The Shadow Hour

by Melissa Grey

  Jasper picked up a stick and stoked the fire even though its magical nature meant it hardly needed stoking.

  “I just don’t understand why you would give him the time of day to begin with,” said Dorian. “You could have anyone you want.”

  Jasper shot Dorian a look he couldn’t quite read. He hadn’t meant to say that last bit out loud, but now that the words were in the open, hovering in the air like traitorous little hummingbirds, there was no rescinding them.

  After a moment, Jasper looked back to the fire. “Apparently not anyone.”

  Dorian had nothing smart to say to that. Jasper had been patient with him, but a century of rage and hate and unrequited love wasn’t something that could be conquered in a matter of months. Lately, however, he’d found himself wishing he could brush it all aside. He hadn’t understood at first why Caius had gravitated so quickly to Echo, but he was beginning to appreciate the desire to seize an opportunity for happiness. How nice it would be to forget everything that had made him the way he was: cantankerous, introverted, and generally unpleasant. But he couldn’t be what Jasper wanted or needed or deserved. He just couldn’t.

  Jasper’s sigh was audible in the silence of the evening. “There was something about Quinn that made me feel safe.”

  Safe? Dorian thought. “Are we talking about the same Quinn?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. I was sixteen when I met him. Can you imagine that?” Jasper glanced at Dorian, his expression a pale version of his reliably mischievous grin. “And Quinn was…well, he was Quinn. He kept me so close the first few months. It was like nothing existed but the two of us. He became my entire world. He was the sun and the moon and the stars, and when I was in his orbit, nothing else mattered. He liked it that way, and for a while, I thought I did, too.”

  “Jasper, that isn’t healthy.”

  “Yeah, I know that now. I left eventually, but I still remember what it felt like to have him be the only thing that mattered.”

  Dorian shook his head. “Infatuation is a poor substitute for love.”

  Jasper shrugged. “But something’s better than nothing. Or at least, that was how it felt at the time. Especially when the real thing seemed so far out of reach.”

  Again, Dorian lacked a response. He hated thinking of Jasper ever feeling desperate for affection or a place to feel safe, but he couldn’t give him that. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  The sound of twigs cracking underfoot signaled Quinn’s return. Dorian wasn’t exactly glad to see him, but he was somewhat relieved that he didn’t have to continue the conversation. He’d started it, but he knew he couldn’t finish it. Not adequately.

  In one hand, Quinn dangled a fat rabbit by its back legs. Its white fur was spotless. It had been killed without any visible wounds. Magic, Dorian presumed.

  “Jasper, dear,” Quinn said, swinging the rabbit. “Come help me with dinner.”

  “Still not your dear,” Jasper grumbled, but he stood and went to Quinn.

  Dorian watched as Quinn jostled Jasper’s shoulder playfully, leaning in to whisper something in Jasper’s ear that elicited a grudging laugh. When Quinn smiled, wide and brilliant, Dorian could almost see his appeal. The smile appeared to be genuine; it made perfectly shaped dimples form in his cheeks and made the stars in his eyes shine even brighter. There was a magnetism to Quinn, but that was the way the best predators worked. They drew you in, and you didn’t even realize you’d walked right into their trap until it was too late.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Time took on an elastic quality as Echo, Caius, and Rowan descended the spiraling stairs, deeper and deeper into the mountain. Below, there was darkness and more darkness. Their torches created an island of light in a sea of black. Echo tried to count the steps, but the hushed whispers of the dead distracted her. She settled for praying that they’d reach the bottom soon. Her knees were beginning to hurt.

  All three of them kept silent. It was as if the strange sanctity of the mountain absorbed their will to make noise, to disrupt the voices of those who’d lived and died among the stones. Each step had been smoothed by time, a slight curve worn in the middle. People had been passing through this mountain for centuries. Millennia, maybe. Echo wondered how many of them had survived the trip. The thought that her voice might join in the ghostly chorus occurred to her—not for the first time since they’d begun their descent—but she pushed it away. She just hoped there wasn’t a pit of skeletons at the bottom of the winding staircase. She really, really, really wasn’t in the mood for corpses. Especially not on a mostly empty stomach.

