The Shadow Hour

by Melissa Grey

  “Setsunai,” Echo thought. Japanese. “Bittersweet.” “Painful.” Used to describe a particular and untranslatable cruelty inflicted upon the heart.

  She might never see them again. The Ala might never wake up. Ivy might never get to yell at Echo for running off on her own. Rowan might never know how much he meant to her. A tear dropped onto the plastic bag, and Echo wiped it away. No time for that. None at all. She put the photograph into the front pocket of her backpack, but after a moment’s hesitation, she removed it and zipped it into the inside pocket of her leather jacket. That was better. She would keep them close. Her backpack might be lost, but the only way she’d ever lose possession of her leather jacket was if she were dead.

  She drew in a deep breath to steady herself. Swinging her backpack over one shoulder, she bid farewell, not just to the hidden room that had been her home for ten years, but also to the girl who had lived in it. She was a different person now, and she would be even more different still if she ever returned. And if she didn’t…Well, that hardly merited thinking about.

  Echo cast a final glance around the room and, to no one in particular, said, “Goodbye.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The two guards deposited Caius in his room and locked the door when they left. He had no doubt that they were standing on the other side of that door, probably flanking it like good sentries.

  He took in his surroundings and remembered there was no window, which was hardly surprising. The Avicen would have been beyond foolish to allow him any opportunity to escape. He knew where the refugees from the Nest were hiding, and while he didn’t know their exact numbers, he could easily estimate how many people the castle could hold.

  The walls were covered in old tapestries. Dirty white unicorns pranced around fenced enclosures surrounded by laughing children who held ribbons aloft. A fine coating of dust clung to the textiles. When he touched them, his fingers came away covered in gray silt. Years of neglect had woven the dirt deeply into the threads. He doubted even the most diligent restoration work would be able to uncover the tapestries’ lost beauty.

  On either side of the room’s cold fireplace were two neat circles in the dust on the floor. Caius assumed that two vases, removed prior to his arrival, had once occupied those spots. The metal ring on the wall beside the fireplace was similarly empty, the pokers and tongs confiscated by his hosts. There was a writing desk crammed into a tight corner, its surface bare. Other than the door, there was no escape from this small, oppressive room.

  Rowan’s words played in his head like a masochistic mantra. If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to my girlfriend alone.

  “Girlfriend.”

  It wasn’t a term the Drakharin used, but Caius knew its meaning.

  With a sigh, Caius fell onto the bed, splaying his arms wide as he sank into the mattress. He lay there, cursing the gods in silence. He cursed the god of love for making him feel. How much easier life would be if his heart were stone, impervious to beauty and cleverness and bravery. He cursed the god of tragedy for raining it upon him while he soaked up misfortune like a thirsty field. If there had been a god of cruel irony, he would have cursed that one, too. Eventually, he slept, plagued by dreams of laughing gods and girls too clever for their own good.

  —

  Without the benefit of natural light, Caius couldn’t tell what time it was when he heard the lock tumble open. He couldn’t be bothered to get up, dignity be damned. The disks in his spine groaned as he turned his head to see who had come through the door, though the angle flipped the world upside down. Rowan stood before him, arms across his chest, studying Caius with a stony look as the guards closed the door.

  “Comfortable?” Rowan asked, voice simmering with the coals of resentment he’d no doubt spent the night stoking. Caius couldn’t really blame him.

  “Quite.” He made no move to rise. It was petty, and he recognized its pettiness, but he wanted to see how long Rowan would tolerate this stubbornness before he dropped the facade of hospitality.

  As it turned out, not very long.

  “Get up. We’re leaving.”

  They took the servants’ stairs so they wouldn’t be seen. Most of the Avicen believed the Drakharin were behind the attack on Grand Central, and Altair did not seem eager to dissuade them of that notion. For the time being, Caius was to remain hidden, out of sight. The servants’ corridors were dark, the air dank and cold. Their path was illuminated by an old-fashioned gas lantern that Rowan held aloft. There were sconces on the walls, Caius noticed, but without tapers to fill them. Altair was most likely conserving supplies. No sense in wasting perfectly good candles on a path trod only by a Drakharin, his guide, and the occasional pink-tailed rat. Avalon hadn’t been occupied in decades, and the passageway was in worse repair than the residential sections of the castle. Somewhere nearby water dripped from a broken pipe. Moss had taken up residence on the walls, and Caius’s boots splashed through shallow puddles that had collected on the floor.

