by Melissa Grey
The blood in the bowl began to boil violently.
Echo’s focus sharpened. She grabbed at memories of Caius as they flew by, a child snatching butterflies out of the air.
The huff of a quiet chuckle when he was trying not to laugh.
The little groan of ecstasy when he bit into something sinfully delicious.
The dance of his fingers over a blade as he tended to it with a whetstone and an oiled rag.
The crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he looked at her.
The low timbre of his voice when he spoke to her of myths and legends and stories passed down from generation to generation. Tales of dragons arcing through the sky on majestic wings. Of gods and nightmares and dreams of peace.
She thought of all the things that made him—as a person, not a prince—all the secret hopes and fears he had shared with her on sleepless nights. Of the way he said her name when there was no one else around.
A ruby glow began to emanate from the silver bowl as the clouds in its contents shrank and expanded and took shape.
A figure kneeling at another’s feet. Head bowed, either in pain or supplication. Another shift of the blood in the water, another image, this one clearer than the last.
An unconscious man shackled with heavy manacles, his head lolling on his shoulders. One of his legs was bent at an unnatural angle. Someone stood over him, a healer perhaps, maybe even a mage, holding his hands out to the man’s many wounds, closing them. Setting the broken bone.
Another figure, this one clad in shining armor, opening the wounds anew. Delighting in the spill of Caius’s blood. A curling black wisp snaked across the surface of the blood. In the blink of an eye, it was gone.
The image writhed into nonsense and then began to solidify. Echo could see the shape of Caius’s body, trussed up in chains in a cavernous room.
He was in pain. He was suffering and there was nothing Echo could do about it. The tether of magic tying her to the vision in the bowl wavered as anger and hopelessness warred for her attention.
A hand gripped her shoulder, a solid, comforting weight. Though Echo kept her gaze locked on the silver bowl, she felt herself buttressed by the strength in that hand.
“We need to expand the spell to see where he is,” Dorian said. “It’ll require more power. Take from me what you need.”
Jasper cut in, his voice low and worried. “Dorian, I don’t think—”
“There’s no other way,” Dorian said.
The act of sharing magic was not one to be undertaken lightly, especially when there was an imbalance of power between participants. Echo was human, but she contained a force that made Dorian’s magic pale in comparison. It would be so easy to take his magic now that it was being so kindly offered, and to keep taking it. She could drink him dry. The firebird roiled inside her, aching to tap into that well of magic right in front of it like a starving woman falling upon a sumptuous feast.
But Echo was not ruled by her beast and its urges. She could—she would—fight it.
Echo placed her hand above Dorian’s. The moment her skin touched his, power flared up between them, raw and vibrant. The firebird burned brightly inside her, but Dorian’s magic had another feel to it altogether. His was gently rolling waves and the deepest fathoms of the sea. His was the coursing river and the drizzling rain. The beast inside Echo rolled around in all that magic, luxuriating in its warmth. She took only what she needed and not one drop more.
Echo repeated the final phrase of the chant, the one that focused on the location of that which was lost. The image in the blood grew smaller as the range of the spell widened beyond the room with its shadows and chains and captive prince.
The blood congealed into shapes: winged statues and soaring columns and an altar set onto a dais. It was a church or a temple or some other place of worship. The ceiling had caved in in places, and beams of light fell on the frieze behind the altar. It depicted a dragon standing atop a heap of bones and swords and flags. One clawed foot crushed a skull; another bent a sword in its grip.
“I know where he is,” Dorian said, breathless, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. His hand squeezed Echo’s shoulder once before severing their connection. Echo felt it snap like a rubber band, a sharp discomfort, and then nothing but the memory of sensation.
Her elation was powerful enough to disrupt the spell. She lost the rhythm of her chanting and suddenly the bowl was just a bowl and the blood was just blood, diluted in water.
A wave of dizziness hit her when the magic dissipated. She would most likely suffer for it later. A headache, probably. Maybe even some nausea. But right now she couldn’t be bothered by the limitations of her aching human body.
