Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor Read Free Book Online

Brimstone—hundreds of them, brought to him over the years by traders. She used to play with them when she was little, before she understood that birds had been killed for them, whole species driven extinct.
    She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil’s lair. She wasn’t innocent now, but she didn’t know what to do about it. This was her life: magic and shame and secrets and teeth and a deep, nagging hollow at the center of herself where something was most certainly missing.
    Karou was plagued by the notion that she wasn’t whole . She didn’t know what this meant, but it was a lifelong feeling, a sensation akin to having forgotten something. She’d tried describing it to Issa once, when she was a girl. “It’s like you’re standing in the kitchen, and you know you went in there for a reason, but you can’t think of what that reason is, no matter what.”
    “And that’s how you feel?” asked Issa, frowning.
    “All the time.”
    Issa had only drawn her close and stroked her hair—then its natural near-black—and said, unconvincingly, “I’m sure it’s nothing, lovely. Try not to worry.”
    Right.
    Well. Getting the tusks up the Metro steps at her destination was a lot harder than dragging them down had been, and by the top Karou was exhausted, sweating under her winter coat, and extremely peevish. The portal was a couple more blocks away, linked to the doorway of a synagogue’s small storage outbuilding, and when she finally reached it she found two Orthodox rabbis in deep conversation right in front of it.
    “Perfect,” she muttered. She continued past them and leaned against an iron gate, just out of sight, to wait while they discussed some act of vandalism in mystified tones. At last they left, and Karou wrangled the tusks to the little door and knocked. As she always did while waiting at a portal in some back alley of the world, she imagined being stranded. Sometimes it took long minutes for Issa to open the door, and each and every time, Karou considered the possibility that it might not open. There was always a twinge of fear of being locked out, not just for the night, but forever. The scenario made her hyperaware of her powerlessness. If, some day, the door didn’t open, she would be alone.
    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.”

B LACK H ANDPRINTS

    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