His body had reminded Karou, from the first time she saw it… unveiled… of a Michelangelo. Unlike some Renaissance artists, who’d favored slim, effete models, Michelangelo had gone for power, drawing broad-shouldered quarry workers and somehow managing to render them both carnal and elegant at the same time. That was Kaz: carnal and elegant.
And deceitful. And narcissistic. And, honestly, kind of dumb.
“Karou!” The British girl Helen was whispering harshly, trying to get her attention. “Is that him?”
Karou didn’t acknowledge her. She drew, pretending everything was normal. Just another day in class.
And if the model had an insolent dimple and wouldn’t take his eyes off her? She ignored it as best she could.
When the timer rang, Kaz calmly gathered up his robe and put it on. Karou hoped it wouldn’t occur to him that he was free to walk around the studio. Stay where you are, she wil ed him. But he didn’t. He sauntered toward her.
“Hi, Jackass,” said Zuzana. “Modest much?”
Ignoring her, he asked Karou, “Like my new tattoo?”
Students were standing up to stretch, but rather than dispersing for smoke or bathroom breaks, they hovered casual y within earshot.
“Sure,” Karou said, keeping her voice light. “K for Kazimir, right?”
“Funny girl. You know what it’s for.”
“Wel ,” she mused in Thinker pose, “I know there’s only one person you real y love, and his name does start with a K. But I can think of a better place for it than your heart.” She took up her pencil and, on her last drawing of Kaz, inscribed a K right over his classical y sculpted buttock.
Zuzana laughed, and Kaz’s jaw tightened. Like most vain people, he hated to be mocked. “I’m not the only one with a tattoo, am I, Karou?” he asked. He looked to Zuzana. “Has she shown it to you?”
Zuzana gave Karou the suspicious rendition of the eyebrow arch.
“I don’t know which you mean,” Karou lied calmly. “I have lots of tattoos.” To demonstrate, she didn’t flash true or story, or the serpent coiled around her ankle, or any of her other concealed works of art. Rather, she held up her hands in front of her face, palms out.
In the center of each was an eye inked in deepest indigo, in effect turning her hands into hamsas, those ancient symbols of warding against the evil eye.
Palm tattoos are notorious for fading, but Karou’s never did. She’d had these eyes as long as she could remember; for al she knew of their origin, she could have been born with them.
“Not those,” said Kaz. “I mean the one that says Kazimir, right over your heart.”
“I don’t have a tattoo like that.” She made herself sound puzzled and unfastened the top few buttons of her sweater. Beneath was a camisole, and she lowered it by a few revealing inches to demonstrate that indeed there was no tattoo above her breast.
The skin there was white as milk.
Kaz blinked. “What? How did you—?”
“Come with me.” Zuzana grabbed Karou’s hand and pul ed her away. As they wove among the easels, al pul ed her away. As they wove among the easels, al eyes were on Karou, lit with curiosity.
“Karou, did you break up?” Helen whispered in English, but Zuzana put up her hand in an imperious gesture that silenced her, and she dragged Karou out of the studio and into the girls’ bathroom. There, eyebrow stil arched, she asked, “What the hel was that?”
“What?”
“What? You practical y flashed the boy.”
“Please. I did not flash him.”
“Whatever. What’s this about a tattoo over your heart?”
“I just showed you. There’s nothing there.” She saw no reason to add that there had been something; she preferred to pretend she had never been so stupid. Plus, explaining how she’d gotten rid of it was not exactly an option.
“Wel , good. The last thing you need is that idiot’s name on your body. Can you believe him? Does he think if he just dangles his boy bits at you like a cat toy you’l go scampering after him?”
“Of course he thinks that,” said Karou. “This is his idea of a romantic gesture.”
“Al you have to do is tel Fiala he’s a stalker, and she’l throw his ass out.”
Karou had thought of that, but she shook her head.
Surely she could come up with a better way to get Kaz out of her class and out of her life. She had means at her disposal that most people didn’t.
She’d think of something.
“The boy is not terrible to draw, though.” Zuzana went to the mirror and flipped wisps of dark hair across her forehead. “Got to give him that.”
“Yeah. Too bad he’s such a gargantuan asshole.”
“A giant, stupid orifice,” Zuzana agreed.
“A walking, talking cranny.”
“Cranny.” Zuzana laughed. “I like.”
An idea came to Karou, and a faintly vil ainous smirk crossed her face.
“What?” asked Zuzana, seeing it.
“Nothing. We’d better get back in there.”
“You’re sure? You don’t have to.”
Karou nodded. “Nothing to it.”
Kaz had gotten al the satisfaction he was going to get from this cute little ploy of his. It was her turn now.
Walking back into the studio, she reached up and touched the necklace she was wearing, a multistrand loop of African trade beads in every color. At least they looked like African trade beads. They were more than that. Not much more, but enough for what Karou had planned.
