The Girl at Midnight (24 page)

“Are you all right?” Caius asked.

Her stomach somersaulted with an audible gurgle, as if it wanted to answer for her.

“Yeah,” Echo said. “Just give me a minute.”

Though all she saw were his boots—the only part of his original outfit to survive Jasper’s wardrobe intervention—she could feel his eyes on her.

“Sorry,” Caius said. “Sometimes I forget.”

She focused on breathing in through her nose and out through her mouth as her body struggled to find equilibrium. “Forget what?”

“How fragile humans are.”

Echo gave him what she considered her best side eye, though it was spoiled by the fact that she was hunched over and battling the unique brand of motion sickness that accompanied long-distance travel with another person leading the way.

“You know, you have a real way with words,” she groaned.

“Sorry,” Caius said. “Again.”

Echo waved it off as a second bout of nausea threatened to overwhelm her.

“No,” she said. “I get it. You’re a bajillion-year-old demigod, I’m a puny mortal.”

“Well, I don’t know about demigod.” Again, that little smile that was almost not a smile. A ghost of a smile. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile. He bowed his head as a cyclist passed them. The shade beneath the bridge shielded his scales from the late-afternoon sun, but they were still visible. It must’ve sucked not being able to walk in the daylight among humans, Echo thought. She’d spent so long envying the Avicen their vibrant plumage that it was easy to forget that their feathers—and Caius’s scales—came with a price.

Caius slipped a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on. The aviators Jasper had lent him—with a solemn warning to return them in once piece—just barely covered the scales on his cheekbones.

“How do I look?” he asked.

How strange
, Echo thought. A Drakharin mercenary, worried about his appearance. Truly, she had seen everything.

“Like a native New Yorker,” she said.

Jasper’s jeans hugged Caius’s slender hips in a way that should have been criminal, and his black wool jacket contrasted nicely with his tanned skin. The military cut suited him. The nausea passed, and Echo straightened. A persistent breeze pulled a few strands of hair loose from her braid.

“So what’s the deal with you and this new and terrifying Dragon Prince? You sold your loyalty to the old one, but not this one?” Echo said. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her leather jacket, stepping onto the paved walkway beneath the bridge. Caius had deposited them exactly where she’d told him to. The path would lead them to Museum Mile and East Eighty-Fifth Street, a few blocks from the Met’s entrance.

He fell in step with her, shortening his strides to match hers. “We had a difference of opinion.”

“I’ve gathered that you don’t support wiping out the Avicen,” Echo said. “Considering how you managed to spend an entire night in the home of one without so much as insulting his decor.”

Caius had a little not-laugh to go with his little not-smile. “It wasn’t easy. Not with that white carpet.” But the not-laugh and the not-smile faded as he spoke. Echo was sad to see
them go. “Tanith thinks the only way to win is in a fury of fire and blood. But fire only brings about death, and blood only brings about more blood.”

It was an impressive answer, but Echo was oddly dissatisfied with it. They’d reached the main path, and the proud stone facade of the Met was visible across the park. The skin between her shoulder blades tingled, as if someone was watching her, but when she turned, all she saw were a few joggers and a hot-dog vendor. Altair probably had someone out looking for her, and she knew the paranoia wouldn’t dissipate until they were clear of New York. She scanned their surroundings as she asked, “Do others agree with you? I’ve never heard about any peace talks between the Avicen and the Drakharin.”

The sun beat brightly down upon them. Caius kept his head bowed. The few scales the sunglasses didn’t shield glittered, sort of like a fish in sunlight. “That’s because there haven’t been any.”

Echo waited for him to volunteer more information, but when he simply walked in silence, she asked, “Why not?”

Caius let his answer percolate. They were nearly to the park’s exit when he finally spoke.

“War is like a drug,” he said. “You spend so long chasing victory that you become blind to the fact that you’ll never find it. It had never even occurred to me that peace was possible, not until …”

He let his words trail off. His voice had the same strangled quality to it that it had the night before, when he’d given her the dagger.

Echo hazarded a guess. “Until the girl?”

“Yes.”

“Must have been some girl.”

“She was.”

Caius fell quiet again as they approached Fifth Avenue. Echo let him have his silence. She couldn’t help but wonder about the woman who had captured his heart. She couldn’t imagine Caius—stoic, serious Caius—in love.

