The Shadow Hour

by Melissa Grey

  He looked back at Tanith to find her standing in the now open doorway, her expression calculating. The look, at least, was all Tanith. He’d seen her stare down enemies with that cunning gaze before, and a small part of him felt a thrill of fear at being the target of it. He arched an eyebrow in question, feigning a nonchalance he did not feel.

  “I’m not evil, Caius.” Tanith broke eye contact first. If he hadn’t known any better, he would have sworn he saw a hint of doubt flit across her expression.

  “I never thought you were,” he said, for lack of anything else. It was true, even if he wasn’t entirely certain the force possessing her now wasn’t evil. His sister, the one he knew, the one he loved, even after all the loss and bloodshed between them, was not evil. He knew her heart as well as he knew his own, or at least he thought he had, once upon a time.

  “By the way,” she continued, tone hardening as she spoke, “your friend, the little snow-white Avicen girl, stole one of your old books and one of my Firedrakes.” Her scarlet gaze cut to Caius, the blackness seeming to grow with each passing second. “Not quite as helpless as she used to be, is she?”

  She clenched her hands into fists. Dark energy crackled around her hands like electricity. Caius fell back on the bed as a surge of pain overwhelmed him. Tanith barked out a laugh and dropped her hands to her sides, releasing him. He sucked in a deep breath of air. His head swam and his vision grayed at the edges.

  “Rest now, Caius,” Tanith said, one hand on the door’s new and improved lock. “You’ve reached an end, but I’m afraid it’s not a happy one.” She brushed dirt that wasn’t there off her cloak. “Not yet, anyway. You may not believe in me now, but you will. You’ll see. With this power I shall herald in a new era for us, for our people. They will no longer live in fear of the Avicen or in the shadow of humanity. I will bring us victory, and through victory, there shall be peace.”

  Peace. It had never been a concept that held much interest for Tanith. The way she’d phrased it—they’d always steered clear of humanity. Neither the Avicen nor the Drakharin had ever had any desire to dabble in the human world or to invite it into theirs. Humans were a young civilization, much younger than theirs, and like all young things, they were rarely careful with their toys. And that was what Caius knew his species would become under a mass human gaze: a toy, a curiosity, something to poke and prod and slice open just to see how its insides worked.

  “Tanith.” The name felt like poison on his tongue, but he forced himself to continue. “What are you going to do?”

  Her answering smile was beatific. “The kuçedra and I want the same thing. Blood. Pain. Death. I’m going to break them,” she said. “And I’m going to start with her.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  For the rest of the day, Echo, Altair, and the surviving Warhawk mages—a cohort that included Violet of the purple-pink hair-feathers—brainstormed ways of tailoring Avalon’s existing wards with a new spell. The blood of the firebird might save them all. But building spells was not in Echo’s skill set. She could follow a list of instructions, but there was a vast world of magical knowledge that eluded her. Constructing a spell wasn’t like whipping up a batch of cookies, or so Echo had been told by a scandalized Violet after asking why they couldn’t just take some of Echo’s blood and slap something together with it. Creating a new ritual was a complex task—not one to be rushed into without considering the metaphysical implications. Or whatever. Echo’s eyelids had begun to droop around two in the morning. Altair had sent her to bed with orders to rest. The mages would plot and plan and argue and debate while she slept. By the time she woke, they would—hopefully—have a spell that would make Avalon the safest place on earth. Echo fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Let the mages plan the magic. She would be more than happy to open up a vein once they figured it all out.

  —

  Screams pulled Echo from her slumber. Her blankets were on the ground and her legs were swinging out of the bed before she had time to think. The air was clogged with the smell of something burning. That was not good. That was very, very not good. Because where there was smoke, there was fire. Rose’s presence fluttered through Echo’s mind. And where there is fire, there is Tanith.

  She pulled her boots on, lacing one up only high enough for her to fit the scabbard of her dagger inside. She was halfway to the door when the castle shook, as if someone were trying to blast their way through the thick stone walls with heavy cannon fire. Echo opened the door and hurtled down the hallway, toward the screams. They were louder now, more urgent. And some of them were high-pitched, like those of children.

