Days of Blood & Starlight (7 page)

With the White Wolf, it never was.

14

The White Wolf.

The Warlord’s firstborn, hero of the united tribes and general of the chimaera forces. What remained of them.

Thiago.

He stood in the corridor, elegant and cool in one of his creaseless white tunics, his silken white hair gathered loosely back and tied with a twist of leather. The white hair belied his youth—the youth of his body, at least. His soul was hundreds of years old and had endured endless war and deaths beyond counting, many of them his own. But his body was in its prime, powerful and beautiful to the full extent of Brimstone’s artistry.

It was high-human in aspect and had been made to his own specifications: human at a glance but beast in the details. A carnal human smile revealed sharp cuspids, his strong hands were tipped in black claws, and his legs transitioned at mid-thigh from human to wolf. He was very handsome—somehow
both rugged and refined, with an undertone of the wild that Karou felt as a lashing danger whenever he was near.

And no wonder, considering their history.

He had scars now that he hadn’t when she knew him before, when she was Madrigal. A healed slash cleaved one of his eyebrows and spidered up into his hairline; another interrupted the edge of his jaw and jagged down his neck, drawing the eye along his trapezius to the smooth form of his shoulders, straight and full and strong.

He had not come unscathed through the last brutal battles of the war, but he had come through alive and, if possible, even more beautiful for the scars that made him seem more
real
. In Karou’s doorway now, he was all too real, and too near, too elegant, too
there
. Always, the White Wolf had been larger than life.

“Can’t sleep?” he asked. The tooth was cupped in his palm; he didn’t offer it up.

“Sleep,” said Karou. “How cute. Do people still do that?”

“They do,” he said. “If they
can
.” There was pity in his look—pity!—as he added softly, “I have them, too, you know.”

Karou had no idea what he was talking about, but she bristled at his softness.

“Nightmares,” he said.

Oh. Those.
“I don’t have nightmares,” she lied.

Thiago was not deceived. “You need to care for yourself, Karou. Or”—he glanced past her into her room—“let others care for you.”

She tried to fill her doorway so that no slice of space might
be construed as an invitation to enter. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m good.”

He moved forward anyway, so that she had to either back away or tolerate his nearness. She stood her ground. He was clean-shaven and smelled faintly, pleasingly, of musk. How he managed to be always pristine in this palace made of dirt, Karou did not know.

Scratch that. She
did
know. There was no chimaera who would not stoop gladly to see to the White Wolf’s needs. She even suspected his attendant, Ten, of brushing his hair for him. He scarcely had to speak his will; it was anticipated, it was already done.

Right now his will was to enter her room. Anyone else would have subsided at his first hint of approach. Karou did not, though her heartbeat hammered a small-animal panic to be so near him.

Thiago didn’t press. He paused and studied her. Karou knew how she looked: pale and grim and waning thin. Her collarbones were oversharp, her braid was a mess, and her black eyes were glossed with weariness. Thiago was gazing into them.

“
Good?
” he repeated, skeptical. “Even here?” He brushed her biceps with his fingers and she shrugged away, wishing she were wearing sleeves. She didn’t like anyone to see her bruises, and him least of all; it made her feel vulnerable.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“You would ask for help, wouldn’t you, if you needed it? At the very least, you should have an assistant.”

“I don’t need an—”

“There’s no weakness in asking for help.” He paused, then added, “Even Brimstone had help.”

He might as well have reached into her chest and seized her heart.

Brimstone. Yes, he’d had help, including, ostensibly,
herself
. And yet, where had she been while he was tortured, butchered, burned? What was she doing as his angel murderers stood guard over his scorched remains and ensured his evanescence?

Issa, Yasri, Twiga, every soul in Loramendi. Where was she when their souls drifted off like cut kites and ceased to be?

“They’re dead, Karou. It’s too late. They’re all dead.”

Those were the words that had destroyed Karou’s happiness one month ago in Marrakesh. Just minutes before, she and Akiva had held her wishbone between them and snapped it, and her life as Madrigal—all the memories that Brimstone had taken away for safekeeping—had come rushing back. She could feel the heat of the block she’d laid her head on as the executioner raised his blade, and she could hear Akiva’s scream—a thing ripped from his soul—as if its echo had been trapped in the wishbone, too.