When they reached the Met’s front steps, Echo came to a stop. A crowd of tourists clustered at the foot of the grand staircase, posing for pictures.

“An hour before closing time,” Caius said. “What now? You’re the expert.”

The heady excitement she always felt before a job rose. Echo tried to control her face so that she didn’t give away just how pleased she was by his words. When the little not-smile flashed across Caius’s lips, she knew that she had failed.
C’est la vie
.

“Now,” Echo said, plopping down on the steps. “The fun part starts.”

Ivy was sure she’d lived through more awkward situations than this, but she couldn’t seem to think of any. After Caius and Echo left, Dorian pressed his lips tightly into something she couldn’t quite call a pout even if it was perilously close. He spent a considerable amount of time sitting on the edge of Jasper’s bed, wiping his sword down with supplies Jasper had conjured up from the depths of his closet. If he cleaned it any more ferociously, she was sure the steel would begin to erode.

She was content to let Dorian stew in his own juices, but Jasper had other ideas. From her seat on the sofa, cradling a warm cup of tea in her hands, she watched the scene unfold. It was better than TV. Besides, it wasn’t like Jasper even owned a television. His loft—with its plush white carpet, stained-glass windows, and stolen art collection—was entirely too posh for something so pedestrian.

Jasper held a sweater out to Dorian. It was a pretty cornflower blue that looked incredibly soft, even from this distance.

“Try it on,” Jasper said.

Dorian didn’t bother looking up from the sword on his lap. “No.”

“In case you forgot, the shirt Caius cut off you last night is currently sporting a sword-shaped hole in it,” Jasper said. “Kind of like you.”

Ivy didn’t want to laugh, but Jasper made it difficult to resist. He was easy to be around, and Ivy appreciated that. She needed a buffer between herself and Dorian, and Jasper had been more than willing to keep them both distracted.

“Besides,” Jasper said, dangling the sweater next to Dorian’s face, “this shade of blue brings out your eyes. Sorry. Eye.”

If looks could actually kill, Jasper would have been brought down by Dorian’s dark stare. Ivy thought he might be teasing the Drakharin for her benefit as much as for his own amusement. Dorian appeared to be on the verge of doing something truly regrettable, but he gingerly laid the sword aside and took the sweater from Jasper’s hands.

Interesting
. Maybe he wasn’t so easy to read after all.

“Attaboy,” Jasper said. “Let me help you.”

Dorian jerked away from Jasper’s hands. Ivy caught the way Dorian’s jaw clenched, and his eyes narrowed, ever so slightly. He was in pain. The part of Ivy that had drawn her to apprentice as a healer poked at her persistently as if trying to convince her to help him. The part of her that wanted to see him suffer squashed it down.

“I don’t need your help,” Dorian said, though it was clear to Ivy, and probably also to Jasper, that he did.

To call Jasper’s sigh exasperated would be to call a hurricane a spot of rain. “There’s no shame in accepting help when you need it, Dorian.”

With a glare, Dorian relinquished the sweater. “Fine,” he gritted out through clenched teeth.

Jasper took the sweater from Dorian’s hands and, with a gentleness that surprised Ivy, helped him pull it over his head. Ivy was beginning to think that all parties involved would escape the ordeal unscathed when Jasper said, “It’s funny. I’m usually better at taking clothes off than putting them on.”

Dorian sputtered. It was the only word Ivy could think of to describe the noise he made. A flush so deep it was almost scarlet crawled up his neck, painting his incredibly fair cheeks a lovely shade of crimson. Ivy almost sympathized. Her own white skin had a tendency to broadcast her embarrassment just as loudly. Between Dorian’s violent blushing and the tufts of silver-white hair sticking up at odd angles it was hard to believe that he’d ever been terrifying. Jasper smoothed the Drakharin’s unruly locks down while Dorian made a sound that was somewhere between a gurgle and a gasp. Ivy hid her smile behind her mug.

“You’re cute when you blush,” Jasper said.

Shockingly, Dorian didn’t come back at Jasper with a pointed barb or a surly retort. He simply blushed even more furiously and pushed his arms through the sleeves of the sweater with a small pained exhalation. Jasper winked at Ivy over Dorian’s shoulder.

