Wicked Like a Wildfire Read online

  “That’s not fair.” Except, it was, at least in part. “Or true.” That, too. “Those things belong to us. And you’re the one who found the patterns for the kimono online, remember? You’re the one who bought fabric and snuck her sewing machine to Jovan’s studio to sew them for us.”

  I could hear her swallow. “But I don’t call relatives we might have in Japan—if they even exist—real family, like you do. As if Mama and I are fake to you.”

  “That’s not how I mean that,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. Or you. I just meant, maybe there I would be someone. Someone real, not just a poor-man’s version of the two of you.”

  Lina brought her thumb to her mouth and chewed furiously at it. “Please, please never say that to me again. There’s no world in which I’m whatever it is you think I am. Prettier, easier to love, somehow better than you. I can’t stand knowing that you think that. That’s—that’s such bullshit, Riss.”

  She spat the word out like it hurt, like she’d been holding tacks on her tongue. I knew how much she hated swearing, and somehow that one word in the whole un-Malina-like tirade comforted me more than anything else she’d said. I stayed silent but I tightened my arm around her waist. In turn, she curled her fingers around my wrist, her ragged cuticles scratchy against my skin. Then she snapped my hair band for me once, as if she knew I needed it. A warm breeze stole over both of us through the cracked-open window, bringing with it the smell of night-blooming jasmine and the sea.

  “Are you going to say something?” she whispered.

  “It’s just, I can’t feel anything properly. Other than that one feeling. I haven’t even cried since we got here.”

  “That’s not all you feel,” Lina murmured. “That’s just the top.” She shifted against me, reaching up to knot my fingers with hers. “Do you want me to sing it for you? It would be better with the violin, but I can do it if I use all three.”

  I hesitated. Malina’s polyphonic songs could be overwhelming when she didn’t hold back, not just echoing emotions but stealing inside you through the cracks—and whatever lurked below my frozen surface, the trapped minnows and monsters underneath, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to meet it face-to-face.

  But the mother who had nibbled on our cheeks—the mother who’d looked at me like Queen Jevrosima at her beloved son—she deserved my tears.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  She sang softly, just loud enough for me to hear, the hum of the fundamental joined by one overtone and then the other. At first the song was peaceful, gentle dips and falls like seawater rippling under a night sky scattered with dim stars, but then I caught the refrain, and it was us—two girls adrift on a raft big enough for three, an endless sea lapping against the edges. We were together, but so alone, far from any welcoming shore. And the space between us, mother-shaped, ached with every note that formed its contours.

  We’d had a mother, wrapped in barbed wire more often than not, but still alive and ours.

  And now we didn’t. Whatever was happening to her, she was gone. We had only each other, and it wasn’t nearly enough.

  I felt my tears before I even knew I was crying, sliding silent but scalding down my cheeks. I wept into Malina’s hair until my body quaked, my ribs aching with the sobs I swallowed. I’d thought nothing could be worse than when Mama’s eyes chilled, or when she flamed into sudden rage like a phoenix, but I’d been wrong. This was worse, so much worse—especially when I remembered imagining her dead a thousand times over, after she slapped me, ignored me, or gutted me with a single word.

  And worse yet when I acknowledged the faintest tinge of relief beneath it all.

  “I saw it happen, Lina,” I whispered through the tears. “I saw it—I saw her dying. I can’t . . . it keeps playing in my head, on loop. I can’t think about anything else.” I could hear her shuddering breath jostle between the notes of the melody. “And sometimes . . . sometimes I wanted her to die. Do you think . . . ?”

  “No,” she said firmly, breaking off the song. “Of course you thought about it, sometimes. So did I. So do kids whose mothers don’t ignore them for two weeks because they accidentally put salt instead of sugar in the meringue. It doesn’t mean we wished her dead, you know?”

  WE BOTH GREW quiet after that. I turned away from Malina, my spine notching into hers like clockwork gears. Drained of everything, I fell asleep in a lurching, heavy drop, as if I’d been heaved into water with stones tied to my feet.

