by Melissa Grey
Echo nodded mutely and held out the package.
The Avicen accepted the package and delicately opened the taped seams. When Echo saw what it was, she wanted to scream. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.
It was a box of Twinkies. A box of goddamn Twinkies.
With a grin, the Avicen handed the box to one of her subordinates, a member of the scouting party that had led them to the camp. She nodded at Sage. “Your tribute is accepted and we offer you our hospitality,” she said. “You may call me Reina.”
Spanish for “queen.” It said a great deal about her, as the Avicen tended to choose their own names. Humble, Echo thought.
Sage responded with a short bow. “We have come about the seal. The Ala said you sent word that it had been compromised.”
Just like that, Reina’s smile vanished. “Compromised,” she said, her tone somber. “That is one way of putting it. Come, I will show you the seal myself.” She stood, and Echo noticed for the first time how tall she was. The top of her feathered head nearly brushed the ceiling. She had a warrior’s body, with long limbs and graceful strength. “The seal is indeed compromised, but I am afraid that is only half the problem.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Reina led them to a cave half a day’s walk from the settlement. Echo lost count of how many mosquitoes had feasted on her flesh.
“The seal is through this cave,” Reina said. “It goes deep into the mountains. Our mages have been holding the seal together as well as they can, but I fear it is only a matter of time before they can contain it no longer. Perhaps the Ala’s mages will be able to help, though I am not hopeful. But first, I will show you what happened to the guards we had stationed here before the Dragon Prince gifted us with the broken seal’s chaos.”
“Tanith must have come here after Echo rescued me,” Caius said. “I’ve never seen this place before. She must have siphoned enough magic from me to break the seal on her own.”
A round space near the front of the cave served as a makeshift infirmary. Mages wearing the same lightweight armor as Reina’s scouts moved among their patients, brandishing bundles of cloying incense and various potions in colorful glass vials.
Two Avicen lay on pallets on the cave floor. Their skin was waxen and pale, and a thin wheezing sound rose from one with every indrawn breath, as if the continued act of living was proving far too much for him to handle. The other dozed, eyes moving wildly under closed lids, head twitching infinitesimally, as if he was lost in the throes of a terrible nightmare.
Echo drew closer, squinting in the dim light.
The wheezing one cracked his eyes open at her approach. His eyes rolled madly, trying to focus, but they were covered in a milky bluish film. Cataracts. He croaked out an inquiry in a hoarse, tired voice. One of the mages answered in that unfamiliar dialect. Echo recognized the Avicet words for “fire” and “bird.”
Wrinkled, flaking skin stretched over a once-proud bone structure. The Avicen’s eyes were sunken, and his hair hung in graying clumps, exposing patches of bald, pockmarked skin.
Echo had never seen an elderly Avicen before. It wasn’t that they didn’t grow old; they aged, but incredibly slowly. As children, they developed at the same pace humans did, but once they reached full physical maturity, their bodies slowed. The Ala had tried to explain it to Echo once—something about magic counteracting the process of cellular degeneration—but Rowan had shown up with a bag of potato chips and a stack of bootleg Disney DVDs and Echo had been thoroughly distracted. She remembered enough, though, to know that this never should have been possible.
“Their magic was leached from their bodies,” said Reina. “Our people are not kept alive by the simple beating of a heart. Magic sustains us. Without it, we wither like leaves fallen off the tree.”
“It’s like the man Ivy saw at the hospital,” Echo said. At Reina’s questioning look, Echo shared all Ivy had related to her. The twenty-three-year-old aged well beyond his years. The sickly feeling of his tainted aura. The presence of the kuçedra lingering like a noxious cloud around him.
Reina’s expression darkened. “The Dragon Prince feeds on them to make herself stronger. Perhaps it is not only magic she craves but life itself.”
“That about sums it up,” Echo said, looking back down at the stricken Avicen. “These two were unlucky enough to get in her way.”
