The Girl at Midnight (8 page)

A small group of Avicen rounded the corner at the end of the corridor. Their glances slid between Rowan and Echo, taking in the palpable tension between them. Two of them bent their heads together, whispering. One hid a giggle behind her hand. Echo waited until they’d passed, turning left at the end of the hallway. When she was sure they were out of earshot, she said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Rowan lifted his shoulders in a helpless shrug. “I didn’t say anything because it doesn’t mean anything. All she cares about is impressing Altair. Besides, it’s just for training, and I know how much you hate her.”

“I don’t hate her.” Echo knew she didn’t sound convincing, but her dignity demanded the denial. Rowan looked at her, but it wasn’t just a look. It was a
look
. “Okay, fine, I totally hate her. But she likes you. Like … 
likes
you.”

“Yeah, but …” Rowan stepped into Echo’s space, crowding her against the wall. “I like
you
. Like … 
like
you.” With a small smile gracing his lips—which were entirely too perfect—he brushed Echo’s ponytail from her shoulder, leaning down to nuzzle her neck. It was more of a resting of lips against skin than a proper kiss, but it sent tingles shooting down Echo’s spine. He always knew just how to distract her. When they were kids, he’d tug on her ponytail or hide bugs in places he knew she’d look. This was much better. She brought her arms up to wrap around his shoulders, hugging him tight.

“Look, I’m sorry. I should have told you earlier,” Rowan said softly, voice muffled by the collar of Echo’s jacket. Her mouth felt curiously dry. Talking about feelings wasn’t a strong suit for either of them. He sighed, breath ghosting across Echo’s skin. “I just didn’t want you to worry about anything. You have enough on your plate as it is.”

“My life is virtually stress-free,” said Echo, fingers carding through the soft short feathers at the nape of his neck.

“Is that so?” Rowan asked with a soft chuckle. He stepped back, putting a few inches between them. Echo wanted to reach out and crush his body to hers, but she resisted the urge. “You spend your days gallivanting all over
the world stealing stuff,
and
I heard you had a run-in with a warlock.”

Echo puffed out a breath of air that sent the strands of hair that had fallen out of her ponytail fluttering about her forehead. “Jesus, news travels fast.”

“Too many Avicen, not enough gossip to sustain them.” Rowan smiled again, and it almost reached his eyes. “Deadly combination. But you know … I worry about you.”

It took entirely too much effort to meet his gaze. “Really?”

“Of course I do, dummy.” With his free hand, Rowan brushed an errant lock of hair behind her ear. Echo’s insides did all sorts of stupid things that she would deny under threat of torture. “Just be careful out there, okay?”

“Careful is my middle name.”

Rowan’s chuckle was nice and soft. Like how the feathers on his head felt when she ran her fingers through them. “I thought your middle name was danger,” he said.

“That was last week.”

“Of course.”

“Of course.”

Rowan slipped his hand from hers, though his fingers lingered a touch longer than they needed to. “I should go,” he said. Echo didn’t think she was imagining the note of wistfulness in his voice.

She had the unacceptable urge to ask him to stay. Instead she said, “Altair awaits.”

“Yup.” Rowan tucked his hands back in his pockets. “Wouldn’t do to get on his bad side right out of the gate.” He leaned down, closing the distance between them. His mouth was mere inches from Echo’s, but he waited for her to make
the first move. Ever the gentleman, no matter what Ivy said. Echo wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down to her. She could feel the curve of his smile against her lips as they kissed.

Kalverliefde
, Echo thought.
The euphoria you experience when you fall in love for the first time
.

For a word that contained only four letters, love felt like a monumental leap, so she kept the thought to herself. Her fingers slid into the fine feathers at the base of Rowan’s neck, causing him to grin against her mouth again. When he pulled away, Echo felt as though he were taking little bits of her heart with him. He dropped a tiny kiss on her nose and said, “I’ll see you later, okay?”

With that, he turned back the way they’d come, heading to the barracks on the other side of the Nest. Echo raised a hand to her mouth. She could still feel the phantom touch of his lips on her skin.

“If you’re quite done, Echo dear, I have a task for you.”