3
CRANNY
Profesorka Fiala asked Kaz for a reclining pose for the rest of the period, and he draped himself back across the daybed in a way that, if not quite lewd, was certainly suggestive, knees just a bit too skewed, smile bordering on bedroom. There were no titters this time, but Karou imagined a surge of heat in the atmosphere, as if the girls in the class—
and at least one of the boys—needed to fan themselves. She herself was not affected. This time when Kaz peered at her from under lazy eyelids, she met his gaze straight on.
She started sketching and did her best, thinking it fitting that, since their relationship had begun with a drawing, it should end with one, too.
drawing, it should end with one, too.
He’d been sitting two tables away at Mustache Bar the first time she saw him. He wore a vil ain’s twirled mustache, which seemed like foreshadowing now, but it was Mustache Bar after al . Everyone was wearing mustaches—Karou was sporting a Fu Manchu she’d gotten from the vending machine.
She’d pasted both mustaches into her sketchbook later that night—sketchbook number ninety—and the resulting lump made it easy to locate the exact page where her story with Kaz began.
He’d been drinking beer with friends, and Karou, unable to take her eyes off him, had drawn him. She was always drawing, not just Brimstone and the other creatures from her secret life, but scenes and people from the common world. Falconers and street musicians, Orthodox priests with beards to their bel ies, the occasional beautiful boy.
Usual y she got away with it, her subjects none the wiser, but this time the beautiful boy caught her looking, and the next thing she knew he was smiling under his fake mustache and coming over. How flattered he’d been by her sketch! He’d shown it to his friends, taken her hand to urge her to join them, and kept hold of it, fingers laced with hers, even after she’d settled at his table. That was the beginning: her worshipping his beauty, him reveling in it. And that was more or less how it had continued.
Of course, he’d told her she was beautiful, too, al the time. If she hadn’t been, surely he’d never have come over to talk to her in the first place. Kaz wasn’t exactly one to look for inner beauty. Karou was, simply, lovely. Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx. Beyond merely pretty, her face was vibrantly alive, her gaze always sparking and luminous, and she had a birdlike way of cocking her head, h
er lips pressed together while her dark eyes danced, that hinted at secrets and mysteries.
Karou was mysterious. She had no apparent family, she never talked about herself, and she was expert at evading questions—for al that her friends knew of her background, she might have sprung whole from the head of Zeus. And she was endlessly surprising.
Her pockets were always spil ing out curious things: ancient bronze coins, teeth, tiny jade tigers no bigger than her thumbnail. She might reveal, while haggling for sunglasses with an African street vendor, that she spoke fluent Yoruba. Once, Kaz had undressed her to discover a knife hidden in her boot. There was the matter of her being impossible to scare and, of course, there were the scars on her abdomen: three shiny divots that could only have been made by bul ets.
“Who are you?” Kaz had sometimes asked, enchanted, to which Karou would wistful y reply, “I real y don’t know.”
Because she real y didn’t.
She drew quickly now, and didn’t shy away from meeting Kaz’s eyes as she glanced up and down between model and drawing. She wanted to see his face.
She wanted to see the moment his expression changed.
Only when she had captured his pose did she lift her left hand—continuing to draw with her right—to the beads of her necklace. She took one between her thumb and forefinger and held it there.
And then she made a wish.
It was a very smal wish. These beads were just scuppies, after al . Like money, wishes came in denominations, and scuppies were mere pennies.
Weaker even than pennies, because unlike coins, wishes couldn’t be compounded. Pennies you could add up to make dol ars, but scuppies were only ever just scuppies, and whole strands of them, like this necklace, would never add up to a more potent wish, just plenty of very smal , nearly useless wishes.
Wishes, for example, for things like itches.
Karou wished Kaz an itch, and the bead vanished between her fingers. Spent and gone. She’d never wished an itch before, so, to make sure it would work, she started with a spot he wouldn’t be shy to scratch: his elbow. Sure enough, he nudged it casual y against a cushion, scarcely shifting his pose. Karou smiled to herself and kept drawing.
A few seconds later, she took another bead between her fingers and wished another itch, this time to Kaz’s nose. Another bead disappeared, the necklace shortened imperceptibly, and his face twitched. For a few seconds he resisted moving, but then gave in and rubbed his nose quickly with the back of his hand before resuming his position. His bedroom expression was gone, Karou couldn’t help noticing. She had to bite her lip to keep her smile noticing. She had to bite her lip to keep her smile from broadening.
Oh, Kazimir, she thought, you shouldn’t have come here today. You really should have slept in.
The next itch she wished to the hidden place of her evil plan, and she met Kaz’s eyes at the moment it hit. His brow creased with sudden strain. She cocked her head slightly, as if to inquire, Something wrong, dear?
Here was an itch that could not be scratched in public. Kaz went pale. His hips shifted; he couldn’t quite manage to hold stil . Karou gave him a short respite and kept drawing. As soon as he started to relax and… unclench… she struck again and had to stifle a laugh when his face went rigid.
Another bead vanished between her fingers.
Then another.
This, she thought, isn’t just for today. It’s for everything. For the heartache that stil felt like a punch in the gut each time it struck, fresh as new, at unpredictable moments; for the smiling lies and the mental images she couldn’t shake; for the shame of having been so naive.