“They were tasked with protecting the seal. Our tribe has always done so. It is one of the reasons we stayed here.” Reina knelt beside the pallets and said a short prayer in Avicet. “They gave their lives for their sacred duty. Now follow me, and I will show you just what they were protecting.”
—
The seal could hardly be called such anymore. A dozen Avicen mages formed a circle around the rift. Torches stuck in the ground illuminated the cavern but failed to pierce the darkest depths of the broken seal. Writhing black tendrils of the in-between lashed at the barrier the mages had constructed around the broken seal, as if testing the limitations of their magic. Violet and the other mages who had accompanied Echo’s group from New York had already joined the circle, adding their power to the barrier.
Reina prevented them from going more than a few feet into the space. Caius pushed to the front of the group, a grim expression on his face. The Avicen of the rain forest had barely given him a second glance, and now Echo understood why. The threat they faced in the heart of their own territory was far more frightening than a single Drakharin in their midst.
Echo could feel the hot pulse of the in-between beating at the shimmering field, aching to be set free. The scar on her chest throbbed in time with the rift, as if the shadows peeking through the hole in the universe were calling to it, beckoning it to join them. Echo gritted her teeth against the sensation. “It looks like it’s about to burst at any moment.”
And she did not want to be near the broken seal when that happened.
“This is the best we’ve been able to do.” An incongruous growl of frustration escaped through Violet’s clenched teeth. Her pink and lavender feathers, which normally fell in soft waves around her shoulders like a candy-colored cloak, were mussed, with strands sticking up as if agitated hands had run through them and pulled them. Echo had seen her often in the Agora, a smile a seemingly permanent fixture on her softly angular face, and at Warhawk training when Echo had gone to spy on Rowan after he first joined their ranks. Yet never had she seen Violet look quite so disheveled. “It won’t hold,” Violet said.
Reina shook her head. “Why tamper with the seals?” She looked down at Echo. “You have faced her in combat. What do you suspect?”
“Tanith is a grade A psychopath,” Echo said. “She wants to build a new world, to remake it in her image. But first she has to tear this one down.”
Reina made a disgusted noise. “And she thinks she can build a world atop the chaos she has unleashed? Fool.”
Caius approached the circle. Reina didn’t try to stop him. He crouched, studying the Avicet runes carved into the dirt. They were slightly darker than the soil.
“You sealed them with blood,” Caius observed.
Reina nodded. “It was the only way to hold the barrier together, but it is a temporary measure. We can hold the in-between back, but we cannot close the seal altogether.”
Violet said something in Avicet to the mage next to her. “They think Tanith’s blood might be able to close it,” she then said to Caius, “but I take it you’re not walking around with any of that.”
“Sadly, no,” Caius replied. He stood. “But what about my blood? Tanith is my twin. Our blood is identical.”
“It was identical,” Violet replied. One of the mages who had accompanied Reina and Echo’s group tapped Violet on the shoulder. Violet dropped her arms and stepped back, and the mage took her place. “Tanith’s blood has been tainted,” Violet said. “Altered. Irreparably, I’m guessing.”
A look flickered over Caius’s face, there and gone before anyone could see it. Except for
Echo. His features hardened into an implacable mask, showing no hint of the emotions that lay beneath, but Echo had seen them—the grief, the loss—written on his face as though Tanith had carved them there. It was so easy to forget that their enemy had been a person once. Not a good person—not in Echo’s reckoning—but Caius had loved her. He probably still did. The bonds of family were not so easily severed.
Altered. Irreparably.
It was a succinct way of saying there was no hope for Tanith, that she was beyond saving. Echo watched Caius’s hope sputter and die in that one fleeting expression. Then it was shelved wherever he put all his other inconvenient emotions. Echo had thought she was good at compartmentalizing, but Caius had perfected it, made it an art form.
“It’s worth trying,” Caius insisted. He rolled up one shirtsleeve, not waiting for Violet to object. “Do it.”
She did it.