  Rowan remained taciturn as they walked. Tension sang through the line of his back, as taut as a bowstring. It would be wise, Caius thought, to let Rowan stew in his own hate. But lately, wisdom had a habit of failing him.

  “She fought well,” said Caius. He did not specify of whom he spoke. There was no need. They both knew.

  Bowstrings could only be held taut for so long before they snapped. Rowan came to an abrupt stop, the lantern swinging in his grasp as he turned. “Don’t.”

  “I am trying,” Caius said, ignoring the voice inside screaming at him to hold his tongue, “to be nice.”

  The Avicen’s eyes narrowed, eyes nearly black in the lantern’s feeble light, and for a second, Caius saw the makings of the fighter Rowan could become. “I don’t want you to be nice,” Rowan said through gritted teeth. “I don’t want you to talk. I don’t want you to even look at me. My commander ordered me to collect you and Echo, and so that’s what I’m doing, but we are not friends. We will never be friends.” Rowan stepped forward, the toes of his boots nearly touching Caius’s. The Avicen was a few inches shorter, but there was nothing small about him in that moment. Caius met his level gaze. The boy would make a worthy adversary for those who crossed him. Caius hoped he was as good an ally. But rivers could not be crossed without first building a bridge.

  “It is not your friendship I require,” Caius said. “Nor even your respect. But I want you to know that you have mine. You and your partner fought well the night we met. She died with honor.”

  Silence stretched between them. Even the persistent drip-drop of water from the broken pipe went quiet, as if it, too, could sense that the moment was a powder keg waiting to go off. A wrinkle formed between the Avicen’s brows as an inscrutable emotion flitted across his face. He turned, offering his back to Caius, but he did not resume walking. They stood there, in tense silence, until finally Rowan said, “Ruby was three weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday. Echo has blood on her hands because she was trying to protect you.” The final word was like a punch to the gut. Rowan half turned to Caius and said, “Tell me, what honor is there in children killing children?”

  Rowan didn’t wait for a response. Even if he had, there was none that Caius could give. He had been bred for war, fed a steady diet of tales of courage and heroism from the time he was a babe in arms. His destiny, he had been assured, was to find glory on the battlefield, to christen his blade with Avicen blood. And so it had been for his father before him, and his father’s father. But these young Avicen were different. They lived in a world far less insular than the one that had reared Caius. They saw their lives as full of options beyond a brutal end in a war that did not have one. The injustice, in their eyes, was that they had inherited a conflict that had little meaning for them. To die at the hands of their enemies, Caius understood, was to die for nothing at all. They fought over territories that were never truly theirs and wouldn’t be so long as they had to build wards to survive and hide like rats in a cellar.

 
Caius said nothing more as they emerged from the cramped darkness of the servants’ stairs, through a doorway disguised to integrate seamlessly with the hallway’s plain wood paneling. Rowan extinguished the lantern and hung it from a hook on the servants’ side of the entrance for the next person lucky enough to spend time with the mold and the puddles and the rats. The hallway was empty, save for the Warhawk leaning against the wall by the door at the far end. Her arms were crossed over her chest, and her head bobbed up and down with the inconsistent rhythm of a person struggling to remain awake.

  “Fern,” Rowan called. The Warhawk snapped to attention, her hand flying to the pommel of her sword when she saw Caius approaching. The movement was driven by pure instinct. She stopped herself before she drew her blade, but her eyes remained wary and alert, her hawklike gaze focused on the scales at Caius’s cheekbones. He did not bother greeting her. His good intentions had antagonized enough Avicen for the day.

  “Echo give you any trouble?” Rowan asked.

  Fern shook her head, her eyes never straying from Caius. How strange it must be for them, to harbor a Drakharin in their safe haven. “She’s been as quiet as a mouse.”

