by Melissa Grey
He locked gazes with her, and for the barest sliver of a second, it was as though Rose was looking at him through Echo’s soft brown eyes. Damn the fire. He approached the circle, and Echo tried to warn him off, her voice rough with desperation.
“Please, Caius, I can’t stop it. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You won’t.” He stepped forward, free of doubt, and the moment his foot crossed the barrier that divided them, the flames extinguished. He was unburned. “See? You’re not a monster. You care about people. Deeply. That means you would do anything in your power to keep the people you care about safe.”
He sat next to her, their knees just barely touching, and held out his right arm. After a moment’s hesitation, she shuffled closer, pressing herself against him and tucking her head beneath his chin. There were no tears, no racking sobs. Only the slight hitch in her breathing and the tense set of her shoulders indicated her unease.
“I’m so sorry,” he said into her hair. “You shouldn’t have to carry this weight alone. I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry it with you.” Echo shuddered in his arms with another repressed sob. “I’m here,” he whispered, praying his voice could pull her from her torment. “I’m here.”
A hundred lost years sat on his lips, but he let them lie there, unspoken. A century ago, he had failed Rose. He would not do the same with Echo.
With a sudden jerk, she stiffened in his arms. Her head shot up, almost colliding with his chin. “Rowan,” she said. “Where’s Rowan?”
Caius placed a hand on the nape of her neck as though trying to calm a frightened horse. “He has to fight his own demons, just as we did.” Echo’s expression darkened, remembering whatever it was she’d seen. With a confidence Caius wasn’t quite sure he believed, he added, “He’ll come through. I don’t know him well, but I know that boy is as stubborn as an ox.”
Echo sighed, her whole body shuddering. “I hope he’s okay. He never should have come. It’s too dangerous.” She rubbed her nose against her sleeve. “How the hell am I supposed to be what everyone wants—no, needs me to be if I can’t even protect the people I love?”
Caius hugged her tight. “You can and you will.” He gestured at the ring of soot, where the fire had been. “You protected me just now.”
Echo sat up and turned to face him fully, her head canted to the side as if measuring him. He realized, then, what he’d just said. She had referred to the people she loved, and he had counted himself among their number. He could have tried to cover his carelessly chosen words, but he didn’t. A part of him—an undeniably large part—wanted them to be true.
Silently, Echo reached out and traced the planes of his face. Her fingers slowed as she caressed the smattering of scales on his cheekbones. Her hand wandered over his brow, his cheeks, the line of his jaw. It was a quiet touch, as light as a feather. She touched him like he was something precious, as if he were made of all the stars she never got to see through the haze of polluted urban skies. Caius’s eyes drooped closed, and he leaned into her hand. It was delicate, but there was strength there. She was small, but she was steel.
“Caius?” Her voice was as soft as her caress.
He hummed in response. When she didn’t continue, he cracked his eyes open. She was studying him, expression guarded.
“Do you love me?”
He blinked. Since the moment he’d met her, his emotions had been a jumbled mess, scattered about him like a child’s toys, but he couldn’t deny what was in his heart. He couldn’t deny the way his pulse raced at her touch, or the way his breath caught in his throat when she said his name, especially when she said it so softly, so sweetly. The loss of Rose had been hard, and he had resigned himself to a lifetime of emptiness in the wake of it, but Echo had slotted herself into the vacant hole in his chest and nested there, filling Caius with hope for a future that was far less bleak than the one he’d imagined.
His answer was simple and honest: “Yes.”
Echo sucked in a deep breath and held it, white and black flames materializing in the air, summoned by whatever she was feeling.
“I haven’t loved many people in my life,” she said. Her expression was still closed, still guarded, but her eyes were raw and open.
“Neither have I.”
“It’s not an easy thing for me to say.”
Caius reached for her, touching her face the way she’d touched his. Softly, gently, with fingers unsure of their welcome. “You don’t have to say anything.”