  As if on cue, her stomach emitted an embarrassingly loud grumble. Behind her, Rowan choked back a snicker. Echo shot him a caustic look over her shoulder, her cheeks flushed. “What?” she snapped. “I skipped lunch.”

  Rowan’s lips pulled into a sideways grin. “The truest sacrifice I’ve ever known you to make.”

  Echo scoffed. She marched down the stairs, head held high, eyes on the steps, which were illuminated by warm, amber torchlight. “Let me tell you something about sacrifice—”

  Caius held up a hand, halting a few steps below. “Shut up, both of you.”

  Under his breath, Rowan muttered, “Rude.”

  With his free hand, Caius beckoned Echo forward. “Look at this.” He lifted the torch high, its light crawling up the wall as if fighting the shadows for coveted territory. There were paintings on the wall, primitive ones that reminded Echo of the caves of Lascaux, a place she hadn’t gotten around to visiting yet. Another item to add to the list of things to do if she lived long enough. The figures were outlined in brownish-red paint, still vivid despite their antiquity. They had faded only a little with age; sunlight had never penetrated this place, so the darkness had preserved them.

  “What is it?” Rowan asked, crowding Echo on the steps.

  “A bird,” said Echo. “And a dragon.”

  She reached out to trace the swooping line of wings. The bird’s talons were locked in combat with the claws of a great dragon. Swirls of smoke and tongues of flame curled from the dragon’s mouth and nostrils. The bird’s beak was open in a silent, frozen screech. The creatures formed a loose circle, their wings meeting beneath their feet and at the apex above their heads. Echo’s fingers hovered near the wall. The ghostly whispers had faded to background static during the long descent, but they grew louder the closer her hand moved to the painting. The voices built and built, becoming a roar in her ears. The moment her fingers brushed the red paint, the roar became a scream, echoing through the mountain with the force of a thousand cries. Her knees buckled. If not for Caius’s quick reflexes and steadying grip, she would have tumbled down the stairs to her doom. The drawing burned beneath her touch, the red glowing as if lit from within. The voices coalesced into a single shout, one phrase slicing through Echo’s mind like a warm knife through butter.

  She snatched her hand away, expecting to find blisters on the pads of her fingers, but her skin was unmarred.

  “Echo?” Rowan knelt beside her, worry and panic clouding his hazel eyes. “What was it? What just happened?”

  Her voice was thin and reedy, but she found it. “It’s not paint,” she gasped. “It’s blood.”

  Neither Rowan nor Caius appeared as disturbed as Echo felt. “Didn’t you hear that?” she asked. “The screaming?”

  Rowan shook his head. “No.” His eyes were a little too wide as he and Caius helped pull her to her feet.

  Welcome to my new life, Echo thought. It is super weird.

  “As a matter of fact,” Caius said, turning to study the image on the wall, “the whispers stopped.” He cocked his head, his eyes going unfocused. “They’re back now, but when you touched the wall, it was as though the air was sucked out.”

  Rowan nodded. “Like a vacuum.”

  Caius extended a tentative hand toward the painting. After a moment’s hesitation, he laid a single finger on the dried blood. They waited, breath held. Nothing happened. �
�It appears the magic in these walls wants to react to you and only you.” He rubbed his finger against his jeans to wipe off the dusty red residue. “What did it sound like? The screaming.”

  Echo closed her eyes. The hushed whispering washed over her. The cadence of it had changed. There was an urgency to it now, as if the voices were excited about something. The sound caressed her as it resounded through the mountain, prickling her skin into goose bumps and making the space between her shoulder blades tingle. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was being watched by a thousand eager eyes. One phrase stood out among the many phantom voices, repeated at uneven intervals like an inconsistent chant.

  “Enu busana.” Echo opened her eyes. Rowan was frowning in puzzlement, but Caius was mouthing the words to himself, silently. “Does that mean anything to you?”