  That didn’t sound like the Echo Caius knew. Rowan frowned as if he shared that thought and brushed past Fern to open the door. Caius followed him into the bedroom, Fern hot on their heels, peppering their backs with questions to which neither of them paid any attention.

  The window was open. Gauzy white curtains fluttered in the morning breeze.

  The room was empty.

  Echo was gone.

  “Shit,” Rowan said.

  “Shit,” Caius agreed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Breakfast, Dorian thought, breathing in the bitter scent of his coffee—black, no sugar—really was the most magical time of day. Or rather, it would have been if a dark cloud hadn’t been cast over the spread the Avicen had so generously provided by a warlock who insisted on picking at the food on everyone else’s plate. Everyone but Dorian’s, that was. Even Quinn’s sense of self-preservation was too strong to risk such a thing.

  Ivy nibbled on a piece of bacon. Her toast had long since gone cold, and Dorian sensed she didn’t want to eat the bacon so much as she wanted something to do with her hands. She was nervous. Brave, but nervous.

  “Kummerspeck,” Ivy said, apropos of seemingly nothing.

  “What?” Dorian asked.

  “It’s a word Echo taught me. It’s German, I think. It means grief bacon.” Ivy looked at the strip of bacon in her hands and then gingerly put it back on her plate. “Has something to do with eating when you’re stressed.”

  Jasper spread a liberal amount of orange marmalade on his own toast, the scrape of the knife loud in the early-morning silence. He sat on the opposite side of the table from Quinn, who had flitted from chair to chair trying to sit next to Jasper before eventually giving up when the act became too farcical even for him.

  “Vocabulary lesson aside, is there a reason why I was pulled out of bed at such an ungodly hour?” Quinn stretched his arms high above his head, arching his back with a drawn-out yawn.

  Jasper swallowed his toast. “Everything about you is ungodly.”

  “No flirting at the breakfast table,” Quinn said with a wink and a leer. “It’s unseemly.”

  A slow flush crawled up the back of Dorian’s neck. He pulled at his collar. It was the coffee. All that heat. Nothing to do with the self-righteous indignation brought to a simmer whenever Quinn was around. Nothing to do with that at all. He pushed away from the window and set his mug down on the edge of the table. Ivy knotted her fingers together in her lap. He laid an encouraging hand on her shoulder. It wasn’t his style to be physically comforting, but Ivy had stopped flinching at his proximity months ago, and through close observation—gods, everything in that warehouse was close—he’d gathered that she benefited from minor acts of physical affection from her friends. Some people were huggers. Dorian wasn’t, but he would lend her his strength any way he could. The Avicen guard in the corner narrowed his eyes, as if Dorian were committing some heinous act by laying his filthy Drakharin hands on a perfectly nice Avicen girl. Three measly months ago, Dorian would have agreed. Personal growth, Caius had called it.

  “Mission briefing,” Dorian said. “Once the others join us, we’ll go over every final detail together, but for the time being, I wanted to go over the basics. Quinn will deliver you to Wyvern’s Keep, then he’ll rendezvous with Jasper and me in the woods nearby.” He nodded at Ivy. “Once you make contact with one of Caius’s loyalists in the keep and retrieve the information that we pray to all the gods will help us battle the kuçedra, we’ll help you escape.”

  Dorian reached into his pocket to retrieve the item he’d spent the better part of the night preparing. It was a fragment of a mirror he’d shattered, rounded into an even circle with the tools Altair’s men had scrounged up. He’d chipped off the colorful enamel finish from an old jewelry box scavenged from the castle’s storage rooms and glued the pieces to the opaque side of the mirror. Viewed from the front, it looked like a simple pendant. The reflective back, however, was far from simple jewelry. He held it by its chain, dangling it in front of Ivy. “This is what you’ll use to communicate with me once you’re inside the keep.”

  Ivy accepted the pendant from him gingerly. “And how exactly will a necklace accomplish that?”

  Quinn wiggled his fingers. “Magic.”

