sky on the TV in a corner bar in Rome, and toasted success with prosecco.
“What do you want to bet Esther never drank that champagne she ordered?” Mik gloated, taking a deep swill of bubbly.
After all their worry and Evil Esther’s fell contrivances, Karou, Akiva, and Virko had pulled it off. The angels were out, and they had definitely not been carrying guns.
“In your face, fake grandma,” Zuzana crowed, but her triumph was chased by sorrow. The portal was closed, and a violin case full of wishes wouldn’t get her back to Eretz, where anything could still be happening. There was nothing to do now but keep worrying, and possibly mope.
“What do you want to do?” she asked Mik. “Go home?”
He blew out a breath. “I guess. See our families. Plus, a certain giant, wicked marionette is probably very lonely.”
Zuzana scoffed. “He can stay lonely. My ballerina days are over.”
“Well. You could make him a wife at least, so he can enjoy his retirement.”
At Mik’s mention of the word wife, something inside Zuzana fizzed. She smothered it with a scowl.
Eliza looked at them, perplexed. “You’re going back to Prague?”
Zuzana shrugged, ready to sink into a good, slumpy self-pity jag. Maybe I’ll even cry, she thought. “What are you going to do?”
“I can tell you what I’m not going to do,” she said. Her wings were glamoured, which she’d somehow figured out how to do on her own, and her torn shirt didn’t even look that weird. It could practically have been fashion. “I’m not going to finish my dissertation. Sorry, Danaus plexippus.”
“Who?” asked Mik.
Eliza smiled. “Monarch butterfly. That’s what I research.” She paused, corrected herself. “Researched. I can’t go back to that life, not now, as much as I yearn to demolish Morgan Toth with the most excruciating forehead smack of all time. What I want to do?” She looked at them intently, her eyes so big and bright. “Is go to Eretz.”
Zuzana and Mik just looked at her. Zuzana cut a significant glance at the TV screen, where they’d all just watched the portal burn.
Eliza, cottoning to this nonverbal language, raised eyebrows and shoulders in a fully committed Yeah, so?
Mik released an even breath. Zuzana scarcely dared to hope, but when Eliza started talking again, it wasn’t about Eretz.
“Did you know, monarch butterflies migrate five thousand miles, round-trip, every year? No other insect does anything like it. And the most amazing thing about it is that the migration is multigenerational. The ones who return north aren’t the same ones that went south the year before. They’re several life cycles removed, but somehow they retrace the route.”
She was silent for a moment, a weird little smile playing at her lips, like she couldn’t tell if something was funny or not. Honestly, Zuzana didn’t know what to make of Eliza now that she was non-vegetal. It wasn’t just that she was coherent. She was… more than human, somehow. It wasn’t just the wings, either. You could feel it coming off her: this energy, unknowable and crackling. What in the hell had they done to her, with one gavriel?
“I don’t really remember how I first got interested in them. It was definitely the migration, though, and it makes so much sense now. I guess I always knew more than I knew I knew, if that makes sense.”
“Not really,” said Zuzana, flat.
“I’m a butterfly,” Eliza said, as if that explained it. “Several life cycles removed. Well, except more than several. A thousand years. I don’t know how many generations.”
Zuzana frowned, waiting for her to say something that made sense. Mik, though, in much the same blasé way as he’d reacted to Karou telling them, months ago, that she was a chimaera, said only, “Cool.”
Eliza laughed, and then she told them about Elazael. The real Elazael, and what she had been and done, and about the dream that had plagued Eliza all her life, and what it meant, and Zuzana had thought she’d lost her capacity for surprise, but she found it again in a corner bar in Rome. No, it wasn’t surprise. It was bigger than that.
Zuzana found flummox in a corner bar in Rome. Universes. Many. And split seams in the linings of the space-time continuum. Or something. And angels who were like space explorers without ships, like science fiction but with magic in the place of science.
“The magi did something to the Faerers’ minds,” Eliza explained. “Their anima, actually. It’s more than mind; it’s self. Part of their duty was to