The Girl at Midnight (32 page)

“I suggest you bring this quarrel to an end,” the Oracle said. She pointed at the wall of clocks, her sleeve falling back enough to show that the scales and feathers ran all the way up her arm. “It’s nearly midnight, but the firebird isn’t the only thing that is almost upon us.” She made her way to the boulder and pressed her ear to the stone. “Young prince, your sister is here.”

As if on cue, a woman’s voice shouted on the other side of the door through which they’d entered. “Caius!”

The room trembled once more with the force of the shout as something heavy buffeted the sanctum’s walls. Even within the Oracle’s chamber, the air crackled with heat.

“It’s Tanith,” Caius said. “She must have followed us here.” He started to move. Echo eased up on the knife enough to allow him to rise to his feet, but still kept the blade at his throat. “If she finds you, she will kill you.”

Wisps of smoke leaked through the cracks around the stone door, and Echo could smell the stench of something burning on the other side. Tanith. The Dragon Prince’s sister.
Caius’s
sister. She had found them, and they would all die, burned to cinders in her fire.

No
, said the voice.
Not if you stop it
.

“How?” Echo asked, pulling the blade away from Caius’s throat, slowly, slowly, slowly. He rubbed his throat, but didn’t move toward her. With Tanith calling out to him, he kept his eyes, dark and green and as lovely as ever, on Echo alone.

The firebird. Go, find it
.

The key in her hand pulsed with a heat so strong Echo almost dropped it, but it may as well have been glued to her palm. She doubted Caius could take it, even if she were to give him the chance.

“Caius!” Tanith called. She was closer now, voice on the other side of the sanctum’s stone door. “Caius, where are you?”

When Echo spoke, her words were meant for Caius, voice in her head be damned. “My friends. They’re out there.”

“I’ll protect you,” he said, drawing the two long knives from their sheaths. “I won’t let her hurt you.”

Tanith had never laid a finger on Echo, but the voice in her head exhaled a quivering, fearful sigh. Echo shook her
head, hair flying about her face. “No.” The key in her hand throbbed mightily. “Protect them.”

She spun on her heel, throwing open the wooden door, running toward the answers she hoped to find. A long corridor separated her from a door at the other end, and her boots pounded hard against stone as she ran toward it, Caius calling after her.

Run, Echo
, the voice in her mind whispered.
And rise
.

The sky was red.

Not the warm red of the sunset Ivy had watched over the crumbling walls of the ruined abbey as the day gave way to the dark blue of night. Nor was it the happy red of freshly picked apples, plump and ripe and delicious, or the vibrant hue of maple leaves in autumn. No, this was the red of newly spilled blood, dark and thick. Or maybe the red of charcoal as it burned. The air was clogged with the scent of ash and smoke. A body slammed into Ivy, pinning her against the sharp stone of the cavern wall behind her. She looked up, but a field of navy blue and silver blocked her view of the sky as it erupted into flames.

Dorian.

Ivy pushed at his chest, but he didn’t budge. He had thrown himself between her and whatever had poured through the hole in the sky that had set it alight. She could smell the ozonic tang of the in-between, more powerful than
she’d ever experienced. Whatever gateway had just opened in the sky had to have been massive. Large enough for an army.

The entrance to the cavern exploded inward as a fireball smashed through it. Stone rained down, pelting Ivy and Dorian with jagged little pebbles. The force of the explosion cracked Ivy’s head against the wall, and her vision sparked with a display of pyrotechnics to rival the one surrounding her. Dorian had his hands on either side of her face, cradling her head between his palms. His lips were moving, and his one eye was searching Ivy’s for some sign that she understood, but all she could hear was a shrill ringing in her ears. She had never had a concussion before, but she strongly suspected that this was what one felt like.

Dorian pushed away, sword in hand, spinning in a blur of blue and silver. Not even the ringing in Ivy’s ears was loud enough to drown out the unmistakable clash of steel against steel. Her brain struggled to make sense of what she was seeing. Dorian, locked in combat with two soldiers, sword whistling through the air as he danced back, deftly dodging the shining golden blades that matched the soldiers’ shining golden armor.

