Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone Book 3)

by Laini Taylor

Turn on the TV. Are you watching this? Wake up. TV. Now. Until the last one. The one that made Eliza want to curl up in fetal position and cease to exist. Come home, it said. We forgive you.

Issa embraced Mik and Zuzana, and shot Karou a look that glittered with some bright meaning. She looked excited, Karou saw. She looked vindicated.

She nodded her obedience to the Wolf, and it was acid in the pit of her belly to see Akiva’s eyes darken. By his side, Liraz was worse. Liraz was contemptuous. That was a little hard to take. The Wolf is dead! She wanted to scream. I killed him. Don’t look at me like that! But of course, she couldn’t. Right now, she had to be strong enough to look weak.

“We have so many enemies, Lisseth,” said Karou, keeping her voice light. “Most of them are our birthright, inherited like a duty, but the ones we make for ourselves are special. We should choose them with care.”

“There is the past, and there is the future. The present is never more than the single second dividing one from the other. We live poised on that second as it’s hurtling forward—toward what? All our lives, it’s been the Empire propelling us—toward the annihilation of the beasts—and that has come and gone. It belongs to the past, but we’re still alive, less than three hundred of us, and we’re still hurtling forward, toward something, but it’s not up to the Empire anymore. And for my part, I want that something to be—” He could have said: Jael’s death. It would have been true. But it was a small truth overshadowed by a greater one. In his memory dwelt a voice deeper than any other he had ever heard, saying, “Life is your master, or death is.” Brimstone’s last words. “Life,” he told his brothers and sisters now. “I want the future to be life. It isn’t the chimaera who stand in the way. They never did. It was Joram, and now it’s Jael.”

She said nothing, didn’t even bother to shake her head, just turned her back on him like he wasn’t even there. How dare she? “I’ll tauntaun her,” Zuzana muttered. “What?” said Karou. “Nothing.”

“Good, I think,” she said. “You’re doing so well.” At being Thiago, she meant. “It’s a little eerie.” “Eerie,” he repeated. “Convincing. A few times I almost forgot—” He didn’t let her finish. “Don’t forget. Not ever. Not for a second.” He drew in breath. “Please.” So much behind that word. Please don’t forget I’m not a monster. Please don’t forget what I gave up. Please don’t forget me.

But beyond that, Ziri’s hope was modest. He wanted to fly again, and be rid of this hateful body with its mouthful of fangs, its jagged claws. If anyone ever did love him, he thought bitterly, it might be nice to be able to touch her without drawing blood.

Liraz was also angry at the chimaera, and not for the reason that would have made sense. They were not, for a miracle, aiming their hamsas at her. She hadn’t felt their magic drill its sick ache through her for the entire time that they’d been encamped here. And that was why she was angry. Because they weren’t giving her a reason to be angry. Feelings. Were. Stupid.

So much to rue, but to what end? All unlived lives cancel one another out.

He watched her eyes sweep the cavern and wished he could be with her. He watched her when he should have been watching the rest. Both sides. There must have been tells, if only he had been watching.

How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility? Because if he succeeded, along with the chance for a true alliance between their armies came another, more personal one. Karou would be able to touch him.

a burst of magic. A burst of magic at the precise fulcrum of catastrophe, peeling them back from the edge. And if the White Wolf had risen to his feet and spoken, he had spoken into the silence of its passage, helping to gather them all back to themselves as their souls reeled. But he hadn’t done it, hadn’t stopped them from killing one another. Akiva had.

How do you just thrust “I love you” out into the air? It needs waiting arms to catch it.

His awareness heightened—of the unnatural strength in his borrowed flesh, of the malice and mischief in Ten’s eyes, and of the weight of the future bearing down on all of them if she gave him away. How could she be so stupid? It felt like whip-crack, the sliver of an instant it took him to reach her. To lay hands to her head, one behind and one to her muzzle. And snap her neck.

He remembered her words to him back at the kasbah. “We haven’t been introduced,” he had said, to which she’d replied, in hot rebuke, “You know who I am, and I know who you are, and that will serve.” She didn’t know, though. And he wanted her to. “We haven’t been introduced,” he said again, as she found her footing under the surface of the soft, dark water. “Not really.”

“You should go to the thermal pools,” Liraz said. “They’re… fairly wonderful.” He halted mid-step and squinted at her. “Fairly wonderful?” he repeated. He didn’t think he’d ever heard Liraz use the word wonderful before, and… was that a hint of a flush rising to her cheeks? Interesting. “The healing water, of course,” she said, and her direct, unwavering gaze was too direct and unwavering; she was covering some other feeling with feigned cool, and she was overdoing it. On top of which, there was the flush. Very interesting.

“My wife likes to say that the mind is a palace with room for many guests. Perhaps the butler takes care to install the delegates of Science in a different wing from the emissaries of Faith, lest they take up arguing in the passages.”

yank out some brains. So instead she said, “Do you think I wouldn’t rather be with Akiva, too?” and this time maybe a little bit of her own frustration sounded in her voice. “Well, it’s nice to hear you finally admit it,” said Zuzana. “But a little Machiavellian maneuvering would not go amiss here.” “Excuse me? I think I’ve been pretty damn Machiavellian,” said Karou, as though it were an insult not to be borne. “There is the matter of hijacking an entire rebellion.” “You’re right,” Zuzana allowed. “You are a conniving, deceitful hussy. I stand in awe.” “You’re sitting.” “I sit in awe.”

In the legends, chimaera were sprung from tears and seraphim from blood, but in this moment they are, all of them, children of regret.

