The Girl at Midnight (13 page)

Echo closed her eyes and let her forehead fall against the bars. Their faces were so close that they were breathing the same air. His breath smelled of hot cocoa, and it made Echo want to laugh and cry and smash the walls of her cell with her bare fists.

“I got into it with Altair,” she whispered. “Ivy’s been
taken, and it’s my fault. I can’t tell you why. I want to, but I can’t.”

“Hey,” Rowan said, freeing a hand so he could wipe at her cheeks. She hadn’t even realized she was crying. “You can tell me anything. You know that.”

Echo shook her head, mussing her hair against the bars. She couldn’t tell. A promise was a promise, especially one made to the Ala. She worried her chapped lips between her teeth, biting back the words she so desperately wanted to speak.

Rowan’s soft sigh ruffled the flyaway hairs at her temples. “It’s going to be okay.”

Echo squeezed his fingers, tightly enough to know it must have hurt. “We have to find her, Rowan.”

He ran his thumbs over her knuckles, tracing the bumps and ridges, and it was so gentle, Echo thought she might start crying again.

“Altair’s already organized a rescue team,” he murmured into her hair. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her.”

He was so sure, so confident. Echo wanted to believe him. She wanted to place her trust in him and the Warhawks to bring Ivy and Perrin home, but the firebird hung over her head, taunting her. She had placed her friends in danger. She had brought the fight to them. “You don’t understand. It’s my fault.”

“But how? The other ’hawks are saying it was warlocks, probably hired by the Drakharin.”

Echo banged her head lightly against the bars. “It was, but”—she sighed—“I think they went to Perrin’s looking for me. I have something they want.”

Rowan pulled back, his hands falling away from hers,
brows drawn together. The inches between them stretched into miles. The damp air chilled Echo’s skin without his to warm it. After several agonizing minutes, Rowan seized the bars again, sighing heavily in frustration.

“What the hell were you thinking, getting mixed up with Drakharin crap?” he said.

“It was the Ala. She sent me to go find this thing and they’re after it, too.”

“What thing?” Rowan hissed, eyes nearly black in the dull light. “If you don’t tell me, Echo, I can’t help you.”

“A locket.” It wasn’t a lie. Just a slim version of the truth.

Rowan shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why is a locket important enough for”—he gestured at the cell—“all this?”

Echo hesitated.
Oh, screw it
. “The Ala thinks it’s connected to the firebird.”

Rowan stared at her for several seconds before saying, “Isn’t that just some fairy-tale thingy that can magically fix everything?”

Echo’s laugh was bitter and sharp. “Fairy-tale thingy,” she said. “That’s one way of putting it.”

Rowan’s hands were back, sliding over hers once more. “But seriously … isn’t the firebird just a myth?”

“That’s what I thought,” Echo said. “But apparently, it’s real, and it’s important, and everybody wants it, and I have to pick up its trail before the Drakharin do.”

“The Ala thought you might say that.”

“The Ala? What are you—”

Rowan slipped a black bundle out from beneath his cloak. It was her backpack.

“The Ala asked me to bring this to you,” he said, shoving it between the bars. “She told me to spring you and to make
sure you did your job. She also said everything you need is in the bag, including another map, this one from the locket. I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I’m guessing you do.”

After a long blink, Echo said, “And you waited this long to tell me that because …?”

Rowan’s eyes softened around the edges. He held her gaze for a moment before ducking his head to stare at his feet. “I needed to know that it was worth it. I needed to know that the Ala wasn’t throwing you in harm’s way for no good reason.” He swallowed thickly, eyes glued to the ground. “I don’t want this war to get any worse, Echo. I don’t want good people to get hurt. If the firebird can stop this—all of this—then we have to take a shot at it.” He laughed, dry and brittle and joyless. “You’d be safer in the cell.”

Echo clutched the backpack to her chest, feeling as if the weight of the world was slowly but surely settling itself on her shoulders. “But what about Ivy?”

“I’ll make sure Altair takes me with him. I’ll find Ivy. You find … whatever it is you have to find.” Rowan pulled a chain from the neck of his armor. A skeleton key swung from its end. He shoved the key into the cell’s lock, yanking the door open faster than its hinges could squeal. “I need you to promise me something.”

