The Girl at Midnight (21 page)

“Am I interrupting something?” Ivy asked. At the sound of her voice, Caius sprang up and backed away from Echo, gracefully falling back into the chair when his calves touched the seat behind him.

“What? No,” Echo said in a rush, scooting to the other side of the couch and shoving the piece of paper into her pocket. Part of Ivy wanted to ask what was written on it, but an even bigger part just wanted to curl into a tiny ball and sleep for five years straight. She’d ask about it in the morning. Echo patted the seat next to her. “Here. Sit.”

Ivy lowered herself gingerly, her body reminding her of every ache and pain. Echo’s frown was a mix of sympathy and anger. Her protective streak was a mile wide, and Ivy warmed a little to see it.

“How is he?” Caius asked, nodding toward the bed. Dorian’s fair skin turned an interesting shade of pink at something Jasper said before walking away.

“I did the best I could with what I had,” Ivy said.

Echo stared at the bruise on Ivy’s cheek. “How’d you get that?”

Ivy’s hand fluttered to her face, hovering over the bruise. She debated not answering—the situation was awkward enough as is, with two Drakharin camped out in what amounted to an Avicen safe house—but her eyes gave her away when they slid, involuntarily, to Dorian.

Both Echo and Caius followed her gaze. Ivy saw the moment they put two and two together. Like a cat ready to pounce, Echo tensed, but Ivy placed a hand on her knee to still her. Caius fell very deliberately silent.

“Don’t,” Ivy said.

Head snapping between Dorian and Ivy, Echo sputtered, “But he—But you—But I can’t just—”

“You can and you will,” Ivy said. “I don’t want to fight right now, so just leave it.”

“Thank you,” Caius said. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Talk to Dorian? Heal Dorian? Not kill Dorian or otherwise cause him additional grievous bodily harm?
Ivy wanted to ask Caius which one he meant. Instead, she simply replied, “I know.”

Caius nodded at them both, pushing himself out of the chair and making his way to Dorian’s bedside. He rested his
hand on Dorian’s forehead, and Dorian stirred, already in the grip of the healing tea. Caius sat on the floor, back resting against the bed. He, too, closed his eyes. Echo watched him, as attentive as a hawk.

“I don’t like this,” Ivy said.

Echo looked at Ivy, eyebrows raised. “What part of this exactly? The part where we’re on the run from the Drakharin, or the part where we’re hiding out in a thief’s house in Strasbourg, or the part where you and I are evidently sharing a couch for the night?”

Ivy pinched the bridge of her nose, willing back the headache she felt tingling right behind her eyes.
When you put it like that …
 “If I had to pick just one … I don’t like that we ran off with two Drakharin. I don’t trust them.”

“Well, they got us out of the keep,” Echo said with a shrug. “Maybe they’re not so bad.”

Ivy knew that tone of voice. It reminded her of the time Echo had found a mangy cat in the subway tunnels beneath Grand Central, the ones the Ala had told them never to play in. Echo had wrapped the cat in her jacket and presented it to the Ala, big brown eyes earnest as ever as she innocently inquired, “Can we keep it?” They would not be keeping Caius. Or Dorian. Especially not Dorian. Ivy rested her head in her hands and focused on breathing in and out. She was staying under the same roof as a man who’d helped imprison her.

A hand on Ivy’s arm pulled her from her thoughts.

“Are you okay?” Echo asked.

The short answer was no. The long answer was also no. But no got them nowhere. No was useless.

“As okay as I can be,” Ivy said. “I didn’t know your life was so exciting.”

Echo laughed, but the sound was all wrong, fragile and worn. “This is extreme, even for me.”

Ivy picked at the tassels on one of Jasper’s throw pillows. “Echo,” she asked, “are you sure we can trust them?”

Echo slouched deeper into the couch, as if she were trying to burrow a hole to the other side. “Sure? No, not sure. But I have this feeling.… My gut says that Caius means what he says. I don’t know why, but I believe him.”

Ivy was far from sold. Her skepticism must have shown on her face, because Echo said, “You don’t have to do this, Ivy.”

“Do what?”

“You can go home. No one will blame you for anything. You got taken; it’s not your fault. Everyone loves you.” The
unlike me
was silent, but it was there all the same. “Even Altair.”

Ivy frowned. “What kind of friend would I be if I left you alone with two Drakharin and the Avicen you once described as the shadiest person you know?”

