Dreams of Gods & Monsters(80)
Author: Laini Taylor

They both knew it wouldn’t yield a result. This was just their routine now.

And so the beating was given and received, and later, when Razgut’s new injuries were seeping a fluid that wasn’t quite blood onto the fine silk cushions of a five-hundred-year-old chair, Jael tried again.

“When we get to the Far Isles,” he said, “and when the Stelians lie shattered in the streets but before we have crushed them utterly, I could demand a boon of them. Everyone grovels at the end.”

Razgut’s smile was a diabolical thing. Until you come up against Stelians, perhaps, he thought, but did not disabuse the emperor of his fantasies.

“If,” Jael continued, visibly struggling to maintain a semblance of grace—a mask that fit him very ill—“if… someone… were to make his best efforts to be accommodating between then and now, I might be persuaded to ask that boon on his behalf. It is not beyond Stelian arts, I wager, to… repair you.”

“What?” Razgut sucked himself upright, his hands flying to his cheeks in his best impression of a beauty queen hearing her name called. “Me? Truly?”

Jael was not so big a fool as to miss that he was being mocked, but neither was he fool enough to show his frustration to the Fallen thing. “Ah, my mistake. I thought that would interest you.”

And it might have, but for one critical point. Well, two critical points, the first of which was really all that mattered: Jael was lying. But even if he hadn’t been, the Stelians would never grant a boon to an enemy. Razgut remembered them from the time before, and they were not foes to be taken lightly. If—and this was a difficult thing to picture, if simply because it had never happened—they ever found themselves overpowered, they would self-immolate before surrendering.

“It’s not what I would wish for,” said Razgut.

“What, then?”

When Razgut had bartered with the blue lovely for a way back to Eretz, his wish had been simple. To fly? Yes, that was part of it. To be whole again. Not so simple, for more than his wings and legs had been ravaged and he knew that he was, in the most important ways, irreparable. But his true wish, his soul’s bedrock, was simple. “I want to go home,” he said. His voice was stripped of mockery and sarcasm and his usual nasty delight. Even to his own ears, he sounded like a child.

Jael stared at him, blank. “Easily done,” he said, and for that, more than anything Jael had ever said or done to him, Razgut wanted to snap his neck. The void within him was so immense, the weight of it so obliterating, that it sometimes took his breath away to remember that Jael had no knowledge of it at all. No one did.

“Not so easily,” he said. If there was one thing Razgut Thrice-Fallen knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was this: He could never go home.

More to conceal his own distress than out of any desire to stop torturing the emperor, he unfolded the letter. What does it say? he wondered. Who is it from? What kind of offer?

Is it almost time?

It was a bittersweet thought. Razgut knew that Jael would kill him the second he no longer needed him, and life, even at its most wretched, does get its hooks in you. With maddening exactitude and the slowest movements he could produce with his shaking fingers, the exiled angel made a show of flattening out the pages.

Confident script, he saw, ink on good paper, in Latin. And then, finally, he read out Jael’s first offer of patronage.

50

HAPPINESS HAS TO GO SOMEWHERE

They were very near, and the situation was absurd. Too absurd, when it came down to it. The shower knob was digging into Karou’s back, the feathers of Akiva’s wings were actually caught in the door, and Zuzana’s contrivance was clear. It was sweet but awkward—extremely awkward—and if it was meant to enflame anything, only Karou’s cheeks obliged. She blushed. The space was so small. The bulk of Akiva’s wings forced him to bend toward her, and by some maddening instinct, both obeyed the impulse to preserve the wisp of space between them.

Like strangers in an elevator.

And weren’t they strangers, really? Because the pull between them was so strong, it was easy to fall into thinking they knew each other. Karou, who had never believed in such things before, was willing to consider that in some way their souls did know each other—“Your soul sings to mine,” he had told her once, and she could swear that she had felt it—but they themselves did not. They had so much to learn, and she so badly wanted to learn it, but how do you do that, in times like these? They couldn’t sit on top of a cathedral, eating hot bread and watching sunrises.

This wasn’t a time for falling in love.

“Are you two all right in there?” asked Virko. His voice was cast low, not quite a whisper, and Karou imagined the hotel clerk hearing it and wondering who was hiding in the bathroom. With that, the scenario hit a new level of absurdity. In the midst of everything that was going on and the great weight of the mission they were on, they were squished into a bathroom, hiding from a hotel clerk.

“Fine,” she said, sounding choked, and it was such a lie. She was anything but fine. It struck her that even to say so in that offhand way was… glib. Careless. She hazarded a glance at Akiva, afraid that he could think she meant it. Oh sure, fine, and nice weather we’re having. What’s new with you? And it was a fresh scrape of anguish to see, again, the pain in his eyes, and the anger. She had to look away. Akiva, Akiva. Back in the caves, when their eyes had at last met across the breadth of the great cavern—across all the soldiers between them, both sides, and the weight of their treacherous enmity, across the secrets they both carried, and the burdens—even at such a distance, their look had felt like touch. Not so now. A wisp of space between them only, and the meeting of their glances felt like… regret.

“Children of regret,” she said aloud. Well, she whispered it, and stole another look up at him. “Do you remember?”

“How could I forget?” was Akiva’s answer, an ache in his heart and a scrape in his voice.

She had told him the story—she, Madrigal—the night they fell in love. He remembered every word and touch of that night, every smile and gasp. Looking back at it was like peering down a dark tunnel—all his life since—at a bright place of light on the far side, where color and feeling were amplified. It seemed to him that that night was a place—the place—he’d kept all his happiness, bundled up and stowed away, like gear he’d never need again.