At the same moment that the image of Ziri’s discarded Kirin body made its debut on human airwaves—the same moment exactly—in Eretz, a Dominion blade… pierced him through the heart.

“But the idea that I could be descended from one? Now that’s crazy! Ship Eliza home, get her some help, and for heaven’s sake, keep her the hell out of my mind palace!” She laughed, mirthless. “You don’t serve my kind in there, isn’t that it? Whoever heard of a black angel, anyway? And a woman to boot. This must be so difficult for you, doctor.”

The Elioud dismissed the Book of Enoch as absurd, which was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, Eliza had always thought, but wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, “My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.” More or less.

“Well. I can’t promise I’ll ruin your life,” Gabriel replied. “Honestly, that’s a bit of a commitment. But I can promise you this. I will make sure everyone knows what you’ve done.” He held up the phone. “And if it does ruin your life, I won’t be sorry about it.”

It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn’t a mystical place to be reached or won—some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it—but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness.

Zuzana said it was the third and last, because she was still counting his getting the air conditioner working back in Ouarzazate. He said that didn’t count—not by a million miles, because it had been in his own self-interest, so that he could pounce on her—and he still had one task to go. Zuzana could only argue up to a point before it would begin to seem like she was begging him to just propose marriage already, so she let him have it his way.

Things were… done to them. To their anima—the incorporeal selves that are the true totality for which bodies were only as icons fixed in space. The magi were always striving and delving, and of the Faerers they shaped something new. It was fitting, for their work was new, and it was great.

They let them in. Razgut and Elazael, Iaoth and Dvira, Kleos and Arieth. They didn’t mean to. It wasn’t their fault. Except that of course it was their fault. They cut the portal, one too far. But how were they to have known? The Stelians warned them. But how were they to have known to listen to the Stelians? They were too busy being chosen, oh, glory. Oh, misery.

She dropped one hand to his heart to be sure it hadn’t been some illusion, that he was truly whole and uninjured, and he was, and so her palm, satisfied, joined her other in slipping to where his neck met his jaw to hold his face steady and gauge the location of his lips. He didn’t wait for her to find them. A beat of his wings and he surged through the air with such force that she was melded to him more completely even than when they had embraced in the shower, and her face was not against his chest this time, nor her feet planted on the floor. Her legs twined with his. She smoothed her hands up his neck and into his hair and held his head as she was swept away with him, spiraling. Finally. Finally, they kissed.

She was no mere weapon as she was trained to be, but a woman in full command of her power, unbowed and unbroken, and that was a dangerous thing.

Karou was laughing, and nodding, and Liraz was sobbing and laughing, and they fell against each other, the canteen between them, its precious cap replaced, and their relief was a shared country, because against her senses Karou had felt the stir of stormhunters’ wings, and the high roaming wind of the Adelphas Mountains, the beautiful, mournful, eternal song of the wind flutes that filled their caves with music, and also: a note that she didn’t remember from before. It was fire, held in cupped hands, and she thought she knew what it meant. Liraz may have captured Ziri’s soul like a butterfly in a bottle, but that was only a formality. It was already hers. And, clearly, judging by the state of her, laugh-sobbing in Karou’s arms, hers was his, too.

She wondered if she would ever again know the simplicity of a closet full of clothes, and the pleasure of choosing an outfit—a clean outfit—in which to go and meet her… what? What could she call Akiva? Boyfriend sounded too Earth. Lover was affectation, intended to shock. “Have you met my lover? Isn’t he divine?” Nope. That is, yep, he was divine. Nope, she wasn’t go to call him that, even if she was dizzy with the urgency to make him that.

It happened to look just perfect on stormhunter-back, with a northerly sea rolling beneath them, dotted with icebergs and breaching sea creatures that were not in any way whales. He couldn’t go down on one knee without risk of falling off, but that was entirely okay, under the circumstances. “Will you marry me?” he asked. The answer was yes.

Always, she had been growing toward this, ever since she heard of a harp strung with taken lives, and before that still, to the earliest moment when energies joined in the making of her. Her path lay before her, and Akiva was entangled in it. She had come on this journey to hunt and kill a magus. She would return from it armed to hunt and kill gods.

Fate took a bow, so neat it all was, but still it stole their breath away to hear Scarab, queen of the Stelians and keeper of the Cataclysm, say, with a fervor that sent tremors up every last spine, including her own: “There will be godstars. And they will be us.”

girl thinks she is part of the gang

“Nightingale,” he said, tense, his voice little more than breath and urgency. And she nodded. She smiled. And she sent to his mind a glimpse of figures in a sky. A stormhunter. A Kirin. A half-dozen seraphim and an equal number of chimaera. And with them one who flew wingless, gliding, her hair a whip of blue against the twilight sky.

They washed, and Karou emerged from the pool feeling purified in body and spirit. It was good to be cared for by women, and what a group they were. The deadliest of all the chimaera alongside the deadliest of seraphim, with a Naja, a ferocious neek-neek in deceptively adorable human form, a pair of fire-eyed Stelians of unfathomable power, and Eliza, who had been the answer. The key that fit the lock. And also, just a really cool chick.

Nightingale’s gift had been unwrapped and given its proper place, and when Akiva brought Karou to the home he’d made for her—a place out of fantasy, so perfect that she forgot how to breathe and had to learn again in a hurry—his wish had all but come true already. On the bed: a blanket to cover them, a blanket that was theirs together. And some time in the night they met on it and faced each other across lessening space, knees curled beneath themselves and wishbone held between. And they hooked their fingers around its slender spurs, and pulled.