The blade sliced through the skin of his forearm with ease, so sharp it took a second for the blood to well. Scars stood out along his arm, pale and shiny against the tan skin. Violet led Caius by his bleeding arm around the circle, fortifying the Avicet runes with his blood. The barrier shimmered so brightly it became nearly opaque. Echo felt the grasping energy of the in-between recede.
“I don’t believe it,” Violet said, gazing at the circle with awe. She let go of Caius’s arm. “It actually worked.” She reached a hand toward the shining barrier and closed her eyes. After a moment, she said, “It’ll hold. For now, at least. We’ll need Tanith’s blood to close it for good.”
Caius was pale when he rejoined the group. Reina studied him with an appraising look, as if taking his measure. She made a gruff sound of approval. “I suppose you have your uses after all,” she said.
Caius offered her a tight smile in response and looked at Echo. “How many broken seals are on that map?”
Echo fished the map out of her backpack and unfolded it. A dozen Xs were scattered across every habitable continent. “Eleven more.”
Reina clapped Caius on the shoulder, with enough force that he nearly staggered under her hand. “Rest up, Dragon. You’ve got a lot of bleeding to do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Caius’s blood was not an infinite resource.
They had made it to one more seal on the Ala’s map, this one located in Iceland, before Sage sized him up and prescribed a period of rest long enough for his blood to replenish itself. It wouldn’t do to have Caius die of exsanguination before they’d gotten to all the seals. Sage had also insisted on making camp near the mended seal in order to conserve their dwindling supply of shadow dust. Ever the pragmatist, that one.
And so Echo found herself staring up at the glittering blue-green lights of the aurora borealis while standing at the center of what appeared to be an abandoned camp somewhere in the middle of miles and miles of Icelandic nothing. Perhaps not nothing. The landscape surrounding the camp was quite possibly one of the most gorgeous sights Echo had ever laid eyes on. Long stretches of rolling green hills were capped with a dusting of the season’s first snowfall. The camp itself was situated near a magnificent fjord that stretched toward the sea like a blanket of deep-blue velvet.
It was hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began. One bled into the other until all the eye could see was the soft indigo darkness sliced through with ribbons of light. Echo hadn’t had time to appreciate the sight when she last saw it. Caius had been too near death, their situation too desperate. She had been too scared. But now she could gaze upward and wallow in a sense of cosmic insignificance. It was strangely comforting. If not for the sound of voices as people wandered about setting up camp and lighting fires, she would have been able to pretend that she was all alone. A tiny speck in a vast wilderness.
Stjerneklart, she thought. Norwegian for “a night illuminated only by starlight.” Echo turned the word over in her head, savoring the rightness of it.
Behind her, footsteps crunched over the frosted grass. When she turned, she saw Caius standing there, watching her watch the sky.
His hair had grown long enough to have a slight wave to it. A gentle breeze sent a lock of it tumbling over his forehead, which he promptly brushed away with an irritated sigh. A vain attempt at a smirk accompanied his words when he spoke. “If it gets any longer, Dorian’s going to be at me with the scissors again.”
“He likes to fuss over you,” Echo said, matching the forced lightness of his tone. “Like a mother hen.”
Caius’s smile failed to reach his eyes. They were nearly black in the darkness, but every now and then, a bit of green glimmered like an emerald, reflecting the shining lights dancing in the nighttime sky. The scales on his cheekbones refracted the light, highlighting the planes of his face and making it abundantly obvious when he flinched at a faraway shout. He wasn’t hunched, exactly—his spine was straight and his shoulders proudly squared—but there was a stiffness to him that seemed altogether alien to Echo. She had grown so used to the casual grace with which Caius moved that its absence was startling, though imperceptible to those who hadn’t spent a great deal of time looking at him. Echo had.
“The others are waiting inside,” Caius said. He inclined his head in the direction of one of the larger buildings at the center of the encampment. Chipped red paint coated its exterior, and its roof sagged in the middle. It had probably served as a meeting hall when the settlement had been up and running. The Avicen used it as an outpost between their territory in the Americas and the Drakharin’s in the British Isles. And now it was their temporary home. There were enough buildings to house the mages and warriors without anyone having to share a room. After the cramped conditions at Avalon, the arrangements were positively luxurious.
