Wicked Like a Wildfire Page 9

  Beside me, I heard Malina catch a shuddering breath, but still no one else in the square even looked our way.

  Patterns began to flicker across the pristine canvas of Naisha’s skin, chasing one another. Tiger stripes of orange and black wound around her waist, then a silver spate of fish scales scattered across her ribs. Long, pale swan feathers fanned out over her chest, then bright-green and glossy black ones swept up her neck. Cheetah spots raced in trails down both her arms, and finally the skin around her eyes turned a stippled, tawny brown and beige, as if she had become part diamondback snake.

  As she flicked through the patterns, her eyes and hair changed color to match, flowing from a brilliant, inhuman orange to a flaring peacock green, and even her features seemed to shift, sharpening or flattening out to mimic the animal she was showing for us. Yet it never went all the way; her face stayed beautiful in each incarnation, a gorgeous were-woman hybrid like a creature from one of my storybooks. A shape-shifter prettier than any succubus I’d ever read about.

  I realized my jaw was hanging open, and closed it with a click as Naisha dipped to pluck her shirt from the ground, shaking her hair loose as she buttoned it briskly back up. Even that was gracefully done, nimble and quick like fingers flying over piano keys. My mouth had gone dry, and everything inside my head swam giddy. I should have been shocked to see something so dazzlingly strange, but the shock felt very far and faint, eclipsed by envy and wonder.

  “Do you see?” Sorai said softly, reaching out to graze the crown of my head with her nails, Malina’s with her other hand. A tingling current ran through me, and I nearly arched my back like a cat at her touch. “This is how you should be. So beautiful that you can wound with it. Your beauty is a force, you know, a power all its own. It can be both sword and shield for you, and win you anything you want.”

  “But I—I don’t know how,” I said hoarsely. Malina made an uncertain hmm beside me, as if she somehow almost knew what that meant, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Sorai enough to question her. “Will you show us?” I yearned for them to stay so badly, to remind me how to gleam.

  “Oh, you will learn again when you need to,” she replied, still stroking my head. “It hasn’t died inside you. I see it merely asleep, like a fox kit curled up in her den. And even what is deeply sleeping nearly always wakes again. But remember that it burns inside you, a fox fire in your chest. Even if it might be simpler, never let yourself forget.”

  “What about me,” Malina asked thickly. “Why aren’t you telling me not to forget?”

  Sorai gave a bright, stirring laugh, a cluster of nested bells rung together. “Because you are my cuckoo, are you not, baby songbird? All that false meekness in your mother’s nest.”

  “Are you going to . . .” Naisha hesitated, then cleared her throat. Sorai turned to her with a languid, too-slow swivel of her head, fine crow’s-feet crinkling as her eyes narrowed. “Do you wish to take them, then?” she finished.

  “No, let her keep them still. She’ll serve as she needs to, when it’s time. She will, and they will.”

  She turned back to me, dropping quick yet weightless to her knees, as if she were at once made of feathers and lead. The feathered gown pooled around her, and she tipped my chin up with a warm, curled finger—I could feel the sharp edge of her nail sink almost painfully into my skin—before leaning forward, her hair sliding like a curtain around both our faces. Her eyes were so bright I could barely stand to look at her, and my own slid closed as her lips covered mine in a smooth, chaste kiss, a long exhale of that dizzying perfume. It had deepened and darkened, too, turning closer to the earth; patchouli, frankincense, and even tobacco.

  Everything seemed to slide away—the ground beneath me, the grit of the stone block against my back, the warm brush of Lina’s arm by mine—and I funneled into a thick and fragrant black.

  AS I BLINKED against the darkened, frayed edge of the memory, I looked up to see the woman on the bastion gather her skirts in one hand and leap nimbly over the other side, beyond the Northern Gate—into the Škurda River. I raced headlong through the gate, but there was nothing, no one, just the lacy green-and-white churn of the water rippling around rocks beneath the bridge.