“Where is he?” Echo said. “What was that place?”
“It’s an old ruin,” Dorian said. His eye was still on the scrying bowl, reluctant to let go of the image of his prince, wounded and chained but alive. “It was a Drakharin temple, centuries out of use. Caius and I went there once a few years after I entered his service. It’s rumored to be haunted. Young men go there to prove how unafraid they are and come back uniformly terrified.”
“Oh, this’ll be fun,” Jasper said. Echo had nearly forgotten he was there.
Ghosts didn’t frighten her. She lived with them, every day, in the confines of her head. A haunted ruin was nothing in the face of her desire to find Caius and break him free of those chains. “Do you remember how to get there?”
“Of course.” Dorian sounded offended she’d even felt the need to ask.
“Then we leave at dawn,” Echo said. “Bring weapons. I have a feeling we’re going to need them.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ivy hated hospitals.
Hospitals, it would seem, hated Ivy in return. She’d never been inside one as a patient—the Avicen took care of their own, not to mention that it would be something of a colossal disaster for Ivy to be dissected because a human doctor had discovered her and decided to find out how she ticked. She’d avoided them at all costs, knowing that nothing good lay within. Human medicine seemed barbaric to her; how they made do without the aid of magic was a mystery.
She stared up at the imposing bulk of Lenox Hill Hospital—where, according to the evening news, the survivors of the attack on Grand Central had been transferred after their condition had stabilized—and wished that she’d paid more attention to Echo’s particular brand of deviancy. Turns out, only half watching someone else pick a pocket didn’t actually teach one how to do it oneself. Until that morning, Ivy had been perfectly content to allow Echo to be the resident criminal mastermind in their little group of friends, but now she would have given her left arm—or at the very least, a kidney—to have Echo by her side.
It wasn’t the first time Ivy had found herself missing Echo since her best friend had departed New York on a mission to find Caius…if there was anything left of him to find. Ivy kept that thought to herself. The fragile hope she’d seen in Echo’s and Dorian’s eyes had been too delicate for her to shatter with pessimism. This time, though, the pang of Echo’s absence was less sentimental and more pragmatic. There was a pickpocket-shaped hole in Ivy’s life, and she felt it keenly as she watched doctors and nurses and security guards walk in and out of the hospital’s main lobby, ID cards dangling from lanyards, pockets, and lapels. If she could only get her hands on one of those, she wouldn’t need to worry about finding an alternative way to get inside. Echo had it right: being an upstanding citizen was a giant waste of time.
As it stood, Ivy had vials of bloodweed elixir burning a hole in her bag and she needed to get into that hospital. And the only way she could think of to sneak past the guards, and the nurses, and the patients, and the patients’ families, and the people who were basically everywhere, all the damn time, was to go to a place she had absolutely zero desire to visit. It would be far less glamorous than using an ancient spell to break into the Louvre, that was for sure.
Movement in Ivy’s peripheral vision attracted her a
ttention. Beside her, Helios fidgeted in his borrowed clothes—a charcoal wool sweater and a pair of black jeans—although “borrowed” was perhaps a bit of a stretch. Ivy doubted that Rowan would have voluntarily loaned his clothing to a Drakharin, even one as nice as Helios, so she had cut Rowan from the equation. Helios needed something to wear besides the armor he had left Wyvern’s Keep in.
Helios had fidgeted all the way to the hospital, occasionally scratching his arms and squirming in his seat. Ivy had assumed at first that the wool was itchy and hadn’t thought much more about it. But when Helios had slid his sunglasses down to read the subway map, Ivy caught sight of an expression she’d grown familiar with in the first few months of living in Jasper’s London hideout. The stiffness of his shoulders, the darted glances searching for threats that weren’t there. Dorian had been like that, living in the middle of London. Caius, too, to a lesser extent. Helios’s fidgeting had worsened in the crush of bodies on the southbound 6 train, confirming Ivy’s suspicions. He was trying valiantly not to show his discomfort, but it was written in the tense lines of his body, in the way he flinched from the jostling elbows and knees as the subway rumbled over the tracks. In the wake of the attack on Grand Central and the shuttering of the Agora, shadow dust reserves were strictly rationed. The Ala had requisitioned enough for Ivy to get into the hospital, but getting to the hospital had called for a slightly more mundane method of transportation. Hence the subway and Helios’s unseasonal sweating.
