by Melissa Grey
“Echo,” he called, resisting the pull and stepping away. “I found something.”
Caius and Echo pulled loose the vines covering the hole while Rowan held the torches aloft. It was narrow, about half the width of a normal door, and short, coming up to Caius’s collarbone.
“That’s going to be a tight fit,” he noted.
Echo was already stripping off her backpack and jacket.
“No,” Caius said.
“Yes,” Echo replied.
“No,” he repeated, with more force to the word this time, as if that would make any difference. Echo’s obstinance was both her greatest asset and the bane of his existence. A different tactic, perhaps. “Please,” he said softly.
She paused, one sleeve of her jacket still on, the other trailing on the dirt floor.
“I’ll go first,” Caius said. “Then you and Rowan will follow. If there’s something in there, I’d like to encounter it first.”
“He’s right,” Rowan said. “If there’s a monster in there, let it eat him first.”
Not quite the solidarity Caius would have preferred, but it would do. Echo, for all her bravado, didn’t protest further. She must have witnessed something truly terrible during her test to give in so easily. Beside her, Rowan watched Caius squeeze through the narrow gap with disinterested eyes. If a monster did await on the other side, Caius knew of at least one person who wouldn’t mourn his passing. He took that cheerful thought with him into the dark, and in an instant, he was gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
I’ll come back for you, Helios had promised.
The confidence in his voice was the confidence of boys. Ivy had heard it in Rowan’s voice every time he did something stupid, which was often. He’d used that tone when he swore they wouldn’t get lost in the abandoned tunnels beneath Grand Central the first time they’d snuck out of the Nest to visit Echo in the library. They had. He’d used it when he swore that starting a relationship with Echo—which Ivy had learned about when she found them kissing in the street like savages—wouldn’t put a strain on their friendship. It had. And now here was Helios, another fresh-faced boy, making assurances that Ivy wasn’t convinced he could keep.
Promises were such delicate things, easily broken, but sometimes a flimsy promise was better than none.
Sleep eluded her. Every time Ivy closed her eyes she saw all the ways in which their plan could go awry. They would both be imprisoned, certainly, and not in a luxurious guest room with a big, squishy bed. She wondered if Tanith would make her watch Helios’s interrogation—his torture—the same way she’d forced Ivy to witness Perrin’s suffering. If Tanith was to be believed, Ivy had some strategic value to the Drakharin, but she wasn’t sure that value was enough to counterbalance Tanith’s inevitable rage.
Hours passed and dawn broke, bathing her room in butter-yellow light. Ivy wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and watched as sunbeams skittered across the surface of the sea, breaking into shimmering fractals on the waves. The sight was beautiful but fragile. Ivy huddled deeper into the blanket and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
She tried to busy herself, but there were few options available to her in her finely furnished cell. She sat, and when she grew tired of that she paced. And when she grew tired of that, she sat down again, and watched night slowly fall.
“Ready to run?”
At the sound of Helios’s hushed whisper, Ivy spun around. He stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob and a dark blue cloak in the other.
He’d kept his promise. He’d come back for her. Her escape was at hand.
“Here,” he said, offering her the cloak. “It’s cold outside.”
Ivy wrapped the cloak around her shoulders. It was soft and woolen and smelled faintly of woodsmoke. She wondered if it was his.
“Is it safe?” she asked as if that weren’t a ridiculous question. Of course it wasn’t safe, but the primitive part of her brain that feared violence and bodily harm needed some kind of reassurance.
“As safe as it’s going to be,” Helios replied. “Tanith left with a small retinue of Firedrakes about an hour ago. I don’t know how long she’ll be gone, but most of the guards are having dinner in the mess hall. Shift change is happening, so our window is small, but it’s there.” He pulled a flask from his back pocket and took a liberal swig. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and offered the flask to her.
Ivy politely declined, but he quirked an eyebrow as if to ask again, and she relented. She didn’t know what was in the flask, but it burned all the way down, scorching her esophagus with its potency. It was vile. Helios looked a tiny bit proud. She handed the flask back and steeled herself for whatever was to come.
“Let’s roll,” she said.
—
The keep was a testament to the Drakharin’s fascination with their creation myth. One corridor had a mural that spanned its entire length—the mural must have been fifty feet across—and showed the evolution of their kind, from primitive, fire-breathing dragons to tall, elegant figures, with smatterings of scales their only connection to their past.
“Wait!” Ivy tugged on Helios’s hand, pulling him into an alcove inhabited by a tall statue of a winged dragon. She didn’t remember which of them had reached out first, but his hand was warm in hers as he led her through the keep’s empty corridors. She suspected that he needed the comfort as badly as she did. So far, they hadn’t had any encounters—she had finally told him about the tunnel—and as much as she wanted to keep it that way, she knew there was more work to be done before she could flee.
He gaped at her as if she had lost her mind. Maybe she had. They were in a carpeted hallway with reams of heavy velvet covering the cold stone walls, which seemed to swallow the sound of Ivy’s whisper. Another small comfort in the nest of vipers they would soon escape. Hopefully.