What a ham
, Ivy thought.

Blowing on her steaming tea, Ivy settled back against the sofa. Its purple cushions were just the right amount of squishy. She took a sip of her tea and watched the two of them bicker.

Yup
, she thought,
way better than TV
.

Caius watched Echo study the blueprints Jasper had provided, planning a way inside. She was so earnest, so focused, that he left her to it. After they’d made camp on the steps, she had pressed a crumpled pile of green paper currency in his hand and ordered him to buy her a hot chocolate while she schemed. He had stared at the bills for a solid thirty seconds before moving on in search of a street vendor. It was the first time someone had so blatantly ordered him around in decades. He had gotten himself a hot chocolate, too. It was surprisingly nice.

Getting in would be the easy part, but there was something fascinating about the way Echo pored over the map, nose scrunching every so often in concentration, errant strands of hair stubbornly falling in front of her face. She had been at it for about fifteen minutes before Caius finally spoke up.

“I can transport us in,” he said.

Echo’s head shot up, startled, as if she had forgotten he was there. They were sitting on the Met’s front steps, right in front of the museum they planned to burgle. Echo had been endlessly amused by the idea of planning a heist right under the guards’ noses. Caius thought it was a needless risk, but she had been so enthused that he’d felt forced to indulge her.

“What?” she said, stretching her legs. She’d spread the blueprints out on the step above the one on which she sat and had been still for so long that her joints must have been unhappy.

Caius waved the paper cup in his hand toward the vendor selling sausages wrapped in bread from a cart on the sidewalk. Echo had called them hot dogs, but as there were no dogs involved in their making, he didn’t understand why.

“I had a lovely chat with that man over there while you were busy scheming. He said his favorite attraction in the museum was the Tomb of Perneb. Apparently, it’s situated on the ground floor of the museum, where it gets a significant amount of foot traffic.” He took a sip of his cocoa, feeling rather proud of himself. Perhaps he was better suited to the life of an outlaw than that of a prince. “Egyptians didn’t view their tombs as monuments of death—they saw them as places of transition between life and what lay beyond.”

Echo nodded slowly. “Meaning, a tomb would be the perfect place to access the in-between.”

He raised his cup in a toast. “Precisely.” He swirled the last bit of chocolate sludge around the bottom. “It’s the same principle behind travel over natural thresholds, like intertwined cherry blossom trees. The cycle of life and death gives them power. That was a rather impressive escape, by the way.”

She blushed, accepting his compliment with a shy smile. That was nice, too. She took a hurried sip of her hot chocolate. “How did you know?”

“Dorian told me,” he said.

Her smile wilted. “Of course.”

“You don’t like him very much,” he said. The sun was setting behind them, and the tall buildings lining the avenue cast a sea of angular shadows on the sidewalk.

“He hit Ivy.”

Caius stared into his cup. Powdery chunks of chocolate slid to the bottom. “I know. And that’s not like him. Dorian is like a brother to me. I know him. He’s not the sort of man who does things like that.”

“Are you defending him?” Any trace of shy sweetness was long gone.

“No.” He set his cup down and watched the last of the daytime staff depart. The only people inside now would be night guards. “No, I’m not. It’s just … this war takes its toll on people, even good men like Dorian.” Echo frowned, but Caius continued. “And he
is
good. But war makes monsters of us all, and the people who least deserve it pay the highest cost.”

Echo sighed, and her shoulders sagged, her anger seeming to dissipate with the motion. Modest progress, but still progress. Caius was struck by the overwhelming desire to know what was going on behind her eyes, to know what she was thinking. He rolled his head, letting his gaze wander from hers. There were more important matters at hand than his fledgling fascination with a thieving human girl.

“That is why this war needs to end,” he said. “There are
no victors in a conflict such as this. Just death and destruction.”

Echo looked at him for a beat, then nodded, shifting her gaze to some point beyond his shoulder. She bit her lower lip absently. “You know,” she said. “You talk a lot in generalities. I mean, I get that you’re a bigger-picture kind of guy, but you have to have some personal stake in this. It can’t just be for the greater good.” She turned back at him, pinning him to the steps with a look that was more astute than Caius was comfortable with. “Nobody’s that good. Nobody’s that selfless.”