The Avicen had lived in close proximity to humans for centuries, but the Drakharin were an insular race. They secluded themselves in remote areas, buried themselves beneath layers upon layers of protective wards, and let the inexorable march of modernity pass them by. Human invention was treated by the Drakharin with a carefully cultivated disdain that was equal parts superiority and superstition. Why invent a microwave to pop corn kernels when you could toast some with magical flame summoned with a flick of the wrist? The Avicen tended to shy away from human technology, but only on a surface level. Just about everyone Ivy knew had their own little vices, from radios to hot pots and even the occasional cell phone. But the Drakharin were fastidious in their avoidance. Humans, with their technological shortcuts and their short, fleeting lives, were other and to be dealt with only when doing so became absolutely unavoidable. Being a lower-ranked Firedrake prior to his defection, Helios had likely never spent much time around humans. Now he’d been thrown into one of the most populous cities in the world. The belly of the beast, as it were.
Ivy sympathized. She’d seen how long it had taken Dorian to acclimatize to life in London, and she didn’t want Helios to put himself through any unnecessary stress—gods only knew their lives were stressful enough as it was—but her insistence that he didn’t need to accompany her to the hospital had fallen on deaf ears. He seemed determined to be her knight in shining armor, minus the armor, even if the majority of their trip involved her subtly watching him for signs of an imminent panic attack on public transport and him pretending that he didn’t need to be subtly watched for signs of an imminent panic attack. So far, everyone had played their roles admirably, if Ivy did say so herself.
No one went out alone. That was the rule Caius had laid down in London, and that was still the rule. That was why Rowan, despite the little regard he held for the Drakharin, had accompanied Echo on her hunt for Caius. And why Ivy and Helios stood on the sidewalk across the street from Lenox Hill Hospital’s main entrance, close enough to a hot dog stand to look like they were innocently waiting for food. Ivy knew every minute she stood on that sidewalk was a minute lost, but she really, really, really didn’t want to break into the hospital via the morgue. Honestly, what had her life come to?
“Why do we need to be here?” Helios asked. He was eyeing the hot dog vendor with a curious stare. She wondered if he’d never seen a hot dog before. Did the Drakharin not have street meat? Maybe Ivy would buy him one if their plan succeeded. Provided he still had an appetite after the morgue. She knew she wouldn’t.
Ivy patted the vials of bloodweed elixir in the side pocket of her messenger bag. “To save people,” she said. “We’re the good guys. It’s what we do.”
It was something Echo liked to say often. She was not wrong.
Helios tore his gaze away from the hot dog stand to make a face at Ivy as if she’d said something distasteful. Even more distasteful than processed meat stewing in dirty water on a sidewalk in Manhattan. “But they’re human,” he said, as if that explained everything, and to him, perhaps it did.
“Yes,” Ivy said, fighting the urge to roll her eyes. He probably wouldn’t notice on account of her sunglasses, but she would know. And she’d probably feel bad about it later. “But they’re people.”
“Human people.”
“Still people.”
He grunted, not quite acquiescing to her point, but apparently unwilling to argue it any further. It would take longer than a few weeks to cross that cultural divide.
“They may be human, Helios, but it’s sort of our fault they’re in the hospital,” Ivy said. Our being the Avicen, the Drakharin, and their associated monstrosity: the kuçedra. “From a purely strategic standpoint, we’re not entirely sure how the kuçedra operates, but we think it’s drawing power from the people it puts into comas, using them as a sort of battery. If we cut off its tie to those people, then maybe it won’t grow quite as fast, which would make it easier for us to kill it…you know, when we figure out how.” And if such a thing was even possible, but Ivy didn’t feel the need to speak that thought aloud. It was entirely too fatalistic for her liking. She patted the vials again. Touching them was a comfort. So far, the elixir’s creation was one of the few victories they’d earned, and Ivy had played no small part in it. “What’s more important, avoiding humans or severing the kuçedra from a potential power source?”
