Daughter of Smoke & Bone

9





THE DEVIL’S DOORWAYS



Akiva stood at the edge of a rooftop terrace in Riyadh, peering down at a doorway in the lane below. It was as nondescript as the others, but he knew it for what it was. He could feel its bitter aura of magic as an ache behind his eyes.

It was one of the devil’s portals into the human world.

Spreading vast wings that were visible only in his shadow, he glided down to it, landing in a rain of sparks. A street sweeper saw him and dropped to his knees, but Akiva ignored him and faced the door, his hands curling into fists. He wanted nothing so much as to draw his swords and storm inside, end things quick right there in Brimstone’s shop, end them bloody, but the magic of the portals was cunning and he knew better than to attempt it, so he did what he had come here to do.

He reached out and laid his hand flat against the door. There was a soft glow and a smell of scorching, and when he took away his hand its print was scored into the wood.

That was all, for now.

He turned and walked away, and folk cringed close to walls to let him pass.

Certainly, they couldn’t see him as he truly was. His fiery wings were glamoured invisible, and he should have been able to pass as human, but he wasn’t quite pulling it off. What people saw was a tall young man, beautiful—truly, breath-stealingly beautiful, in a way one rarely beholds in real life—who moved among them with predatory grace, seeming no more mindful of them than if they were statuary in a garden of gods. On his back a pair of crossed swords were sheathed, and his sleeves were pushed up over forearms tanned and corded with muscle. His hands were a curiosity, etched both white with scars and black with the ink of tattoos—simple repeating black lines hatched across the tops of his fingers.

His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, with a hairline that dipped into a widow’s peak. His golden skin was bronzed darker across the planes of his face—high ridges of cheekbones, brow, bridge of the nose—as if he lived his life in drenching rich honey light.

Beautiful as he was, he was forbidding. It was difficult to imagine him breaking into a smile—which indeed Akiva hadn’t done in many years, and couldn’t imagine doing ever again.

But all of this was just fleeting impression. What people fixed on, stopping to watch him pass, were his eyes.

They were amber like a tiger’s, and like a tiger’s they were rimmed in black—the black both of heavy lashes and of kohl, which focused the gold of his irises like beams of light. They were pure and luminous, mesmerizing and achingly beautiful, but something was wrong, was missing. Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves. When, coming around a corner, an old woman found herself in his path, the full force of his gaze fell on her and she gasped.

There was live fire in his eyes. She was sure he would set her alight.

She gasped and stumbled, and he reached out a hand to steady her. She felt heat, and when he continued past, his unseen wings brushed against her. Sparks shivered from them and she was left gaping in breathless, paralyzed panic at his receding form. Plainly she saw his shadow wings fan open and then, with a gust of heat that blew her headscarf off, he was gone.

In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil’s magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint.

In far reaches of the world, Hazael and Liraz were doing the same. Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin.

And it would begin with fire.