“I heard that.” Jasper was in the kitchenette, but the loft offered little by way of privacy.

Ivy ignored him. “Why does this mean so much to you, Echo? I mean, I get why the firebird is important, but why does it have to be you? Let someone else do this.”

Echo shook her head, eyes downcast. “It needs to be me,” she said softly.

“But why? Echo, you’re only seventeen. I know you don’t feel like a kid, and that’s fair—you grew up too fast, we both did—but you don’t have to do this.”

“You don’t understand.” When Echo looked up at her, eyes raw, Ivy’s heart broke. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“What
what’s
like?” Ivy asked. “Talk to me.”

“They look at me like I shouldn’t be there. Like they would be happier if I wasn’t,” Echo said. Ivy didn’t need to ask who
they
were. Altair. Ruby. The Avicen like them. Everyone who had ever looked at Echo as though she were lesser. “But if I do this, if I find the firebird, if I help them end this war, then they can’t say I don’t belong. They can’t say I’m not one of them.”

“Oh, Echo.” Ivy took one of Echo’s hands in her own. “You do belong with the Avicen. You belong with me and the Ala and Rowan and your little army of sticky brats. Yeah, Altair’s a dick, but he doesn’t speak for all of us.”

Echo sniffled and rubbed her nose with her sleeve. When she spoke, she almost sounded like herself. “Strange how you ended up as an outlaw, and Rowan’s the one in a uniform.”

Ivy smiled, for Echo’s sake. “Yeah, who saw that coming?”

“Crazy world we live in.” Echo rubbed her eyes. “I saw him in his uniform, you know. When he busted me out.”

Nuzzling her head against the sofa, white feathers sticking up at all sorts of angles, Ivy yawned. “Yeah? How’d he look?”

“I prefer him out of it.”

Ivy forced herself to laugh, just a little. “I bet you do.”

Echo flopped backward on the couch, pulling Jasper’s throw blanket across the both of them. The sofa was built for three people sitting, not two teenage girls reclining, but they made it work. Ivy wrapped the blanket around herself like a shield. Echo was trying to be strong for her, and so Ivy would do the same.

“We’re gonna make it home,” Ivy said. “Both of us.”

Echo kept her eyes down, focused on her hands. “I don’t know if I can even call it that. Not now.”

Ivy reached across their legs to seize Echo’s hand. She squeezed it tight. “You belong with us, Echo. Never doubt that. If I can’t get you to believe that, maybe Rowan can. You know he and I don’t always get along, but he loves you, even if he hasn’t said it yet. You’re one of us, whether you like it or not. Just try to remember that.” She brought her other hand up, pinkie raised. “Promise? For me?”

Echo’s smile was more a halfhearted twitch of the lips, but it was something. She linked her own pinkie with Ivy’s. “Promise.”

Echo crouched deeper in the coat closet. It was dark, and the smell of old wool was thick on the air. This was her safe space. The place where she went when the monsters outside were too real to ignore. She balanced her flashlight on her knee and turned the pages of a hopelessly outdated encyclopedia. It was so old, the chapter on the Berlin Wall referred to the structure as “still standing.” Echo had read it cover to cover enough times that the pages had gone soft like fabric. Its words were imprinted on her brain, but still she read on. She reached up to push her bangs out of her face, and that was when she realized she was in a dream. Echo hadn’t had bangs since she was seven. She’d let her hair grow out after running away, and it was only ever tamed when the Ala forced her into a chair to trim the ends.

The nightmare was a familiar one, and as the dream unraveled, she knew what to expect. There was the crunch of gravel in a driveway, the familiar growl of an engine on
its last legs, the metallic slam of a car door closing. The sharp tang of whiskey and the cloying scent of stale cigarettes clinging to the air no matter how many windows she cracked. The closet door yanked open so fast and hard that its hinges groaned in protest.

But when the door opened, it wasn’t the backlit figure of her mother—drunk, and reeking of whatever bar she’d stumbled home from—that she had been expecting.

“Hello, my little magpie.”

The Ala reached a hand down to Echo, black feathers glinting in the soft light behind her. Over her shoulder, Echo could see the mismatched furniture and haphazard piles of throw pillows that decorated the Ala’s chambers. The wave of homesickness that hit her was so powerful, she felt as if she might drown in it.

