Sing the Angry Children by Celia J. King

Author:Celia J. King [King, Celia J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

XIOMARA

Xiomara ran her hands across the smooth glass of the shoe in her lap. Rain stained sunlight refracted through it onto her pale skirts, dying them shades of purple, gold, pink, and blue. The craftsmanship was impeccable, multicolored shards woven together into the picture of a sunset over the sea, all confined to the delicate surface of a heeled shoe.

She remembered the way the girl's hands had settled at her waist, the way the music had sung through her blood. The heady dizziness of the wine on her tongue and the circles they had danced in. The warmth of bodies all around her and dark eyes locked onto her own.

The blue silk of the girl’s dress had been smooth under her fingertips, and Xo did not mind that the body her hands touched stood in discordance with the illusion the girl had wrapped herself in. It was basic magic, flickering in and out of effect as it made the flat plane of the girl’s chest appear fuller, her muscled arms appear slimmer.

Her smile was not an illusion, and that was what had drawn Xo like a moth to the flame of a lantern. Infectious and bright, intoxicating as the perfumed violets in her hair. Xiomara had wanted to kiss that girl a hundred times.

Before the lantern, she had danced out her beautiful death.

They had stumbled from the building, and they had pretended the filthy street was a ballroom, and the candles were chandeliers, and Xo had to wind her hands through the girl’s many braids to coax her down into a kiss.

And then Corey had come running in a panic, face bright with candlelight, and her beautiful stranger had reeled back as though struck, nearly twisting her ankle as a shoe caught on the pavement and came off. Xo hadn’t even had time to chase after her with the pretty thing before Corey was dragging her away.

Maybe she should have been thinking of other things. Good lord, they had killed a man. She had buried him with her bare hands. All her memories of Corey’s hunched shoulders and childhood bruises could not banish the thought of blood and dirt under her fingernails.

Still, she could do nothing but wish the girl had a name to give her. The only name she could have taken would have been a lie–a boy’s name, one that she did not want to hear fall from either of their lips.

How do you ask after a girl who hasn’t even named herself?

Xo held the heeled shoe up to the pale gray sky beyond the window.

She did not know how she would find her, but she would.

She pushed away the part of her that still loved the little boy who had sword fought his way through the background of her childhood. Her affection for Iman was a childish one, born from a time when he had said he loved the coiled hair that her own father made her flatten with foul smelling gel. A time when he had complemented the too-dark, Ushakk skin that her mother had left her, and she had believed him.

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