Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,44

knew it. It was love inseparable from sadness, and it made her heart ache for him. “I’m with you,” she had told him back at the kasbah, so he wouldn’t feel so alone in his stolen body. But he was alone. She wasn’t with him, even when she was. And he knew it.

She made herself smile. “I was just coming to find you.” That was true, in any case. “Has anything been decided?”

He sighed and shook his head. He was unkempt, something the Wolf never was, except perhaps immediately after battle. His hair was in disarray, his brow dark with dried blood from his crash landing, and his knees and hands, scraped and bloodied, looked like meat. He cast a glance around and beckoned Karou through a doorway.

Only for an instant did she stiffen and want to demur. He’s not the Wolf, she told herself, preceding him into the small chamber. It was dark, musty. Karou closed the door and made an arc with her sputtering torch to confirm that they were alone.

Alone. Was this what Ziri had hoped for, back in the night, just this small sad slice of time to let his Wolf posture fall slack? He sagged against a wall, plainly exhausted. He said, “Lisseth proposed we choose a scapegoat for a show execution.”

“What?” Karou cried. “That’s awful!”

“Which is why I said no, unless she wished to volunteer herself.”

“I wish.”

“She declined.” He gave a wry, tired smile, then pitched his voice low. “They’re still waiting for this to make sense. For me to reveal the true plan, which must, of course, involve slaughter.”

“Do you think they suspect anything?” Karou asked, anxious, her voice a secret murmur like his. She wished she could speak to him in Czech as she could to Zuzana and Mik, and not have to worry about being overheard.

“Something, yes. But I don’t think they’re near the truth.”

“They better not get near it.”

“I’m acting like I have an endgame that I just haven’t shared with them, but I don’t know how long that will hold. I was never in his inner circle. What if he told them his plans, and this secrecy looks wrong to them? As for this problem…” He lifted his hands to his head and drew in a sharp breath at the contact of injury to injury. “What would the Wolf do? He would do nothing. He would give the seraphim no one, and stare them down for asking.”

“You’re right.” The image came to Karou easily, of the contempt the Wolf would hold in his eyes, facing his foes. “Of course, he really would be orchestrating a slaughter.”

“Yes. But this is our tactic, in all of this: to begin believably, where he would, but not follow where he would take it. I’m giving the angels no one, and no apology. It’s a chimaera matter, and that’s the end of it.”

“And if it happens again?” Karou asked.

“I’ll see that it doesn’t.” Simple, heavy, full of threat and regret.

Karou knew that Ziri wanted no such responsibility, but she remembered his words in the air—“We will fight for our world to the last echo of our souls”—and the way he’d stood between two blooded armies and held them apart, and she didn’t doubt that he could rise to any occasion. “Okay,” she said, and that was the end of it.

A silence unspooled between them, and with the matter decided, the quality of “alone” changed. They were two tired people standing in the flickering dark, a tangle of feelings and fears—love, trust, hesitation, sorrow.

“We should get back,” Karou said, though she wished she could give Ziri his peace for a while longer. “The seraphim will be waiting.”

He nodded, and followed her to the door. “Your hair is wet,” he said.

“There are baths,” she told him, opening the door, remembering that he wouldn’t know that.

“I can’t say that doesn’t sound good.” He indicated the blood-caked fur of his feet, his raw-meat hands. There was the wound where his head had smashed the cave floor, too. She stepped closer to him, reached up to touch it; he winced. A good goose egg had risen under the dark, crusted blood.

“Ouch,” she said. “Are you having any dizziness?”

“No. Just throbbing. It’s fine.” He was scrutinizing her face in return. “You’re looking a lot better.”

She touched her cheek, realizing the pain had gone. The swelling, too. She touched her torn earlobe and found that the flesh had knit itself together. What?

With a little gasp, she remembered. “The water,” she said.