“Are you mad?” Helios hissed. “Or just suicidal? Because I do not plan on dying tonight, and you are complicating that plan. Tanith could be back at any moment, and I am getting you out of here whether you like it or not.”
“No,” Ivy hissed. “I came here with a mission, and I am going to see it through whether you like it or not.” She squared her shoulders and tried to make herself seem as imposing as possible, which was probably not very imposing at all.
“I do not like it,” Helios argued. He peeked out of the alcove as if he’d heard something, but after a few seconds of silence, he turned his attention back to Ivy. “I truly do not like it.” The corners of his mouth quirked up. “Not that that matters. What’s the plan?”
“There’s a book I have to find. One of Caius’s.” At Helios’s confused expression, Ivy added, “A very important book that might contain information to help us fight the giant, scary monster that destroyed the Nest.”
Helios nodded slowly, as if he were dealing with a lunatic. “Tanith has been using the Dragon Prince’s study.” After a beat, he clarified, “The old Dragon Prince. All his books are there.”
“Take me.” Ivy injected every ounce of confidence she could muster into her voice, but the consequences of failure loomed in her mind. At best, she would find information that would prove useful, something she could take back to Avalon and use to help people. At worst, she and Helios would be captured and killed. It was a dangerous choice, to stay when she should go, but some choices weren’t really choices at all. She’d made hers before she even embarked on this adventure. The point of no return was miles behind her.
A series of emotions flickered across Helios’s face: Deeper incredulity. Stubborn resistance. Then, finally, grudging respect. “Fine,” he said, taking her hand. The contact made Ivy feel a little bit braver. “But if we die, my ghost is going to make your ghost miserable in the afterlife.”
—
Ivy waded through stacks of books. Some were piled in teetering towers on the floor; others were scattered across leather seats and mahogany side tables, their spines cracked open to reveal where pa
ges had been ripped out. The massive desk at the room’s center was littered with papers, both faded with age and marked up with fresh ink. Ivy rifled through the mess, hunting for books that might contain a neat, foolproof plan to defeat a monster composed of shadows and suffering. Not that she had the foggiest idea what such a tome would look like.
“We don’t have much time,” Helios whispered. He had one foot in the study and the other in the hall as he kept watch. “You have to hurry.”
“I know, I know,” Ivy said, sifting through the clutter for something—anything—useful enough to justify her presence in the keep. Regret surged through her. This had been a terrible idea. Shame on the person who’d thought of it.
Almost as soon as her hope began to flag, she found it: a book about the firebird. Its battered red leather cover bore a gold-embossed bird, its wings spread to show feathers tapering into flames. The book had been left open to a page furiously marked up with ink as red as blood. The page’s illustration, however, was not of a firebird. Or any bird. The figure looked like a dragon made of smoke and shadow. Just like Echo’s description of the kuçedra that had torn apart the Nest as if its walls were made of paper. Ivy flipped through the pages. There were smaller, more rudimentary illustrations of what looked like battles and piles of corpses, all of which featured the beast hovering like a malevolent god. She turned a page and sucked in her breath when her mind made sense of the crude drawings; there were figures lying prone, as if dead, their limbs marked with blackened veins. Like the Ala. Like all the others wounded by the kuçedra. On the next page, another crude figure bent over one of the prone forms, a cluster of red plants clutched in its hand. On the page after that, the previously stricken figures were rising from their deathbeds, bodies clear of the black veins. Ivy scanned the page, hope bubbling desperately to the surface. There was a cure. They might not yet know how to fight the kuçedra, but they could fight the disease it caused. Tiny problem: the text was entirely in Drakhar.
“Helios, come here,” she whispered. He did. She held up the book, pointing to the passage beneath the illustration with the red plants. They needed to move on, but her curiosity got the better of her. “What does this say?”
Helios shook his head, squinting at the page as if trying to summon its secrets. “No idea. This type of written Drakhar is old. Much older than me. The Drakharin haven’t used these runes in centuries.”
A new voice interrupted them. “What in the name of the gods is going on in here?”
Ivy snapped the book closed and spun around. Two Firedrakes had entered the study, as silent as cats even in full armor. Suspicious glares bounced between her and Helios. This was bad. This was very, very bad.
“Relax,” Helios said as he approached them slowly, hands raised to show that he was unarmed. Ivy wasn’t sure that unarmed was their best option at the moment. She clutched the book tightly; she wouldn’t let them take it from her, not unless they killed her first. But as per usual, she had already been written off as a threat, and neither of the Firedrakes seemed the slightest bit interested in a stolen book.
One of the Firedrakes jerked his head in her direction. “What’s the little bird doing out of her cage?” He said it in English, not Drakhar. Probably just to taunt her.
Helios closed the distance between himself and the Firedrakes, ambling up to them as though he didn’t have a care in the world. “Well, you see, here’s the thing—” His fist lashed out, connecting with one Firedrake’s jaw with the sickening sound of bone snapping. The other reacted, but he was slow. Helios knocked the sword from his hand, but the Firedrake recovered quickly and trapped Helios in a headlock. Helios’s fingers scrabbled at the arm at his throat, his face turning an alarming shade of red.
