by Anna Argent
“No, you’re not,” Stygian said. “You’re one of the Riven, just like us. You have as much right to be here as we do.”
“He’s right,” Eden said. “Every one of you has been alone at one time or another. We all have some kind of baggage. And most of you have had something nasty on your tail at one time or another. You know what it’s like to be left to deal with the problems and the voices all by yourself.”
Garrick sighed. “I don’t like it, but Eden does have a point. Still, this rat man might come back.”
Stygian added, “If he does, a bullet through the eye will take down the giant rats.”
Echo shook her head. “He will come back for me, but not tonight—not now that he knows I have backup.” At least she hoped that was true.
“How can you be so sure?” asked Garrick, exposing her worries.
She shoved her tone full of confidence. “Because he’s been chasing me a long time. He’s not one to take risks. Besides, I’ve lived too many years alone on the streets not to have good instincts. It’s the only way I’ve survived this long.”
Stygian gave her a strange look she couldn’t quite interpret. It wasn’t pity, but there was a hint of sadness in his indigo eyes. “No more, Echo. You’ll live here with us now.”
“Thanks for the offer, but I do better on my own.”
“The Vires are counting on it,” Argo said under his breath. “Easy, stupid prey.”
Echo let her anger roll through her, strengthening her spine. She took a step toward Argo, who pushed Eden behind him.
“If I was so easy to kill, then why am I not already dead? You have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of.”
Argo studied her for a second. “How many of those shots did you fire?”
“My gun was in my car,” she said.
“That sounds a lot like an excuse, little girl.”
Echo poked her finger against Argo’s massive chest. “I haven’t been a little girl for a very long time, old man.”
Stygian took Echo’s arm and urged her away from Argo. “No need for hostilities, people. We’re all on the same side. You know as well as I do that a gun isn’t the only weapon we have at our disposal. I think it’s clear that Echo’s weapon of choice is her voice.”
“What?” she asked, startled that they’d caught on so fast. Most people didn’t. “No, it’s not.”
“You just shouted down an entire room full of strong willed, magic-fueled, opinionated people all trying to get a word in. If that’s not a super power, I don’t know what is.”
“He’s right,” Garrick said, rubbing a hand through his inky hair. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
Echo waited for the comments about how she was a freak show to come flying at her, but none came.
With a heavy sigh of resignation, Garrick shook his head. “Echo is in. Make her feel welcome.” Then he turned and left.
“Where are you going?” asked Stygian.
“I was on the phone with Holt when I heard the shots. I need to call him back. He’s been watching Starry. Something is going down.”
Stygian’s expression went blank. Eerily so. “If he confronts her, he shouldn’t be alone. He’ll take too many risks.”
“I know. I’m heading out tonight to catch up with him.”
“You know she’s not the woman you remember, right? Not after that last kill she made. She absorbed too many bad shards to ever be the same again.”
Garrick’s jaw clenched. “I know all that. Don’t care. She’s one of ours, and if she has to be caged, I want to be the one to bring her in myself.”
“It’s dangerous. If she attacks you, you can’t fight back with lethal force or you’ll inherit all the nasty shards she’s gathered.”
Eden spoke up. “He’s aware. I warned him already, but he’s being typically stubborn.”
Garrick’s shoulders straightened with resolution. “I won’t just abandon her. I owe her. I’m going to do whatever it takes to bring her in and lock her up below until we can help her. I’d do the same for any of you.”
Echo had no idea who Starry was or what had happened to her, but Garrick seemed dead set on his course of action. Before anyone else could argue with him, he disappeared down the hall.
Argo turned to Eden, his tone gruff. “You have homework.”
She rolled her eyes. “None of it matters. It’s not like I’m going to be working some desk job in a cubicle farm somewhere. I’ll be a hunter, just like you.”
“Not like me,” Argo said. “Now go. It’s getting late and I’m waking you up early to train in the morning.”
Eden sighed in exasperation and rolled her eyes, but headed off in the same direction Garrick had gone. Argo was right on her heels.
“Who is Starry?” Echo asked.
He hesitated for a moment, as if he might not answer. Then he said, “She’s been part of the Riven for years, our leader before Garrick. She was our anchor—the glue that held us together. Most of us owe her our lives.” He paused again, measuring his words. “She didn’t keep a firm check on the balance of good and evil she carried around. She killed one too many bad guys, absorbed their dark sides and turned on us. She’s one of them now.”
“One of the Vires?”
Stygian nodded as he headed for the kitchen, turning before she could read his expression. Fear? Worry? Regret? She couldn’t be sure.
He said, “Garrick feels responsible for her fall and hasn’t stopped looking for a way to help her since she left.”
“Can he save her?”
“He says he knows better than to believe that, but I think he’s lying to himself. The man has never given up on anything in his entire life. He’s not about to give up on a woman who was like family. Even if it means risking his life to save someone who can’t be saved.”
“What if she can be saved?”