  And then the bed was gone and I was cold, colder than I’d ever been inside a dream. The night sky above me was both black and bright, feathered with a vast, milky tapestry of stars and a sickle moon. I stood on a sweeping mountain plateau, circled by peaks looming darker than the night above. Frosted pines surrounded the clearing, and at its very center, a naked woman knelt with her face turned up to the sky.

  I followed the spill of moonlight on her dark hair, so long it swept over her shoulders and covered her breasts, its ends brushing the thick, curved muscle of her thighs. I could see the wisps of breath pluming from her flared nostrils; she was so much warmer than the air that the snow had melted beneath her folded legs, all the way down to the brittle, dead grass and earth beneath. Even from where I stood, I thought I could smell her, something sweet and stirring that pierced me to my core.

  It was too dark and she was too far for me to make out the features of her face, but I could see the liquid glitter of her eyes. And when she met mine, there was nothing else. Only her and me, two fixed points in a universe that wheeled furiously around us.

  I loved this woman, I realized. I adored her. I wanted her to hold me, to own me, to chain me to her side with a collar made of silver links. Because nothing more was needed—I would never run from her.

  There were things scattered in a circle around her, too, wickedly sharpened stones, little sigils shaped from sprinkled powders, and flowers so perfectly dried they looked like sketches against the snow. They burst into fractals when I looked at them, multiplying into a spiraling infinity around her. Together with the powder sigils, they made a complex design that shifted and blurred every time I looked at it head on—a geometric ring around her like the rapid spread of ice crystals under a microscope.

  The powder was made of ground and colored bone, I knew somehow, from the skeletons of things she had killed with her own hands. Little things, rodents and hatchlings and baby snakes; bigger things, foxes and wolves and sinuous ermines; and biggest things, that she’d had to strike with spears and slash with knives, peeling back glistening hanks of muscle to reveal the bleach of bone beneath.

  Even the dye was made from murdered life, the shells of glossy insects she’d smashed with her own fists, flower petals bled of color in her grip.

  There was also a brilliant little heap right in front of her knees, as if she’d shaped it into a pyramid with her hands, and though I wasn’t close enough to tell what it was, I could see it glittering madly beneath the moonlight.

  One of the sigils kept catching my eye, because I knew—I felt—this one had been made of something small, something fuzzy-haired and squalling as it swung little fists in search of a missing mother. Because that was what it would have taken, to summon the attention and favor of the old gods who would let her do what must be done. To give body to that which had none.

  And yet as soon as I thought it—she killed a child for this—the certainty was gone.

  She watched me, humming a tune that dipped low before soaring high, the warmth of her rising off her silhouette in an icy halo. This dark flower of a woman, this sacred lady, would never have done a thing like that. I couldn’t have loved her if she had, and love for her was the only thing I knew.

  Without breaking the lock of our gaze, she reached out and delicately plucked up one of the stone blades, her fingers fine and dark against the snow. Slowly, she drew it along the inside of her arm, and I winced as I saw it bite into skin, the well and sluice of her blood down to her palms. She let it drip over the flowers and
patterned powders, then gathered them all up and crushed them between her hands. With splayed fingers, she smeared the paste over her face, and throat, and chest, until her eyes blazed between the whorls and streaks, her hair like water dappled with moonlight.

  The song she hummed grew louder, and I loved her so much I wanted to die. If she would let me be her daughter—if she would deign to be my mother—I would fling myself off mountains, let river water fill my lungs until they burst. But only if my death was what she wanted.

  Then she rose up in a fluid movement, rocking back onto her heels. The love inside me eddied like whirlpools, tinged with a dash of panic, a hint of terror. She made her way to me with slow, deliberate steps, each fine-boned foot searing an imprint into the snow below her soles. A light, feathery snow began to fall, and it gathered in my lashes even as it barely glanced her skin before melting.

  Her fingers were so hot when she trailed them over my face that I would have flinched away from her, if her humming hadn’t held me fast.

  “Mara,” she whispered, the sound of it so alien I wondered if it was a word in some other tongue. She bared her teeth in a smile, and they flashed white in the dark.

  “Mara,” she said again, her tongue flicking behind her teeth. She ran her fingers through my hair. The snow had turned to flurries that whipped around us, and still she stroked my hair, from its roots to its ends, until I nearly swooned at her touch. Even in the dream, ribbons were threaded through its length. “Marzanna. More. Moréna.”

