Monsters, #Juvenile Fiction / People & Places - Europe, #Juvenile Fiction / Fairy Tales & Folklore - General, #Juvenile Fiction / Action & Adventure - General
“Issa.” She started to tremble as the full dread of this new predicament took hold of her. “Where will we go?”
Coiling, unknowable veins of intention and chance. Later, Karou would wonder where they might have gone, and how everything else would have fallen out differently, unknowably.
If the Dominion had not already arrived.
The chimaera host was gathered in the court and ready to fly when they heard a sound in the distance, a mundane sound with no place in this wasteland silence. It was the honking of a horn. The incessant, insistent honking of a horn, and the crunch of tires grinding over the trackless hill, careless with urgency and far too fast. More than a few of the soldiers broke formation to rise into the air and see over the wall. Karou was first.
Her breath and heartbeat caught in her throat. Headlights
on the slope. A van. Someone was hanging out the passenger window waving both arms, shouting, drowned out by the honking.
That someone was Zuzana.
The van skidded, fishtailed, stopped. Zuzana was out and running through the kicked-up dust, and Karou knew what she was screaming before the words came clear.
And she knew that the blame for two worlds’ fates was on her shoulders now.
“Angels! Angels! Angels!”
Zuzana was sprinting. Karou dropped out of the air, catching her friend by the shoulders.
“Angels,” Zuzana said, breathless and wide-eyed and white. “Holy hell, Karou. In the sky. Hundreds.
Hundreds.
The world. Is freaking.
Out.
”
Mik came running around the van to Zuzana’s side, and lurched to a halt. Karou heard rushing on the hill like a landslide and knew the chimaera were gathered behind her.
And then… she felt heat. Zuzana, looking past her, gasped.
Heat.
Karou spun around, and there was Akiva. For a long moment, he was all she saw. Even the Wolf was only a white blur, moving to take his place at her side. Akiva had come back, and his beautiful face was tense with remorse.
“Too late,” she said softly, knowing that this world that had nurtured her in hiding, that had given her art and friends and a chance at normal life, would never be the same again, no matter what happened next.
The chimaera host, bristling in the presence of the enemy,
was watching Thiago for a sign that did not come. The pair of seraphim stood not a wingspan away, and their mythic, angelic perfection was everything the “beasts” were not. Karou saw them with her human eyes, this army she had rendered more monstrous than ever nature had, and she knew what the world would see in them if they flew to fight the Dominion: demons, nightmares, evil. The sight of the seraphim would be heralded as a miracle. But chimaera?
The apocalypse.
“No. It isn’t too late,” Akiva said. “This is the beginning.” He put his hand on his heart. Only Karou could know what he meant, and, oh, she did know—
we are the beginning
—and felt heat flare in her own heart, as if he had laid his hand there. “Come with us,” he said. He turned to Thiago, standing at her side. His voice scraped and his eyes burned hot, and Karou knew how hard it was for him to make himself address the Wolf, but he did.
He said, “We can fight them together. I have an army, too.”
EPILOGUE
The Kirin caves. Two uneasy armies seethe and roil. Only the sprawl of the caverns keeps the peace, by keeping them apart.
The Misbegotten claim to feel the sickness of hamsas even through stone. The revenants, enraged by the cold calculations writ black on the knuckles of their enemies, will not desist from pressing their palms against the walls that divide them. It is not a good beginning. Each army burns to hack off the others’ hands and hurl them over the drop into the ice chasms below.
Akiva tells his brothers and sisters that the magic of the marks doesn’t penetrate stone, but they don’t want to admit it. Every hour he wishes Hazael were here. “He would have them all playing dice together by now,” he tells Liraz.
“The music helps, at least,” she says.
She doesn’t mean the music of the caverns. The wind flutes haunt them all, waking beast and angel both from nightmares more alike than they could ever imagine. The Misbegotten
dream of a country of ghosts, the chimaera of a tomb filled with the souls of their loved ones. Only Karou is soothed by the wind music. It is the lullaby of her earliest life, and she has been surprised by deep and dreamless sleep these two nights they have spent here.
Not tonight, though. It is the eve of battle, and they are gathered, several hundred altogether, in this largest of the caverns. Mik’s violin fills the space with a sonata from the other world, and they are all quiet, listening.