“You don’t have enough dark shards to understand the pull they have on you. They’re like a drug you can’t resist. They offer power, stamina, intelligence. They give you the ability to do things you’ve never been able to do before. It feels good to give into their demands and let them use you. If the balance of power shifts too far, then there aren’t enough of the good guys to draw on for the strength to resist temptation. Once the light shards are outnumbered or exhausted, it’s hard to remember why you shouldn’t just give in and let go.”
“How do you know this?” she asked.
“Because I’ve been close to the tipping point before. Hazel has this way of staying quiet and biding her time. She makes me think that I’m safe because she’s not making demands. It’s almost like she’s asleep. But once in a while, I feel her stir and I know I’m far from safe. That’s why I check in with Eden often. She keeps me honest with myself, and for that, Hazel despises her.”
Pieces of a puzzle shifted in Echo’s head, clicking into place. “That’s why Argo is so protective of Eden, isn’t it? He’s afraid that someone like you is going to snap and come after her.”
Stygian nodded. “Without Eden, we’d have no way to know what the balance of power was inside of us. We could guess, but that’s a dangerous game to play with dark souls skilled in deception.”
Eden couldn’t have been out of high school yet. To be that young and have such a big target on her back couldn’t be easy.
Thank goodness she had Argo to look out for her.
Maybe Echo shouldn’t have been so quick to poke her finger at him.
“This is all too much,” she admitted. “All I planned to do was drop off a piece of paper and be on my way. Now I’m being drawn into some secret club I never knew existed. That’s a lot to deal with for one night.”
“Sorry,” Stygian said with a lopsided grin. “Plans change. You’re here now. You might as well see what Harold has to say about your future.”
“I should make him that coffee.”
“I’ll help.”
Her hands were trembling too much to carry the sugary coffee, so Stygian did
the job for her. He led the way to the library, which was smaller than she had expected.
It was about the size of a large living room with book shelves lining every wall from floor to ceiling. Four ladders were mounted to tracks, one along each wall. The only space that wasn’t filled with books was a single window on the outside wall under which sat a pair of worn recliners.
The room smelled like dust and old leather. Beneath that was something clean and citrusy, like lemon furniture polish. There was less light than she would have expected for a library, maybe to protect all those books from fading.
A desk sat in the middle of the room. It was stacked high with papers, aged, leather tubes, rolled up scrolls, and even more books. Here, most of the tomes were old and worn, without titles on their spines. There were dark handling marks where the leather binding had absorbed the oil of who knew how many hands. As she approached, she saw that the trio of books currently laid out open on the desk were all handwritten on paper yellowed with age.
Stygian sat the tray down on a corner of the desk. “We brought coffee.”
Harold mumbled something unintelligible and kept reading. He used a lighted magnifying glass to read the page Echo had brought, and then moved to a notebook where he furiously scribbled something.
Stygian poured a cup from the insulated pot and waved it under the librarian’s nose.
Harold startled, staring at the cup like it was some kind of alien larvae. “What’s this?”
Stygian’s tone was patient and kind, as if speaking to a slow child. “Coffee. Like you asked for.”
“Oh, right.” Harold set his pen down and took the cup in his gnarled hands. As the warmth sank into his old bones, he gave a sigh of pleasure.
“Any luck?” Echo asked.
“Luck is for people with no skill.”
“Okay, then. Any skill?”
He sipped the brew and stared at her over the rim of the cup. “Much. It’s a good thing you didn’t try to sneak away the way Stygian thought you might. He would have had to waste precious time hunting you down.”
Her cheeks burned with guilt, but Harold didn’t seem to notice in the dim light.
“Why?” she asked, averting her gaze away from Stygian.
“Because the bearer of prophecy alone can light the way,” Harold said, like it actually meant something.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Stygian asked.
“Well, I’m not exactly sure, but it will all become clear with a little more time and study.” Harold looked at Echo. “Do you have any power over light? It’s usually best to start with a literal translation and then expand from there.”
“Uh, not really. As far as I know, I just have this voice thing.”
“What voice thing?”
“Sometimes, if I try really hard, I can use my voice to make people do things.”
“You have the power of compulsion?” Harold shared a dark look with Stygian.
“No,” Stygian said. “Not like Thane Morel. More like a short burst of power that gets people’s attention.”
“Give me an example,” Harold said.
Echo thought about how to explain it in the least creepy way. “Okay. This one time, when I was gassing up my car, this guy came up to me and started hassling me. He wanted money, which I didn’t have. Then he got pissed and started digging in my car like I was hiding something from him.”
“What did you do?”
“I screamed for him to stop. When he did, I felt what had happened—that something had come out of me to make him do that. But he was still there and I was still scared, so I told him to run. He did. I passed him a few blocks later and he was bent over, trying to catch his breath.”
“Only short commands?” Harold asked.
“I guess.”
“Anything more complicated?”
“I don’t know. Never tried.”
Stygian moved until his big body was standing in front of her. “Try it now on me.”
