The Savage Dawn

by Melissa Grey

  The magic in her reached out. It was thinner now, but she gathered it around herself and fortified it with her own reserves of strength. And she pushed.

  She had saved so many. And none of it would matter if she couldn’t save him. If she couldn’t wipe that despair from Jasper’s expression, the hopelessness from Ivy’s.

  All those lives saved. And still, she was powerless to help the one person she so desperately wanted to save.

  Caius was gone.

  The in-between had claimed him, and there was nothing she could do. The magic flowed through all of them, as bright as starlight.

  The vessels left Echo. They let her go, finally finding their own peace after all those years, centuries, millennia tied to the firebird and its magic.

  She poured the last vestiges of magic left in her body into Dorian, guiding it with her will. Wishes, the Ala had told her a lifetime ago, had power. And she wished for Dorian to be whole, wished it with every last spark of strength she had. The world went dark at the corners of her vision as the magic grew stronger and her body grew weaker.

  Lashes fluttered against her palm.

  The last thing she heard before darkness—a gentle darkness, so different from the malevolent one that had done all this—was a familiar voice. One that had sung the magpie’s lullaby Echo so loved a century before she had even been born. A voice she knew as well as her own, that inhabited the place between life and death, neither one nor the other. In-between. A voice Caius had loved as he had come to love Echo.

  Rose’s presence hovered at the edges of Echo’s mind, lingering long after all the others had faded, and made a promise.

  I’ll find him.

  EPILOGUE

  The battle came to an end and the rebuilding began. Together, Avicen, Drakharin, and human tended to their wounded and mourned their dead. Nothing would be what it once was, but that was perhaps not the worst possible outcome. Days passed in a fragile camaraderie, burdened by the weight of all that had been lost.

  Echo made her way to the roof of the ruined library—or what was left of it—scaling piles of rubble and partially collapsed stairways until the sky opened up before her. Clouds the color of smoke and ambient light crowded the heavens, obscuring her view of all but the most stubborn stars.

  It was easier to think up here. She felt closer to the sky.

  Slowly, she let herself relax. Her body felt the strain of the past few hours, days, months. She ached in places she didn’t know a person could ache. But despite her bruised and battered body’s litany of complaints, she felt the weight of all that had transpired slip away like grains of sand between her fingers. She knew that the worst was yet to come. The burden of those who survived the war was dealing with the ruin it left in its wake. Loss was not a wound that could be carefully sutured. It would rise up like a flaring infection once the thrill of adrenaline worked its way through her. But for now, she had the relative silence of the city and the quiet companionship of the stars.

  Things were quieter this far above the ground. She wanted quiet. Needed it. But she also needed a place that had made her feel like herself. And the library was that place. It always had been. It was broken, but then, so was she. The library would bear the scars of its suffering for the rest of its existence, but then, so would she.

  Echo closed her eyes, shutting out the night sky and the stars and the crescent sliver of the moon that peeked out from behind a veil of clouds.

  “Are you there?”

  She asked this aloud, though she knew she was unlikely to get an answer, much less one spoken out loud, with all the body and volume of a person’s voice.

  She waited.

  Silence greeted her words, and her heart sank a few centimeters.

  It was possible that her mind had been playing tricks on her ever since the battle. Trauma had a way of addling the brain. Loss wreaked havoc on the human mind, and Echo, it would seem, was not immune to its influence.

  She let out a sigh, preparing herself for the climb back down. There was so much to be done. Explanations to be made to the human residents of New York, who were still reeling from the revelation that an entire society had existed beneath their feet while they had been none the wiser. There were injured people who needed looking after. Dragons to find. The one that had joined the fray had taken off after the last shadow beast had dissolved into nothingness, its great and terrible wings carrying it far away. Echo suspected the human military had tried to capture it, but like any magical creature worth its salt, it had evaded them. Just as the Avicen had done for millennia. Until now.

  Echo stuffed her hands into her pockets and turned away from the edge of the roof.

  There was nothing for her to see. Nothing for her to hear. Nothing for her to feel.

  She hadn’t gone more than three steps when she felt it.

  She stopped. Closed her eyes. Strained her senses, both mundane and magical, as far as she could.

  There.

  A tiny tug.

  The vessels had left her days ago. The firebird had done its job. It had brought about the war’s end. It had made room for a new future to grow. But when she was tired—which was always—she felt a shadow of their presence, like a perfume hanging in the air after its wearer had left the room.

  Sillage, she thought. French. The trace of a person left behind after he is gone.

  Her ears strained and she heard it. A faraway voice, as soft as the chiming of a distant bell, humming a tune almost too soft to hear.

  Echo hummed along, reciting the words in her head.

  One for sorrow.

  Two for mirth.

  The tug grew stronger, as if it were trying to pull her in a particular direction, but not one that was restricted by the limits of the physical plane as she understood it. There was a sense of summoning to the tug. A persistence that verged on obstinate.

  The vessels had left. All but one.

  Echo breathed the name into the evening air, her hope almost too much to bear. “Rose?”

