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replied, “I think a flying girl would not go unnoticed in your city.”
    “Easily solved,” said Karou. “Give me two gavriels, and I’ll wish for invisibility, too.”
    Brimstone looked up. His eyes were those of a crocodile, luteous gold with vertical slit pupils, and they were not amused. He would not, Karou knew, give her any gavriels. She didn’t ask out of hope, but because his complaint was so unfair. Hadn’t she come running as soon as he’d called?
    “I could trust you with gavriels, could I?” he asked.
    “Of course you could. What kind of question is that?”
    She felt his appraisal, as if he were mentally reviewing every wish she’d ever made.
    Blue hair: frivolous.
    Erasing pimples: vain.
    Wishing off the light switch so she didn’t have to get out of bed: lazy.
    He said, “Your necklace is looking quite short. Have you had a busy day?”
    Her hand flew to cover it. Too late. “Why do you have to notice everything?” No doubt the old devil somehow knew exactly what she’d used these scuppies for and was adding it to his mental list:
    Making ex-boyfriend’s cranny itch: vindictive.
    “Such pettiness is beneath you, Karou.”
    “He deserved it,” she replied, forgetting her earlier shame. Like Zuzana had said, bad behavior should be punished. She added, “Besides, it’s not like you ask your traders what they’re going to use their wishes for, and I’m sure they do a hell of a lot worse than make people itch .”
    “I expect you to be better than them,” Brimstone said simply.
    “Are you suggesting that I’m not ?”
    The tooth-traders who came to the shop were, with few exceptions, about the worst specimens humanity had to offer. Though Brimstone did have a small coterie of longtime associates who did not turn Karou’s stomach—such as the retired diamond dealer who had on a number of occasions posed as her grandmother to enroll her in schools—mostly they were a stinking, soul-dead lot with crescents of gore under their fingernails. They killed and maimed. They carried pliers in their pockets for extracting the teeth of the dead—and sometimes the living. Karou loathed them, and she was certainly better than them.
    Brimstone said, “Prove that you are, by using wishes for good.”
    Nettled, she asked, “Who are you to talk about good , anyway?” She gestured to the necklace clutched in his huge clawed hands. Crocodile teeth—those would be from the Somali. Also wolf fangs, horse molars, and hematite beads. “I wonder how many animals died in the world today because of you. Not to mention people.”
    She heard Issa suck in a surprised breath, and she knew she should shut up, but her mouth kept moving. “No, really. You do business with killers, and you don’t even have to see the corpses they leave behind. You lurk in here like a troll—”
    “Karou,” Brimstone said.
    “But I’ve seen them, piles of dead creatures with bloody mouths. Those girls with their bloody mouths; I’ll never forget as long as I live. What’s it all for? What do you do with these teeth? If you would just tell me, maybe I could understand. There must be a reason— ”
    “Karou,” Brimstone said again. He did not say “shut up.” He didn’t have to. His voice conveyed it clearly enough, on top of which he rose suddenly from his chair.
    Karou shut up.
    Sometimes, maybe most of the time, she forgot to see Brimstone. He was so familiar that when she looked at him she saw not a beast but the creature who, for reasons unknown, had raised her from a baby, and not without tenderness. But he could still strike her speechless at times, such as when he used that tone of voice. It slithered like a hiss to the core of her consciousness and opened her eyes to the full, fearsome truth of him.
    Brimstone was a monster.
    If he and Issa, Twiga, and Yasri were to stray from the shop, that’s what humans would call them: monsters. Demons, maybe, or devils. They called themselves chimaera.
    Brimstone’s