The Girl at Midnight

by The Girl at Midnight (ARC) (epub)

  “Welcome,” the old woman said in lightly accented English, voice rough with age. “Come in, come in.”

  Echo’s response fizzled before she could muster a greeting. Over the old woman’s shoulder, she saw the most beautiful and terrifying creature she had ever seen. A young man stood in the main room of the teahouse, out of place in his dark blue jacket and rugged leather boots. A fall of silver hair brushed against the faint smattering of scales at his temples. From a distance, they almost looked like uneven skin, but Echo knew them for what they were. The air shimmered around the scales; he was using low-level glamour to hide them, kind of like magical concealer. The single blue eye not covered with an eye patch raked over her from head to toe with a haughty disinterest that was almost comforting. She was human, and he suspected nothing.

  “Very rude, that one,” the old woman muttered. “Wouldn’t take off his shoes.”

  Act casual, Echo thought, swallowing down the sudden fear that seized her. Because that’s not hard at all.

  “Um” was all she got out. Not her finest performance. The silver-haired Drakharin slid his gaze away from her, as though he’d already written her off as some hapless human stumbling into his operation. A bit insulting, but she’d take it.

  The old woman walked into the main room, beckoning for Echo to follow her. Her slippered feet shuffled against the tatami flooring. “Don’t worry about your shoes.” She leveled a glare at the Drakharin. “Nobody else did. Sit, sit. I made tea.”

  Echo sank to her knees on the tatami mat, and the Drakharin followed suit, giving her a curious but mostly uninterested look. Nothing strange to see here, nothing at all.

  As the old woman filled two tea bowls with thick green matcha, Echo tamped down the hysterical laughter threatening to bubble to the surface. She was having a tea party with a Drakharin. She could hardly wait to tell Ivy all about it, if she lived to tell the tale. As it was, that was looking like a mighty big if.

  The old woman’s voice pulled Echo from her thoughts. “You know, you’re not the first to come knocking at my door. Two boys came by just a few days ago. They had feathers, though. And they took off their shoes. One of them had eyes just like a falcon.” She turned to the Drakharin, head tilted to the side, as if she was sizing him up. His single blue eye narrowed in suspicion, and his body went still, like a viper waiting to strike. The woman smiled, the weathered skin around her eyes crinkling. “No need to waste magic hiding your scales, boy. I can see right through your glamour. It’s a skill my family has passed down through the generations since we inherited this teahouse. My grandmother told me that the previous owners had feathers, too. But you can only see them if you know what you’re looking for.” She winked at Echo. “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

  Echo choked out a few syllables that were distant cousins of coherent words. The old woman saved her from responding by placing the tea bowls in front of them. “So,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “What brings you two to my humble teahouse?” She angled her head to look at the Drakharin. Her eyes were the only thing young about her. They were bright and sly, like a fox’s. “You first.”

  The Drakharin arched an eyebrow, as though he wasn’t used to being told what to do by humans. “Information.” His voice was rich and deep, with a slight accent that Echo couldn’t identify. She’d never heard Drakhar spoken, but his native tongue must have been what colored his speech so.

  The old woman chuckled. “Wrong answer.” She turned to Echo. “And you?”

  This is it, Echo thought. Do-or-die time. She could still escape this situation unscathed. All she had to do was feign ignorance. She could lie and say she’d honestly stopped by for tea. But the map from the music box was burning a hole in her pocket, and she knew she had to see this through. With the Drakharin’s steady gaze locked on her, she pulled the map out of her jacket pocket. She unfolded it and slid it across the tatami mat. “This is what brought me here.”

  The old woman picked up the map and squinted at it. After a few seconds, she reached a wizened hand into the folds of her kimono. When she unfurled her fingers, Echo’s entire field of vision narrowed down to what the old woman held. A jade pendant, large enough to fit comfortably in her palm, dangled from a thin bronze chain. A seam ran along its side—it was a locket. A bronze dragon with emerald eyes and outstretched wings was curled around it, as though hoarding treasure. Clearly, it was Drakharin in origin, but something deep and visceral within Echo called out for it.

  “That was the right answer.” The old woman reached for Echo’s hand, arthritic fingers pressing the locket into her palm. “This is for you.”

  The Drakharin looked from the locket in Echo’s hands, with its dragon insignia, to her. Echo could almost hear the gears in his head turning. The old woman curled Echo’s fingers around the necklace, squeezing her hand with surprising strength. Her toothless smile was withered, but lovely. “Take it,” she said. “And be strong.”

  Before Echo could ask any of the multitude of questions she had, the Drakharin hissed, “You work for the Avicen.”

  Crap. Echo tightened her fist around the pendant and sprang to her feet, knees knocking over her bowl of matcha. The old woman threw herself between Echo and the one-eyed Drakharin, using her body as a shield as the tip of a long knife—Echo hadn’t even noticed him carrying one—emerged from the back of her kimono, red with blood. Echo hesitated. It was so bright, so impossibly red against the cold gray steel. The old woman pointed a trembling hand toward the back door as the Drakharin struggled to free his blade. “Run,” she croaked.

  The Drakharin barked out a command, and the sentries from outside poured through the front door. Echo leaped over broken bits of china and spilled tea, and ran into the garden. When she saw what the old woman had left her, she almost wept with relief.

