The Shadow Hour

by Melissa Grey

  “Let’s try not to kill anyone this time,” Ivy said.

  A line formed between Caius’s brows as his frown deepened. Echo was too tired to deal with this. She didn’t want to think about Caius murdering people—no matter how creepy and unethical those people were in their own right—and she didn’t want to watch Ivy judge him for it. Hell, Echo judged him for it. And somewhere in the back of Echo’s mind, Rose was probably forgiving him. The cognitive dissonance was a lot to handle. Their lives were a lot to handle.

  “Great,” Echo said before the conversation could continue. “Now that that’s settled, I need to get some rest.”

  She left them to their business and plopped down on her mattress, positioned farthest from the windows. With a single, unreadable backward glance at Echo, Caius returned to checking the wards. Ivy joined Dorian by Jasper’s bedside to continue preparing the herbs for a new poultice. The sound of their banter was a comforting white noise. They’d been holed up for months, but it was still strange to consider how unlikely their group was. Two Avicen, two Drakharin—once mortal enemies—and Echo, the lone human. She looked down at her hands, remembering the black and white fire that had burst from her palms. Maybe she wasn’t quite so human after all.

  The mattress dipped beside her. She looked up to find Caius sitting next to her. “Wards okay?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Solid as ever. We’re as safe as we’re ever going to be.” He ran a hand through his dark hair. A few days ago, Dorian had forced Caius into a chair, brandishing a pair of scissors. This is getting out of hand, Dorian had said. Echo, Ivy, and Jasper had shared a bag of microwave popcorn while they watched Caius stew in resentful silence as Dorian cut his hair. That was what passed for entertainment in the warehouse. Caius kept touching the back of his neck, like he wasn’t quite used to the new length. He turned to Echo, eyes gone dark in the flickering candlelight. “How are you feeling?”

  Her smile was small and tight, her jaw clenched. Now that she was back in the warehouse she felt strangled. Odd. Exposed. It was nothing like her home, the secret room in the New York Public Library, with its fairy lights and stolen treasures and mountains of books. The silence and solitude of that place had suited her. The image of that empty room, still shielded by its wards, made her chest ache. But thinking about the things she’d lost was infinitely easier than thinking about the people she’d left behind. Like Rowan. She pushed the thought down, deeper and deeper, as far as it would go.

  “I’m fine,” she lied.

  Caius was not fooled. “You don’t look fine.”

  A train rolled past, shaking the windows. Echo broke the hold his gaze had on her and focused on the television. On its screen was aerial footage of plumes of smoke, bellowing forth from the mouth of a volcano somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, miles off the coast of New Zealand. The flawlessly coiffed blonde behind the news desk relayed the baffled opinions of experts who had agreed en masse that the volcano was supposed to be dormant and that its recent activity was nothing short of a conundrum, as there was no logical explanation for the tectonic movement that had caused its eruption. Something deep inside Echo tugged at her as she watched clouds of black ash and oozing rivers of bright magma flash across the screen. The feeling wasn’t recognition, but a close cousin to it; it felt as though a force within her was trying to communicate in nonverbal sensations. The volcano had erupted the same day Echo had driven a dagger into her own heart, freeing the firebird from, as the prophecy put it, its cage of bones.

  Caius was saying something, his voice low and distant, but Echo heard none of it as the image on the screen switched to the complete and utter ruin of a village, half-collapsed walls sticking up from the ash-covered ground like fractured, blackened teeth. It looked exactly like the village from her dream. She grabbed the remote to turn up the volume and shushed Caius.

  “—the scene here is simply devastating,” intoned the field reporter, his wool coat snapping in the wind, his hair fighting free of its pomade. Behind him, what looked like a rescue crew combed through debris, lifting fallen planks of wood and shuffling around jagged chunks of stone. The dark mass of the volcano was visible in the distance. “This entire area of land has just been destroyed. There’s nothing—and no one—left.”

  “Is there any word on the ground as to what could have caused this?” asked the blonde in the studio, unruffled by the elements.