  She didn’t get a response, but she didn’t need one. She knew.

  Rose had made her a promise, and Echo knew there was nothing in the world that would stop her from keeping it. Not the laws of physics. Not the known limitations of magic. And certainly not something as pedestrian as death.

  “Where are you?” Echo asked.

  Again, there was no answer. Not yet. But Echo thought that one was on its way, striving toward her. She could feel the shape of it in her dreams, and for once, she didn’t run from them.

  The first night after the battle had been the worst. She thought she would be fine never sleeping again. She hadn’t wanted to face the morning when she knew she’d be forced to remember all that had passed. All she’d lost.

  But that wasn’t what happened.

  So fiercely had she dreaded the first morning in a world without Caius that she’d almost missed it, nestled as she was in that liminal space between sleeping and waking, when nothing was certain and all things were possible.

  A ghost of a touch. A phantom breath on her cheek. The quiet humming of a lullaby in a voice that was decidedly masculine. All of them too real to be the product of an imagination desperate to cling to even the slimmest hope.

  Echo knew better than anyone that death wasn’t always the end. Sometimes, death was a beginning.

  The tug faded, but it would come back, stronger and stronger, just as it had every day since the battle.

  Patience was not one of her middle names, but maybe it could be, if the cause was just.

  And so Echo would wait. She’d wait as long as it took for Rose to fulfill her promise. The tether that connected the two of them had thinned, but it had not snapped. Rose could reach her. And if Rose reached Caius, then Echo could reach him too.

  Nothing was ever so lost that it couldn’t be found again.

  After all, she had found herself, and that had been hardest of all. She had been many things in her life:

  A lost child.

&
nbsp; A lonely girl.

  A survivor.

  A savior.

  A thief.

  This last descriptor felt the truest in that moment and every moment before it. She stole things. And she was good at it. And when something was stolen from her, she always found a way to steal it back.

  A childhood.

  A life.

  A love.

  She’d never been much good at taking no for an answer, even when the laws of physics and magic were determined to say it.

  She’d changed the world once, and she would bend its rules once more if she had to.

  Echo opened her eyes and breathed deeply. The air was still thick with smoke and dust, but there was something else there. Possibility. Potential.

  There were so many stories left to tell. This one was not over.

  No, this one was just beginning. And what a beginning it was. Echo let herself mull over the threads of the story they had started, all of them together, her heart sputtering because Caius wasn’t there to see it.

  Yet.

  A crown needed a head to rest upon, and in the vacuum left by Caius’s sacrifice, his closest friend had risen to take his place, at least until a proper election could be held. As far as Echo knew, not a single Drakharin soul objected to Dorian’s ascension to interim Dragon Prince. He had remained loyal to his prince when so many of them had proven faithless. Jasper had accompanied Dorian to Wyvern’s Keep, and no one had objected to that either, but Echo suspected that had less to do with the respect they felt for Dorian and more to do with the glares Dorian was capable of leveling at anyone who so much as looked at Jasper with anything but the utmost reverence. The ferocity of these glares was lessened not one bit by the fact that he had only one eye. Echo’s magic had healed the wounds from the battle, but nothing older. Dorian had thanked her and said that was enough.

  A Dragon Prince with an Avicen consort. They truly had changed the world, in the most unexpected of ways.

  The war was over. There would be other wars in the future. There were always other wars. But for now, there was peace.

  And so it goes, Echo thought. It was a line from one of her favorite Vonnegut books. A pithy phrase summing up the tragedies of life and death and the incalculable cruelties people were capable of inflicting on each other. Tomorrow the moon would set and the sun would rise and the world would keep on spinning, held together in all its delicate fragility, so easily shattered.

  She looked up, raking her eyes over the familiar constellations she recognized. There was comfort to be had in familiarity. In her mind, she drew lines connecting the stars. A frown creased her brow when she noticed a star that had not been there before.

  It was possible that it had been there and she simply had never noticed. It could have been obscured by clouds or pollution, or maybe its flickering light had only just made its way to Earth. But there was something that felt new about it. It burned brighter than the stars around it, as if beckoning for her attention.

  The Dragon Princes, Caius had told her, were said to ascend to the heavens at the end of their reigns. It was one of the many stories he had shared with her as they had lain awake on a rooftop of a warehouse in London, hiding from those who wished them harm, surrounded by safety that had proven to be an illusion. The war had found them. And it had claimed him. Perhaps, in death, Caius had taken up his rightful place among the stars.

  Her throat constricted. She drew in a breath, and longing filled her lungs. She was no stranger to the optimistic ache of wishful thinking, but this felt different. Her eyes were locked on that star, the sight of it knocking loose something that had been trapped inside her. She felt something give in her chest. She exhaled, and that sick cloud of sorrow began to thin. Hope—pale and weak but there—unfurled deep inside her, blossoming like a trampled flower.

  I’ll find him, Rose had promised. And Echo was beginning to believe that maybe she had.