Echo nodded, and he cupped her cheek in his hand and wrapped his other arm around her waist. He wanted to draw her in, to press his lips against hers until she forgot her own name, but he didn’t. He waited until she came to him. She leaned in and brushed her nose against his. Still, he didn’t close the distance between their mouths. They shared air for several agonizing seconds, her proximity tightening the coil of heat at the base of his spine. The plea hovered on his lips until he couldn’t take it anymore.
“Please,” he breathed.
The kiss was as sweet as honey. Her lips were chapped yet soft, and they moved against his with excruciating slowness. His eyes were closed, and he could feel the fire around them growing as its warmth spread.
Caius had meant what he said. Echo didn’t need to tell him anything. He already knew.
CHAPTER FORTY
As if on cue, a figure fell through the opening from which Echo had emerged, landing on the ground with a sputtering cough and the sound of dry heaving, a sensation she knew all too well. The dim light glinted off the feathers on Rowan’s head, making them glow as bright as gold. He held one hand over his stomach, and the other cradled his temple, as if the seams of his skull were threatening to split. He was mumbling something under his breath over and over like a mantra.
Echo pushed Caius’s hands away and stood. The chill of the cave seeped into her skin. She hadn’t realized how warm he was. She shivered once and forced herself to walk away from him and toward Rowan. When she reached the Avicen, she fell to her knees in the dirt beside him, her own hands settling on his arms. He rocked back and forth, his jeans stained with dirt, his mumbling reaching a fever pitch. Caius had brought her back to herself, and she would do the same for Rowan. She didn’t let herself think about what Caius had just confessed. She had known, in some deep part of her, what he felt for her. But now was not the time to dwell on such things. At least, that was what she preferred to believe. It was a more comforting thought than admitting to herself that the depth of Caius’s emotion frightened her, just a little. She was too much of a coward to confront it. Besides, Rowan needed her more at this moment.
“It’s not real,” Rowan whispered hoarsely. “It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.”
Echo took his hands and pulled them away from where he was beginning to claw at himself. She clutched them tightly and rested her forehead against his. “That’s right,” she said, rocking with him. “It’s not real. This is real. I’m real.”
Rowan twitched, then reared back, his eyes wide and afraid. “Echo?” he asked. He sounded so young, so scared.
She held on to his hands, refusing to let him pull away from her completely. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s me.” She brought one of his hands to her face and rested her cheek in his palm. “Same old me.”
He cupped her face as if she were made of glass, fingers tracing her cheekbones with reverence. “You’re alive.” It felt more like a question than a statement.
Oh. Oh. That had been his nightmare. Her death. She knew how creative the mountain’s magic could be with the visions it conjured. It had probably been gruesome. It must have been, to put that look on his face.
“I’m alive,” she said. Twigs cracked and pebbles scattered as Caius stepped away from where Echo and Rowan huddled and walked off a short distance. Perhaps he was giving them a moment alone. Perhaps he simply couldn’t bear to see them like this, wrapped around each other like the rest of the world didn’t matter. As if he didn’t matter. Espec
ially not after what had just happened between him and Echo.
With great reluctance, Echo relinquished her hold on Rowan. He let her go with minimal resistance. She stood, brushing dirt off the knees of her jeans. Rowan gathered himself and stood as well. Their eyes met, then skittered away from each other. She thought of him kissing her back in Avalon, of the way his arms felt around her, of the tickle of his feathers against her face. From the rising color in his cheeks, he was thinking of those things too. She turned and walked toward Caius, who was staring up at the statue, his posture rigid and still as stone. She wanted to apologize for shoving him aside for Rowan, but she had a feeling that would only make things worse.
She looked at the statue so she wouldn’t have to look at him when she asked, “What did you see?”
He was silent for a moment, then said, “I don’t wish to talk about it.”
He moved away from her, rounding the statue’s base as if he couldn’t bear to be near her. It had not escaped Echo’s notice that he hadn’t been able to look at her either.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Caius felt Echo’s eyes on him as he circled the basin, but she didn’t push him to speak. She let him go, her objections, if she had any, kept to herself. He’d told her he loved her. That seemed more impossible than a magical fear cave hidden inside a long-forgotten mountain. He was stupid. Beyond stupid. It was a moment of weakness, he told himself, spurred on by the trauma of what he’d just witnessed. But not even he could believe that.
