The Girl at Midnight (29 page)

She turned to Caius. Standing there, in the dying light of the early-evening sun, he didn’t look two hundred fifty. He looked dark and silent and sad. She was keenly aware of her own pulse, of the way his hair just barely brushed his collar, of the scales on his cheeks, of the sound of the nighttime forest coming alive. It was beautiful and terrible, all at once.

Ever since she’d found that music box, Echo’s world had tilted on its axis, just a few degrees, but enough so that everything was different. She saw colors differently, smelled things differently, heard sounds that she had never deigned to notice before. It was as though she was experiencing the world for the first time, and everything was new. But nothing was newer to her than Caius. He was the sound of the nightingale welcoming the evening, the moon peeking out from behind a cloud, the secret shadowy parts of the Black Forest that she was only just discovering.

But she didn’t deserve this novelty, this great and terrible beauty, not when she could still feel Ruby’s blood on her hands, seeping into her pores, drying under her nails.

“Why do I feel like this?” she said. “I did something terrible, and I did it for you, and I don’t understand why.”

A change was happening beneath the surface of her skin, as monumental as the shifting of tectonic plates. Something inside her was building to a crescendo she couldn’t begin to fathom. She rubbed her fingers against her temples and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn’t want to feel like this. It was too much. Too confusing. Too disastrous. She wanted to be the person she’d been before she’d taken a life, before she’d set off on this cursed journey. She wanted, more than anything else, to forget. To forget the pain and the guilt and the regret that threatened to drown her. She wanted to feel something, anything, besides the ache inside her heart.

When Caius didn’t answer, she reached for his hand, fingers brushing along his knuckles. She needed to feel the warmth of another person. She wanted to let him be her anchor. Caius looked down at their joined hands. His hair fell
in front of his eyes, hiding them. This time, she didn’t quell the urge to brush it away. Her fingers traced the line of his temples, the uneven texture of his scales. His eyes fluttered shut, and he leaned his cheek into her hand. He let her explore the contours of his face for a moment before pulling his hand away. No more than six inches separated their bodies, but it felt like a vast expanse. He wrapped his arms around himself. On anyone else, the gesture would have made them look smaller. It just made him look tired.

Echo took another step forward, crowding into Caius’s space. He tensed but didn’t step back. Their chests brushed with every indrawn breath.

“Help me, Caius,” she said. “Help me forget.”

He parted his lips, but no sound came out save a barely there hitch in his breath. A tiny part of her wished that he would push her away, tell her to stop, but more than that, she prayed he wouldn’t. She needed the silent comfort of feeling another person’s body against her own without the weight of words between them. She didn’t think she could bear what he would say. If he spoke, he would water the nasty little seeds of betrayal that had taken root in her heart when she wasn’t looking, and they would blossom into something she couldn’t deny, and bend toward him, a flower angling for the sun.

“Echo, I—”

When she pressed her lips to his, balancing on the tips of her toes to reach him, she felt something inside her click into place. She grabbed the open collar of his jacket for balance. His hands slid up her arms to circle her wrists, steadying her. Caius’s lips were warm and slightly chapped. They
parted, welcoming her own. It was a soft kiss, searching and hesitant. Echo’s pulse roared in her ears. She pressed her body flush against his, soaking up every bit of warmth he could offer. When she felt his tongue slide against her bottom lip, she thought she might explode.

He pulled back first, trailing his lips over her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose, the ridge of her brow, his fingers tracing the skin of her wrists as though it were as delicate as the spindly membrane of butterfly wings. Echo could feel herself dissolving where he touched her, disintegrating into a pile of ash at his feet. On a good day, she would have been embarrassed about that, but today was not a good day. She felt herself becoming someone else, someone she didn’t recognize.
War makes monsters of us all
, Caius had said. Echo wondered, if she were to look in a mirror now, who she would see.

She slipped her fingers under Caius’s shirt, warming them against his skin. His hands dropped to wrap around her waist, and he arched into her touch. A strangled sound escaped him, like a man gasping for breath after drowning. Breathing heavily, he shuddered in her arms and squeezed his eyes shut, forehead falling to rest against hers. Her touch was light, but Caius reacted as though he hadn’t been touched in years. Maybe he hadn’t. Echo flattened her palm against his lower back, right above the waistband of his jeans. Her skin felt aflame.

