by Melissa Grey
My dearest Ivy, the second note began, her penmanship a sloppy, hurried scrawl, I’m off to fight bad guys. Sorry about the secrecy, but if I don’t return, I bequeath to you all my earthly possessions, including that replica Romanov tiara you loved even after I told you it was fake. Also, find the laptop I stole from that guy in the library and delete my browser history. And please…take care of the Ala. Love, Echo.
It was a lighthearted note, jovial both in its promise and its warning, but she couldn’t bring herself to bid Ivy a proper farewell. The finality of goodbye was too much to bear.
Echo yanked the linens off the bed and the drapery from the four-poster frame. She tied the ends together, fashioning the bedclothes into a rope she hoped was long enough to reach the ground. It would be the height of humiliation if someone found her in the garden the next morning, lying amid the unkempt shrubbery with a broken leg. Her plan was simple: crawl out the window, navigate her way through the garden and over the castle’s outer wall with the aid of a maple tree that had conveniently grown right next to it, and abscond with the boat to a shore distant enough to let her access the in-between but not so far away that the Avicen on the island wouldn’t be able to find the boat. That was one theft in which she’d take no pleasure.
Before Echo knew it, it was time to leave. Backpack on, hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail, she secured one end of her makeshift rope around a leg of the bed and tossed the other end out the window. She crawled down as silently as possible. She kept her mind on the physical tasks at hand. Finding footholds with the toes of her boots. Balancing her weight and praying the bed was sturdy enough to support it. When she reached the bottom, she jumped into the bushes and, quiet as a cat, crept through the garden and up the maple tree.
She couldn’t look back. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to do what she had to. It was, Echo thought grimly, like something from a story she’d encountered years ago. She’d gone through a phase of researching religions. The Ala had reared her on tales from Avicen myth, the result of which was that Echo was more familiar with their pantheon of gods and goddesses than she was with that of any human religion. Capitalizing on the library’s vast collection, she’d gorged herself on tales from the Bible, the Torah, the Quran. She’d drawn comparisons between the Avicen gods and the human ones. The Avicen gods had names, the Ala had explained, but no mortal who walked upon the Earth knew them.
There’s power in names, the Ala had reminded a curious ten-year-old Echo.
But even so, there was the goddess of love, a scarlet-feathered figure with two heads, one smiling with the euphoria of newfound romance, the other sobbing with the ache of heartbreak. The deities of the harvest—both male and female, for life could not exist without both—cropped up in every faith around the world, including the Avicen’s. Their god of war had reminded Echo strongly of Ares, with his reputation for ruthlessness. And as someone who had shuffled off this mortal coil only to resurrect shortly after, Echo was uncomfortable considering the Avicen parallels with Christ-like figures. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach.
As she walked away from the castle, mostly dark now save for a few windows that flickered with weak candlelight, she remembered the tale of a city besieged by angels and a woman who looked back as she tried to escape, despite strict orders not to. The woman had turned into a pillar of salt. Echo had read the story one of the nights spent at the Nest, with Ivy holding a flashlight under the covers while Echo turned the pages. When she had asked Ivy why the woman had been punished for looking back, Ivy had simply shrugged and clicked off the flashlight. The darkness of the room had enveloped their words, granting them greater substance than they probably deserved.
“Maybe she couldn’t help it,” Ivy had said, snuggling into the mound of pillows on which they’d made their bed. Echo had lost count of the number of slumber parties they’d had in that room. “Maybe she was just scared. Maybe she wanted to go back, but she knew she couldn’t or she would die too.”
Echo hadn’t understood the story then, but she understood it now. Looking back was easy. Even if everything you left behind was in flames, it was easier to watch it burn than it was to keep going, to march headlong into an uncertain future. But Echo did not have the luxury of stalling. She was no longer a girl, swept up in an adventure too grand for her. She was a part of it, a cog in the machine, a player on the stage. She was the firebird. Not a pillar of salt, but a means to an end. She was a weapon, a sword. She kept going, ignoring the way her heart pounded in her chest, thumping out two words in a steady rhythm.
