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

by Laini Taylor

I may have shushed it. Shushed a cat. And what do you think it did? It purred louder. “I will do just as you wish,” said no cat ever.

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

Karou. I text her: Phase One a success. The Puppet That Bites would be proud. Because, yeah, using scuppies to animate a puppet, where on earth did I come up with that idea?

Once you know magic is real, it’s really hard to remember what it was like not to know. It’s kind of like trying to see how you look with your eyes closed. (I did that once. I was a kid. It occurred to me out of nowhere to wonder what I looked like with my eyes closed, so I… um, went to the mirror and… closed my eyes.) (Yeah. I looked exactly like the inside of a pair of eyelids.) (I’ve never claimed to be a genius.)

And let me tell you something about me. I love vengeance like normal people love sunsets and long walks on the beach. I eat vengeance with a spoon like it’s honey. In fact, I may not even be a real person, but just a vow of vengeance made flesh. My parents swear I was a real baby and not a demonic bargain, but of course they would say that. Bottom line: There is enough spare vengeance in me to act on behalf of mistreated, undervalued, toyed-with girls everywhere, and this is Karou we’re talking about.

“Huh?” 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.

I sigh, and tell him so. “You are not a worthy opponent.” “What are you talking about? Opponent at what?” “Opponent at opponenting. Duh.

The point is: coffin nails, check. Coffin, check. Crazy one-eyed Imrich and his bar cronies ready to take hold of pretty boy here and introduce him to the satiny interior of a hexagonal box? Check. Me, able to participate? Not check. Any other night. Any. Other. Night. But tonight is not for vengeance. I take a deep breath. It’s for a dazzling.

“Actually,” I tell Kaz, “I have other plans. But by all means, you go right ahead. And when you’re trapped in there, in the dark coffin, hungry, thirsty, hallucinating, and desperate to pee, when the cafe’s closed and there’s no one left to hear your screams, just know… that I’m not thinking of you at all.” I gesture to the door, and as the coup de grâce, I give him… Excited Maniac eyes. These are the eyes that say, I have something fascinating to show you in the cellar. Come with me. It’s one of my favorite looks, and, incidentally, my brother’s least favorite, because it’s the one that invariably signals an escalation of hostilities to a level of dedicated vengeance that he could never match. He simply doesn’t have it in him. Tomas knows: You cannot defeat the Excited Maniac. You can only provoke her. Kaz might not know this experientially, but he intuits it. The eyes freak him out. I see it. He quails. Glances at the door. Gives me that curled-lip look that bullies get when they’re afraid of someone and trying to cover it up. He’s going to call me a freak next. Wait for it. “You’re a freak, Zuzana.” “Yeah,” I confirm with relish, amping up the eyes. “I know.”

Mik is en route to Location Three, and Location Three is the final location, the place where I am supposed to manifest my actual self and commence human interaction. Do I have to? a voice in me whimpers. Can’t the puppets act on my behalf? Puppet ambassadors? Yeah, because what’s creepier than a stalker? A stalker ventriloquist who speaks through angel and devil puppets. I imagine Mik introducing me to his family: “I’d like you to meet my girlfriend Zuzana and… her representatives.” No no no. You can do this. I can do this. I unfurl myself from behind the tombstone. I am the same person who just put fear in the heart of that best-friend despoiler, Kaz. Rabid fairy, rabid fairy. Why should speaking to a boy I like be so much harder than speaking to one I despise? I know it’s all brain chemicals—everything is brain chemicals—but my excitement and dread feel like tiny wrestlers in my heart right now. I picture Excitement choking out Dread and gently, almost lovingly, lowering his inert body to the ground.

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

I’m not the only person who’s been drawn to the music. Passersby are stopping to listen. Some windows clatter open in the buildings fronting the stream, and for a minute everyone is still, bent toward this lovely sight: Mik on the mill dock, playing Mozart to the snow. No, not to the snow. To me. Eine kleine Nachtmusik is Mozart’s Serenade 13. Serenade. World, I think it’s important to acknowledge here that I am being serenaded. 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.

“Can you boost me up?” I gesture to the wall. It’s high, with pointy iron finials to further discourage what I am about to do, but the couple make no effort to dissuade me. They smile like they’re in on a secret, and the guy makes a stirrup with his hands, and up I go. That’s when Mik looks up. Right when I’m balanced on top of the wall. Our eyes meet, and all this rigamarole and scheming, the back-and-forth across the bridge and diving behind tombstones, it all comes down to this moment. Our eyes meet. And… it’s like all my life I’ve been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I’m not a tower at all. I’m a lighthouse. It’s like waking up. I am incandescent. I never knew I could emit heat and light. Damn. If the music created an external dimension, this creates an internal one. There is more to me than I knew.

Mik smiles, and it’s such a mix of glad and shy and sweet and eager and even a little bit of what I could swear is amazed—like he’s amazed by his good fortune that I am climbing over a wall to him—that it triggers a kindred smile in me. 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. It’s like there were hidden zippers in my cheeks. Jesus. This must be what feelings are. This is why people write poems! I get it now. I get it, and I want more.

In adolescent fantasyland, the kiss is the happy ending. On the planet of grown-ups, I am fully aware, it’s only a beginning. I look at Mik intently, wondering where he falls in the spectrum of adolescent versus grown-up expectations. (And PS, if you use the word grown-up, you probably aren’t one.)

already can’t feel my fingers, and freeing the tube the rest of the way from the ice deadens them to the point that they feel like wooden finger prosthetics, and if you’ve ever tried to open a plastic tube and unroll a very small scroll using wooden finger prosthetics (and really, who hasn’t?), you know it’s not easy.

Which is what one always hopes will happen: for life to take over and be bigger and more marvelous than what we can dream up on our own. Life doesn’t need magic to be magical. (But a little bit sure doesn’t hurt.)