“Anything,” she said, stepping out of the cell and breathing deeply. She knew it was in her head, but the air on this side smelled that much sweeter, that much freer.

Rowan tangled his hands in her hair, pulling her close. His mouth crashed into hers, their teeth knocking together. The kiss was fast and artless, and Echo’s heart hammered in her chest. When he pulled away, there was a fierceness
there that she had only dreamed about seeing. The reality was more than she could have imagined. He drew her hand to his lips, kissing the backs of her fingers. Her skin tingled where his lips touched. When he spoke, she felt every syllable against her flesh.

“Come back to me,” Rowan mumbled against her knuckles, his eyes shiny with something dangerously close to tears.

A lump lodged itself in Echo’s throat, and it took every ounce of strength she had to say, “I will. I promise.”

Bless your fine feathery soul, Ala
, Echo thought as she rummaged through her backpack. Along with her lockpick and glass cutter, the Ala had packed a small book of spells, a full pouch of shadow dust, a change of socks, a pair of leather gloves, and a Tupperware container full of oatmeal raisin cookies. The Louvre was known for many things—the
Mona Lisa
, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the glass pyramid out front—but its cafeteria was not one of them. Besides, it wasn’t even open at midnight. Kind of like the rest of the museum. It was just Echo, the guards, and the tiny slip of paper the Ala had found in the locket, which had been tucked into the bag’s side pocket, along with the locket itself. She slipped the locket on, studying the piece of parchment in her hand. It was another map, or rather, part of one. Just like the map of Kyoto, it had been torn from a larger whole. The same hurried hand had scribbled a note—this one in English—in the bottom right corner, most of which
obscured the faded blue of the Seine as it cut through central Paris.

Found again, what once was lost
,
But nothing earned without a cost
.
This token of love will guide your heart
To a pointed end, where all things start
.

The words “pointed end” were underlined with a thick stroke of ink. Right beside the Seine, the Louvre’s recognizable shape had been circled in brownish-red ink. There was clearly some kind of methodology to the maps and their rhymes, but how they would lead Echo to the firebird—
if
they would—she had no idea. After slipping through the Nest as slyly as possible, she had used her shadow dust to jump straight from Grand Central—avoiding the Nest’s main gateway—to the Louvre-Rivoli metro station connected to the museum. Even if the map were a dead end, it wouldn’t hurt to have a few thousand miles between herself and Altair’s wrath.

The gate that separated the station from the museum’s lobby was overcome with a sprinkling of shadow dust to ferry Echo from a door on one side to a supply closet on the other. She nibbled on a cookie and thumbed through the spell book before landing on a well-worn page, its dog-eared edge permanently creased. She crouched down behind a column in the lobby, just out of view of the security cameras. She swallowed the rest of the cookie and wiped her hands on her jeans. With a single finger, she traced an Avicet rune on the marble floor.

Drawing in a deep breath, she steeled her nerves and said, “By the shadows and by the light, may I pass beyond all
sight. From here to there, as quick as air, as I will it, so shall it be.” Once she uttered the final word of the spell, she felt the familiar drain of energy from the very core of her being. Magic required some form of payment to work, a sacrifice to balance the scales of the universe the spell upset. It cost Echo more than it would a naturally magical creature, like the Ala, but it was a small price to pay if it meant strolling through the Louvre without anyone noticing. A dull, throbbing ache settled at the base of her skull. She’d have a wicked headache in a few hours, but that was a problem for later.

Overhead, the security camera whined a tiny electric protest before powering down. The meaty sound of bodies hitting the floor let her know that the night guards had collapsed, struck by a sudden and overwhelming sleep. The museum was hers and hers alone. She stood, slinging her backpack over her shoulders. She’d promised Rowan and the Ala that she would see her mission through, and that was exactly what she was going to do.