  I stood for a moment with the back of my hand to my forehead, reeling; the way she moved had been so fluid it was nearly inhuman. And now that I remembered her—remembered them both—I couldn’t believe that I had ever forgotten. I could recall the rest of that afternoon perfectly, almost too well, as if the excision of that memory had crystallized the remainder of the day. Lina and I had gone on as if nothing had happened, used some of the glasswork money to split a hazelnut and strawberry gelato before we headed to the beach with Luka and Niko. And there’d never been a single mention between us of a woman wrapped in feathers and scent, or another that could draw animal prints using nothing but her own skin.

  It was the perfume that had done it: a perfume that made us feel things and then forget them, just like Mama had said our grandmother’s gleam had done before she died.

  And both of those women had our eyes.

  Those women were family, somehow, they had to be. And if they were, then everything Mama had told us—the three of us, all alone in the world—was a lie. And from what Sorai had said, the gleam she saw inside us was something not to be tamped down, but to be coaxed into full flame just like I’d always wanted.

  But who were they to us? Why had Sorai given me back a memory she had stolen from me years ago, just like she had considered stealing both me and Malina from our mother? Why had they even wanted to take us—and why had they left us with Mama anyway when they could have spirited us away so easily, luring us with that perfume like some scented pied piper?

  The only thing I could latch onto was that one of these three women, Dunja, Sorai, or Naisha, had hurt our mother, then somehow suspended her just short of death. It was Dunja’s name that Mama had spoken last, but then again, that “don’t” . . . now I wondered if she was truly our only suspect. Everything felt like twist-tied nonsense, without end and beginning, like the world had spun itself into a Möbius strip. I yearned suddenly for Luka, who’d taught me about Möbius strips and then indulged me endlessly when I caught a fascination with them, wondering how they could be worked into my glass fractals. If he were here, what would he tell me to do? How would he cut to the root of this tangle?

  The root. That was it. Mama was the root of this, and even if I couldn’t go to her directly, I still had all her things.

  TEN

  I CROSSED THE BRIDGE OVER THE ŠKURDA, WHICH LED TO the shop-lined street that backed ours. I was nearly home when it struck me that I had no actual plan for confronting any potential murderer lying in wait in our apartment, and that this was a thing I might want to consider.

  Glancing around the riverbank, I armed myself with a rock and a sturdy branch snapped off from our oleander tree. Tucking the stick under my arm, I tried the doorknob; it didn’t budge under my hand.

  Squatting near the base of the oleander, I dug gingerly around the roots, wary of beetles and things with stingers, until I found the spare key nestled there. The apartment felt hushed and stale as I let myself in, and my stomach contracted at the stubborn, lingering tang of rakija. Still clutching my stick and rock, and feeling only slightly like an asshole but mostly like a subscriber to the “best have it and not need it” school, I poked through the kitchen, bathroom, tiny living room, and two bedrooms—the pile of Lina’s shoes tipped precariously against one wall, like an abstract sculpture of stabby heels and glossy straps, seemed like it had multiplied exponentially, but that was always the case—until I was satisfied that no one was going to dart out at me from under a bed or behind a door.

  Since there’d never been much of anything in our living room other than a TV with actual rabbit-ear antennas and more of Jovan’s gorgeous driftwood furniture, I started my search in Mama’s room. Other than two nights before, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in there. She’d
kept it locked during the day since she’d caught us playing dress-up with her clothes once, years ago—that once had been enough to keep Lina humming her danger song for weeks.

  The space between bed and closet was so narrow I had to do a little sideways shuffle as I eased open one wing and then the other. The armoire exhaled lavender, sage, and lemon peel into my face; no mothballs for our mother. Wooden hangers clacked as I plunged my hands into an assembly line’s worth of fitted dresses. Mama bought her clothes at the flea market stands and thrift shops just like we did, but she spent hours of her scarce free time painstakingly altering them until they somehow transformed into finery, as if she couldn’t bear anything less than perfection against her skin. She took fastidious care of them, and threw them away so rarely that some of these were almost ten years old, ones she’d worn even before I lost her.