  The field reporter ran a finger along a wooden stump beside him. His gloved hand came away covered in what looked like soot. “No idea yet, Sandra. But a member of the recovery team has told me that this”—he rubbed his fingers together, smearing the black soot—“residue doesn’t appear to be volcanic in origin, despite the recent activity in the area. We’re not quite sure what it is, but we’re hoping to have answers soon.”

  “Thank you, George,” the newscaster said. “And keep us posted….”

  Echo thumbed down the volume. The tugging in her gut intensified, as if the firebird were shouting at her without words, trying to force her to realize something that should have been obvious but wasn’t. The volcanic eruption. A village swallowed by fire and ash. And all of it timed to neatly coincide with the firebird’s appearance. With her dreams. With the sense of dread that had been building in her since she had sliced open not just her own body but the fabric of the world, letting in a cosmic force she didn’t understand.

  Caius pitched his voice low so only Echo could hear him. “Are you still having those nightmares?”

  She nodded, still not looking at him. The muscles in her neck were taut enough to snap. The others knew about the dreams. It was hard to keep something like that a secret when you woke up screaming several nights in a row. But she didn’t want to talk about them. They made her feel powerless. Confused. Consumed by questions and plagued by suspicions that she had done something terrible and irrevocable.

  “It’s connected,” Echo said softly. “I started dreaming about the volcano before I heard about it on the news. It started that night.” She gestured to the scar on her chest, which was only just visible over the collar of her T-shirt. “The night all this happened.” She swallowed. The words were still strange on her tongue. “The night I unleashed the firebird. I let it into me, but I don’t think it’s the only thing I unleashed.”

  “Perhaps it’s a coincidence,” Caius said. “You went through something extremely traumatic. Maybe your psyche latched on to the idea of the volcano and conflated the events in your mind.”

  She shook her head. “I dreamed about the volcano before I knew it had happened. We didn’t have a TV at Jasper’s loft in Strasbourg. I hadn’t heard the news yet. And that village— I saw it, that exact one.”

  Caius reached for her, maybe to offer comfort, but she pulled away.

  “It’s not a coincidence,” she said. “I know it. I know.”

  Echo couldn’t believe in coincidences, not anymore, not when she lived in a world peopled by creatures that should be more at home in fairy tales than on the streets of major metropolises, not when she herself had become a thing of magic and myth. She could feel Caius’s eyes on her, questioning, wondering, just as she was, what her role in all this was—what the firebird’s role was.

  The bird that sings at midnight from within its cage of bones, Echo remembered, eyes still trained on the now quiet television, riveted by the scene of destruction, will rise from blood and ashes to greet the truth unknown.

  She’d often found herself mulling over the prophecy that had led her here, to this warehouse, to these people. The last line in particular. What truth? As the sensation that was not quite recognition strengthened, as the firebird pounded against the inside of her skull, demanding that she take notice, take action, do something, she thought that maybe she was about to find out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The night air rustled the short strands of Caius’s hair, tickling the back of his neck. He stood on the roof of the warehouse, hands in his pockets, skin still warmed by the memory of Echo’
s body heat. He’d waited until she fell asleep, curled up on the mattress on her side, long brown hair spread out on the pillow like a dark cloud, her brow furrowed even in slumber. Caius had smoothed the wrinkle with a gentle touch, mesmerized by the way she’d turned toward his hand, mumbling something incoherent. People were supposed to look younger in their sleep, but Echo seemed older than her years, as if the weight that bore down on her was even heavier when she was most vulnerable. At night, Caius knew, she was plagued by the lives of the vessels that had come before her, memories that weren’t her own crowding her head like unwelcome houseguests. And that was when she wasn’t forced to live through an eruption, the lone witness to a cataclysmic event that claimed an island in a far-off sea. Eventually, she’d stilled, and Caius had come up to the roof, leaving the others to their nighttime rituals, seeking as much silence as one could find in a place as chronically boisterous as London.