Firedrakes. Dorian was fighting Firedrakes. And no matter how they lunged and parried, he kept himself in front of Ivy, using his body as a shield between her and their blades. He was protecting her. A Firedrake rushed toward them, but Dorian’s sword slid through a chink in its armor with a spray of blood that marred his fair skin with a bright red splatter.

Ivy fought to get to her feet, fingers scrabbling at the stone behind her, as more Firedrakes poured through the cavern’s entrance. She tried to shout at Dorian, to warn him,
but her voice was lost in the cacophony of falling stone and the roar of the fire. Four Firedrakes replaced the one Dorian had killed. They were going to die here, no matter how swift or strong or skilled Dorian was. There were so many of them and only one of him.

The Firedrakes set upon Dorian at once. Though he held off three, one slipped through the pack and circled the rest, sword leveled directly at Dorian’s back. Ivy’s entire world narrowed down to that one blade as it sailed through the air, golden and graceful. She screamed a warning, but she knew it would be too late.

A figure crashed into Dorian, moving so fast that Ivy saw only the quickest flash of feathers—blue and purple and green—before Dorian was knocked aside. It was Jasper. But Jasper hadn’t joined Dorian on the stone floor of the cavern, still cold despite the fire raging all around them. The sword that protruded from Jasper’s front was slightly off-center, impaling him like a bird on a spit.

Jasper’s mouth opened and closed in soundless shock. Dorian stared at him, face pale and stricken beneath the blood that dotted his skin like scarlet freckles. Even the Firedrake holding the sword that had run Jasper through looked the tiniest bit surprised to find an Avicen on the end of it. But the pulsating pain in Ivy’s head, vicious and powerful, would not be ignored. It clawed at her, dragging her down into the deep. The last thing Ivy thought, before the darkness opened up and swallowed her whole, was
Interesting
.

Echo ran, but the hallway seemed impossibly long. Behind her, the Oracle’s army of clocks chimed midnight, and the key and dagger blazed in her hands with a force so strong she stumbled. She fell to her knees, assaulted by a searing pain in her head. It brought with it a kaleidoscopic mess of images that made little sense. Visions of places she knew—the library, the Ala’s chamber in the Nest, Grand Central—mixed with sights she’d never seen and locations she’d never been. A cabin by the sea. The beach she’d set foot on only in her dream. Echo struggled to her feet, the pain so severe she thought it might split her skull. She leaned against the wall, pushing herself onward to the door at the end of the hallway.

The sounds of a battle raged behind her—the loud metallic clang of blades colliding, the angry roar of a raging fire—but she was in another world, one that contained nothing but the door at the end of the hall and the memories that crashed into her, one on top of the other, flashing by
with dizzying speed. Snippets of a life, of hers, and lives that were not hers, couldn’t possibly be hers. Echo shouldn’t have remembered them. She hadn’t lived them, hadn’t made those memories, hadn’t seen what those eyes had seen. She ran without seeing what was in front of her, struck blind by the chaos of her own mind.

—shadow dust in her hand, smearing a doorjamb as it opened into the blackness of the in-between—

“… the magpie is the only bird that can recognize its own reflection …”

—a man’s hands, made strong through years of swordsmanship, in hers, but they were not her hands, they were Avicen hands, and on the backs of her arms were feathers, neatly striped, black and white, like the wings of a magpie—

“The bird that sings at midnight …”

—a voice, talking about magpies, and it was hers, but it was also not hers, not always, in a richly furnished nest atop the tallest spire in a cathedral, stained-glass windows painting the light that drifted through them, excellent thieves, magpies—

“… from within its cage of bones …”

—the long line of a slender back, half covered by a tangled bedsheet, a delicate speckling of iridescent scales down the ridges of a man’s spine, lovingly lit by moonlight streaming in through her window, and she traced the line of scales, counting them, one by one, drawing patterns on his skin as he slept—

“… will rise from blood and ashes …”

—the Ala speaking, voice light and airy, calling Echo her little magpie—

“… to greet the truth unknown.…”

—lips brushed her neck, and arms snaked around her
waist, solid and strong and safe, and she knew, without the tiniest shred of doubt, that she was loved—

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

—fire crashing through her window like a hurricane, someone she knew, someone she loved, shouting her name, while she was burning, burning, burning—

Echo reached the end of the hallway and slumped against the door, fumbling to fit the key in the lock. Other memories, less familiar, more removed by time and distance battered at her. Memories of her own flesh, covered in feathers in shades of azure and gold and crimson. The sight of her own knuckles, speckled with scales that glittered under a field of stars. Her skin felt as if it were bursting at the seams with a hundred souls jockeying for place inside a single body.