  And they smelled so strongly of her.

  I let the sobs come rolling out, the louder ones I’d held trapped in my rib cage the night before. Curling the fabrics between my fingers, I pressed her dresses against my flushed face. It felt as if I were turning myself inside out and my innards were spikier than expected, spiny like burrs.

  Once I’d finally cried myself dry, I slid down to the floor, my back against the bed and my knees drawn up. If I hadn’t been at that angle, I might not even have caught a glimpse of the folded chessboard at the bottom of the closet, wedged upright against the back so that most of it stood hidden behind longer dresses.

  I dove into the closet face-first and dragged it out. It was a big board, and heavy, the squares black and white and the surrounding wood pale shisham, inlaid with silver diamonds and flower petals. I knew that Mama and Čiča Jovan loved playing chess together, so he must have made this for her; nothing strange about that. But when I gave it a shake no muffled rattle of queens and pawns sounded from the inside. I could hear only a papery slide as I tilted the board back and forth, along with a rumbly little roll. And the padlock that clasped to the hinge holding the two parts of the board together felt unusually sturdy.

  Fortunately, I had a rock handy, and a right arm honed by years of stirring, rolling dough, and blowing glass. It had made me the arm-wrestling champion of the sixth grade, and now it let me deal a series of precise blows to the lock without damaging the board. I had just eased the mangled lock out of the hinge and flipped the top back, revealing a plush, royal-blue lining, when a hand clamped down on my shoulder.

  I leaped off the bed, scrambling for my rock.

  “Riss! Jesus!” Malina backed away, hands held up. “Don’t kill me, please, okay?”

  I tossed the rock away and leaned on my thighs, panting. “Why would you sneak up on me like that, for fuck’s sake? How did you even know I was here?”

  “Well, the window was open, and the calzones baking at the Bastion woke me up.” Of course they had. “You weren’t there, and after that . . .” She shuddered, and a bright flush blotched down her neck. “That awful dream last night, I thought you’d come back here and look for, I don’t know, clues or something. About what’s happening to Mama. What’s happening to us.”

  “That dream,” I said, sinking back down onto the bed. “What was that? I loved her, Lina. I was all but looking around for the nearest cliff to jump from, just so I could show her how much I loved her. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I know. I don’t understand it either, how something could feel that way. Especially for us both. This is just—it’s all too much.” She took a deep breath and soldiered on. “Did you find something? What’s in there?”

  She sat beside me as I lifted a plain little apothecary vial from inside the chessboard. The thick brown liquid inside slid viscously back and forth as I tilted it.

  “It looks like an absolute, I think?” Lina said. “They’re always thicker than the essentials. Are you going to open it?”

  “I was thinking we’d sit here and contemplate its visual properties for a while. See what we can see.”

  She frowned at me reproachfully, wrinkling the creamy expanse between her thick eyebrows. “Mean.”

  I worked the stopper out carefully, and Lina leaned in until we were almost touching foreheads. Then I brought the vial between our noses and took a wary sniff. The fragrance rushed up bitter, bright, and sweet all at once, vibrantly intense and underpinned by the faint hint of something darker.

  Malina whistled softly, then bit her cherry-cleft lower lip. “Orange blossom absolute, wow. That’s wonderful. I’ve never smelled one that dramatic. There’s amber in there too, I think, and maybe myrrh? And lots of other things I can’t recognize, I’m sorry. You know what’s weird, though . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Mama never used orange blossom absolute, even though it’s stronger than neroli. That’s the essential-oil version of bitter orange flower. Neroli she loved, but we never had any of the absolute around. I only know what it smells like because Niko bought me the Egyptian kind last year for us to play with.”

  “Why would she keep this locked up in here?” I wondered, working the stopper back in place. “It’s gorgeous, but it’s only perfume.”

  “Is there anything else in there?”

