The moment stretched, and Karou, leaning wearily against the doorframe, noticed something. She straightened. On the surface of the door was a large black handprint. That wouldn’t have been so very strange, except that it gave every appearance of having been burned into the wood. Burned, but in the perfect contours of a hand. This must be what the rabbis were talking about. She traced it with her fingertips, finding that it was actually scored into the wood, so that her own hand fit inside it, though dwarfed by it, and came away dusted with fine ash. She brushed off her fingers, puzzled.
What had made the print? A cleverly shaped brand? It sometimes happened that Brimstone’s traders left a mark by which to find portals on their next visit, but that was usually just a smear of paint or a knife-gouged X-marks-the-spot. This was a bit sophisticated for them.
The door creaked open, to Karou’s deep relief.
“Did everything go all right?” Issa asked.
Karou heaved the tusks into the vestibule, having to wedge them at an angle to fit them inside. “Sure.” She slumped against the wall. “I’d drag tusks across Paris every night if I could, it was such a treat.”
7
BLACK HANDPRINTS
Around the world, over a space of days, black handprints appeared on many doors, each scorched deep into wood or metal. Nairobi, Delhi, St. Petersburg, a handful of other cities. It was a phenomenon. In Cairo, the owner of a shisha den painted over the mark on his back door only to find, hours later, that the handprint had smoldered through the paint and showed just as black as when he’d discovered it.
There were some witnesses to the acts of vandalism, but no one believed what they claimed to have seen.
“With his bare hand,” a child in New York told his mother, pointing out the window. “He just put his hand there, and it glowed and smoked.”
His mother sighed and went back to bed. The boy was an established fibber, worse luck for him, because this time he was not lying. He had seen a tall man lay his hand on the door and scorch the mark into it. “His shadow was wrong,” he told his mother’s retreating back. “It didn’t match.”
A drunken tourist in Bangkok witnessed a similar scene, though this time the handprint was made by a woman of such impossible beauty that he followed her, spellbound, only to see her—as he claimed—fly away.
“She didn’t have wings,” he told his friends, “but her shadow did.”
“His eyes were like fire,” said an old man who caught sight of one of the strangers from his rooftop pigeon coop. “Sparks rained down when he flew away.”
So it was in slum alleys and dark courtyards in Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, San Francisco, Paris. Beautiful men and women with distorted shadows came and scorched their handprints onto doors before vanishing skyward, drafts of heat billowing behind them with the whumph of unseen wings. Here and there, feathers fell, and they were like tufts of white fire, disintegrating to ash as soon as they touched the ground. In Delhi, a Sister of Mercy reached out and caught one on her palm like a raindrop, but unlike a raindrop it burned, and left the perfect outline of a feather seared into her flesh.
“Angel,” she whispered, relishing the pain.
She was not exactly wrong.
8
GAVRIELS
When Karou stepped back into the shop, she found that Brimstone was not alone. A trader sat opposite him, a loathsome American hunter whose slab-of-meat face was garnished by the biggest, filthiest beard she had ever seen.
She turned to Issa and grimaced.
“I know,” agreed Issa, coming across the threshold in a ripple of serpentine muscle. “I gave him Avigeth. She’s about to molt.”
Karou laughed.
Avigeth was the coral snake wound around the hunter’s thick throat, forming a collar far too beautiful for the likes of him. Her bands of black, yellow, and crimson looked, even in their dulled state, like fine Chinese cloisonné. But for all her beauty, Avigeth was deadly, and never more so than when the itch of impending molt made her peevish. She was wending now in and out of the massive beard, a constant reminder to the trader that he must behave if he hoped to live.
“On behalf of the animals of North America,” whispered Karou, “can’t you just make her bite him?”
“I could, but Brimstone wouldn’t be happy. As well you know, Bain is one of his most valued traders.”
Karou sighed. “I know.” For longer than she had even been alive, Bain had been supplying Brimstone with bear teeth—grizzly, black, and polar—and lynx, fox, mountain lion, wolf, and sometimes even dog. He specialized in predators, always of premium value down here. They were also, Karou had pointed out to Brimstone on many occasions, of premium value to the world. How many beautiful carcasses did that pile of teeth amount to?
She watched, dismayed, as Brimstone took two large gold medallions out of his strongbox, each the size of a saucer and engraved with his own likeness. Gavriels. Enough to buy her flight and invisibility, and he pushed them across the desk to the hunter. Karou scowled as Bain pocketed them and rose from his chair, moving slowly so as not to irritate Avigeth. Out of the corner of one soulless eye, he cut Karou a look that she could almost swear was a gloat, and then had the gall to wink.
Karou clenched her teeth and said nothing as Issa escorted Bain out. Had it been only that morning that Kaz had winked at her from the model stand? What a day.
The door closed, and Brimstone gestured Karou forward. She heaved the canvas-wrapped tusks toward him and let the bundle collapse on the shop floor.
“Be careful,” he barked. “Do you know the value of these?”
“Indeed I do, since I just paid it.”
“That’s the human value. The idiots would carve them to bits to make trinkets and baubles.”
“And what will you do with them?” asked Karou. She kept her voice casual, as if Brimstone might forget himself and reveal, at last, the mystery at the core of everything: what in the hell he did with all these teeth.
He only gave her a weary look, as if to say, Nice try.
“What? You brought it up. And no, I don’t know the inhuman value of tusks. I have no idea.”
“Beyond price.” He started sawing at the duct tape with a curved knife.
“It’s a good thing I had some scuppies on me, then,” said Karou, flopping into the chair Bain had just vacated. “Otherwise you’d have lost your priceless tusks to another bidder.”