Common enemy
, their commanders have told them.
Common cause.
For now, anyway. It is implied or believed that soon this will change—revert—and they will be released to once more freely pursue their hate as they always have, chimaera against seraphim, seraphim against chimaera. The hope—Karou’s, the Wolf’s, Akiva’s, and even Liraz’s—is that their hate will turn to something else before that day comes.
It feels like a test for the future of all Eretz.
Zuzana’s head is on Karou’s shoulder, and Issa is on her other side. The Wolf isn’t far; Ziri has grown easier in his new body, and, lying back on his elbows beside the fire, he is elegant and exquisite, the former occupant’s cruelty absent from his face unless he remembers to try to put it there, and his smiles no longer seem learned from a book. Karou feels him looking at her, but she doesn’t look back. Her eyes are pulled elsewhere, across the cavern to where Akiva sits at another fire with his own soldiers around him.
He is looking back at her.
As ever when their eyes meet, it is like a lit fuse searing a
path through the air between them. These past days, when this has happened, one or the other would turn quickly away, but this time they rest and let the fuse burn. They are filled with the sight of each other. Here in this cavern, this extraordinary gathering—this seethe of colliding hatreds, tamed temporarily by a shared hate—could be their long-ago dream seen through a warped mirror. This is not how it was meant to be. They are not side by side as they once imagined. They are not exultant, and they no longer feel themselves to be the instruments of some great intention. They are creatures grasping at life with stained hands. There is so much between them, all the living and all the dead, but for a moment everything falls away and the fuse burns brighter and nearer, so that Karou and Akiva almost feel as if they are touching.
Tomorrow they will start the apocalypse.
Tonight, they let themselves look at each other, for just a little while.
… to be continued
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Whew.
It always comes as a relief to get to this page, because it means I have finished a book—a thing that gets easier in some ways over time, but not in all ways. Every story is its own challenge, and in the middle I find myself relying on the quote “It always seems impossible until it is done.” Because it
does.
(I didn’t know who said that until just this moment when I googled it, and now that I know it was Nelson Mandela, finishing a novel doesn’t seem like such a big accomplishment after all. Thanks a lot, Nelson Mandela.)
Ha. But truly, it
is
an accomplishment, and I owe deep thanks to some wonderful people:
First and best, my husband, Jim Di Bartolo, who is not only my earliest and most crucial reader, but also my fort holder-downer and slack picker-upper when I am struggling to balance writing with life. My books would not be what they are without
you, and neither would my life, which I would not trade for any other life, real or fictional, not for anything. Thank you for the happy!
Clementine, age two, who, when I left in the mornings to write, would call after me, “Say hi to Karou!” Look, my little Pie, I finished the ham! Very soon, I would like to write a book for you.
Always, my parents, for everything they’ve always done to help me be me. I am so lucky to have you.
My agent, Jane Putch, friend and partner. I truly would be lost without you. Thank you.
With my arms flung as wide as they will go, a huge thanks to the amazing teams at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers in the U.S. and Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K. for parallel amazing publishing experiences that make this all twice as much fun. At Little, Brown, thanks especially to Alvina Ling, editor extraordinaire; Lisa Moraleda, Bethany Strout; Victoria Stapleton; Melanie Chang; Andrew Smith; Megan Tingley; Stephanie O’Cain; Faye Bi; the design team; and everyone else who squeezed the publishing schedule to within an inch of its life to accommodate my pace and get the book out on time (ish). I’m sorry for any stress I have caused. Thanks also to Amy Habayeb and the rights team—getting the foreign editions in the mail is one of my favorite things!
At Hodder, massive thanks to Kate Howard and Eleni Lawrence and the rest of the team. Everything you do blows me away.
And thanks, lastly, to the readers of
Daughter of Smoke & Bone
for such marvelous enthusiasm and support. There is no motivation quite like the excitement of readers, and it has been a truly amazing year. From the depths of my heart, I hope you like this one, too.
XO
CHAPTER 1: THE GIRL ON THE BRIDGE
CHAPTER 5: A STRANGE MOON WORD
CHAPTER 8: THE END OF AFTERMATH
CHAPTER 11: THE UNFATHOMABLE WHY