  The Avicelings. They were housed near the Warhawk barracks, which should have been the safest place in the castle. Adrenaline coursed through Echo’s veins, propelling her down the winding corridors with as much speed as her muscles could muster. The castle shook again with the ferocity of an earthquake, nearly hard enough to knock Echo off her feet. She rounded the corner that should have left her near the top of the grand staircase, but all that greeted her was a dead end and a small wooden cabinet, the kind for holding linens or some such household nonsense. She let loose a string of curses that would make a sailor blush. There had been no time for her to properly familiarize herself with the layout of Avalon Castle. She’d been there for less than two full days before striking out on her own, and now her haste was coming back to bite her in the ass.

  She retreated, trying desperately to retrace her steps. Altair had brought them into the castle using a circuitous route to avoid detection—mustn’t let the Avicen know one of their worst enemies was in their midst—and after several wrong turns, she finally—finally—made it to the east wing. Fallen stone blocked off the rest of the castle. Echo’s room had been set apart from the others: Ivy, Jasper, Dorian. She said a silent prayer that they would be safe, trapped as they were. She skidded to a stop, her feet reacting quicker to the carnage than her brain. The still form of a Warhawk, surrounded by chunks of stone and wooden shards from a broken bench, blocked her path. A tapestry lay about his legs, as if he’d tried to hold on to it as he fell. His skin was so thoroughly covered in blackened veins that it was hard to tell if he was still alive. Echo knelt down beside him, careful not to touch him. She couldn’t risk being taken out of commission before she’d even made it to the source of this man’s pain.

  Slowly, painfully, the Warhawk’s chest rose with a labored breath. The sound gurgled out of him, as if there was fluid in his lungs. “Help them,” he croaked. He reached for her, but his hand fell limply to his side before he could complete the motion. “Save them.” And just like that, the light faded from his eyes as life fled his body. His gaze rested, unseeing, on the ceiling, the capillaries in his eyes turning from pinkish red to deepest black as the contagion continued to spread through his body even after his heart stopped beating.

  I will, Echo wanted to say. I promise. But dread constricted her throat, and it was all she could do to push herself to stand, to step around the Warhawk’s dead body. She wanted to close his eyes, to do him that one small act of mercy, but she didn’t dare touch him with her bare hands. She didn’t even know his name.

  The corridor was littered with debris. The wall on the other end had been blown out, leaving an almost perfect circle of an opening. Through the hole, Echo could see that the expansion off the east wing, the area in which the Warhawks had taken up residence, had imploded. Muffled screams reached her through the fallen rocks and beams of wood rising from the ground like stalagmites, their tips blackened with what Echo knew was not smoke damage. She had seen it before, on the news broadcast about the volcanic eruption, on the walls of the Nest after the attack, on the face of the clock from the information booth at Grand Central.

  The kuçedra had come again. No, that wasn’t right. Tanith had come looking for her, her body acting as the kuçedra’s cage.

  The wards, Echo thought. The wards should have stopped it. They should have hidden her presence, as Altair had said. But
the kuçedra didn’t need to sense her to find her. Echo had looked into Tanith’s soul and Tanith had looked back. She had known about Avalon. She’d seen it in Echo’s memories as clear as day. It didn’t matter if the wards shielded Echo from detection. Tanith had been all but handed a road map on a silver platter. The Avicen sanctuary had been violated the moment Echo’s mind touched Tanith’s. And Echo had been too blinded by her grief over Caius to think such a thing would happen. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  Tanith could have seen the view that had greeted Echo as the boat carried them toward the island, the battlements rising through a dense fog like something out of a fairy tale. She could have heard Altair explaining the layout of the castle, where different groups were housed, the location of the barracks. Their destruction had not been accidental. It was strategic. Take out the fighters, then pick off the weakest among them. Like ducks in a barrel.

  A scrap of Nietzsche hovered at the edge of Echo’s memory. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

  Echo pushed herself forward, over the rubble, through the razed section of the garden that separated the Warhawk annex from the main castle, around the fallen mass of the castle’s outer wall. She could hear the cries of the people trapped beneath the wreckage. The Warhawks who hadn’t been near the annex flowed in the direction of the worst of it, toward their dead and dying comrades, toward the monster that had caused it all.

