Dreams of Gods & Monsters(101)
Author: Laini Taylor

This was a much better dream than she was used to.

“Sorry about your shirt,” said the girl.

At first Eliza didn’t know what she meant, but then she realized it hung loose and tattered, as though the wings had torn it when they grew. It hardly seemed consequential, except for one thing. It was an unexpected detail, for a dream.

“How do you feel?” asked the young man, solicitous. “Are you… back?”

Back? Back where, or… back from where? Eliza realized she had no idea where she was. What was the last thing she remembered? Being in a car in Morocco, in disgrace.

She looked around now and beheld a twist in a narrow alley that could almost have been a stage set. Cobblestones and marble, iconic red geraniums lined up on a window ledge. Laundry lines roped overhead. Everything said “Italy” as clearly as Eliza’s glimpse of desert out the airplane window had said, “not Italy.” An old man in suspenders even leaned heavily on his cane, frozen as still as a cardboard cutout, staring at her.

It was like a tingling, at first, the presentiment that this was not a dream. The old man’s cane had duct tape wrapped around the handle. One of the geranium plants was dead, and there was litter, and noise. Tinny horns just out of sight, a brief canine quarrel, and some kind of muffled drone lying over it all: a hive sound of many distant voices. The blares and dents of the world, intruding in a dream? That was when Eliza began to understand.

But to understand her situation truly, she had to listen inward.

The sensation of stirring within her had gone still. The things known and buried, they weren’t trying to dig themselves out anymore. It took her a moment to understand why, and it was so simple. They were no longer buried.

They were known.

Eliza understood what she was. This realization was the mental equivalent of a slow-motion clip played in reverse: A great mess lifts itself off the floor and flies upward to arrange itself on a tabletop. Tea unpuddles and siphons itself into cups midair to land neatly on a tray. Books leap from a jumble, flapping their covers like wings, and rise to roost in a stack.

Sense out of madness.

It was all there, and it was still terrible—and terrible and terrible—but it was quiet now, and it was hers. She was saved.

“What did you do to me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said the girl, worried. “We didn’t know what was wrong with you, so we just made this broad kind of wish in the hope that the magic would know what to do.”

Magic? Wish?

“I know what was wrong with me,” Eliza said, realizing it was true. There was an explanation for the things known and buried, and it was not that she was an incarnation of the angel Elazael.

Elation and devastation fused to become a new emotion, unnameable, and she didn’t know how to react to it. She knew what had been wrong with her, and it was not the thing she’d most feared. “It wasn’t me,” she said aloud, and this was the elation. The guilt from the dream was not, and never had been, and never would be, her own.

But the Cataclysm was real. She understood it fully now, and this was the devastation.

Her hands went to her head, holding it, and it felt familiar under her fingers—I’m me, Eliza—but on the inside, it, and she, encompassed a vast new territory.

The young man and woman were watching her with furrowed brows, probably wondering if she was crazier now than she’d been before. She wasn’t. She knew this absolutely. Her brain, her body, her wings felt as finely calibrated as one of nature’s perfect creations. A double helix. A galaxy. A honeycomb. Entities so improbable and uncanny that they made you dream that Creation had a will and a wild intelligence.

It didn’t.

It wasn’t that she understood. No one ever could. But… she knew the source.

Of everything.

It was among the things known and no longer buried, all of them part of her now, orderly and intertwined, and it was so beautiful she wanted to worship it, even though she knew it had no consciousness. It would make about as much sense as worshiping the wind. She saw that magic and science were heads and tails of the same bright coin.

And she beheld Time itself laid open before her, unzipped like a strand of DNA. Knowable. Possibly even navigable.

Her mind trembled at the brink of this new vastness. She was saved, she had thought, moments ago. She saw now that she was more than saved. So much more than saved.

“So,” she said, trying not to cry as she fixed her saviors with all the warmth her eyes could bestow. “Who are you guys?”

67

A SPRAY OF SPARKS

Karou followed Akiva away from the Papal Palace, and they were glamoured, so when she came to him it was clumsy. But only for the first surprised seconds.

She didn’t even mean to do it. Well, it’s not that it was an accident. They didn’t stumble against each other with their faces. It was only that her body didn’t run it by her brain first.

She knew where he was by heat and airflow, and she meant to follow him to the cupola of St. Peter’s. From there, the four of them planned to watch Jael’s exodus and escort the Dominion army unseen all the way back to Uzbekistan, and through to Eretz.

But a part of Karou was still poised at the edge of that hurled knife, hearing the scream she had almost become. She couldn’t see Akiva, to reassure herself that he was well, and so she couldn’t catch her breath. They had no victory to celebrate yet except for being alive, and that was all she could bring herself to care about in the moment it took her to catch up to him. They were over the plaza, Michelangelo’s colonnades curving beneath them like outstretched arms.

Karou reached for where Akiva’s shoulder might be and got wing instead. A spray of sparks, and he turned into her touch, startled by it, so she careened into him and he caught her against him, and that was all it took.

Magnets collide, and swiftly align.

Her hands found his face, and her lips followed. She was clumsy, showering kisses of thanks on his invisible face. She was overwhelmed, and her lips landed where they would—on his brow, then his cheekbone, then the bridge of his nose—and in the profound relief of the moment she barely registered the sensation of his skin against hers: the heat and texture—at last—of Akiva against her lips.

She dropped one hand to his heart to be sure it hadn’t been some illusion, that he was truly whole and uninjured, and he was, and so her palm, satisfied, joined her other in slipping to where his neck met his jaw to hold his face steady and gauge the location of his lips.