For the way loneliness is worse when you return to it after a reprieve—like the soul’s version of putting on a wet bathing suit, clammy and miserable.
And this, Karou thought, no longer smiling, is for the irretrievable.
For her virginity.
That first time, the black cape and nothing under it, she’d felt so grown up—like the Czech girls Kaz and Josef hung out with, cool Slavic beauties with names like Svetla and Frantiska, who looked like nothing could ever shock them or make them laugh. Had she real y wanted to be like them? She’d pretended to be, played the part of a girl—a woman—who didn’t care. She’d treated her virginity like a trapping of childhood, and then it was gone.
She hadn’t expected to be sorry, and at first she wasn’t. The act itself was neither disappointing nor magical; it was what it was: a new closeness. A shared secret.
Or so she’d thought.
“You look different, Karou,” Kaz’s friend Josef had said the next time she saw him. “Are you…
glowing?”
Kaz had punched him on the shoulder to silence him, looking at once sheepish and smug, and Karou knew he’d told. The girls, even. Their ruby lips had curled knowingly. Svetla—the one she later caught him with—even made a straight-faced comment about capes coming back in fashion, and Kaz had colored slightly and looked away, the only indication that he knew he’d done wrong.
Karou had never even told Zuzana about it, at first because it belonged to her and Kaz alone, and later because she was ashamed. She hadn’t told anyone, but Brimstone, in the inscrutable way he had of knowing things, had guessed, and had taken the opportunity to give her a rare lecture.
That had been interesting.
The Wishmonger’s voice was so deep it seemed almost the shadow of sound: a dark sonance that lurked in the lowest register of hearing. “I don’t know many rules to live by,” he’d said. “But here’s one. It’s simple. Don’t put anything unnecessary into yourself.
No poisons or chemicals, no fumes or smoke or alcohol, no sharp objects, no inessential needles—
drug or tattoo—and… no inessential penises, either.”
“Inessential penises?” Karou had repeated, delighted with the phrase in spite of her grief. “Is there any such thing as an essential one?”
“When an essential one comes along, you’l know,”
he’d replied. “Stop squandering yourself, child. Wait for love.”
“Love.” Her delight evaporated. She’d thought that was love.
“It wil come, and you wil know it,” Brimstone had promised, and she so wanted to believe him. He’d been alive for hundreds of years, hadn’t he? Karou had never before thought about Brimstone and love
—to look at him, he didn’t seem such a candidate for it—but she hoped that in his centuries of life he’d accrued some wisdom, and that he was right about her.
Because, of al things in the world, that was her orphan’s craving: love. And she certainly hadn’t gotten it from Kaz.
Her pencil point snapped, so hard was she bearing down on her drawing, and at the same moment a burst of anger converted itself to a rapid-fire vol ey of itches that shortened her necklace to a choker and sent Kaz scrambling off the model stand. Karou released her necklace and watched him. He was already to the door, robe in hand, and he opened it already to the door, robe in hand, and he opened it and darted out, stil naked in his haste to get away and find a place where he could attend to his humiliating misery.
The door swung shut and the class was left blinking at the empty daybed. Profesorka Fiala was peering over the rim of her glasses at the door, and Karou was ashamed of herself.
Maybe that was too much.
“What’s with Jackass?” Zuzana asked.
“No idea,” said Karou, looking down at her drawing.
There on the paper was Kaz in al his carnality and elegance, looking like he was waiting for a lover to come to him. It could have been a good drawing, but she’d ruined it. Her line work had darkened and lost al subtlety, final y ending in a chaotic scribble that blotted out his… inessential penis. She wondered what Brimstone would think of her now. He was always reprimanding her for injudicious use of wishes—most recently the one that had made Svetla’s eyebrows thicken overnight until they looked like caterpil ars and grew right back the moment they were tweezed.
“Wom
en have been burned at the stake for less, Karou,” he’d said.
Lucky for me, she thought, this isn’t the Middle Ages.
4
POISON KITCHEN
The rest of the school day was uneventful. A double period of chemistry and color lab, fol owed by master drawing and lunch, after which Zuzana went to puppetry and Karou to painting, both three-hour studio classes that released them into the same ful winter dark by which they’d arrived that morning.
“Poison?” inquired Zuzana as they stepped out the door.
“You have to ask?” said Karou. “I’m starved.”
They bent their heads against the icy wind and headed toward the river.
The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century—or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tal houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshel blue, embel ished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fal en angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Mozart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet.
Above it al loomed the castle on the hil , its silhouette as sharp as thorns. By night it was floodlit, bathed in eerie light, and this evening the sky hung low, ful -bel ied with snow, making gauzy halos around the street lamps.
Down by the Devil’s Stream, Poison Kitchen was a place rarely stumbled upon by chance; you had to know it was there, and duck under an unmarked stone arch into a wal ed graveyard, beyond which glowed the lamp-lit windowpanes of the cafe.
Unfortunately, tourists no longer had to rely on chance to discover the place; the latest edition of the Lonely Planet guide had outed it to the world—