“I don’t think I—”
“He’s right,” Harold said. “Try to make him do something. We need to know the extent of your powers.”
Echo narrowed her eyes at him and said, “Put your fingers in your ears and jump up and down.”
Stygian only grinned. “That’s what you’d order me to do if you could?”
“What? Should I have asked you to rub my feet or cook me a steak dinner?”
His gaze intensified and held hers in a tight grip. “I was thinking something a little more fun and possibly a lot more naked, but we can discuss it later.”
Harold cleared his throat. “Can we focus on what’s important, or does everything have to be about genitals with you young people?”
Echo blushed and Stygian laughed.
“What else can you do, Echo?” Harold asked.
She wasn’t used to talking about this with anyone. She remembered Melody and Mom talking about it, but she wasn’t supposed to have ever had these powers. Talking about them made her feel like an imposter. A poser.
“Is this really important?”
“Vitally so.”
She let out a breath to release her frustration. “Sometimes I can hear stuff.”
“Hear?” Harold asked as if he’d misunderstood.
“Yeah. Stuff—objects—they hum sometimes, like they’re singing to me.”
“What happens when you sing back?”
“Sing back? Isn’t that a little nuts?” she asked.
“No more so than hearing an inanimate object sing to you.”
She pushed out an exasperated sigh. “Look, I don’t sing. Stuff sings to me. The last time I sang was with my basset hound puppy when we found an empty metal trash can. We stuck our heads in and wailed until the echo drove my sister crazy. That’s where the nickname Echo comes from.”
“What’s your real name?” Stygian asked.
She raised a brow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Harold adjusted his reading glasses. “Perhaps there’s something else here…”
She moved to the nearest shelf and looked at the books. Some weren’t even written in English or any other language she recognized. The alphabets were strange, like runes. All of the books were old and worn. So much history and knowledge here.
She ran her finger along the spines just to see what all those years felt like bound in leather.
A low hum tickled her ears, just like at the thrift shop in Arkansas.
Harold’s voice crackled with age. “I’ve barely begun to unravel the whole script, but what I have translated leads me to believe that you’re both crucial to what comes next.”
“And what is that?” Stygian asked before Echo could.
Echo moved along the shelves, drawn by a song in her head. There was something important here, but she didn’t know what or where it was.
Harold answered. “The Witch of the Pageant is rising. She can’t be destroyed. Our only choice is to cage her or set her free.”
“I still don’t get it,” Stygian said.
“It is the hunter and the bearer of prophecy who must find her cage.”
The hum in Echo’s head grew louder as she neared the back wall of the library. There was an urgency in the noise, compelling her.
“How do we do that?” Stygian asked.
“The prophecy doesn’t say.”
“Does it say what we’re looking for? Or is the cage a literal cage with bars and a lock? We have plenty of those downstairs.”
“Oh, it’s never that simple. The cage could be anything. It could be a person or a place or an object.” His voice brightened with excitement. “It could even be a book. Wouldn’t that be grand? Having shards inside a book?”
“Does it say anything else?” Stygian asked. “Anything helpful?”
“It does mention that Echo is the key.”
“To the cage or the key to finding the cage?”
She couldn’t think about any of that right now. Let them sort out the details. She had to figu
re out what the humming was all about.
“Echo?” Stygian said. “What are you doing?”
“There’s something here. Something important.”
“Everything here is important,” the librarian said, sounding offended.
“No. Not like this.” She bent down, searching for the source of the song.
Her hand grazed a thick, brown tome on the bottom shelf, and the voices in her head practically deafened her with their song. Here!
She pulled the book out, half expecting it to sprout teeth and go for her throat. Instead, it was merely heavy and dusty, like all of the other big books in here.
The instant it was in her hands, she knew that it wasn’t her target. But something behind it was.
She knelt on the floor and bent down to see what was there.
Crumpled and compressed along the back of the shelf was a piece of paper. She moved enough books to pull it out without tearing it, and as soon as it was in her hands, the whispers fell silent.
Just like the yellowed page of prophecy she’d found in a random thrift shop, she knew instantly that this paper was special.
“How did that get there?” asked Harold.
“It looks like it fell out of an old book and got shoved back there,” she said.
“What is it?” Stygian asked.
“I don’t know.” She gently opened the wrinkled page, and on it was a crude map.
Something tickled her memory. She knew she’d never seen this map before, but there was something oddly familiar about it.
“Bring it here, under the light.”
She did as Harold asked and laid it flat on the spot he’d cleared on his desk. As her hands smoothed over the paper to flatten it, she realized what it was about the map she recognized.
Her fingers began to tremble with emotion.
“This is my mother’s handwriting.”
She followed the lines drawn there with her finger. As she did, a memory came to her from a time when she was around ten years old. She remembered her mom behind the wheel where they’d parked for the night. It was Echo’s turn to sleep in the front seat, and Hedy and Melody were already asleep in the back.
