“No samurai skills?” He’d made puppy-dog eyes. “Or perhaps some other, more cautiously phrased superpower request?”
“We can get Virko or someone to teach us how to fight,” she’d said. “It’s a nonessential wish.”
“It’s a lazy wish. That’s its appeal. Learning stuff is hard.”
“Says the violinist to the artist.”
“Right. Right.” He’d beamed. “We totally know how to learn stuff.” He’d turned to Eliza. “Scientist and smart fellow learner-of-stuff, want to do samurai-monster training with us? We intend to become dangerous.”
“I’m in,” she’d said, that easy. Eliza Jones was what’s known in fruit parlance as: a peach.
Really. If they weren’t tied together by a quirk of fate and a crazy shared purpose, Zuzana would still have wanted to be friends with her. That didn’t happen often, and she was really, really glad it was the case. If Eliza had been a whiner, or a prima donna, or some kind of loud chewer or something, this journey could have been a nightmare.
What it had been, instead, was awesome.
First, getting to Patagonia (which turned out to be in Argentina, mainly, with a slice of Chile thrown in; who knew?). That only required money, which they had no shortage of, on account of Karou’s accounts being perfectly in order, apparently unmolested by Evil Esther. In your face again, fake grandma. Zuzana had lamented not being able to gloat at least, or better yet make good on her threat, but Mik, for his part, had been sanguine.
“Having to keep her own company for the rest of her life is vengeance enough,” he said.
Little imagining.
Eliza, it turned out, had a wicked yen for vengeance, too, which only made Zuzana like her more. She looked so sweet, with those big, beautiful eyes, but she knew how to nurse a grudge. She demurred from wasting a wish on her nemesis, though, who sounded like such a rancid little weenie, until Zuzana persuaded her that a shing—of which they had dozens, and which were far too modest to be of any real heroic value to Karou—could still wreak a satisfying morsel of revenge.
She’d told her about Karou’s most excellent torment of Kaz, and had her and Mik both in helpless laughter describing the sight of his nude Adonis body doing a spastic itch-dance on the model stand. But it was the companion piece to that revenge—Svetla’s ever-grow eyebrows—that had been Eliza’s inspiration.
She’d kissed the shing like lucky dice before pronouncing, “I wish that the hair just between Morgan Toth’s nose and upper lip will grow in at a rate of an inch per hour, beginning now, ending one month from now.”
There was always that moment of wondering if your wish exceeded the medallion’s power, but the shing vanished with her last syllable.
“You do realize,” Mik had said, “that you just described a Hitler mustache?”
By the glint in her eye, they gathered that she did. The revenge was not complete, however, if the subject didn’t know who was responsible, so she’d sent, to his work e-mail, a picture of herself, finger raised to her lip like a mustache. Subject line: Enjoy.
“We have to do that to Esther, too,” Zuzana had declared. “Right now.”
So they did, and began their journey in the best of all possible ways: imagining, in solidarity, the bewildered horror of their enemies.
A long flight, some shopping for cold-weather gear and supplies, a long drive, a long hike—in the snow; damn, it was winter in the Southern Hemisphere—and they were there. Near enough to the portal to contemplate a couple of gavriels for flight. They almost did it, too, but it had become a matter of honor by this point, to preserve them, so Mik said, “Let’s just see what’s on the other side before we decide. Eliza can carry us.”
She did, and that was how they found out what no one in all of Eretz knew:
Where stormhunters nested.
And what none could have guessed:
They liked music.
And it was official: Mik’s three fairy-tale tasks were accomplished. And the ring burning a hole in his pocket? The one that had seemed so crude in the light of the Royal Suite’s shining marble bathroom?
It happened to look just perfect on stormhunter-back, with a northerly sea rolling beneath them, dotted with icebergs and breaching sea creatures that were not in any way whales. He couldn’t go down on one knee without risk of falling off, but that was entirely okay, under the circumstances. “Will you marry me?” he asked.
The answer was yes.
“Am I glad to see you,” Zuzana cried now, crowing at the sight of Liraz and Ziri. Ziri! Not the White Wolf, but Ziri! Oh. That meant he must have… But it was okay, wasn’t it, because here he was in Kirin form again, and he looked pretty nearly exactly the same as he had in his natural flesh. He was smiling broadly, so very handsome, and Liraz at his side was smiling broadly, too, and beautiful, laughing in unbridled amazement, laughing. Laughing like a person who laughs. Liraz.
That seemed almost more amazing than showing up on a freaking stormhunter. But wasn’t.
Because nothing was as amazing as that.
“Can you tell them,” Zuzana asked Eliza, after the initial jag of laughing and exclaiming in mutually non-understandable languages had begun to subside, “that we can’t find the caves?”
Eliza spoke Seraphic, which was handy, but also mildly irritating, as it undercut any sound argument Zuzana might have made for spending a wish to acquire an Eretz language herself. It would have been Chimaera, though, because come on.
“We’ll just have to learn that, too,” Mik had said with a sigh that didn’t fool her for a second. “Resurrection and invisibility and fighting and now non-human languages, too? What is this, school?”
But Eliza wasn’t translating, and Zuzana realized she was staring at Ziri agog. Oh! Right. His body. She’d seen his body at the pit. That was going to take some explaining. “It’s him,” Zuzana confirmed. “We’ll tell you later.”
And so translations were given—to Liraz, who in turn translated to Ziri in Chimaera—and then they were guiding them back south, asking things like where they’d come from and whether the stormhunter had a name, and when Zuzana spotted the crescent, she realized a flaw in her grand vision of sweeping in and bowling everyone over with amazement and tornado-force wingbeats.
The stormhunter—who did not have a name—wasn’t going to fit through the crescent. Well, damn.