Daughter of Smoke and Bone (23 page)

“Stop squirming,” said Karou, pausing with her makeup brush as Zuzana engaged in an unladylike tug-of-war beneath her tutu.

“My tights are crooked,” Zuzana said.

“Do you want your cheeks to be crooked, too? Hold still.”

“Fine.” Zuzana held still while Karou painted perfect pink rouge circles onto her cheeks. Her face was powder-white, and her lips had been transformed to a doll’s tiny Cupid’s bow, with two fine black lines out from the corners of her mouth, simulating a marionette’s hinged jaw. False eyelashes fringed her dark eyes, and she was dressed in the tutu, which did indeed fit, and the toe shoes, which had seen better days. Her white tights were laddered with runs and patched at the knees; one of the straps of her bodice hung broken; and her hair was a messy chignon crowned with faded rosebuds. She looked like a doll that had lain unloved in a toy chest for years.

A toy chest, in fact, stood open and ready to receive her as soon as her costume was squared away.

“All done,” said Karou, surveying her work. She clapped her hands once in delight and felt like Issa when she fixed Karou with temporary horns fashioned of parsnips, or a tail out of a feather duster. “Perfect. You look adorably pathetic. Some tourist is sure to try to carry you home as a souvenir.”

“Some tourist will rue the day,” Zuzana said, upending her tutu and pursuing the tights tug-of-war with surly determination.

“Would you leave those poor tights alone? They’re fine.”

“I hate tights.”

“Well, let me add them to the list. This morning you hate, let me see, men in hats, wiener dogs—”

“Wiener-dog
owners
,” Zuzana corrected. “You’d have to have, like, a
lentil
for a soul to hate wiener dogs.”

“Wiener-dog
owners
, hairspray, false eyelashes, and now tights. Are you finished?”

“Hating things?” She paused, reading some inner gauge. “Yes, I think I am.
For now.
”

Mik peered through the opening. “We’ve got a crowd,” he said. It had been his idea to take Zuzana’s semester project to the street. He sometimes played his violin for change, donning a patch over his perfectly good left eye to seem more “romantic,” and he promised Zuzana she could make a few thousand crowns in a morning. He had his eye patch in place now, and looked somehow both roguish and darling.

“God, you’re adorable,” he said, his visible eye on Zuzana.

Usually
adorable
was not a word Zuzana relished. “Toddlers are adorable,” she’d snap. But where Mik was concerned, all bets were off. She blushed.

“You give me wrong thoughts,” he said, slipping into the crammed space, so Karou was trapped against the puppet’s armature. “Is it weird that I’m turned on by a marionette?”

“Yes,” said Zuzana. “Very weird. But it explains why you work at a marionette theater.”

“Not all marionettes. Just you.” He seized her around the waist. She squeaked.

“Careful!” Karou said. “Her makeup!”

Mik didn’t listen. He kissed Zuzana lingeringly on her painted doll mouth, smearing the red of her lipstick and the white of her face makeup, and coming up at last with his own lips rosebud pink. Laughing, Zuzana wiped it away for him. Karou considered touching her up, but the smear actually suited the whole disheveled look perfectly, so she left it.

The kiss also worked wonders on Zuzana’s nerves. “I think it’s showtime,” she announced brightly.

“Well, all right, then,” said Karou. “Into the toy box with you.”

And so it began.

The story Zuzana told with her body—of a discarded marionette brought out of its trunk for one last dance—was deeply moving. She started out clumsy and disjointed, like a rusty thing awakening, collapsing several times in a heap of tulle. Karou, watching the rapt faces of the audience, saw how they wanted to step forward and help the sad little dancer to her feet.

Over her the puppeteer loomed sinister, and as Zuzana twirled, its arms and fingers jittered and jumped as if
it
were controlling
her
, and not the other way around. The engineering was cunning and didn’t draw attention to itself, so that the illusion was flawless. There came a point, as the doll began to rediscover her grace, that Zuzana rose slowly onto pointe as if drawn up by her strings, and she elongated, a glow of joy on her face. A Smetana sonata soared off Mik’s violin strings, achingly sweet, and the moment went beyond street theater to touch something true.

Karou felt tears prick her eyes, watching. Within her, her emptiness
pounded
.

At the end, as Zuzana was forced back into the box, she cast toward the audience a look of desperate yearning and reached out one pleading arm before succumbing to her master’s will. The lid of the trunk slammed shut, and the music bit off with a twang.

The crowd loved it. Mik’s violin case filled fast with notes and coins, and Zuzana took a half dozen bows and posed for photos before vanishing inside the puppeteer’s trench coat with Mik. Karou had no doubt they were doing grievous damage to her makeup job, and she just sat on the trunk to wait it out.

It was there, in the midst of the school-of-fish density of tourists on the Charles Bridge, that the wrongness crept back over her again, slow and seeping, like a shadow when a cloud coasts before the sun.

27

N
OT
P
REY, BUT
P
OWER

You’re gonna live like prey, little girl.

Bain’s words rang in Karou’s ears as she looked around, searching faces in the throng surrounding her. Feeling exposed in the middle of the bridge, she squinted at the roofscapes on both riverbanks, her imagination running to the hunter sighting her through a rifle scope.

She shook it off. He wouldn’t, would he? The feeling faded and she told herself it had only been paranoia, but over the rest of the day it came and went in scattered chills as Zuzana danced a dozen more times, gaining confidence with each performance, and Mik’s violin case filled again and again, far exceeding his promised take.