  Dorian counted to ten and bit back a stinging retort. The warlock wasn’t wrong; Dorian just wished he’d be quiet. Preferably forever.

  “Open the clasp,” Dorian told Ivy. “Carefully.”

  A small needle, just large enough to prick the skin, was hidden inside the clasp. Dorian drew his own blade and held it up to the light. Ivy watched him curiously.

  “Prick your finger,” he told her. “And press the blood to the mirror.”

  She grimaced but did it. A bead of her blood sat on the shiny surface for a second or two before the mirror absorbed it. The pendant was clean, as if it had never been touched. A drop of blood appeared on Dorian’s blade.

  Ivy froze, one hand wrapped around her thumb. “Whoa.”

  “The mirror is small,” Dorian said as he wiped his blade clean. “So we’ll have to use a limited means of contact. One drop for abort mission, two for proceed as planned. That’ll be my sign to meet you at the rendezvous point to make our escape.”

  Ivy swallowed thickly. “What happens if I abort the mission? Will I just be stuck there?”

  Dorian sheathed his sword. He liked the weight of it against his hip. It was comforting, like a child’s blanket. “If I receive the mission-abort signal from you, I will storm the keep and slay every Firedrake that gets in my way.”

  Jasper muttered something unintelligible and began fanning himself with a paper plate.

  Ivy’s eyes widened. “That’s insane, Dorian.”

  He shrugged, as if embarking on a suicide mission weren’t at all out of the ordinary, even for him. “No one gets left behind. I’m taking point on this mission, and you are my responsibility.”

  With a roll of her eyes, Ivy said, “Thanks, Dad.”

  Dorian frowned. “I’m too young to be your father.”

  “Yeah, you’re really not, though.”

  Quinn cleared his throat and made a nuisance of himself as he bustled around the table, pouring coffee and stealing more bacon than was fair. “It’s a cute idea,” he said, “but count me out of the harebrained heroics.” He graced Ivy with an insincere smile. “No offense, love. I’m not much for rescues.”

  Dorian inhaled a slow and steady breath. And exhaled. And inhaled. “If you have nothing else to add, Quinn, may I suggest you take your heaping plate of bacon and leave?”

  Quinn popped a strip of bacon in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. “Just curious, as I’ve been nothing less than helpful since the moment I joined this band of ragamuffin misfits…what exactly have I done to offend you?”


  Dorian waited for Ivy to pull her hair-feathers to one side so he could clasp the chain around her neck. “Your existence offends me.”

  Quinn pouted. “That seems a bit harsh.” He reached out to trail a finger along one of Ivy’s feathers. She flinched from the contact, pulling the chain through Dorian’s fingers.

  “I don’t like you,” Dorian explained. “I like her.” Quinn’s starlit eyes twinkled with amusement. He wouldn’t look so amused with Dorian’s sword protruding from his gut. Considering the slime that practically oozed from the warlock’s every pore, Dorian thought it was not beyond the realm of possibility that such a fantasy might become a reality. “If you do anything—and I mean anything—to put her life in any more danger than it will already be in, I will kill you.”

  Quinn smirked. “You could try.”

  Jasper stiffened, his golden eyes bouncing between the two of them like a spectator at a sporting match. The words brought a smile to Dorian’s lips. They were an echo of the very taunt he’d used on Jasper the night they met, when he’d been half mad from blood loss. He was a different person now, he could admit that, but he was no less deadly. He leaned into the warlock’s space, close enough to kiss. “Oh, I won’t just try. I will hunt you down. No matter how fast you run or how far, I will find you. And I will make you rue the day your wretched mother brought you into this world.”

  Jasper let out a low, impressed whistle. “Da-a-amn.”

  Suddenly, the door flew open, its knob slamming into the stone wall. Rowan doubled over, breathing heavily as if he’d been running. Half a second later, Caius appeared next to him in the doorway, nary a hair out of place. Rowan sucked in a deep breath, his forehead beaded with sweat. “It’s Echo,” he rasped. “She’s gone.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Ivy said.

  “Language,” Quinn remarked, idly inspecting his nails.