Lips Touch: Three Times(28)
Author: Laini Taylor

"Don’t touch her!" Mab screamed at him. An impact at the door thrust her forward and she had to throw herself back, watching helplessly as the hunter turned Esme to face him.

Esme scarcely knew where she was. Coming out of the fugue of the wolfsong, she would not have been surprised to find herself in the snow, standing beside a quick, dark river. Indeed, she half expected it. A flood of memories had transported her to just such a place and, looking up into the eyes of the Druj hunter before her, she half believed she really was in the mountains a continent away, in memories a lifetime past. She knew this face. She had tasted these lips. She heard herself purr, "Mihai," in a stranger’s voice, and, hearing herself, her eyes flew open wide. So did his. They stared at each other, startled.

Mab let out a sound that was like a gasp and a wail as the door battered her again and wolf snouts shoved into the crack of the door. Her feet slipped. Seeing her desperate white face, Mihai quickly whispered a word in his harsh language. A glimmering window peeled open in the air and he said, "Come," drawing Esme against him with one arm and holding out his other hand to Mab. She hesitated for just a second, but then the door thrust her forward. The wolves broke through. Teeth grazed Mab’s elbow. And there was Mihai clutching Esme against his side, disappearing with her backward through the opening in the air. Mab grabbed frantically at his outstretched hand and disappeared too.

FIVE Whispering

Druj magic must be spoken aloud. Most commonly it’s whispered. The magic is in the breath, and the shape of the breath as pressed by lips, tongue, and teeth into words determines the shape of the magic. It is an important peculiarity that only the mouth of a Druj in human cithra is physiologically fit to shape language. Thus, a Druj can shift shape, but once shifted must trust to another to whisper him back again or risk eternity as a crow, owl, stag, fox, magpie, viper, or in the case of the Naxturu, a wolf.

Being alone and in exile, Mihai no longer shifted shape. There were other Druj in the cities, but they were rootless and wayward and didn’t trust one another as whisperers. That was what tribes were for, and Mihai had broken from his tribe long ago. So he kept to his human cithra and used his magic for other things.

The window he whispered open in the air led straight back to Mab and Esme’s living room in London, so they tumbled from a ship in harbor in the south of France onto their own rug with as little fanfare as if they were crossing a threshold. Mab and Esme gasped and spun around. A wolf was lunging after them and Mihai had to grab its huge jaws with both hands and wrestle it back as the glimmering window slammed shut. His hands were bleeding when he pulled them out but he took no notice.

He whirled toward the chandelier and yanked down the two long red braids, one in each bloody hand, and threw them onto the carpet. He looked at Mab, his eyes narrow. "You should have gone to Yazad if you were afraid, Mab. Didn’t I say he would always help you?" he demanded. "Didn’t I say I would?"

Mab didn’t answer. She was gasping for breath, on the edge of hysteria.

Mihai turned to Esme and knelt in front of her. "Do you know who I am?" he asked softly.

She stared at him, at his fangs, at the lips that she knew from some alien tangle of memories. But it wasn’t her memory! She had never kissed this creature. She had never kissed anyone! "No," she lied, shrinking away from him. "I don’t know you!"

He stared at her blue eye and Esme was sure he knew she was lying. He turned again to Mab and asked her, almost gently, "Are you hurt?"

She shook her head and tried to edge nearer to Esme. "I thought we were safe," she whispered.

Mihai reached out and took her hands in his, keeping himself between mother and daughter. He kissed Mab’s knuckles and she tensed as if she were afraid he might suddenly savage her. "You are safe," he told her.

"But the wolves –"

"It isn’t what you think."

"How do you know what I think?"

"I know, Mab. I was there when it happened to you, remember? This … isn’t that."

Mab blinked. "Then what is it?"

"Nothing so terrible. It will be all right soon," Mihai replied.

"But how did they find us, and why wasn’t the Queen with them? What’s wrong with Esme’s eye? And how did she know your name?" Mab asked in a rush.

"Everything will be all right. Soon."

"You keep saying ‘soon.’ Isn’t it all right now?"

"I’m sorry, Mab," he told her, meaning it with a regret unknown to other Druj. "I’ll bring her back to you. I promise."

"Bring her –" Mab stared at him, stricken. "No!" She lunged toward Esme.

But Mihai caught both her fine wrists in one hand and held her off as easily as if she were a gossamer. "It isn’t what you think," he said again. Then he whispered open a window in the floor. Silent and surprised, Esme dropped through it. For a frozen moment Mab saw into the impossible aperture. She saw the top of Esme’s shorn head, and she saw spires and bridges, cliff walls, drifting mist. She started to scream.

"Go to Yazad, Mab," Mihai said, and he dove after Esme. "He’ll explain." The air closed around his feet, and Mab went on screaming, caught in a nightmare from which there was no waking. She only left off screaming when her voice was ravaged to a rasp, then she slumped over, panting, staring in a daze at the carpet. Only one red braid lay coiled there. Mihai had taken the other.

SIX The Queen

Druj live forever and have forever lived. There are no new Druj, no young Druj, no ripe bellies, no babes. If their race began as infants, that history was lost in ancient books, swallowed by fire or mold. As for their memories, they have proven unfit for immortality. They recede into a lake of mist, revealing nothing. They have no legends, not even of a time before the forests grew. Nothing has ever been new, least of all themselves. To an ancient folk dulled by eternity, children are a revelation. That’s why they keep them as pets.

Mab was born in the citadel of Tajbel to a girl-mother like she herself would later become. She never knew her. The Queen’s human pets were released once they gave birth to their successor, or so Mab was told. Whether all those girl-mothers were really turned loose with their pockets full of jewels, she couldn’t guess. Perhaps they did walk out across the black meadows and into a new life. Or perhaps they were fed to the beasts. You never knew what the Druj might do.

They might sing to you one moment and stick you in the cage the next.

"Little sparrow, my little kit, my downy little owlet," the Druj Queen sang to baby Mab. And though Mab didn’t remember it herself, later the handmaidens would tell her that for the first few years of her life the Queen had scarcely ever set her down but carried her everywhere like a treasure, rocking her and dancing with her, and whispering made-up songs into her tiny ears, never the same lyrics twice.