He and Zuzana tried to coax Karou out to dinner with them, but she declined, pleading jet lag, which was not untrue but was also not foremost on her mind.

She was certain she was being watched.

Her fingertips fluttered against her palms. A prickle sparked there and traveled up her arms, and as she walked off the bridge and into the cobbled maze of Old Town, she knew she was being followed. She paused and knelt, pretending to adjust her boot as she pulled out her knife—her ordinary knife; her new crescent moons were in their case at her flat—and slipped it up her sleeve while scanning ahead and behind.

She saw no one, and kept going.

The first time she’d come to Prague, she’d gotten so lost exploring these streets. She’d passed an art gallery and a few blocks later doubled back to find it, and… couldn’t. The city had swallowed it. In fact, she had
never
found it. There was a deceptive tangling of alleys that gave the impression of a map that shifted behind you, gargoyles tiptoeing away, stones like puzzle pieces rearranging themselves into new configurations while you weren’t looking. Prague entranced you, lured you in, like the mythic fey who trick travelers deep into forests until they’re lost beyond hope. But being lost here was a gentle adventure of marionette shops and absinthe, and the only creatures lurking around corners were Kaz and his cohorts in vampire makeup, ready with a silly thrill.

Usually.

Tonight Karou felt a real threat, and with each step she took, cool, precise, she willed it to manifest. She
wanted
to fight. Her body was a loaded spring. The way it so often taunted her with the phantom of what else it might be doing, at this moment, she was sure that in her phantom life she would
fight
.

“Come on,” she whispered to her unseen pursuer, ducking her head and quickening her pace. “I have a surprise for you.”

She was on Karlova, the major pedestrian route between the bridge and Old Town Square, and tourists continued thick as fish. She moved among them, darting and erratic, throwing looks back over her shoulder more to craft the illusion of fear than in the hope of catching a glimpse of her stalker. At the intersection of a quiet side alley, she ducked left, hugging close to the wall. She knew this territory well. It was riddled with lurking places for Kaz’s tours. Just ahead, the curve of a medieval guildhall created a hidden niche where she had several times lain in wait in ghost garb. She moved into the shadows to tuck herself away.

And came face to face with a vampire.

“Hey!” said a sharp voice as Karou worked a quick reversal of momentum and tottered backward, out of the shadows. “Oh god,” said the voice.
“You.”

The vampire leaned back against the wall and crossed her arms in an attitude of bored superiority.

Svetla. Karou’s jaw clenched at the sight of the other girl. She was model tall and thin, with a harsh kind of beauty that was sure to age scary. She was wearing white face paint and Goth eyeliner, with fake fangs and a dribble of blood at the corner of her ruby lips. Kaz’s sexy vampire vixen to a T, black cape and all, and she was, most inconveniently, wedged into Karou’s intended hiding place.

Stupid,
Karou admonished herself. It was tour hour. Of course Kaz’s hiding places would be stuffed with actors. It often amused her, as she walked through Old Town in the evening, to see bored ghosts leaning against walls, texting or tweeting while they waited for the next clutch of tourists to be led along.

“What are you doing here?” Svetla asked, her lip curling like she smelled something off. She was one of those beautiful girls with a knack for making herself ugly.

Karou glanced back to Karlova, then ahead to the next curve in the alley that could provide her with cover. It was too far down; she couldn’t chance it. She could almost feel her stalker drawing nearer.

Svetla drawled, “If you’re looking for Kaz, don’t bother. He told me what you did.”

Jesus,
thought Karou. As if any of that mattered now. She said, “Svetla, shut up,” and thrust herself into the niche right along with her, shoving the other girl back against the stones.

Svetla gasped and tried to shove her out. “What are you doing, freak?”

“I said shut up,” Karou hissed, and when Svetla did not, she whipped her knife from her sleeve and held it up. It curved at the tip like the claw of a cat, and its edge caught a thread of light and glinted. Svetla gave a little gasp and fell silent, but not for long. “Oh, right. I’m so sure you’re going to
stab
me—”

“Listen,” said Karou, low. “Just be quiet for a minute and I’ll fix your stupid eyebrows.”

Shocked silence preceded a rasped
“What?”

Svetla’s hair was cut in a long, hard bang, so low it brushed her eyes, and it was shellacked with hairspray so it scarcely moved, all in order to hide her eyebrows, on which Karou had wasted a shing in a fit of spite around Christmastime. Black and bushy under her hair, they were likely not working any wonders for her modeling career.

Svetla’s expression hovered somewhere between confusion and outrage. There was simply no way that Karou could know about her eyebrows, always kept so carefully covered. She would think Karou had been spying on her. Karou didn’t care what she thought. She just wanted silence. “I’m serious,” she breathed. “But only if I’m still alive to do it, so
shut up
.”

Voices drifted over from Karlova, along with strains of music from nearby cafes, and the purr of engines. She couldn’t hear footsteps, but that didn’t mean anything. Hunters understood stealth.

Svetla’s expression remained aghast, but for the moment, at least, she was quiet. Karou stood rigid and fierce-eyed, listening intently.

Someone was coming. Footsteps like the ghosts of footsteps. Out in the alley, a shadow seeped into view. Karou watched it lengthen on the ground in front of her as its source drew nearer. Her palms throbbed; she clasped her knife tighter and peered at the shadow, trying to make sense of it.