  The sky outside was dark, charcoal-gray clouds blocking the light of the moon and the stars. But even against the backdrop of night, the stain of the kuçedra was visible still, darker than the darkest night, as black as a hole in space, consuming everything it touched.

  First the Nest. Now Avalon. There was nowhere left for the Avicen to run. If they lost this home, they would be forced to scatter in the wind, dispersed to cramped safe houses throughout the country, torn apart as a people in exile.

  No, Echo thought. The light summer breeze was not cool on her skin as it should have been. It was too warm, too clogged with smoke and dust and despair. She didn’t want the Avicen to have to run. She didn’t want them to have to hide. They had given her a home when she had none. She would protect theirs if it was the last thing she did. And, if she was brutally honest with herself, it just might be.

  A voice boomed across the small island, amplified by the same magic that held its speaker aloft, floating above the mess she’d made. Tanith’s power flashed around, cutting through the swirl of shadows that surrounded her like cracks of lightning. She was flying, which should have been impossible. And yet.

  “Ah, the firebird,” Tanith said. “So nice of you to join us.” She spread her arms wide, her bloodstained cloak flapping open to reveal tarnished golden armor. Her blond hair was laced with streaks of black so dark they seemed to absorb the light around her. “Do you like what I’ve done with the place?” She lowered herself, her feet not quite touching the one stubborn wall of the annex that remained standing. “I did it just for you.”

  Echo took half a step forward, intent on wiping the smirk off Tanith’s face any way she could, when her jeans caught on something sticking out from behind a slab of stone. She looked down, ready to kick away the offending piece of debris, when she saw a skinny arm, covered in downy red fluff. Flint. She would have knelt down to see if he was okay, but she didn’t want to draw Tanith’s attention to him. From the corner of her eye, she could see that he wasn’t trapped beneath the broken wall’s weight; he was hiding. “Go.” She tried not to move her lips as she spoke. “Run.”

  A tiny voice replied, “I’m scared.” Flint huddled deeper into his precarious shelter. Echo spared him a quick glance. He wasn’t alone. At least two other Avicelings were hiding with him. Help them, the Warhawk had said. Save them.

  Echo didn’t know how. She didn’t know if she could. But she had to try.

  “When I tell you to run,” she whispered, “run.”

  She walked away from the stone shelter, her stride long and confident. Crimson eyes tracked her movement. Echo was glad Tanith had come alone. Most of the Warhawks had been in the barracks, and the ones who had rushed to the scene had already sustained injuries in the time it had taken for Echo to arrive. She spotted the orange hair-feathers of one Warhawk she recognized—Sage, one of Altair’s lieutenants. The right half of her body was covered in a network of wounds, some old and scarred, some fresh and weeping with blood that was almost black in the night. She was standing by the body of a Warhawk whose candy-colored hair—a cheerful pink—was shocking against the blood that covered almost her entire face. Violet, Echo recalled. Sage’s sword was held loosely in her left hand.

  Sage followed Tanith’s gaze to Echo. Their eyes met across the distance. The Avicen nodded once, shallowly. Maybe it was an acknowledgment of Echo joining the battle. Maybe it was a commiseration. A sort of “We’re all going to die here tonight, might as well be polite” gesture. Echo tilted her head in the direction of the Avicelings’ hiding place. Help them, Echo thought. Sage narrowed her eyes and then nodded once in understanding. Good. Echo focused on Tanith, floating above the ruined section of the castle.

  Remember what Caius told you, Rose’s voice whispered in Echo’s mind.

  What? Echo thought at the voice. He told me a lot of things.

  But Rose had fallen silent, either unwilling or unable to share her wisdom.

  “Useless,” Echo spat.

