Wicked Like a Wildfire by Lana Popovic

Author:Lana Popovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

EVEN WITH THE RAIN THAT LASHED AT THE WINDOWS, I knew it was hot inside the Stari Mlini, but not even the shawl wrapped around my shoulders could keep me warm. Usually I loved it here, the exposed wooden beams, rough-hewn furniture, and bronze candelabras on every table, the water wheel spinning in the stream outside as the night rain sheeted down on it. And it smelled of warm things, curling cigarette smoke, beeswax, and grilling fish. But I couldn’t stop trembling. My insides felt like slush, sliding around a skeleton of ice instead of bone.

Someone had set a bowl of bean stew in front of me at some point, recently enough that it still steamed. Plump sausages bobbed between the kidney beans, and I caught a savory waft of spices, enough to make my stomach growl. So I was hungry, then. That was good to know.

Malina sat across from me, her hands wrapped around her own bowl. I could see her fingers shaking, the torn edges of her cuticles. Niko was next to her, an arm slung around her shoulders. By my side, Luka gripped my own arm, massaging me briskly as if I actually needed a boost in circulation.

“It wasn’t you, Riss,” he said. I had the dim sense that he’d been saying this for a while. “That was not you. Those things you said . . . they didn’t come from your mind. Not the mind I know.”

“It was me. It was her, speaking through me, but it was me, too.” That also sounded like something I’d said before. From the moment I’d stepped up to that reliquary, time had taken on an elastic quality that reminded me of how I’d felt after finding Mama broken. Every moment felt as long as an opium dream, but at the same time I barely remembered the ride back to Cattaro after Luka wrapped me up in the shawl and tucked me into the backseat. He’d kept me on his lap for a long time, his long body folded awkwardly in the small space so he could hold me, rocking me and crooning in my ear as I shook with tears against him. He’d asked Malina and Niko to meet us here on our way home, so neither his father nor Čiča Jovan would see me like this.

“How can this be happening?” I said through numb lips. “Who is she to us? Is she—is she even real? Because this is more than just dreams. This is some kind of open connection, a conduit. She was in me, I could feel her, and I wanted . . .” Aftershocks rippled through me, and I took a shuddering breath. “I wanted to rip apart that reliquary. Crush all those bones. Because they hate her, and she hates them for hating her, and even then I loved her so much I wanted to keep her safe.”

Malina reached across the table and grasped my hand. “I felt it too. A shadow of it, at least, nothing as strong as you.

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