“Ala,” Echo said. She pulled herself to her feet, aware of how small the closet was. Or had she grown in the seconds it took for her to stand? One could never quite trust the internal logic of dreams. “What are you doing here?”

The Ala squeezed Echo’s fingers and drew her out of the darkness. With her long skirt whispering against the Persian rug, she guided Echo to the center of the room. “I’m here because you needed me.”

The glow of candlelight was hazy, as if Echo were looking at everything through a lens smeared with Vaseline. There were no sharp edges. The corners of the shelves and tables were worn down and blurred. The more Echo fought to bring it all into focus, the faster it slipped away. The Ala’s fingers untangled from hers. Echo reached a hand out, but the Ala shook her head and stepped back.

“I want to go home,” Echo whispered.

There was such sadness in the Ala’s eyes. “I’m afraid you can’t. Not now. Not yet. You have miles to go before you sleep, Echo dear.”

“Don’t you quote Robert Frost at me.”

The Ala smiled. “That’s my girl. But back to your original question. Do
you
know why I’m here?”

Echo frowned. Poking at the world of the dream made the room quiver, as if the walls were threatening to cave in. “You saved me. Back there, in the closet. From my effed-up childhood.”

The Ala shook her head. “No, Echo. You saved yourself. And I wish you hadn’t had to. But you must understand, I cannot save you from the past. Only you can do that.”

Echo pressed the heel of her palms into her eyes. How was it that anyone could be this tired while they were sleeping? “That doesn’t make any sense. Why do I need saving from something that’s already happened?”

“Just because it’s in the past doesn’t mean it’s over. Remember what I taught you, Echo.”

“And what’s that? You know, it wouldn’t kill you to stop being cryptic for like five seconds.”

“Your future is your own. Remember that, and you will find your way.”

The Ala’s form began to go soft at the edges, like the blurred furniture and hazy candlelight. Echo was losing her.

“Ala, wait!” Echo flung a hand out, but the Ala’s feathers slipped through her fingers like smoke.

The walls of the Ala’s chamber disintegrated, giving way to a light that swallowed the smell of melted wax and the feel of the rug beneath her feet. The light was so bright it felt as
if Echo were staring into the heart of the sun. She brought a hand up to shield her eyes. One by one, the sounds and smells and textures of the world around her materialized. Wet grains of sand squished between her bare toes. A spray of ocean water misted her face, and she tasted the salt of it on her tongue. Nearby, waves crested and crashed, dashing against rocks. Overhead, gulls sang their mournful lullaby. Behind her sat a modest wooden cabin, smoke cheerily piping from its chimney. It was a beautiful sight, but unfamiliar.

A screech cut through the gulls’ soft cries. Echo looked up, squinting against the cloudy brightness. A bird, fat and dark, soared toward the beach, a black blemish against the gray-blue sky. Her heart pounded against the walls of her chest in time with each flap of its wings, and she knew that if it reached her, she would die.

Echo tried to run, but her feet sank into the sand. She couldn’t move. The tiny waves that had lapped at her ankles so gently before boiled when they collided with her skin. The bird’s silhouette got bigger and bigger, closer and closer, until Echo could just make out the streaks of white under its wings.

The bird approached, feathers turning to flames as if something had ignited it from within. Echo screamed, but the sound was little more than a pained whimper as acrid air seared her lungs. She wanted to beg, to plead, to open her eyes and wake up and leave this nightmare behind, but the sand formed shackles around her ankles. No matter how vigorously she struggled, she couldn’t break free.

The bird swooped down, talons extended, with a screech loud enough to shatter glass. Its beak was nearly level with
her eyes. Echo held up her arms, and the bird scratched at them in a rage, its beak ripping at her skin. She tried to scream, but her voice had abandoned her. The sand beneath her turned to ash, and the salty tang of seawater was replaced with the hot, coppery taste of blood. Every breath she drew was smoke. She was dying. The sky around her burned, and she burned with it.

Beneath Caius’s feet was solid ground, but he was surrounded by perfect, velvety blackness, darker than the darkest night. The in-between.

A weight settled against his chest. He reached for it, fingers brushing the metal of the locket he’d given to Rose a lifetime ago. He traced the jade and bronze on its face, the gentle dips and swoops of the dragon that adorned it. It was only when the dragon began to peel away from the pendant, flapping its wings as it took to the air, that Caius realized he was dreaming.