Helios sucked his bottom lip between his teeth, another nervous tic Ivy had noticed. She didn’t quite mind this one. Helios had a very nice mouth. “Severing the kuçedra from a potential power source,” he said.
“That’s right. If we administer the elixir, hopefully those humans will wake up and the kuçedra will be short a few meals. And if we can do that while helping a bunch of people whose only crime was being caught in the cross fire of our war, then everybody wins. Well, everybody except the bad guys. Let’s not help them win.”
“Fair enough,” Helios said. He looked away from Ivy, turning his head toward the hospital. Through the revolving doors, Ivy could make out at least two guards and a dizzying array of hospital staff and patients, all standing between them and their objective. “But how are we going to get in?” he asked.
Ivy grimaced. “I have an idea,” she said, pulling the small pouch of shadow dust from her jacket pocket. She’d spotted a supply closet on the subway platform they could use to access the in-between. From rats to corpses. Lovely. “But you’re probably not going to like it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Why does it always have to be ruins?” Jasper grumbled, shaking the dust off his hair-feathers. Clouds of it cascaded from the ceiling, jolted free by the presence of living things disturbing the stale air. “Why can’t we ever look for something at, like, an amusement park?”
His question went unanswered as Dorian helped Echo over a precarious pile of fallen stones. They had been climbing through the ruin for what felt like hours but had probably only been forty-five minutes. Echo’s legs were significantly shorter than Dorian’s and Jasper’s, and her calves were beginning to ache with ferocity.
Echo paused, hefting her backpack higher on her shoulders. It contained everything she thought she might possibly need: the silver bowl, the glass vial half full of Caius’s blood, her dagger, water, a flashlight, snacks. Echo didn’t know what Tanith had been feeding Caius this whole time, but she was willing to bet it was terrible.
The temple was majestic in its own way, but it was very much ruined, very much forgotten. Broken statues lay in fragments at their
feet; aggressive vines wound their way through holes in the cracked paving stones; the air was thick with the pungent scents of moss and decay. Every now and then, Echo heard a distant noise that was either the sound of an animal in distress or wind cutting through the rubble at just the right frequency to sound like a wailing ghost. She sincerely hoped it was the latter.
“What was this place?” she asked. Once Dorian had identified the location where Caius was being held, Echo had gone into overdrive, preparing for their departure and steeling herself for whatever they might find. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask which ancient Drakharin god the temple had been dedicated to or what rituals had been performed there.
Dorian broke his tense silence to answer her question. “There was a time when every god in our pantheon had a specific place of worship.”
“Before humans spread across practically every available inch of this planet like a plague?” Jasper interjected. “No offense,” he added for Echo’s sake.
“None taken.” Not only did her humanity feel like a thing of the past, but when you’re right, you’re right.
“Yes, quite,” Dorian said. He peered up at one of the statues that was still mostly standing, save for a left arm that had been knocked off at some point over the centuries. The stone figure was relatively humanoid. Two arms (in theory), two legs, one head. But then there were the wings. A set of them jutted forth from the statue’s shoulder blades, creating a wingspan of at least twenty feet. They reminded Echo a bit of bat wings.
“Like the Avicen,” Dorian continued, “our gods don’t have names. We referred to them by their attributes.” He laid a reverent hand on one of the outspread wings. “This temple was built for the god of battle.” He inclined his head to the statues flanking the winged figure. “Those were probably minor gods. They embodied different aspects of the god—bloodlust, justice, mercy. Their places among the pantheon have largely been lost to time.” With a look back at the god of battle, he said, “We only remember the major gods now. So much has been lost.”