Look back. Look back. Look back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
New York City had become a war zone. Tanks rolled through the streets, flanked by young men in pale green fatigues, high-powered rifles slung over their shoulders, caps pulled low over watchful eyes that darted here and there, into every corner, looking for enemies Echo knew they wouldn’t find. The streets were empty of civilians. The ubiquitous hot dog vendors, who slung frankfurters through hail and sleet and snow, had abandoned their street corners. Coffee shops and delis were dark. Some had their metal grates pulled closed; others had been locked in a hurry as their owners fled in a rush to get as far from Grand Central as possible. The area between Fourteenth and Fifty-Ninth Streets was impassable on foot. Yellow police tape and parked police cars cordoned off Fifth Avenue.
It took the last of Echo’s shadow dust for her to travel from the shore of the Hudson River to a utility closet on the platform of the Forty-Second Street/Bryant Park subway stop. She exited the tiny room to find the station deserted, save for a few scattered National Guardsmen patrolling the area. There was no crowd to hide her. The subway system had been shut down immediately after the attack, and Echo was the only soul foolish enough to try to use it. She evaded detection by ducking around columns and hopping the turnstile as silently as a rabbit. It was easier than she had expected. The guards were afraid. Of another attack. Of terrorists lurking in the shadows. Of bombs waiting to go off that might or might not be hidden throughout the transit system. It wasn’t the first time the city had been caught in a stranglehold of fear, but it never got any easier. People forgot what it was like to be scared, to be uncertain. But their fear was useful to Echo now. Danger made the guards alert, but their fear made them sloppy. They didn’t see a wraith of a girl flit up the steps and out of the station. They didn’t spy her hopping from darkened corner to darkened corner through Bryant Park, the sandwich kiosks and umbrella-shaded tables providing her with just enough cover to sneak by. Slowly and methodically, Echo made her way to the library’s side entrance, to the nondescript metal door that deposited maintenance workers and staff into their preferred smoking space, a small, open-air alcove littered with flecks of ash and occupied by a green municipal trash can cum ashtray. Echo waited a beat before trying the handle. The door was usually left open for convenience’s sake. Her best chance of entering the library unseen was the possibility that no one had remembered to lock the door on their way out as the area was evacuated.
All eyes were focused on Grand Central. Clusters of guards ambled warily up and down Fifth Avenue, but no one was looking at the library, a pale gray mass against the darkness of night. Echo allowed the guardsmen to pass. Twenty paces. Thirty. When she was confident their backs were to her, their ears comfortably out of range, she twisted the door handle and pushed. The door glided open without a sound. She said a silent prayer of thanks to whichever member of the custodial staff had seen fit to oil its hinges so recently. When the door closed behind her—locked this time—Echo was submerged in complete darkness. With her hands on the walls on either side of her, she felt her way through the narrow maintenance corridor, around a tight corner, then down a wider hallway. Even without the benefit of light, her steps were sure. These darkened corridors had been her playground her entire life; she knew exactly where she needed to go.
A few more turns, two more hallways, and she was in the library’s foyer. The spotlights that illum
inated Grand Central for rescue workers and the National Guard bathed the nearby streets so brightly that enough light angled through the glass panes of the revolving doors at the entrance to shine feebly on the polished white marble of the library’s floor. The busts of wealthy patrons peered down at Echo from their lofty alcoves, their stone eyes silently welcoming her home.
Like every other building in Midtown, the library had been evacuated in a rush. The front desk, where a blue-suited guard normally inspected bags to make sure no patrons left with books, still held traces of his presence. A coffee mug sat on an open newspaper, the ink smudged and the paper wrinkled by a few stray droplets and a ring of moisture near the mug’s base, a milky white film settled atop the now cold liquid. Loose papers had fallen to the floor as students had dropped their research like trees shedding their leaves in autumn. Dirty footprints marred some of the pages, the work trampled in the haste to flee. A small stuffed bear with threadbare stitching stared at Echo from the middle of the staircase leading to the second floor. Its forlorn button eyes were dark with loss. Or maybe Echo was just projecting.