“Echo.” It was a whisper, breathed into her hair.

She reached up, closing the inch that separated them to brush her lips against his. He made that desperate strangled sound again. This was what she needed. A distraction. A way to feel something besides regret. But after a few seconds,
his hands dropped from her waist. He followed the line of her arms to grasp her forearms, pushing her away from him. The distance was practically negligible, but it was enough for Echo to curse the cold that settled between them. He’d been so warm. He let his head drop, close enough for his bangs to brush her cheekbones.

“Not like this,” he whispered. “Not like this.”

Even after he pulled away, Caius could still taste the subtle mint of Echo’s lip balm. She sagged against him, forehead falling against his chest. When she spoke, her words were muffled by his jacket.

“I did it for you.”

Caius stroked the soft skin on the undersides of her wrists with his thumbs. “I know.”

She rubbed her face against the space between his collarbones. He could feel a slight dampness on her cheeks through his shirt.

“Why did I do it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, would you have done the same for me?” Echo peered up at him, brown eyes bloodshot and shiny. She lifted her head just enough so that Caius’s skin tingled with the fleeting warmth of her cheek. Something quite like pain
seized at his chest. He would have. Without a moment’s hesitation.

“Echo—”

And then she was crying. Caius wanted to cry with her, but he had run out of tears so long ago. There was nothing he could do for her beyond sliding his hands up her arms and around her shoulders, pulling her closer, smoothing the mess of her hair. She sobbed her guilt against his chest while he whispered soft Drakhar nonsense into her ear. She didn’t understand his words, but the sound of his voice seemed to soothe her. After a while, her sobs faded to hiccups and then, finally, to silence.

Caius held her as he sank to his knees, drawing her down with him. He rested his back against the trunk of an oak tree, stretching his legs out in front of him. Echo pulled her knees close to her chest, burrowing into the space between his arm and his body, her thighs resting against his own. She fit against the curve of him as though she’d always been there.

They sat like that long enough to watch the sun dip below the horizon, the stars pricking their way through the velvety indigo of dusk. The only noise to keep them company was the sorrowful song of the thrushes nesting in the trees as they bid farewell to the sun. Caius closed his eyes and listened to the quiet sound of Echo’s breathing.

He hummed a lilting tune into her hair, the same one he had heard in his dreams for so many years. She shifted in his arms, hair brushing the sensitive skin of his throat.

“How do you know that song?” Echo asked. “The magpie’s lullaby. I thought it was an Avicen thing.”

“It is.” His chin slid against her forehead when he spoke, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Someone taught it to me, a long time ago. The girl I told you about.”

“Rose … she was Avicen, wasn’t she?” Echo shifted, and her hair tickled his cheek. “What happened to her?”

He hesitated. Some wounds were not so easily reopened. Her breath ghosted, warm and soft, against his collarbone.

“There was a fire,” Caius said, brushing away an errant strand of Echo’s hair. “She died.”

Two sentences. That was all it took to sum up their story. The neatness of it felt like another death. Echo’s arm tightened around Caius’s waist. Just like that, his darkest secret, the one known only to him and his sister, was bared to the dying light of the Black Forest.

“And the fire,” Echo said, fingers drawing small circles on the skin at his side. His shirt must have ridden up when he sat down. It was the nicest thing he’d felt in years. “Was it an accident?”

Caius shook his head, rubbing his cheek against Echo’s hair. “No. Someone found out about us. They said Rose was a spy.”

“Was she?”

Shrugging the shoulder opposite Echo, Caius answered as truthfully as he could. “I don’t know. I like to think so. If she was, then maybe her death would be easier to bear.”

He couldn’t see Echo frown, but he could feel the set of her jaw against his clavicle. “Is it?”

Caius’s shaky exhale stirred the hairs atop Echo’s head, and she squirmed slightly, as if tickled. “No,” he admitted. “Not really. Not at all.”

“I’m sorry,” Echo whispered. With her lips brushing his throat with each word, he felt it more than heard it. He shivered and tightened his arms around her. Night continued to settle, painting the forest violet.

“It was a long time ago.” If Caius kept saying it, then maybe it would begin to mean something.