Echo ran a gloved hand over a glass case in the Near Eastern Antiquities section of the Richelieu Wing. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the words “pointed end” had been underlined on the map. It had to mean something. Perhaps it was a reference to a sword or something else sharp and pointy that had been in the Louvre for at least a hundred years. The Near Eastern department—home to an impressive collection of Mogul weaponry—was her best shot at finding whatever she was looking for, but as she gazed at the sea of artifacts before her, her heart sank. It would be like finding a needle in a stack of needles. The map had narrowed down
the location to the Louvre, but it hadn’t come with a convenient catalog number.

“Crap,” Echo whispered, pausing in front of one of the display cases she’d studied a dozen times over. Nothing jumped out at her. None of the placards held any information even tangentially related to firebirds. She was at a loss.

With a heavy sigh, she wrapped her fingers around the locket. The moment she touched it, her breath caught in her chest, and an electric current coursed through her body, the hairs on her arm rising with it.

In that moment, she knew what it was she sought.

This token of love will guide your heart
, Echo recited to herself. Just like the rhyme on the map. With the necklace clasped tight in her fist, she followed the strange, persistent tug she felt deep in her belly to a modest glass display case tucked into a corner. The case held a single item, with a placard that said only
PROVENANCE UNKNOWN
.

It was a dagger, complete with pointed end.

Echo pressed her palm to the case, and the locket in her other hand blazed through the leather of her gloves. A row of small birds were set in the dagger’s hilt, wings angled upward as though in flight, their black and white feathers detailed in delicately carved onyx and pearl. Magpies. The design was simple, the blade unadorned steel, but the dagger was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Echo slipped the locket back on, freeing her hands to work on the case with her glass cutter, tracing out a circle large enough for her hand to fit through, careful not to cut too deep lest the entire thing shatter. It would have been cleaner and subtler to remove the top of the case, snatch the dagger, and replace the glass, but that would have taken too
long. Her heart beat in time with the soft pulses of energy from the locket against her chest. She needed to feel the weight of the magpie dagger in her hand the same way she needed air in her lungs. Urgently. Undeniably.

She tapped at the circle in the glass, and it fell inward with a satisfying pop. After tucking the glass cutter into the side pocket of her backpack, Echo reached a hand through the hole. Her fingers brushed the metal of the dagger’s hilt, and a surge of heat flashed through her body with a ferocity that knocked the breath from her lungs. She wrapped her hand around the hilt and once it was secure in her grip, the energy from the locket quieted.

The room was silent, but the skin on the back of her neck prickled with gooseflesh. She wasn’t alone.

“It’s rude to sneak up on people, you know,” Echo said, fighting to keep her voice steady. She slipped the dagger through the hole, careful not to snag the bracelet Perrin had given her.

A soft chuckle. “Next time I’ll be sure to wear a bell.”

Echo turned to find a young man standing not twenty feet from her, half in shadow. He never should have been able to get that close. Few people in this world could have gotten the jump on her like that, but there he was, leaning against a pillar as if he hadn’t even tried. His nonchalance was more menacing than outright violence would have been.

“And you are?” Echo asked.
Stay calm. He isn’t threatening you. Yet
.

He stepped into the beam of moonlight streaming through the gallery’s high windows. He was sickeningly handsome, verging on beautiful. The light threw the angled planes of his face into sharp relief. He was tall, with just
the right amount of muscle for his height. Hair so dark it was all but black brushed the faint dusting of scales on his cheekbones, and his eyes were the kind of green that would make emeralds weep with envy. There was a savage sort of beauty to him.

Like a snake
, Echo thought.
A pretty snake waiting to strike
. Her second Drakharin in as many days.
Lucky me
.

“What is this?” Echo said. She gripped the dagger tightly. “First One-Eye, now you. Am I being stalked by the cast of
America’s Next Top Dragon
?”

The Drakharin simply blinked at her, silent.

“Tough crowd,” she said.

“Who are you?” he asked, voice softly curious, as if he wasn’t expecting an answer. That was fine by Echo since he wouldn’t be getting one. “Why do the Avicen have a human child running errands for them?” His accent was hard to place. There was a faint thread of something almost-but-not-quite Scottish hiding beneath his words, like the slight rumble of
r
’s simmering just under the surface.