The key slid home, and Echo flung the door open. She fell through it with such force that she collapsed to her knees and stared at what the Oracle had said would show her the firebird.

A mirror. It was a mirror. She gazed into it, chest heaving with ragged breaths, hand clutching the dagger in a viselike grip, onyx and pearl magpies digging into her palm.

Echo looked into the mirror and saw only herself.

It was her. Echo was the firebird. The firebird was Echo. She wanted to laugh, but all that came out was a strangled sob.

She closed her eyes. Images of entire worlds flashed by, freeze-frames and stilted moments, scrambled to the point of illegibility. Echoes of lives she had never lived, in places she had never seen. Echoes within echoes within Echo. As they shifted and coalesced into globs of colors and splashes of sound, one memory stood out: a cabin by the sea and a man
by her side—he was so much younger in the memory, as if his shiny newness hadn’t yet been worn down by time and tragedy. Caius. He had known her before. No, not her. Another person, someone whose memories mingled with her own.

Yes
, whispered the voice that had stilled her hand when she’d held the dagger to his throat, and Echo knew what she had to do. Her eyes fell shut and images flickered behind her lids. Ivy’s face lit up with a smile. Dorian’s hesitation in response to kindness he couldn’t understand. Jasper, wearing a grin that knew too much. Rowan’s face, full of tenderness, and maybe even love. And Caius, smiling at her as if he’d only just remembered how. She could save them. She could protect them from the dangers that threatened to bring their world crashing down, from Tanith and her fire, from the war that promised to swallow them whole. She could do it. She could make things right. But before she could rise, first she had to fall. She met her own gaze in the mirror and raised the dagger high. She gritted her teeth and clenched the hilt tightly.

“By my blood.”

Echo drove the blade down, and it sank into her skin, sliding between the bones of her rib cage with a painful scrape. She had only a fraction of a second to register that the blood leaking around the hilt was her own when the door flew off its hinges in a whirlwind of smoke and flame.

The last thing she saw before her eyes drifted closed, welcoming the dark oblivion of death, was Caius, mouth moving as he shouted her name just as Tanith’s flame engulfed the room and Echo with it. This was it. This was how her life ended. In blood and ashes.

“The firebird is not a
what
,” the Oracle had said. “It’s more of a
who
. You, Rose, are its vessel.”

Rose sat in front of the fireplace in her cabin, knees drawn up to her chest, blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and turned the words over in her mind. It was amazing how a simple statement could change a life forever.

She teased the dying fire in the hearth with a poker. Caius had gone out for more wood, and she hadn’t decided how much she wanted to tell him about her trip to the Oracle. He hadn’t known where she’d gone when she’d left four days prior, only that she was following a lead on the firebird. If it hadn’t been for Caius, she never would have known of the Oracle’s existence, never would have followed the feeling in her gut that told her she would find answers there.

They’d been sharing stories, cuddled under a blanket in front of this same fireplace. He’d told her all about his
election the year before and his journey to the Oracle. They’d laughed over the bit of inane wisdom she’d imparted
—Follow your heart, honestly
—and traded lazy kisses, treasuring the rare bit of stolen time they had together. It wasn’t often that Caius managed to sneak away from the keep without a retinue of guards to accompany him, and those moments were precious. They were sacred, and she had violated his trust in a way she wasn’t sure he would forgive.

Rose sighed and rested her chin on her knees. She loved Caius. There was no doubt in her mind about that, but there was a part of her that missed the simplicity of her mission before she’d given him her heart. Find the firebird, the Council of Elders had instructed her. She remembered the look of absolute conviction in Altair’s eyes when he’d taken her aside and told her to do whatever she had to in order to complete her mission, up to and including seducing the Dragon Prince for information. Rose had always been confident about what she had to offer: beauty, intelligence, a quick wit. She wasn’t surprised that Caius had succumbed to her charms. What
did
surprise her was that she had fallen for his. Altair must have suspected something was amiss when she stopped sending him reports the last time she was in Japan, but that was a problem for another day.