  He gazed at the city spread before him, the silhouettes of buildings dark against a sky so polluted by ambient light that the stars were all but invisible. He and Echo had spent many a night trying to pick out the brightest ones, though she occasionally mistook a passing plane for a shooting star. Even when the constellations weren’t wholly visible, Caius still told her the stories he’d carried with him since childhood: tales of great dragons cutting through the sky, wings as black as the void of space, eyes glittering with the fire of stars. The sky, all Drakharin children were told, was the realm of the gods, where Dragon Princes of days gone by ascended when their reigns came to an end, destined to watch over their earthbound brethren for all eternity. Caius had believed those stories, as children so easily did, until the day of his coronation, when he’d knelt before the assembly of Drakharin nobles that had elected him, and swore that he would serve his people until his dying day. As the weight of the crown settled on his head, he knew that he’d given up the chance to live a long and happy life. Power corrupted, and those it didn’t corrupt, it killed. He’d met his sister’s eyes from across the room, burning as bright as rubies, speaking truth to the lie of her proud smile. He should have seen it then. The jealousy. The ambition. He should have known that his reign would end with Tanith. But love had blinded him, as it was wont to do, and he’d only seen the twin he entered this world with, not her potential for betrayal, and believed what he wanted to believe. That her love for her brother was greater than her aspirations.

  Behind him, the hinges of the rooftop door squealed as it opened. Caius didn’t need to turn around to see who had just come through it. He’d recognize Dorian’s footsteps anywhere.

  Dorian came to stand beside him, pale hair and even paler skin bright in the darkness. A coin appeared in his hand, as if from nowhere, and he proceeded to roll it over his knuckles, fingers moving with a practiced grace.

  “Where’d you learn to do that?” Caius asked as he watched the effortless motion of Dorian’s hands.

  Dorian faltered, and the coin slipped from his grasp. He caught it with his other hand and slipped it into his pocket. “Jasper.”

  “An Avicen teaching you coin tricks.” Caius let himself smile. “Now I really have seen everything.”

  Dorian chuckled softly. “If you look closely at the horizon, you can see pigs flying in the distance.” He turned to Caius, single blue eye as focused as a hawk’s. “Speaking of Jasper…”

  “I know,” Caius said. “He’s not healing. Ivy told me. I think the blade that wounded him was cursed.” He added, “By a warlock.”

  Dorian swore softly in Drakhar. “You never let Tanith off her leash to do as she wished, but now that she’s Dragon Prince, there’s no one to stop her. Without you there to hold her back, she’s getting reckless.” His hand drifted to his side, where his sword would be had he been wearing it. “I would sooner die than allow a warlock to touch my blade. Gods only know what magic they could work on weapons without you even knowing.”

  “I know,” Caius said. “And that’s why I never wanted her to do it. But it seems she has and now we have to deal with the consequences.”

  Beside him, Dorian shuffled, hands curling into fists and uncurling. “Jasper is the one dealing with the consequences. We have to help him, Caius. We have to do something. I can’t just sit here and watch him die because he took a blow meant for me.”

  Dorian, pleading for the life of an Avicen. Caius stifled a smile. He turned back to survey the urban vista before them. It was so different from the world he’d known, but he was finding a kind of alien beauty in that difference. “If the blade was truly cursed by a warlock, then perhaps a warlock can remove the magic infecting his wound.”

  With a weary sigh, Dorian turned to rest against the parapet, arms crossed over his chest, back to the brightly colored lights shining through the windows of the warehouse across the way. There was a party in that warehouse every other day. Echo called it a rave. “Well, I’m fresh out of warlock friends after we killed the last batch we worked with. I’m afraid you and I are beginning to earn something of a reputation in that community. Those bridges are a little too burned for us to use.”

  Their eyes met, and for a brief moment, Caius caught the rawness, usually so well hidden, in Dorian’s expression. Dorian turned away, breaking the connection.

  “I have a plan,” Caius said, “but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

  “How many times do I have to say it?” Dorian asked. “I’d follow you anywhere, Caius. Prince or not.”

  “Well,” Caius began. “We’re going to make a new warlock friend. We just need a warlock. Any one will do. Jasper has mentioned before that he used to run with a band of warlocks in his”—Caius curled two fingers in the air, forming quotation marks, a gesture he’d picked up from Echo and Ivy—“ ‘wild and reckless youth.’ I’m going to see if one of them would be willing to help us.”

  Dorian opened his mouth to object, but Caius held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say and I don’t want you to say it, because then we’re just going to argue and you know I always win.”