  Caius glanced at her, then back at the painting. “It’s from a language that died many years ago, long before the development of modern Drakhar and Avicet. One of my old tutors knew it well and taught it to me when I was researching the origin of the firebird. If memory serves—though my grasp of the language’s finer complexities is admittedly somewhat rusty—then I think I know what it means.”

  “Well?” Echo prompted. “Spill. The suspense is killing me.”

  “Us,” Rowan said, his animosity buried for the moment beneath his curiosity. “The suspense is killing us.”

  Caius ran a hand through his hair, mussing it up on one side. “I’d like to consult a more knowledgeable scholar than myself on the nuances of the linguistics….”

  “Look around.” Echo waved at the black expanse above and below their position on the stairs. “Unless you’ve got a more knowledgeable scholar hidden in your pocket, it’s just us. What does enu busana mean?”

  “ ‘It has returned,’ ” said Caius. “Or, ‘she or he has returned.’ I’m a tad rusty on the pronouns of primitive Drakhar-Avicet.”

  “It has returned,” Rowan said softly. His eyes locked with Caius’s and, as one, their gazes slid to Echo. Rowan gave voice to the thought she did not want to speak. “Maybe ‘she’ and ‘it’ are one and the same.”

  “It’s the firebird,” Echo said. She cradled her head in her hands, cupping her palms over her ears. It did nothing to silence the ghostly whispering that filled the mountain with a frenzy of agreement. “It’s me. They—it—whatever is in this mountain recognizes me. Or whatever’s inside of me.”

  Her mouth went dry. It has returned. She has returned. It was too much. It was all too much. She could ignore the enormity of her present situation when she had something to do, somewhere to be, a task to occupy her mind, a theft to occupy her hands. But it came crashing down around her now, like a wave breaking against the shore. She snatched Caius’s torch from him. He didn’t try to stop her. Perhaps he sensed her need to do something, anything, besides consider the implications of what it all meant. Flickering torchlight spilled onto the steps below, illuminating the stone with a caramel glow. More petroglyphs lined the walls, all drawn with the same reddish-brown paint. Blood, Echo reminded herself. She wondered whose it was. Who had hewn these stairs, who had opened a vein so that centuries later, she would find a mountain full of paintings depicting a story so old that no one alive could recount it. By the unsteady light of the torch, the paintings appeared to be moving. Echo held still, fighting the tremor in her hands. The blood-drawn figures were stationary. A trick of the eye, then. That was the more comforting option, so she chose to believe it.

  She took one step forward. Then another. And another. Caius and Rowan followed her.

  Caius leaned forward to ask, “Are you all right?”

  His breath was warm against her neck. That, too, was comforting. She huddled around that small comfort. “Not really.” It felt good to admit it. She didn’t have to put up a front here. The ghosts of the mountain knew her, and so did the two men at her back. All in different ways, from different angles, but they knew her. She had nothing left to hide. “But it doesn’t matter.” Her stubborn feet didn’t want to continue descending the steps, but she forced them, one foot, then the other. “There’s something down there,” she said. “And it’s been waiting for me for a very long time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “If I have to walk down any more stairs,” Echo grumbled, “I’m going to give up. I will live on these stairs. I will grow old on these stairs. I will die on these stairs.”

  Caius threw her a smirk over his shoulder. He’d wrested the torch back from her and taken the lead. If there was anything at the bottom, he’d told her, he wanted to encounter it first. “That seems a touch melodramatic,” he said, fumbling slightly as his foot reached for the next step. “Cheer up, Echo. We’re at the bottom.”

  The landing was a small, conical space, its ceiling swirling up with the staircase, its dirt floor pockmarked by stray stones and the odd root poking up from the ground. They faced a narrow, arched opening opposite the stairs. Where it led was hard to tell. The light from the torches seemed reluctant to penetrate the darkness beyond the arch. Behind Caius, Echo popped up onto her toes. Her chin barely made it past his shoulder. He stepped aside so she could see.

  “Ooh, a door,” said Echo. “I wonder where it leads.”

