from Yasri’s tray before letting Issa usher her into the vestibule. The door closed behind them, sealing out sound.
She didn’t bother asking Issa who was at the other door—Issa never gave away Brimstone’s secrets. But she said, a little pitifully, “I was just about to ask Brimstone if I could sleep in my old cot.”
Issa leaned forward to kiss her cheek and said, “Oh, sweet girl, wouldn’t that be nice? We can wait right here, the way we did when you were small.”
Ah, yes. When Karou was too small to shove out into the world’s streets on her own, Issa had kept her here. Hours they had sometimes crouched in this tiny space, Issa trying to keep her entertained by singing songs or drawing—in fact, it was Issa who had started her drawing—or crowning her with venomous snakes, while inside Brimstone confronted whatever lurked on the other side of that door.
“You can come back in,” Issa continued, “after.”
“That’s okay,” Karou said with a sigh. “I’ll just go.”
Issa squeezed her arm and said, “Sweet dreams, sweet girl,” and Karou hunched her shoulders and stepped back out into the cold. As she walked, clock towers across Prague started arguing midnight, and the long, fraught Monday came at last to a close.
9
THE DEVIL’S DOORWAYS
Akiva stood at the edge of a rooftop terrace in Riyadh, peering down at a doorway in the lane below. It was as nondescript as the others, but he knew it for what it was. He could feel its bitter aura of magic as an ache behind his eyes.
It was one of the devil’s portals into the human world.
Spreading vast wings that were visible only in his shadow, he glided down to it, landing in a rain of sparks. A street sweeper saw him and dropped to his knees, but Akiva ignored him and faced the door, his hands curling into fists.
He wanted nothing so much as to draw his swords and storm inside, end things quick right there in Brimstone’s shop, end them bloody, but the magic of the portals was cunning and he knew better than to attempt it, so he did what he had come here to do.
He reached out and laid his hand flat against the door. There was a soft glow and a smell of scorching, and when he took away his hand its print was
scored into the wood.
That was all, for now.
He turned and walked away, and folk cringed close to walls to let him pass.
Certainly, they couldn’t see him as he truly was. His fiery wings were glamoured invisible, and he should have been able to pass as human, but he wasn’t quite pulling it off. What people saw was a tall young man, beautiful —truly, breath-stealingly beautiful, in a way one rarely beholds in real life— who moved among them with predatory grace, seeming no more mindful of them than if they were statuary in a garden of gods. On his back a pair of crossed swords were sheathed, and his sleeves were pushed up over forearms tanned and corded with muscle. His hands were a curiosity, etched both white with scars and black with the ink of tattoos—simple repeating black lines hatched across the tops of his fingers.
His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, with a hairline that dipped into a widow’s peak. His golden skin was bronzed darker across the planes of his face—high ridges of cheekbones, brow, bridge of the nose—as if he lived his life in drenching rich honey light.
Beautiful as he was, he was forbidding. It was difficult to imagine him