Echo spun around, blushing with a vengeance. The Ala was standing in her now open doorway, eyes alight with silent laughter.

Echo’s blush felt as if it were powered by lava, simmering just beneath her skin. “How long were you standing there? Were you watching? How much did you see?”

The Ala held her hands up. “I’m a thousand years old, Echo. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Now, come along so I can fill you in.”

Without waiting for a response, the Ala retreated into her chamber. With a last glance back at the corridor—Rowan was long gone—Echo followed her inside. The chamber was exactly as she had last seen it, except for the whoopie pies.
They’d been replaced with a bowlful of coconut macaroons. A vastly inferior cookie.

The Ala walked to a table in the center of the room and picked up the map from the music box. She offered it to Echo. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

There was a somber quality to the Ala’s voice that settled deep in Echo’s stomach. After a tense few seconds, Echo took the map, cradling the fragile paper in tentative hands. The Ala cleared her throat and settled onto the chaise that Echo had sprawled across earlier. A few crumbs of the whoopie pie she’d eaten littered the velvet, and the Ala brushed them off. It was as if she was stalling.

“Ala?” Echo sat down next to her and placed a hand on the Ala’s arm. “What’s going on?”

The Ala finally looked straight at Echo. “I want you to follow that map. If it leads to a clue about the firebird’s location, I want to find it before Altair—or anyone else—does, but I can’t exactly saunter into Japan myself. Kyoto is in Drakharin hands, but you’re human. Your presence will go unnoticed.” She cleared her throat and smoothed her skirts. “If you don’t want to go, I won’t force you. You are just a child after all.”

Echo knew the Ala meant well, but hearing those words strengthened her resolve. If Rowan could be sent off to war, the least Echo could do was go on a little scavenger hunt behind enemy lines. She glanced down at the map, eyes roving over the words written in neat block letters at the bottom.
Beware the price that you must pay
. Echo shook off the sense of dread that snaked around her. It would be a simple job, straightforward in and out. She’d be fine. With a nod, she said, “If you need me to steal something, I will steal the crap out of it. You know that.”

A smile graced the Ala’s face, though her expression remained serious. “This task will require the utmost discretion, even from our own people. No one must know about your involvement. Especially not Altair or any of his Warhawks. And when I say any of his Warhawks, I mean
any
.” The Ala pinned Echo with a hard look. “Not even the pretty ones.” Echo blushed furiously. “Whatever you find there, retrieve it, and then come straight back to me.”

As much as Echo hated keeping secrets from Rowan, she would do it. The Ala had given her so much—a home, a family—and asked so little in return. Echo could do this one thing for her. She placed her hand over the Ala’s. “I’ve got this, okay? I may not be feathery, but you’re the only real family I’ve ever known. If whatever this is, is important to you, to the Avicen, I’ll find it. I’d take on the Dragon Prince himself if I had to.”

With a small smile, the Ala patted Echo’s hand where it rested on her own. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” She let out a long sigh. “I know you must be exhausted, but do you think you’ll be able to depart as soon as possible?”

“For you? Anything.” Echo spared a thought for the nearly empty pouch of shadow dust in her jacket pocket. “I just need to swing by Perrin’s shop to pick up a few supplies.”

Echo leaned in to place a quick kiss on the Ala’s cheek, as black as the rest of her but absent of feathers. She was nearly at the door when the Ala spoke again.

“Oh, and Echo?”

Echo spun on her heel, walking backward. “Yeah?”

“Try not to be reckless this time.”

With a laugh, Echo pushed the door open with her hip. “I make no promises.”

Dorian’s scar itched. It did that when he was agitated, or angry, or experiencing anything one might call
emotion
. Or when rain was on the horizon, but he didn’t think that was entirely relevant to why it was itching now. He fought the urge to rub it as he watched three of the guards under his command assemble on the rocky shore outside the keep’s walls. Normally, the green and bronze of their armor—Caius’s colors—would be gleaming in the fading twilight, but Dorian had ordered them all to wear civilian clothes and make sure their scales were hidden. They needed subtlety, not a show.

He could have used the massive archway on the grounds of the keep to transport them all to the shores of the Kamo River in Kyoto, but he preferred the natural threshold between land and sea. Water had always called to Dorian as if beckoning him home, and the ocean sang a sweeter song than the cold iron of the keep’s main gateway.