  It wasn’t a word, I realized. It was her. It was her name, and she had many.

  “Maržena,” she continued through gritted teeth. A flood of pure terror flushed through me, until she gripped my face in one strong, bloodied hand and I went slack, gasping with fear and adoration. I could smell her fully now, the iron reek of blood, the dry salt of bone, and an overwhelming wave of sandalwood. “Morana, Mora, MARMORA!”

  The last she shrieked into my face, her voice blending with the gale, and I tore myself awake like a bandage off a wound. I was still screaming her names as I sat up in bed, my entire body shuddering. Beside me, Malina sat stone-faced, her jaw clenched so hard I could see the tendons in her throat twitching.

  I folded over until my head lay in her lap, pressing my fists against my face.

  “Did you see her?” she whispered, in a cold, uncanny dual voice that sounded nothing like her. I’d never heard her just speak in polyphony before. “Did you?”

  “Yes.” I bit back a whimper. “I saw her.”

  It felt like a long time until she laid her hand on my head.

  NINE

  I WOKE AT DAWN, AS IF MY INTERNAL ALARM CLOCK hadn’t come dislodged in spite of everything that had happened. It seemed impossible that either of us had managed to get back to sleep after a dream like that—a dream that we’d somehow shared, something we’d never done before—but Malina was still resolutely asleep, curled tightly like a mollusk with a little frown creased into her brow, her lips pursed and rosy as a baby’s.

  I didn’t want to wake her so early, but I needed to be outside. I needed the world firm and real beneath my feet, to breathe warm morning air until I could calibrate to this new normal.

  Throwing a heather-gray cashmere wrap over my nightgowned shoulders, I eased the bedroom window open and dropped lightly onto the smooth stones of the courtyard. Čiča Jovan lived in a pied-à-terre in one of the renovated stone buildings near the Northern River Gate, the Old Town’s back entrance. It was right across from our favorite pizzeria, the Bastion, named after the fortifications that led out of the Old Town along the clear, green water of the Škurda. The air was always cooler here, like spray to the face, and it already smelled like baking calzones: the insides a molten mass of cheese, prosciutto, and mushrooms spiced with oregano, and a rich dollop of sour cream on the top.

  Whatever eagle eyes the police had posted to watch over our house had apparently called it a night long before dawn. I could see one drooping at his post, snoring in his chair in Jovan’s wild little garden. Other than him and the bakers inside the pizzeria, the small square was deserted beneath the blazing pink and orange of a sky shot through with veins of molten gold.

  There shouldn’t have been anyone around watching me. But there was.

  I could feel it, a tingle over the crown of my head that spread down the back of my neck like a flurry of pins and needles. People had stared at me plenty over the years, at me and Malina both, and I was intimately familiar with how the weight of eyes usually felt. But this was different, so intent I almost felt as if I was being touched, caressed by fingernails running lightly through my hair and down my nape.

  It felt so weirdly delicious yet uncomfortable that I froze, scanning the square. Nothing stirred against the gray of the stone blocks, other than the whisper of lacy curtains behind open white shutters across the way, and a scattering of wildflowers nodding in Jovan’s garden. They pinwheeled into an unruly whorl as soon as my gaze landed on them, and I looked hastily away.

  Then a flicker of movement drew my gaze up to the bastion itself, the rounded stone fortification with its crenelated edges. I’d never seen anyone up there before, but now a woman leaned on the edge right above the river gate, hair even blacker than my own spilling over like an inkfall.

  I walked across the small square like a sleepwalker until I stood in front of the gate, my neck craned so I could look up at her with parted lips and squinted eyes. To her right the craggy mountains reared, patches of green against the sheer stone screes, and her silhouetted form was draped in dusky blue and silver, a loose Grecian dress pinned around her neck. From where I stood below her, the angle threw the architecture of her bones into stark relief, and I realized I knew her. I knew that powerful jaw, the full mouth and regal flare of the nostrils, the unyielding cheekbone sweep and thick black brows above pale eyes.

  Then somehow her perfume reached me, as if it could seek me out despite the direction of the wind. With déjà vu rolling over me like a lurching tide, I didn’t just know but I remembered.

