Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,170

the greetings there was news to share, and much of it, though they kept it as brief as they could. There would have been no natural end to the speculation that followed, but that Issa intercepted a glance between Karou and Akiva.

It was the lit-fuse look, the space between them fairly shimmering with heat, and Issa’s lips pressed into a smile. They didn’t see her notice it—they didn’t see anything but each other—and when she said, “Well, I imagine our travelers are weary,” and began to break up the gathering, they didn’t guess that it was on their behalf.

Everyone seemed to share the sense of homecoming, even the Misbegotten, and the whole party moved off together, along with those who’d come out to greet them. And when they reached the grand cavern, where the chimaera might have gone on and down toward the village they had formerly occupied, they didn’t, but stayed with the angels to prepare a meal together, beneath the stalactites.

Karou wasn’t hungry. Not for pilfered Dominion rations, anyway.

A Christmas-morning feeling had come over her. Well, she’d had few enough Christmas mornings in her life. The one with Esther had felt more like a stage play—glittering and special, but as something she was meant to watch, rather than participate in. She’d had two with Zuzana’s family, and those were much better, and though they hadn’t exactly been children, they’d acted like it as much as possible. Holiday rituals in the Novak home were immutable, and even Zuzana’s older brother, who had tried so hard to impress Karou with his dubious manliness, had come scampering down the stairs at dawn on Christmas morning to see what magic had happened in the night.

The feeling, it was the sense of waiting drawing to an end. Not dread waiting, but excited waiting of the best kind: waiting for magic.

And the magic Karou was waiting for now, waiting for and reaching for—and she could feel it reaching right back, like a mirror image at the very instant before your fingertips touch their twins in the glass—was of the decidedly grown-up variety.

She couldn’t stop looking at Akiva. And every time she did, either she found his gaze waiting, or else it sensed hers at once and came around to meet it. Every look was vivid and full and alive. There was laughter in the set of his mouth, because it had become funny, at last, at the tail end of waiting. Only funny because it was almost over, and everything that was… not them… was obstacle. It was a tease now, this lingering, a game, to see who could last another minute, and a dance. Their bodies—two in the midst of many—moved to the pull of the same magnet, no matter who stood between them.

Karou felt as though her skin had been awakened. It had been dormant and she hadn’t even known it, but since the kiss in the sky—more exactly, when Akiva’s lips had touched the place beneath her ear—some switch had been flipped. Small, exquisite currents of electricity were coursing all over her, raising goose bumps, shivers, waves of heat. She couldn’t still her hands. The “love chemicals,” she knew from her school days: dopamine, norepinephrine. She remembered, in their reading, how one scientist had called them the “cocktail of love rapture” and how she and Zuzana couldn’t stop giggling about it. Well, she was flooded with them now. Flushed and trembling, her belly a riot of butterflies. Papilio stomachus. Her heartbeat was a tap dance and her breathing was shallow. She tried to draw deep breaths to settle herself, but every one felt like a buoy refusing to sink. The edge of hyperventilating, but in a good way—which sounded stupid but felt like the full spectrum of excitement, from trills of giddiness to the rich and languid bass note of anticipated pleasure, slow and sweet as syrup.

All of which is to say: Karou was on fire.

Akiva caught her eye again. There was the spark and flash. Light and heat, racing up a fuse. No more laughter. She saw that his hands at his sides could not find stillness. He curled them into fists. Uncurled them, but they would not be at peace until they were allowed to do what they wanted and touch her. His whole body was taut. So was hers. They were violin strings, the pair of them, ready to sing.

A question in his eyes, in the tilt of his head, in the set of his shoulders. His whole