He slipped a finger under the patch he wore to hide his scarred eye socket. When he touched the gnarled tissue where his eye used to be, the itch only worsened. No matter how long he lived with the loss, he didn’t think that he would ever get used to how it felt. The eye patch itself was largely symbolic. Every Drakharin and their dog knew he had lost his eye to the Avicen, and he only kept the wound hidden because it itched most ferociously when they stared. It was vanity, but there were far worse sins than that.

You are my prince, and I would follow you anywhere
.

Dorian could have laughed at his words, but being the punch line of one’s own joke was a hollow humor. He had long since perfected the art of saying precisely what he meant without saying anything at all. It was true, he would follow Caius anywhere, even into the fires of hell if only Caius so much as hinted that he desired the company.

The memory of their first meeting was as raw as an open wound. It was the day Dorian had lost his eye. He’d been a fresh recruit, plucked from the ranks of Drakharin orphans, eager to prove his mettle the way only the young and disposable could. Battle, he’d thought, would be a marvelous affair. He’d imagined that he would earn glory and honor, but all he’d gotten was a knife in the eye. Lying on a rocky shore, so like the one he stood on now, in the middle of a godforsaken, abandoned spit of land in Greenland, Dorian had found a place beyond pain. His entire being had been reduced to the throbbing absence where his eye had been. Strands of silver hair had clung to his forehead, tacky with his own blood. He could barely see anything past the veil of red obscuring his remaining eye. The river by which he lay had gone pink and frothy with the blood of the fallen. The water was cold and
it stung where it licked at his wounds, but he didn’t have the strength or the will to move.

The Avicen who had taken Dorian’s eye—a beast of a man with the piercing gaze of an eagle and white and brown feathers speckled scarlet with blood—had left him there to die, surrounded by bodies. Some were still writhing in agony, moaning out their last tortured prayers. They would die soon, as Dorian would. Cold and alone. Just as Dorian’s own parents had. He could barely remember what they looked like. His mother had silver hair, so like his own, but the memory of her was a phantom, fuzzy around the edges. He knew, in that moment, that he would see her soon enough.

And that was when Dorian saw him.

A solitary figure picking his way through the dead and dying, turning over bodies with his boot. Looking for feathers or scales. Deciding who to kill and who to save. He was a lonely spark of life in a killing field. Dorian had opened his mouth to plead for rescue or death. He hadn’t quite decided which. All he got for his trouble, though, was a mouthful of blood. He managed to croak out a single word.

“Help.”

The figure’s dark-haired head snapped around. When their eyes met, Dorian could have wept. Green eyes—rare among the Drakharin—shone through a layer of sweat and dirt that just barely covered a smattering of scales high on his cheekbones. The soldier made his way to where Dorian lay, gingerly stepping over broken bodies and shattered shields. It was strange to think that it would all be gone come morning. Mages, both Avicen and Drakharin, would sweep the battleground like maids after an unruly party. It was the one
thing both sides agreed on. They fought. They died. They left no trace for human eyes.

By the time the soldier reached him, Dorian was convinced he was already dead. No one could look that good after a long and brutal fight, but there the stranger knelt, breeches stained by the pool of blood that surrounded Dorian’s head like a halo. A gentle hand brushed Dorian’s bangs off his forehead. He tried to turn away, to hide the ruin of his face, but the stranger didn’t allow it.

“What’s your name?”

Dorian had been taken aback. Who asked for names at a time like this?

The thought must have shown on his face, because the stranger managed a weak smile and added, “I’m Caius.”

The more Caius spoke, the more Dorian’s awareness returned. He noticed the insignia on Caius’s armor and the green and bronze dragon pin that held his cloak around his shoulders. The mark of the Dragon Prince. Dorian had one foot through death’s door, and he was face to face with a prince. Through some wild magic, he was able to mumble his own name.

Caius gave a terse nod. “Can you stand?”

Dorian shook his head.

“Take my hand.”

Dorian took his hand.

Caius’s smile was weak, but it was the grandest thing Dorian had ever seen. “Do you trust me?”