  Dorian scowled. “Only because I let you.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Caius. “Jasper’s wound requires magic neither you nor I can counter. We need help, even if that help comes from a distasteful source.”

  “You’re right,” Dorian said, his words punctuated by a rapid exhalation. “But Jasper’s in no condition to go anywhere,” he added, all protective indignation. Caius sank his teeth into his lower lip to hold back a smile. After so many years of pining after his prince, it was nice to see Dorian’s affection focused on someone else. He deserved to find love and to have that love returned.

  “And that’s why I’ll be contacting the warlock of his choosing.” Caius pushed himself away from the parapet, stretching his arms high above his head. It was getting late, even if the dull roar of the party across the way showed no signs of abating. He took one last look at the stars, dimmed by the noxious clouds that hung above the city. As prince, he’d done little to deserve his place in the heavens, but he’d meant every word of his vow. He’d protect his people and serve them, even if he had to do it from afar, without a title and with precious few allies. Even after they threw their support behind someone else.

  He started toward the door, Dorian hot on his heels. “I take it you mean to go alone,” Dorian said.

  Caius pulled the door open, grimacing at the loud sound of the hinges complaining. They needed a good greasing. The staircase was dark, illuminated only by a single, flickering bulb hanging sadly from a rusty chain. “I need you here, Dorian. To protect the others.” He winked at Dorian over his shoulder. “Besides, I doubt I could pull you away from Jasper even if I wanted to.”

  Dorian missed the top step. He grabbed the banister, catching himself. Caius laughed, then clapped a hand over his mouth when Dorian shot him a dark look. “Sorry,” Caius said, words muffled by his palm. He lowered his hand. “But it’s true. You’re quite smitten.”

  It was hard to tell in the shadowy stai
rwell, but Caius was willing to bet that there was a pale pink blush painting Dorian’s cheeks. With an indignant huff, Dorian headed down the stairs, brushing past Caius. Oh, yes, that was most certainly a blush, crawling all the way up to the silver hair.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Dorian. He kept his back to Caius as he descended, rounded the bend, and then began making his way down the next staircase.

  “Of course not,” Caius said, taking hold of the banister and swinging himself down in front of Dorian. He bent his knees as he landed, silent as a cat. “I’m sure all those surreptitious glances mean absolutely nothing.”

  Caius was through the door before Dorian could muster a response. He felt lighter than he had in weeks. They had a plan to help Jasper—or at least the very beginnings of a plan. A plan in infancy. And it was probably a terrible plan, but it was better than nothing, and sometimes, that was all anyone could ask for.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Echo woke to the rich, bitter scent of freshly brewed coffee. Her eyes flew open. The coffeemaker in the warehouse had broken two weeks ago, dripping its last forlorn drop of badly burnt coffee as she and Jasper looked on in sadness. Echo bolted upright, kicking off the sheets and pulling a hand through her sleep-tangled hair. In the corner of the room, where they’d arranged boxes of instant oatmeal, cups of ramen noodles, a microwave, a rickety table, and a kettle into a makeshift kitchenette, stood the Ala, greasy paper bag in one hand, and a cardboard tray holding four large cups of coffee in the other. Her expression was that of a disgusted parent walking into a child’s messy bedroom.

  “Honestly, when was the last time any of you ate something that couldn’t be prepared in a microwave?”

  “Ala!” Echo sprang to her feet, legs tangled in the sheets. The Ala was here. The Ala had brought food. The Ala was a goddess.

  Echo’s shout woke the others. On the mattress nearest her, Ivy grumbled, pulling the sheet higher above her head, while Caius rubbed a hand over his face, hiding a yawn. His dark hair was mussed from sleep, but it was an artful disarray, the kind that beckoned to be combed through with questing fingers. He met Echo’s eyes and smiled a little wryly as his gaze dropped. Only then did Echo remember that she wasn’t wearing any pants. Thankfully, the gray T-shirt she’d nipped from Jasper’s stack of clothes hit her mid-thigh. She looked back at Caius and shrugged. Coffee and a hot breakfast were infinitely more important than sartorial modesty. She kicked the mess of blankets off and made her way to the Ala, who was setting the bag and coffee tray down on the table.