On quiet feet, she made her way up the marble stairs, through the stacks, down the pitch-black hallways whose lights she dared not switch on. Echo had known returning home would be painful. She hadn’t predicted just how heavy her heart would feel as she walked across the familiar white marble, how her eyes would sting with tears that didn’t quite fall as she gazed up at the painted sky on the ceiling of the Rose Reading Room, a false daylight compared to the night outside. Never before had she been able to walk through the library so freely, secure in the knowledge that there was no one to stumble across her. No employees burning the midnight oil. No night guards roaming the reading rooms. It was just her and the silence of the library.
—
The ward on the staircase leading to her room pushed back at Echo, the resistance lasting only as long as it took for the spell to recognize its caster. With a prick of her finger and a whispering of words that had taken on a new meaning since the last time she’d uttered them, her hands wrapped around the hilt of the dagger stuck in her chest—“By my blood”—she opened the door.
She clicked on the fairy lights. The homesickness that struck her was so sudden, so overwhelming, that she thought she would choke on it. Things were mostly where she had left them. Mostly. Her living space was a prime example of orderly chaos, the kind that would look like a mess to an outsider but always made sense to Echo. And while the treasures on the shelves and the books littering her desk and nightstand and random bits of the floor were all in their proper place, they were neater than she’d left them. The stacks of books by her bedside weren’t quite as precarious as they had been. The crumpled candy wrappers had been moved from the surface of her desk to the wastebin beneath it. Her collection of matryoshka dolls was now arranged in order of height on one of her shelves, from the largest on the left to the smallest on the right, their painted eyes staring straight ahead, all facing the same direction.
Someone had tidied up her room in her absence. And the only person who could have made it past the protective ward without permission was the one who had helped her set it up. The Ala. She’d been taking care of Echo, even when Echo hadn’t been around to yell at her for moving her things or appreciate the silent act of maternal love that it was.
Echo pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. You will not cry. You will not cry. You will not freaking cry.
There was work to do. There were things to steal. Monsters to fight. Mystery illnesses to cure. Tears were not on the agenda. Tears got in the way; they were an obstacle—and a sloppy one at that—and obstacles were exactly the type of nonsense Echo did not have time for.
But tears were stubborn, even more stubborn than Echo was, and when she pulled her hands away, they fell freely down her cheeks, obscuring her vision. What she wouldn’t give to go back in time, to the days when things made sense and her primary concern in life had been picking out the right birthday present for the Ala. A presence fluttered at the back of her mind; it was like the ghostly equivalent of someone rubbing her back with a soothing hand. The sensation wasn’t quite as comforting as Echo assumed the vessel—whichever one it was—intended it to be, but it had the effect of forcing her to overcome the swell of emotion that had gotten the best of her. She pieced her focus back together, steadfastly ignoring the ache in her chest.
Work to do. Monsters to fight.
Echo swung her backpack off and set about stuffing it full of everything she might need for the task ahead. Her second-best lock-picking kit—the best one had been confiscated by a Drakharin guard during her brief stint in a cell deep in the belly of Wyvern’s Keep—a small flashlight, her compact book of spells, a pair of slim leather gloves, a handful of granola bars, and a map of London marked with tube stations and other spots from which the in-between could be accessed in case of emergency. In the mesh side pocket went a bottle of water, and in the front pocket she stuffed two pairs of socks. One never knew when one might need a clean pair of socks. Almost finished. She dropped to her knees and began rummaging around beneath her bed. Behind the army of footwear—boots and sneakers and ballet flats collecting dust—was a small metal banker’s box, its contents protected by a rusted brass combination lock. Echo slid the box out from underneath the bed, dust tickling her nose. She thumbed in the combination: 0621. June 21. The date the Ala had found her in the library and brought her into a world of magic. The date she’d been given a new home, a new family, and, unbeknownst to either her or the Ala, a new purpose. Within the box was a small pouch, left untouched for years and reserved for only the direst of circumstances. A note written in Echo’s own hand was stapled to the pouch: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, BREAK (METAPHORICAL) GLASS. If her current circumstances didn’t qualify as a dire emergency, she didn’t know what would. She replaced the box and rose to her feet, weighing the pouch in her hand. It was full of shadow dust, but she would still need to use it wisely. Gods knew when she’d be able to stock up on more.