There was a small dragon-shaped sculpture holding down a few papers on the desk. It looked heavy enough to do some serious damage if wielded properly. Ivy shifted the book to one hand and grabbed the statue with the other. She marshaled every ounce of strength she had and brought the statue down on the Firedrake’s golden helmet. He groaned and his grasp weakened, allowing Helios to slip away. The Firedrake slumped to the ground beside his equally unconscious partner.
“Holy crap,” Ivy said, setting the statue back down on the desk. There was an indent in the Firedrake’s helmet where she’d struck it.
Helios rubbed his throat and grinned at her through ragged breaths. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
Ivy looked at her hands, shocked. It felt as though they belonged to a stranger. “Neither did I.”
Helios took a small knife from the belt of one of the fallen Firedrakes. For the first time, Ivy noticed how many blades were tucked away in their armor. She guessed that the element of surprise, no matter how flimsy, rendered even the sharpest weapons irrelevant. Helios offered her the knife hilt-first. “In case you need it,” he said.
Ivy accepted the blade, but her fingers shook. She was a healer, not a fighter. Hitting someone over the head was one thing, but this? Stabbing another person? Feeling steel bite through their flesh while their blood spilled out of them? That was something else entirely. She didn’t want to be the kind of person who could do that, but as Helios led her through the keep, she began to worry that listening to her conscience was a luxury she could no longer afford.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The muddy terrain of the forest gave way to rocks and slushy sand closer to the shore. The imposing facade of Wyvern’s Keep was visible now, looming in the distance like a darker spot of black against the night sky, a few of its windows illuminated by firelight and candles. There was a rocky outcrop that would shield them from view once they arrived at the tunnel opening that Dorian had instructed Ivy to find, but they had to get there first.
Dorian thanked the gods for their run of good fortune when they reached a small stream that marked the point where they would be within range of the archers posted along the keep’s walls. Quinn and Jasper came to stand on either side of him. “From here on out, they’ll be able to shoot us,” Dorian said.
“So, this is the danger zone?” Jasper asked, eyeing the stream. He said it like he was quoting something, but the reference was lost on Dorian. Jasper had been uncharacteristically silent since they’d broken camp and departed that morning. The remainder of the trip had lasted the entire day, which was fine by Dorian since the cover of darkness was a requisite part of the plan to get in and out with minimal fuss and bloodshed. Less fine was the way Jasper clammed up in Quinn’s presence. The longer he was around the warlock, the less he seemed like himself.
Quinn shot Jasper a look that was far too intimate. “As much as I adore your brilliant plumage, Jaybird, now’s the time to cover up. Your feathers catch moonlight like they’re desperate for the attention.” With a dismissive wave at Dorian’s silvery hair, Quinn added, “And you might wanna do something about that.”
Jasper’s feathers ruffled. He didn’t return Quinn’s subtle jab with one of his own, but instead focused on smearing mud on his feathers, while Dorian did the same to his hair. While Dorian would never dare utter the thought aloud, he was sad to see Jasper’s feathers covered so. Quinn was right about one thing: they absorbed light in an unearthly fashion, the golds and indigos and fuchsias somehow brighter at night than they were during the day.
“You missed a spot,” Quinn noted. His fingers grazed a clean patch of feathers, and Jasper flinched away from the touch. His face was arranged in a careful mask that betrayed nothing of his true feelings, but there was something a little too like panic in his eyes.
“I’ve got it,” Dorian said. He elbowed Quinn out of the way, pointedly ignoring the warlock’s starlit glare. Jasper seemed to relax into Dorian’s touch. It was the perfect moment for a wisecrack designed to make Dorian blush; therefore it was worrying when Jasper didn’t so much as attempt to flirt.
“You okay?” Dorian asked, keeping his voice soft. He didn’t much care if Quinn eavesdropped, but he had the feeling that Jasper might.
Jasper offered him a shadow of a smile. “Not really,” he whispered back, “but I will be.” His eyes darted to where Quinn stood, gazing at the keep in the distance. “Soon enough.”
Soon enough. As in, when they didn’t need Quinn anymore. They were minutes from the keep. Their business would be concluded soon enough indeed. Then it would be back to New York, Ivy in tow, and they’d have no need for Quinn’s services.
The mud was cool and cakey. It squished between Dorian’s fingers as he combed it through Jasper’s feathers. A contented sigh escaped the Avicen’s lips, and Dorian was suddenly aware of the intimacy of the moment. It felt right, touching Jasper like this. As though he could keep doing it all day.
As soon as the thought occurred to him, he dropped his hands. There was enough mud on Jasper’s feathers to hide them from sight. Dorian cleared his throat and stepped back, resolutely not reading into the Avicen’s arched eyebrow and too-perceptive expression.
“How do I look?” Jasper asked.
“Muddy.” Dorian’s voice was half an octave deeper than normal. Because Jasper and Quinn were Jasper and Quinn, they both cast him knowing looks.
Not fair, Dorian thought as heat rose in his cheeks. Jasper’s lip quirked up on one side. Not fair at all.
“Ugh.” Quinn stalked off toward the keep, exaggerated disgust radiating off him.
“I take it that means the wards are safe to cross,” said Jasper.