“Ivy and Helios have arrived, along with some reinforcements from Avalon,” Caius said.
“I know,” Echo said. “I just…”
“Needed some air?” Caius offered.
She nodded.
“As did I,” he said. An inscrutable expression flitted across his face. Then he shook himself, as if trying to knock loose the grip of a spitefully stubborn memory.
Echo wanted to ask him if he’d been allowed outside during his captivity, if he’d felt the warmth of daylight on his skin or if he’d seen the sky, but she kept her queries to herself. If there was anything Caius felt obliged to share with her, he would share it in his own time.
“How are you holding up?” she asked. General questions seemed safe.
He heaved a weary sigh before answering. “Well enough. Violet healed most of the cuts on my arms. The blade was plain steel. Unenchanted. That helped. Wounds inflicted with magic are harder to heal.”
Well enough to get through today and maybe even tomorrow. Well enough to stand on his own two feet and do what needed to be done, like a good soldier.
“So, terrible, then,” Echo said.
This time, Caius’s grin had some life. There was a ghost of his true smile in it. “Am I so transparent?”
“Only to me.”
The moment stretched between them in a thick, meaningful silence. Something in Caius began to loosen, as if the earlier stiffness Echo had noticed was working its way out of his system. He didn’t have to pretend around her. She knew too much. She and Rose.
Neither Echo nor Caius acknowledged this revelation. It didn’t need to be said. It was simply the truth, and it allowed Caius to let go of the tension he held so tightly.
“We should go back,” he said. “Before they send out a search party.”
“Mother Hen would be most displeased,” said Echo. She wanted so badly to see that smile again, to know that he was wounded but not broken.
It flashed across his face for the briefest moment before he schooled his features into something more staid. “Come,” he said, offering her his hand. His skin felt feverish to the touch, but Echo knew that was his normal temperature. “They’re updating the map and managing to work together without killing each other. It’s all very impressive, but I don’t know
how long it’ll last.”
—
It lasted longer than Echo would have thought possible. Though the alliance was heavily skewed toward the Avicen, most of them had come around to having the Drakharin present. Echo thought it was hard for them to hold on to their animosities after they had watched Caius spill his blood to protect them. Dorian had carved a niche for himself when he’d been at Avalon and earned the Avicens’ grudging respect. Echo had had precious little time with Helios, but if Ivy trusted him, that was good enough for her.
With a frustrated sigh, Echo knocked her head against the wooden backrest of the chair she’d claimed at the table. Across the table’s surface lay a larger, more detailed version of the map she had carried in her backpack. Black markers had been placed on the two seals they’d managed to close, while ten red markers remained dispersed across the continents. The sheer amount of work ahead of them—coupled with the ever-present danger of travel through the in-between—was enough to make her head throb. Even if mages closed the seals with vials of Caius’s blood, there was nothing stopping Tanith from tearing open more. She didn’t seem to need Caius to do so anymore. Either she’d siphoned enough of Caius’s magic, as he suspected, or the kuçedra was strong enough to open the seals on its own. Neither possibility filled Echo with much hope. Closing the seals was a losing battle, but at the moment, options were less than abundant.
Sage had led the meeting, with Violet and Caius taking point. They’d discussed additional guards for the mended seals and the unbroken ones Tanith either hadn’t discovered or simply hadn’t gotten around to breaking yet. Ivy brought news of more Avicen refugees filling the halls of Avalon Castle. Word of its wards had spread far and wide, and anyone with a shred of sense knew there was a clash brewing, a game-ending battle between the firebird and the kuçedra. Everyone wanted to be behind those wards when it happened. Dorian updated the group on the progress of his agents working to undermine Tanith’s power base at Wyvern’s Keep and the likelihood of Drakharin reinforcements. Barring some kind of miracle, they were unlikely to arrive anytime soon. Echo had drifted in and out of consciousness, lulled into a half-dozing state by listening to plans she couldn’t help but find tedious.
