Night of Cake & Puppets (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1.5)

by Laini Taylor

My height triggers the puppy-kitten reflex—Must touch—and I’ve found that since you can’t electrify yourself like a fence, the next best thing is to have murderer’s eyes.

When I think about kids (which isn’t often, except to wish them elsewhere and stop just short of deploying them hence with my foot), the main reason I would consider… begetting any (in a theoretical sense, in the far-distant future) is so that I can practice upon small, developing brains the same degree of mind-molding my grandfather has practiced on us. I want to terrify little kids, too! I want to build spires in their minds and dance shadows through like marionettes, chased by whispers and hints of the unspeakable. I want to torture future generations with the Puppet That Bites.

Milquetoast girls raised on princess stories might sit tight and bat their eyelashes in desperate Morse code—notice me, like me, please—but I am not that girl.

I am a rabid fairy. I am a carnivorous plant. I am Zuzana.

there’s something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn’t been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it. They get all tame and cool. You know how some people think cool equals bored, and they act like they’re alien scientists who drew the short straw and ended up assigned to observe this lowly species, humans, and they just lean against walls all the time, sighing and waiting to be called home to Zigborp-12, where all the fascinating geniuses are?

Because let’s just say that the kind of alien I am is the kind from a planet of lipless dinkmonkeys and drooling slugboys, where affection of the facial variety carries a deep risk of grossness. By which I mean… I have not yet elected to bestow the grace of my saliva upon another human being.

A while back, for fun and evil, Karou and I used to practice our you are my slave come-hither eyes on backpacker boys in Old Town Square, and I have to say I got pretty good at it. You need to imagine you are sending little tractor beams with your eyes, drawing the boy irresistibly toward you.

So while I could do the normal thing and try talking to him—“Nice fiddling, handsome man” has been proposed—I don’t trust my mouthparts not to betray me by either stuttering into silence or puckering up.

Here we go. I have scuppies in my pocket and lust in my heart.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not melt in one’s bath.

I don’t know where she goes after work, but I imagine stars and mist and halls of mirrors, and I want to be there, too.

Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it. —Roald Dahl

I haven’t mentioned her, for fear of pubescent-caliber backstage hijinx, and I don’t think I stare at her. (When anyone’s looking.)

So I do that awkward thing you do when you get good news in the company of strangers and you look around at them, grinning like an idiot, and they look back, not grinning like idiots, and you almost have to tell them, to tell someone. You almost hold up your piece of paper and say, “The girl I like just gave me a treasure map to herself.”

Seize the night. And I blink and feel a surge of certainty and excitement, because of course that’s what one does when one wants something. One seizes it. Well, maybe not all things. Cats, for example, do not respond well to seizure. Probably girls don’t, either. So this might not be a good credo in life, but for Saturday nights in general and this one in particular, it works.

I see a black cat slip through an open door across the street and have a brief impulse to follow it, as if it might be a feline escort doing Zuzana’s bidding. I smile, glad no one can read my thoughts. Zuzana probably can’t command cats with her mind. Probably.

My brain is an inhospitable environment for belief,

Curious. (You know, if curious means “impossible” or “freaky” or… “indelibly awesome.”)

And now my head feels all full of moonlight or starlight or something. Or snow. My head feels like a snow globe that’s been shaken, and glitter is swirling around in it like unmoored stars.

Cradling the devil in the crook of my arm like a baby, I set off. Whistling.

What did I think, that Mik would thrust open the door and demand, “Why purrest thou, feline?”

In this case, though, it really is an homage, to my own magical awakening two years ago. It seems right that Mik should be awakened in the same way. That we should lose our magic virginity the same way. To creepy puppets, during snowstorms. (Okay. That sounds so wrong. But you know what I mean.)

I kind of wish I was just meeting Mik at Poison Kitchen. I mean, I could. I could just walk in behind him and say, “Well played, handsome man. Now let us eat strudel and then kiss. Just as soon as I get back from the bathroom.”

When I feel a surge of fondness for Mik’s maybe-footprints, I know I’m in serious trouble. The fact that I can’t even muster any true self-disgust tells me how deep this goes. I’m doomed.

“What’s my problem? I have so many, but violent tendencies and probable demonic origins are the ones that should concern you.”