  “Thank you.” Echo breathed words into the smoke-laden air and hoped that wherever Rose was, she heard. A cool breeze carried the words up into the night sky as if lifting them toward the stars.

  Echo heard the scrape of boots on gravel. The footsteps were slow, as if the person was taking deliberate care not to spook her. Or perhaps they were unsure of their welcome.

  Echo let them approach, but she did not turn around. There was no sense of danger now. Everyone who wished her harm was dead, dying, or detained. And she did not have the power of the firebird anymore. She had turned it over to people who needed it more than she did, and now she was free. Free of its prison. Free of its potential. She was just a girl standing among the ruins of a demolished library, staring up at the stars.

  The person stopped a few feet behind her. “I can come back,” said a familiar voice, “if you would rather be alone.”

  Rowan.

  She had come up to the roof seeking solitude, but he was a warm presence at her back and she had no wish to send him away.

  “It’s all right.” Echo turned to look at him, forcing her lips into a small smile. It wasn’t as difficult as she thought it would be. “I don’t mind the company.”

  Rowan nodded, his hands thrust into his pockets. He looked different. It wasn’t merely the cut on his brow—hastily stitched by the battlefield healers working frantically below—or the plaster dust that clung to his skin and clothes. It was as if something fundamental within him had shifted. He was not the person he had been. And neither was she.

  “Are you okay?” Rowan asked.

  “No. Not really.” Echo kept her answer honest. “But I will be. Eventually.”

  Another nod. His hazel eyes drifted to his feet. He scuffed at the cracked masonry with the toe of his boot. Silence stretched between them, punctuated by the shrill wail of sirens in the distance. The city was stunned, but it would recover. It always did.

  “I have an idea,” said Rowan. “Let’s start over….I’m just me and you’re just you and we’re meeting for the very first time.”

  He stuck out his hand. There was dirt caked under his nails and the black dust of charcoal smudged on his skin. “I’m Rowan. What’s your name?”

  There was power in names. To give your name to a stranger was to give them a little piece of yourself. Years ago, Echo would have hoarded her truth, clutched it tightly, afraid to share it, afraid that breathing a part of her soul into the air would cheapen it. But Rowan was safe. Like Ivy and the Ala and Dorian and Jasper, Rowan was home. He would take that little piece of her and cradle it with gentle hands.

  She took Rowan’s hand in hers, committing each old callus and fresh scar to memory. His wounds told the story of who he was and who he was becoming, just as hers did. Her mind was already churning with plans to do the impossible, and she knew she wouldn’t have to do it alone.

  There was power in names, and power, she had learned, was to be shared, not hoarded.

  “My name,” she said, “is Echo.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  When I was twelve years old, I scribbled some awful poetry in a Winnie-the-Pooh notebook and decided I wanted to be a writer. There were many people who told me it was a silly dream, a waste of time. Some of those comments stung, but they just made me want it more. I owe those people as much as I owe the people who supported me, in a weird, twisty sort of way.

  But only one of those groups merits being mentioned by name.

  First, I want to thank my agent, Catherine Drayton, without whom Echo and her friends would never have found a home. She took my dream and cradled it in her hands and made it come true.

  My editor, Krista Marino, helped mold these books into what they are. Without her, I don’t think I would have survived this trilogy with my sanity (mostly) intact. She is the best editor a scared debut author could have asked for.

  The team at Random House, especially Aisha Cloud: thank you for guiding me on the crazy journey that is publishing; Alison Impey and Jen Wang, thank you for making these books beautiful. Lyndsey Blessing of InkWell Management:
you are a foreign-rights rock star.

  Virginia Boecker, thank you for helping me survive the this-is-the-worst-writing-sin-anyone-has-ever-committed phase of drafting and the burn-it-with-fire stage of revisions. Amanda, Idil, and Laura, thank you for believing in Echo’s story from the start.

  Compiling Echo’s lexicon of esoteric and untranslatable words wasn’t easy, and I’m deeply indebted to the curators of Other-Wordly (other-wordly.tumblr.com), Wordstuck (wordstuck.co.vu), and Haggard Hawks Words (twitter.com/​HaggardHawks).

  Last, but never least, I would like to thank you, the reader, for being curious enough to pick up The Girl at Midnight and caring enough to see this story through to The Savage Dawn. Echo and Ivy and Caius and Dorian and Jasper are as much yours as they are mine. Books may end, but characters carve out spaces for themselves in your heart, and I am so incredibly grateful that you allowed mine into yours. Thank you.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Melissa Grey was born and raised in New York City. She wrote her first short story at the age of twelve and hasn’t stopped writing since. After earning a degree in fine arts at Yale University, she embarked on an adventure of global proportions and discovered a secret talent for navigating subway systems in just about any language. She works as a freelance writer in New York City. She is the author of the Girl at Midnight series: The Girl at Midnight, The Shadow Hour, and The Savage Dawn. To learn more about Melissa, visit melissa-grey.com, follow @meligrey on Twitter, and look for melissagrey_ on Instagram.

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