  The promise of a new and exciting mystery had rejuvenated her spirits. A sane person would have been frightened by the prospect of what they might find, but not her. Her curiosity overwhelmed all sane emotion. Caius’s curiosity seemed tempered by the need to keep Echo safe. And Rowan too, she supposed. Though it was clear the scars of their first meeting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art had not scabbed over well enough for Rowan to appreciate Caius’s presence.

  “I’d rather not barge in without a plan,” Caius said. “If we could just—”

  Echo plucked the torch from Caius’s hand with alarming speed. He grabbed for it, but she danced out of his reach. She was slippery. Like an eel. “Luckily for you, barging in without a plan is my specialty.” She tipped an imaginary hat to them. “Gentlemen.”

  A series of problems arose the second Echo ducked through the doorway and emerged on the other side.

  The first problem: She was no longer standing in a dark cave. The room in which Echo found herself was not unusual per se. There was a faded leather couch, the cushion on its right side, the one closest to the end table, sagging in the middle from wear. A television was set against the wall opposite the couch, static on its screen as if someone had turned off the cable and forgot to turn off the set itself. An old wooden coffee table sat between the two, its surface covered with dog-eared copies of Cosmopolitan and National Geographic, empty glasses with lipstick on the rims, a neat pile of used textbooks, and an ashtray that was near to overflowing. The carpeting was a forest green that had been cheerful once but was now the color of regurgitated spinach. A smell hung in the air, like stale smoke and even staler beer.

  The room itself was not unusual in anything other than its location, which Echo knew, without the slightest shred of doubt, to be on the other side of the world, in a completely different hemisphere from the one she had been in not two minutes prior. And also for the minor fact that it was a room she had sworn she would never set foot in ever again. She knew this room. She knew it despite the fact that she had longed to forget it and the house it was in and the people who lived under its roof.

  Echo stood in the living room of the house in which she’d grown up, before running away, before meeting the Ala, before embarking on her new life. And somehow, she’d gotten there from a cave hidden within a mountain in China.

  The second problem was when she looked back at the door behind her, the one through which she’d entered, it was nowhere to be found. All she saw in its place was peeling wallpaper and a framed still life of a bowl of peaches.

  She would have called out to see if Caius or Rowan could still hear her on the other side of the wall, but her voice had escaped her and was determined not to be found. The familiarity of the room was too much. She h
ad left. She had sworn never to return. Never, not ever. She willed her feet to move, but they were rooted to the ground. She could handle a great many things—killer shadow monsters, homicidal monarchs, terrorist attacks on Grand Central—but not this. Everyone had their limits. This was hers.

  “Looking for this?” The question came from behind her, spoken in a voice gone raspy with smoke and slightly slurred with alcohol, accompanied by the squeaky swinging of the saloon doors leading to the kitchen. That voice. Echo’s blood turned to ice in her veins and her vision prickled at the edges as if she might faint. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in ten years, a voice she’d never wanted to hear again, not as long as she lived. It was her mother’s voice.

  Echo turned slowly, the way people did in horror movies. Her mother stood on the other side of the room, her parched, processed blond hair pulled into a messy bun atop her head, her eyes bloodshot as if she’d been up all night drinking. It was a look Echo knew well. There was a small stain on the sleeve of her mother’s pink tracksuit. It was red. Not bloodred. Wine red. A black-and-white composition notebook dangled from her mother’s manicured fingers; in her other hand, she held a mostly empty glass of wine.

  This isn’t real, Echo told herself. None of this is real. It couldn’t be. She’d been in China, thousands and thousands of miles from the home she’d left behind. And she hadn’t entered the in-between. She would have felt that familiar drop as she’d entered its void. No, this had to be some kind of test. Another instance for her to prove herself worthy of whatever was on the other side of…whatever this was.

  But, by the gods, it felt real. Her mother took another step forward, wine sloshing in her glass, and Echo instinctively retreated. She took half a step back before her shoulder blades hit the wall. There was nowhere to go. Her mother was in the center of the room now. The stone archway was gone and the only way out was through her. Whatever nightmare the mountain had deposited Echo into, she would have to live out, whether she wanted to or not. And she really, really didn’t want to.