What he’d seen in that cave…a sea of flames, as endless as the universe itself, burning every inch of his flesh, the sound of Rose’s screams piercing his ears. It was a nightmare he knew well, and that had been his only saving grace. He had pulled himself from that particular agony before, in his dreams. But he had saved himself from reliving the loss of one love only to anticipate the loss of someone else who had carved a place for herself in his heart, an organ that wasn’t quite as dead as he had believed it to be.
In the months after the events of the Black Forest, cooped up in an enclosed space with Echo, Caius had let himself become acquainted with a notion he thought he’d left behind: optimism. About himself. About Echo. About their future. Not necessarily one that they shared but that of their respective peoples. And maybe, if he allowed himself a moment of brutal honesty, he wanted to consider a future for himself that involved her. But theirs had been a self-made bubble, bound to burst at some point.
Echo had Rowan now. Rowan was a good soul, of that Caius was certain, as much as he was loath to admit it. And the boy wasn’t burdened with a century of heartache. Bearing that weight had made Caius brittle, as though his heart had gone stale in his chest from years of abuse and neglect. Echo deserved better. Gods knew she had enough ghosts of her own without adding Caius’s to the mix.
He had to focus on the task at hand. Matters of the heart could wait. He inched closer to the statue, squinting up at the beast’s downturned head. Bored into the inner corners of its eyes were two small holes from which the water flowed, moistening the dirt in the fountain’s basin with the creature’s tears. Even the whispering of the mountain’s ghosts grew mournful in the statue’s presence, as if they, too, had suffered a great loss. There was a sanctity about the space, as though they had wandered into the remnants of a temple.
“Caius, look.” Echo pointed toward the rim of the basin. She had shucked off the moment they had shared before Rowan showed up with an ease that discomfited him. Nevertheless, he kept his mouth shut and looked at what she was pointing to. Curved around the basin’s circumference were runic symbols in the same ancient language as the book in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum. It was the written form of the language the ghosts had cried out in when Echo had touched the painting made of blood. She knelt down, holding the torch aloft. “What does it mean?”
Caius joined her in the dirt, his knees resting on the fountain’s base. He brushed away the delicate red leaves that spilled over the side of the basin. With reverent fingers, he traced the lines of the first phrase. “Enu sutagan,” he read. “ ‘It destroys.’ ” He moved on to the next phrase. “Enu kamalan. ‘It saves.’ Or, ‘it protects.’ Like I said, my grasp of the language is a little rusty. The verb conjugation is similar to Drakhar, but the vocabulary is something else. Older than Avicet. A distant relation, I think.”
“What’s the ‘it’?” Echo asked. Her eyes drifted up to the stone beast, carved countless centuries ago and left there, weeping into its basin of soil. “Is it another reference to the firebird, or…?”
Caius had only ever seen one being who possessed both feathers and scales, who was neither solely Avicen nor Drakharin but both: the Oracle, an ancient Seer who had survived wars and disasters and the passage of time, only to be struck down by Tanith’s fire. His hands itched to grab his sister by the shoulders and give her a good shake. The Oracle had been their one source of information about a past so distant, most of its writings had been lost, and Tanith had brought her long life to an end in a fit of rage.
“I don’t know,” Caius said. How hateful were those three little words. “It could be a reference to the prophecy, but it’s more than a little vague.”
Echo sighed. “I am so done with prophecies.”
Caius couldn’t agree more.
“What are these?” Rowan plucked a leaf from the scarlet weeds growing in the basin. He rubbed the thin leaf between his fingers, pulverizing it into a cherry-red paste that stained his skin. After a few seconds, he dropped the remnants of the leaf as if scalded and frantically wiped his hand on his jeans. “Holy shit, it burns. Ouch. Shit. Ouch.” He sniffed the red paste that lingered on his skin. “And it smells like Satan’s toilet seat.”
Caius leaned closer to the weeds, careful not to touch them. Whole, they were odorless. The delicate stems swayed with his breath.
“How do they grow down here without any sun?” Echo wondered aloud. “How can anything grow in this darkness?”