Echo let her gaze roam around the room. The aim was to travel light, but she wasn’t sure when—or if—she’d ever see her home again. She wondered what would become of this place if she never returned. Maybe the spell would wear off after a few years and some unsuspecting library worker would stumble upon a strange room full of strange things. Maybe they’d make up stories about the girl who lived in the library, unseen, passing through the stacks like a ghost. Maybe she’d become an urban legend, a tale passed down through generations of library employees to kill time during their breaks. But then, maybe she’d defeat the evil threatening to destroy everything she held dear and return triumphant to take up residence in a room that felt far too small to contain her. Wishful thinking, she knew. Things never quite worked out the way she wanted, and she had little reason to believe this time would be any different.
Looking again at her unzipped backpack, Echo was struck with a sense of longing. This couldn’t be it. She couldn’t leave here with a bag full of strictly utilitarian goods. If she was headed off to her doom, she didn’t want to go alone. Not completely. She refused to further endanger the lives of the people important to her by staying with the pack, but she could not—would not—allow herself to forget that she was loved. She mattered. And she would carry the thought of those who cared for her with her no matter where she went or what she did.
Behind the orderly matryoshka dolls was a framed photograph—the only one on the shelves. The picture had been taken on Echo’s sixteenth birthday, and it had been a point of contention between her and the Ala for months afterward. The Avicen had a strict policy against photography, but Echo had snuck a camera into the Nest that day, an old Polaroid she had salvaged from the library’s lost and found after eyeing it covetously for the span of a full week, the maximum amount of time she waited before pilfering in case someone returned to retrieve their belongings. Ivy had once asked her why she bothered waiting. Echo was, after all, a thief. Echo had said that even t
hieves had codes of honor and Ivy had accepted the explanation with a roll of her eyes and a demand that Echo pass her a slice of pizza. But that birthday had been special. It hadn’t been a “sweet sixteen” in the truest sense of the term—the Avicen, being a race whose people could live for centuries, didn’t attach any particular significance to the sixteenth year of life. But Echo was human enough to want the milestone marked in some way. The Ala had arranged a dinner picnic in her chamber of all Echo’s favorite foods and invited Ivy and Rowan and a few of the Avicelings who clung to Echo whenever she stopped by the Nest. They’d sat on cushions on the floor, eating macarons from Paris and mochi from Tokyo and sopaipillas from New Mexico. Echo had taken the photo on the sly. In it, Ivy and Rowan were arguing over the last macaron while the Ala rested her hands on the heads of two Avicelings who had fallen asleep on her lap, their bellies full to bursting, victims of a vicious sugar crash. The Ala had seen the photograph on Echo’s bookshelf the following week and told Echo to get rid of it. If someone were to find it, the Avicen risked the kind of exposure they’d avoided for centuries living beneath the streets of New York. Echo had refused. It wasn’t until weeks later, when a frame had miraculously appeared to house the photograph, that Echo realized the Ala had forgiven her for taking it.
Echo removed the photo from its frame, careful not to smudge it. She opened a drawer in her desk, hoping she had some plastic sandwich bags left. The frame was too heavy to bring, but she didn’t want the photo getting wet or otherwise damaged. At the back of the drawer was a box of ziplock bags she’d shoved in there, and she let out a sigh of relief when she found a single one left. She sealed the picture inside the bag. As she ran her fingers along the faces of the people she loved so dearly, a word came to mind, surfacing from the depths of her lexicon.