  FOUR YEARS AGO Lina and I had sat in the Arms Square on my threadbare blanket, hawking my glass flowers while Lina sang wanting songs at passing strangers. We’d already had a good day of it—three fractal poppies sold, scarlet with jet-black centers like singularities, and two lady’s slipper orchids I’d sweated over for weeks—when they came.

  Counting our coins and dinar bills, neither of us noticed until their shadows fell over us, and that sweet scent tightened around us like a grasping hand. It smelled like sandalwood and honey and bergamot, bright honeysuckle above and the tang of blood oranges below. It smelled so good it nearly hurt, and I could feel my lungs expanding painfully with the effort to draw it in, my bronchioles unfurling like cherry-blossom buds.

  The black-haired woman had worn a gown then too, so extravagant it should have been silly in the milling crowd of T-shirted tourists, but it wasn’t. Its full skirt was lined with stripes of shining peacock feathers alternating with raven black, as if she were heading to a masquerade. Her arms were swathed to the elbow with fingerless gloves, black leather and lace fine and dense as filigree. Deep copper shoulders glowed smooth above a satin hem.

  But none of it compared to the sheer force of her face, a kind of bold that seemed almost wild: cheekbones flat and broad as steppes, a wide-bridged nose with a small bump between her eyes, a lush and perfect mouth. And those pale, pale eyes, black-rimmed and water gray. Exactly the color of my mother’s, or Malina’s, or my own.

  And there was that hearthstone smell, like warmth and trust and mother-love. I wanted to be even closer to it, I realized. I wanted the black-haired woman to sit down with us, to somehow pull both me and Malina onto her lap as if we were still little girls who could fit.

  “Look at them, Naisha,” she whispered to the other in a rough-edged purr layered with more tones at once than I could count. It was a bit how Malina sounded when she sang, but I didn’t think she could talk this way, and she wasn’t anywhere
near so multiple. “Look at how faint and little they are, that all these shamblers barely even see them. They should be so much lovelier by now.”

  “It’s not their fault, Sorai,” Naisha murmured back. She was lovely too, a blonde carved out of ivory, platinum, and silver. She had the same wolf-gray eyes, but her narrow features were both delicate and sharp, as if a sculptor had whittled her face using only a very pretty knife. She wore a man’s white shirt unbuttoned to her breastbone and rolled up to her elbows, and in her worn-down, shapeless jeans she still looked like someone’s queen. “She isn’t teaching them, like I told you.”

  There was something familiar about her voice, sweet and stripped of the other’s inhuman resonance, but the honeyed prison of perfume wouldn’t let me think enough to place it.

  “But they do look at us,” I said, as if the blonde hadn’t even spoken. My voice sounded strange and echoing, as if the three of us were underneath a dome, an upended goldfish bowl. It made the air feel like cotton stuffed in my ears. “They stare at us all the time.”

  “Of course they do, little one,” the brunette—Sorai—said, and the slight smile she gave me warmed me to my core. Looking at her felt like staring at a darkened sun, watching an eclipse until it turned your eyes to cinders. “You were born to draw the gaze, to snare it like a butterfly in a net. But you are not nearly what you should be. Show them, Naisha. Show them what beauty should be like. Show them all they are missing.”

  Naisha’s face stayed impassive, and I would never have noticed the struggle beneath if I hadn’t seen Malina’s eyes on her and heard my sister’s dissonant little trill: Don’t tell me what to do. It seemed strange, that childish note of defiance. Especially since they both looked around the same age to me, not much older or younger than Mama.

  Moving so slowly, Naisha unbuttoned her shirt and let it fall, tossing her head so the gleaming corn-silk rope of her hair slid over one shoulder. Her bare torso shone long and lithe, small teardrop breasts tipped in pink. Every gesture was beyond deliberate, the bending of each wrist and crooking of her fingers like the precise steps of the most minute dance. I noticed she had an odd piercing, a tiny diamond embedded into her left wrist, sparking between the forking green threads of her veins. My heart pounded wildly in my chest; I’d seen women topless on the beach sometimes, but they’d never looked anything like this, a perfection vast and heartbreaking as a sunrise.