“I’ve seen this before,” Caius said. “It’s called bloodweed.” From his back pocket, he retrieved a handkerchief requisitioned from Jasper’s supply at the warehouse. A voice in his head that sounded remarkably like Echo reminded him that “requisitioning” was just a fancy word for stealing. With the cloth protecting his skin, he pulled up one of the weeds, roots and all, and folded the handkerchief around it. “I’ve never seen living specimens, though, only illustrations in old texts I came across while researching the firebird.” His gaze strayed from the weed to Echo. Her cheeks flushed pink, and his chest tightened at the sight. She blushed easily, like Rose. Echo cocked her head to the side, no doubt wondering why he was staring at her so intently. He cleared his throat. Focus, you lovestruck fool. “I had assumed they were extinct as I’ve never come across them in the wild, at least nowhere with light. But perhaps they require darkness to thrive.”
“I didn’t know botany was one of your specialties,” Echo said, trailing a finger along the lip of the basin. She walked around the fountain, each step bringing her closer to Caius. There was something beguiling about the way she looked in the dim light. Her hair—an otherwise nondescript brown—shone with chocolate shadows and caramel highlights. Her skin, pale from being cooped up in a warehouse, away from the sun’s rays, glowed in the torchlight. The proximity of her was almost suffocating. Paired with the weight of the mountain bearing down on them, it made Caius feel suddenly claustrophobic.
He shrugged. Focus. “It’s not. But there was a drawing in one of my old texts that bore a striking similarity to these plants. I dismissed them as insignificant at the time. Those old books are full of herbal remedies for common ailments, most of them stemming from old wives’ tales. Colicky babies, rheumatic joints, irritable bowels.”
Echo scrunched up her nose. “Gross.”
“Indeed.”
She drew up beside him and examined the weed he held in the handkerchief. Her presence buzzed along the side of his arm as if her body heat were a palpa
ble force.
“Let’s take a bunch,” Echo said. She fished her gloves from the depths of her backpack and put them on. Caius held the handkerchief while she plucked more weeds and deposited them into his open hands. When they had filled the handkerchief to capacity, she tore sheets of paper from a notebook and wrapped up even more weeds in makeshift envelopes.
Rowan watched them, confused. “What are you doing?”
“It’s a mysterious plant that grows in the dark.” Echo packed her leafy plunder into her bag. “Maybe it can help fight the dark too.”
Caius wished he had her faith. But, he thought, perhaps that was what set her apart. If she was part of a greater prophecy, destined to bring about an end to all that plagued them, then her faith, her ability to believe in a solution even in their darkest hours, was what made her a worthy vessel for a force such as the firebird. The statue loomed above them, watching with its tearful gaze.
“Why leave this here?” Caius asked.
Echo paused in her packing. “To remember?”
Her words reminded him of a conversation they’d had a lifetime ago, in the shadow of a headless sculpture, before Echo’s hands had become stained with blood. It was the first time he’d let himself notice her—her strength, her beauty. He shook his head, both to clear the memory and to convey his objection. “I don’t think so. Why would someone build a memorial here? Deep in the belly of a mountain where no one could see it?”
“Hope,” Rowan said softly. The orange glow of the torch warmed his tawny feathers, granting him an unearthly halo. “Enu busana. It has returned. Someone left it here for you.”
“But why?” said Echo. No one had an answer for her, not even the ghosts who continued their infernal whispering, their voices prickling the skin on the back of Caius’s neck like a cold wind. “And why make us go through that nightmarish cave to get here?”
“We had to earn it,” Caius said. He wandered the circumference of the cavern as Rowan and Echo filled her backpack with more of the bloodweed, looking for an exit. The cave seemed like a one-way trip. Caius trailed a hand over the silver ore threaded through the walls, brushing aside the network of dry vines that hung over it, when all of a sudden, his hand slipped through an opening in the wall, masked by those very same vines. It was a hole in the rock, the mouth of it showing nothing but darkness. The void seemed to have a gravitational pull of its own. It tugged at something deep in Caius’s gut, a magnetism calling to him, beckoning that he give himself to its black depths.