  And then it occurred to her. The first day Echo and Caius had spent alone together, when they’d broken into the Met to find the key that opened the door in the Oracle’s chamber, he had held her hand beneath a bridge in Strasbourg and conjured an entrance to the in-between. When she’d asked him why he’d used such an obvious seam between their world and the in-between, he said that just because you had power didn’t mean you had to use it. It was a lesson he wished his people would take to heart. But Echo hadn’t known the truth then. That the new and terrible Dragon Prince was his sister. That it was her flexing of her muscles and her magic that he had so strongly disagreed with. And right now she was expending energy keeping herself afloat. Leave it to the Dragon Prince to act like she was too good to stand.

  Power, Echo knew now, was not an infinite resource. Magic had its cost, even for the kuçedra. She wouldn’t have been able to chase it off in Grand Central if its magic had been limitless. She needed Tanith to waste her power. But the only way to do that was to get her to use it. And there was no way that could happen without more destruction, more loss of life.

  “Where is he?” Flames crackled in Echo’s fists, dancing up her arms. Her hair stirred in the current of her own power. “What did you do with him?”

  “My brother is lost to you, firebird,” Tanith called out. “He was never yours and he never will be.”

  White-hot hate boiled inside Echo. If Caius was hurt, if he was dead, she would paint the broken stones of Avalon with Tanith’s blood if it was the last thing she did. She climbed atop a pile of rubble. Tanith watched her, amusement dancing in her strange crimson eyes. Black veins, just like the ones that had snaked up her arms when they’d found her in the field, framed her face, leaving most of it strangely untouched. It was almost as if the kuçedra’s poison wanted to spare at least some of her golden beauty.

  “You want me?” Echo shouted. “Come and get me!”

  The kuçedra peered at her through Tanith’s crimson eyes, black bleeding into the irises. Echo saw the truth of the kuçedra’s desire in those eyes. It wanted to bend Echo to its will, to swallow the light of the firebird until it was extinguished and all that was left in its stead was the darkness of its despair.

  It wanted to break her.

  Enu sutagan. It destroys.

  Try, Echo willed the thought to reach the kuçedra. Tanith twitched her head to the side, as if listening to a far-off shout. Try to destroy me.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Tanith launched a volley of attacks in Echo’s direction. Her aim was wild, erratic. Stone exploded on
either side of Echo, pelting her with shrapnel that embedded itself in her skin. Everything Caius had ever told Echo about his sister had painted the picture of a battle-hardened tactician. There was nothing tactical in these strikes. They smashed through the remaining walls of the barracks with all the precision of a hastily lobbed grenade. This was sloppy. Echo could work with sloppy.

  She darted away from the huddle of Avicelings behind the stone. “Run!” she shouted, not turning to see if they did. Drawing Tanith’s fire was Echo’s priority, and she could only pray that Sage got the children to safety. A shower of earth erupted as Tanith pounded the courtyard with a fresh barrage of flame. Echo ducked behind a tangled mass of stone and steel. Weapons, warped from the searing heat of Tanith’s attack, had bent and broken as they were buried by collapsing stone walls. The stones themselves were as hot as coals.

  Fire licked at the stones, reaching for Echo. She answered its call with her own, a black-and-white blaze that circled her like a shield. Tanith’s power beat down on Echo, driving her to her knees. Every ounce of strength went into her barrier of flame. It absorbed the crackling shadows like a sponge.

  “I grow tired of this game, Firebird.” Tanith’s voice grew closer and there wasn’t a shred of sanity in it. Her fire died as abruptly as it had erupted. “Come out and play.”

  Echo dug her hands into the dirt, balling them into fists. Her own power quieted. The soil was dry, both from the warmth of summer and from the unrelenting heat of Tanith’s fury. It was so hot, the air burned Echo’s exposed skin, and every breath she drew scorched her lungs.

  I can’t do this. Tanith was strong, stronger than she’d been in the Black Forest, and even then, she had been too powerful for Echo’s magic. Now she had the full force of the kuçedra chained to her. Echo could feel Tanith’s approach on the other side of the mound of debris. Armored boots clanged over the weapons of dead Warhawks, every step bringing with it a fresh wave of despair that threatened to force its way down Echo’s throat and suffocate her. She heard the sound of metal crumpling to the ground as the last Warhawks standing fell under the onslaught.