He gives me dumb-face, which is such a disappointing response to a good nemesis zinger. Kaz might deserve First Class status for Crimes of High Douchebaggery, but he’s just not quality enemy material.

“Oh, Jackass,” I say with what I hope comes across as gentle pity. “Poor Jackass. Let me explain something. You know in fairy tales, when a bunch of princes all try to win the princess’s hand, but they’re all vain and entitled and self-involved and they fail at the task and get put to death? And then there’s one who comes along who’s clever and good and he wins and gets to live happily ever after with her? Yeah, well, you’re the first kind.” I pat him on the shoulder. “It’s all over for you.”

Rabid fairy, rabid fairy. Why should speaking to a boy I like be so much harder than speaking to one I despise?

I picture Excitement choking out Dread and gently, almost lovingly, lowering his inert body to the ground. Go. Now. Leave Dread lying there. Go fast, before he gets up and sees which way you went. Breathe. Walk. Breathe. Walk.

Oh hell. Dread rallies, chases us up the block. High-kicks Excitement in the neck just before I round the corner to Location Three. It stops me in my tracks, and I find myself stuck to the side of the building by the centrifugal force of my anxiety.

It’s my personal theory that only 27 percent of perceived confidence is actual confidence, and the rest is sham. The key is: If you can’t tell the difference, there is no difference. Oh, the person shamming can feel the difference, in their clammy palms and pounding heart, but the outward effect—hopefully—is the same.

That’s not my heartbeat pounding in my throat. That’s confidence.

Close your eyes and music paints light vines and calligraphy on the darkness within you.

The Charles Bridge arcs in the backdrop, its lampposts ghostly. The canal is black and glinting, and the night is saying: Yep. Everything is miraculous. Indeed, Picasso. Indeed.

My face responds without authorization from my brain, so the resulting smile feels like the biggest, most unguarded, goofiest smile I’ve ever unleashed in my entire life. I didn’t even know my face could do this.

This must be what feelings are.

There’s a long pause. But it’s not a bad pause, because Mik is looking at me like I’m the treasure from the high shelf that someone’s just taken down and put into his hands. I find I don’t mind being looked at like this. I don’t mind it at all.

“Every week when I’m doing something boring and typical after the show. It’s how I punish myself for laming out and not talking to you—by imagining you doing, like, secret errands over the rooftops, or vanishing through trapdoors that leave no seam when they close, just traces of silver dust.”

It’s this feeling of being a kid in a roomful of grown-ups: All around you are just knees, and the grown-ups are up there in their own world, a bunch of distant heads talking about things you can’t begin to understand.

Waking up with someone is the natural aftermath of sleeping with them, and that’s something that happens up there, with the grown-up heads. Me, I’m still down here on the floor with the dropped Cheerios, getting thwacked in the face when the dog wags its tail. Metaphorically speaking.

“Well, there is one other person. My best friend. We go there a lot. Imrich’s kind of protective of us.” “You think? He gave me this ten-second silent stare, and I’m pretty sure that if my intentions weren’t honorable, my face would have melted.”

“I see. So we don’t have permission to be here.” “Not exactly. I only had twenty minutes. I was kind of scrambling. Cake?” Cake. As subject changes go, it’s a good one.

making the first divot in the cake’s smooth surface—a dainty fairylike bite that is really not my usual MO—and holy hell the chocolate is so intense and pure it should be named an element and given a spot on the periodic table. It would be Ch, which isn’t even taken.

Now it reads: Carpe puella Zuzana. I swallow, and it’s cartoonishly audible. “That was what I hoped it meant,” I say. “But if puella meant, like, sandwich, or bicycle, it could have been pretty embarrassing.”

So here we are, talking about Roman unicycles and alien sandwiches and my sister’s Italian misfortunes, while hanging in between us is: MY EPIC FAILURE TO CARPE.

It’s like losing gravity and falling into space—the moment of pitching headlong when the endlessness of space asserts itself and there is no more down, only an eternity of up, and you realize you can fall forever and never run out of stars.

I just see it, with this rare kind of clarity. It’s an open horizon before us, as far as the eye can see: no angst and no games, just mutual delight. So simple, but so rich. Like chocolate. Not a gold-dusted truffle or a foofy pastry tower teetering on a crystal platter, but a plain, honest bar of the best chocolate in the world.

Life doesn’t need magic to be magical. (But a little bit sure doesn’t hurt.)