Eighteen years ago, she had died. Brimstone had resurrected her in secret, and she had lived this human life with no knowledge of the one that came before it. But in Marrakesh it had all come back to her, and she had…
awakened
—joined her life already in progress—to find herself with the fractured wishbone in her hand and Akiva miraculously before her.

That was the most astonishing thing—that they had found each other, even across worlds and lifetimes. For a pure and shining moment, Karou had known joy.

Which Akiva had ended with those words, spoken in deepest shame, most wretched sorrow.

“They’re all dead.”

She hadn’t believed it. Her mind simply would not approach the possibility.

Following the maimed angel Razgut from the skies of Earth into those of Eretz, she had clung to the hope that it would not be—
could not be
—as Akiva had said. But then she had found the city, and… there
was
no city. She still couldn’t wrap her mind around the devastation. She had
lived
there once. A million chimaera had lived there. And now? Razgut, foul thing, had
laughed
at the sight; that was the last she remembered of him. From that moment, she’d been in a daze, and couldn’t remember how they’d parted, or where.

All she’d known in the moment was the ruin of Loramendi. Over that blackened landscape hung something Karou had never felt before: an emptiness so profound that the very atmosphere felt
thin
, it felt
scraped
, like an animal hide stretched on a rack and hacked at and hacked at until it was clean.

What she was feeling was the utter absence of souls.

“It’s too late.”

How long she had wandered in the ruins, she could not afterward have said. She was in shock. Memories were at work in her. Her life as Madrigal was twining itself into her self as Karou, and it was fraught with death, with loss, and at the core of her stunned grief was the knowledge that she had enabled it. She had loved the enemy and saved him. She had set him free.

And he had done
this
.

Bitter, bitter, this desolation of angels.

When a voice splintered the silence, she had spun around, her crescent-moon blades leaping in her hands with the will to make angels bleed. If it had been Akiva there in the ruins, she could not have spared his life again. But it was not him, or any other seraph.

It was Thiago.

“You,” he had said, with something like wonder. “Is it really you?”

Karou couldn’t even speak. The White Wolf looked her over from head to toe, and she shrank away. Her memories burned. Revulsion roiled like snakes in the pit of her belly, and from within the deadness of her shock she was lit with fury—at the universe, for this newest cruelty. At him, for being the one left alive.

Of all possible souls to survive the slaughter: her own murderer.

15

She should have known that night, long ago in another life, another flesh, that she was followed, but joy had dulled her caution.

She was Madrigal of the Kirin. She was in love. She was in the grip of a huge, bold dream. For a month of secret nights, she had flown in darkness to the temple of Ellai, where Akiva waited, restless with new love and on fire as she was to remake their world. She always savored the moment of arrival—her first glimpse of his upturned face as she slipped down through the canopy of the requiem trees, and how he would see her and light up with a joy to answer her own. It was the image she would keep with her in the days that followed—Akiva’s lifted face, so perfect and golden, bright with such amazement and delight. He reached up to draw her down. His hands skimmed up her legs as she descended, took her hips and gathered her
right out of the air so that their lips met before her hooves ever touched ground.

She laughed against his mouth, her wings still open behind her like great dark fans, and he sank down, reclining on the moss right there with her astride him. They were giddy and hungry, and made love in the middle of the grove in plain sight of the bright-eyed evangelines whose night symphony was their music.

In plain sight of those who had followed Madrigal from the city.

Later, it made her sick to realize that they had watched. They had waited and watched, not content with the treason of mere kissing, but needing a more outrageous raft of crimes—to see it all, and to hear what they would talk of afterward.

And what had they been rewarded with?

The lovers moved languidly into the small temple, where they sipped from the sacred spring and ate bread and fruit that Madrigal had brought. They worked at magic. Akiva was teaching Madrigal his invisibility glamour. She could manage it for a moment, but it required a heavier pain tithe than she could sustain on her own to hold it in place. In the temple, she flickered in and out: there, not there.

“What shall I do,” she mused, “for pain?”

“Nothing. No pain for you. Only pleasure.” He nuzzled her, and she pushed him off, smiling.

“Pleasure won’t help me stay invisible long enough for it to count.”

They couldn’t hide forever, and would need to be able to come and go in both their lands, among chimaera and seraphim,
unseen as needed. They were working out whom to recruit to their cause; they were poised to begin. It would be a critical moment, giving themselves away to their first few chosen fellows, and they talked them over in turn.