“It must hurt.” Echo shifted again, stretching her legs out next to his. She reached for the key that hung around her neck, stroking it lightly. She’d slipped it on that morning, along with the locket, before they left Jasper’s. “Remembering.”

And it did. But the only thing worse than remembering the feel of Rose in his arms, the softness of her black and white feathers, the sound of her voice when she sang quietly to herself, would be forgetting it.

“Memories make us who we are,” he said. “Without them, we are nothing.”

Echo hmmed in response. The distant sound of birdsong gave way to the gentle chirping of crickets in the dark and the lonely hoot of an owl in the distance. A chill was beginning to set in. It was late spring, but remnants of winter clung to the forest like a lover reluctant to say goodbye. Caius whispered a soft Drakhar spell into Echo’s hair—it was a simple thing, a spell to keep warm. The words came without him having to think about them—he’d said them enough during long, cold nights of battle and bloodshed. The feeling of Echo in his arms was much nicer than that.

The part of himself that craved the touch of another person, the feel of warm skin against his own had died with Rose, burned out of him with Tanith’s flames. But Echo had burrowed her way inside, past decades of stone walls, and
found the dying embers of the man Caius had been. She was bringing him back to life, slowly, as if coaxing a stubborn fire. He stroked the soft hair at the nape of her neck and breathed in time with the rise and fall of her chest as she dozed off. Soon enough, he, too, fell asleep. For the first time in days, he did not dream of fire.

Echo blinked awake to the sound of birdsong. Larks crooned at the rising sun while warblers sang their lullabies. She settled deeper against Caius’s chest and breathed in. He smelled, just faintly, like wood. And apples. It was cozy. When he’d talked to her in Drakhar the night before, it was the first time she’d ever really heard it spoken, aside from a few indistinct bits of conversation between Caius and Dorian and the words inscribed on the key. The Avicen claimed it was a guttural language, with inelegant vowels and harsh consonants, but when Caius spoke it, whispering words into her hair, it was melodic, almost lyrical. It was beautiful.

Her first time waking up next to a person of the opposite sex wasn’t quite what she’d expected. In her fantasies, there had been no stubborn sharp-edged stones digging into her thighs, no gnarled twigs stabbing at the sliver of bare skin between her jeans and T-shirt, no awkward cramps in her
neck from falling asleep mostly upright. And in those fantasies, the person resting beside her had always been Rowan.

Echo shifted so she could see Caius’s face. He looked younger asleep, softer. His dark lashes were stark brushstrokes against his cheekbones, scales barely visible in the dawn light. She let her eyes roam over him, trying to commit each detail to memory. This quiet reprieve wouldn’t last, but she didn’t want to let it go. She closed her eyes, resting her temple against the curve of Caius’s shoulder. She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it or if the locket and key dangling from the chain at her breast were actually thrumming in time with the thumping of his heart. Even the dagger in her boot felt warmer through the fabric of her jeans, but it was nothing compared with the heat radiating off Caius. When she was held against his side like this, it was almost too much. She slid down, pressing her ear against his chest.
Thump. Thump thump
. It was a good heartbeat. A solid heartbeat. It felt as though her own were skipping a few beats to match it.

There was a sense of rightness to being in Caius’s arms. It was the sort of rightness she’d never felt before, not even with Rowan. It was almost like … belonging. Like home. Echo squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her cheek against his chest, feeling the soft scrape of wool against her skin. But she had to remember that Caius was not her home. She already had a home.

Do you?
a nasty little part of her whispered.

Shut up
, Echo whispered right back.

She turned in the circle of Caius’s arms and looked around. Drakhar runes had been drawn in the dirt nearby, alternating with a line of stones to form a circle. Dorian must have come after them in the night to cast a protective ward.
Heat pricked at Echo’s cheeks at the thought of another person finding them like this, wrapped around each other with a familiarity they shouldn’t have felt. But as embarrassing as the thought of Dorian and his judgmental one-eyed gaze was, Echo was glad it hadn’t been Ivy who found them. Her best friend had stuck with her through a decade’s worth of questionable life choices, but even the most tolerant of people had their limits. Echo snuggling with a Drakharin mercenary just may have been Ivy’s.