  There was, a curling photograph tucked into the velvet-lined rim. I gently slid it loose. The photo was of a smiling girl who looked a little like our mother, but a much softer rendition, more along Malina’s lines. She was maybe eighteen or nineteen, and her hair blazed a fiery copper, threaded through with ribbons just like ours. Her gray eyes were even bigger and clearer than our mother’s as she smiled widely into the lens, lush wooded mountains and a pine-studded valley visible behind her. She wore an ivory dress, cap-sleeved with a black Peter Pan collar and a sheer lacy panel down the middle, exposing her fine clavicles and even the inner curves of her full breasts. It was both demure and aggressively sexy, and it seemed like a strange choice for a mountaintop in the middle of the day.

  I turned the photo over; it simply said Anais in our mother’s swooping, calligraphic handwriting.

  “Anais,” Malina breathed. “Ana.”

  I ran my fingers over the glossy contours of the woman’s face. I’d never seen a photo of Mama’s sister before. I hadn’t even known any existed; Mama had always said she’d taken nothing with her when she ran, but I wondered now how we’d never thought to question that. How would she even have made it from a remote mountain village to Cattaro, without money or a car or any belongings? What would have happened to our grandfather, if he’d really killed our aunt and grandmother—and not just killed them, but flung them off a mountain?

  We’d swallowed the story at the time, like a bitter tincture of truth, but now it seemed glaringly false. Gory as a Grimm fairy tale. A story meant to scare a child, to urge us never to dig deeper.

  “But this doesn’t make any sense,” Malina murmured, echoing my thoughts. “I thought Mama had to leave everything behind.”

  “Exactly. And it’s not just that. I saw someone today, and remembered something that happened to us once. Do you remember two women coming to see us, about four years ago? A brunette and a blonde, Sorai and Naisha?”

  She shook her head and frowned as I described the memory to her, chewing on her index finger. “I don’t know, Riss . . . I want to say I almost remember, but I think it’s just because you’re telling it so well. Animal prints on a naked chick’s skin, in the middle of Arms Square? I think I’d remember that. But I don’t, I’m sorry.”

  Huffing with frustration, I set the chessboard aside. “Why don’t you see if you can find anything else? Weird things like this, or something missing, like my sculpture from the café? I’ll finish up in here.”

  Once I was done rummaging through Mama’s closet, I riffled through her drawers too, and dipped my fingers beneath her mattress and under her pillows. But there was nothing.

  It seemed wrong, somehow, to leave the room in such chaos, so I rehung the clothes and made her bed, then stacked up the velveteen pillows lining her window nook. Besi
de it lay the stained and crumpled dove-gray sheath she’d worn, and I picked that up too. A corner of it sagged in my grip. Frowning, I worked my hand into the hidden pockets. The left was empty, but the right held something cold and long, its end ridged beneath my fingertips.

  A key, attached to a little magnetic fob.

  I carefully worked it free as it snagged on the pocket’s silken inner lining. It was heavy and ornate, the bow molded into the lion’s head and fleur-de-lis I’d seen many times—the sigil of the Hotel Cattaro in the Arms Square of Old Town.

  “Lina,” I called out, twirling the blade of the key between my fingers, “I think I found something.”

  “Me too,” she called back. “My violin, Riss. It’s gone.”

  ELEVEN

  “BUT WHY WOULD ANYONE EVEN WANT IT?” MALINA ASKED as she trotted next to me across the Škurda bridge. There’d been nothing else out of place at home, no new things or ones missing that should have been there. We’d called the detective to let him know about the stolen violin, but everything had careened so far from the mundane that I couldn’t imagine what the police could possibly do for us now. What else would I have told him, anyway? Look out for tiger-striped witches, Detective? Beware of perfumes that smell like commands?

  Any answers we wanted to find, we’d have to hunt down ourselves.

  “It was just a Stagg, nothing special,” she continued. “Not like anyone was going to mistake it for a vintage Stainer or Guarnerius or anything.”