  A pair of cherry trees stood in the garden, their twisting branches meeting like lovers in a perfectly formed arch. Echo assumed that their roots were doing the same beneath her feet. A naturally formed threshold. Her hands trembled with adrenaline as she scooped up a handful of shadow dust. The pouch slipped from her fingers, falling to the ground, but she had just enough shadow dust to open the gateway. She ran, smearing a messy trail of it down the trunk of the tree on her right. Echo spared a look over her shoulder as she skidded beneath the tree’s entwined branches. She met that single, impossibly blue eye as the Drakharin rounded the corner, shouting out an order to his sentries before everything was dark, and she was gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Caius stared at Dorian, the sounds of the armory’s training room—steel singing against steel, the scuffing of boots along worn stone—shielding their conversation from curious ears. Caius could have sworn that the captain of his guard had just admitted to being outsmarted by an elderly woman and a teenage girl—both human, no less—but that couldn’t be true. It simply couldn’t.

  “You lost her?” he asked, chest heaving from exertion. He nodded at the guard with whom he’d been sparring, dismissing her. She bowed and walked away, sheathing her sword as she joined a cluster of other guards cooling down in the corner.

  Dorian opened his mouth to offer whatever disgrace of an explanation he’d scrounged up between Japan and Scotland, but Caius wasn’t interested in excuses. “One human girl and you lost her?”

  A pale pink flush crept up Dorian’s neck, though the scarred flesh on his left cheek remained as white as ever. At least he had the good grace to look embarrassed. Caius wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve, hands still holding the two long knives with which he’d been practicing. They lacked the reach of a broadsword, but they made up for it in speed and precision. The blades were relatively plain, unadorned save for the long, elegant etchings of winged wyverns. Caius breathed deeply, allowing his pulse to slow. Dorian waited for him to speak, silent and shamefaced.

  “Please tell me we have something to go on,” Caius said, walking to the corner of the room farthest from where Ta
nith’s Firedrakes were training. Every Drakharin in the room had sworn an oath of fealty to him, but the Firedrakes were staunchly loyal to his sister.

  Dorian pulled something small from his pocket and held it out to Caius. It was a leather pouch, soft and supple from years of handling. It might have been purple once, but the leather had long since faded to a soft black. The cluster of stars embroidered on its front had gone gray from use. Caius reached inside, and his fingers came away stained with a fine black powder.

  “Shadow dust,” Caius said. “How in the name of all that’s holy did a human girl come across shadow dust?”

  “She used it to escape through a gateway the old woman had in the garden.” Dorian shook his head, sighing a long, ragged breath. “Damn trees.”

  Caius closed his hand around the pouch. “A human traveling through the in-between. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  “Just tell me what to do.” The blues in Dorian’s eye swirled like a maelstrom. Caius had never seen another Drakharin with eyes that varied with his mood. “I can set this right.”

  “I want her found. Round up our Avicen informants. Call in the warlocks if you have to. If there’s a human running errands for the Avicen, if she’s close enough to know about threshold magic, someone is bound to know who she is.”

  Dorian nodded. “There was one other thing,” he said, casting his eye to the side. The Firedrakes had gone silent. When Caius looked their way, not one made eye contact. He waited until they raised their swords and resumed training before he spoke.

  “What is it?”

  Dorian stepped closer to him, voice pitched low. “The woman gave her something. A locket. Jade, I think, with a bronze setting. It bore your crest.” He drew a small piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. “The girl showed her this.”

  When Caius saw what Dorian held in his hand, it was as though time slowed down around them. His heart became a rusty wheel, sputtering to a tortured crawl. He was painfully aware of every tiny movement of his joints as he took the map from Dorian. He knew that handwriting. He hadn’t seen it in nearly a hundred years, but he knew it. Rose had never been careless enough to write him love letters, but she’d been an obsessive notetaker. Her cabin had been full of scribblings, from half-remembered song lyrics to vegetables she needed to pick from her small garden out back. There wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that Rose—his Rose—had written the words on the map. But how had the girl come across it? He swallowed, mouth gone dry. “And you’re absolutely sure it was a jade locket?”

  Dorian wrinkled his brow and nodded, slowly. Caius looked away. He had no desire to see the confusion written on Dorian’s face. There was only one piece of jade jewelry bearing his seal that had gone missing from his possession. It had been lost in a fire, a lifetime ago, along with so much else. His sister was the only person who knew about Rose, and that was a secret they would both take with them to their graves. Caius closed his eyes, and for a moment, he smelled nothing but acrid smoke and the salt of the ocean.

  “She has no right to it.” The words felt thick in Caius’s mouth. Unwieldy. “Track her. Hunt her down.”

  Dorian was staring at him with concern, and maybe something else, something Caius couldn’t respond to. It tugged at his heart, but not in the way he suspected Dorian might want it to. Every friendship had it secrets, and he was willing to play the oblivious fool if it meant Dorian got to keep his. Dorian looked like he wanted to ask Caius about the slight hitch in his voice, about the haunted look Caius feared was in his eyes.

  “And when I find her?” Dorian asked.

  “Do nothing,” Caius said. If he wanted something done right, he would do it himself. “Report back to me.”

  “What are you planning, Caius?” Dorian’s tone was not that of an obedient guard, but of an old friend.

  Finding the map, written in Rose’s hand, and the locket Caius had given her meant that she’d been involved, somehow, in this hunt, and he’d never known. He had told her everything about himself, every secret, every embarrassing story, every wish and dream he’d ever had. She’d known it all, and he was beginning to think now that he had only begun to scratch the surface of her. He remembered the feel of her skin against his lips as he kissed the side of her neck, admiring the way the locket had gleamed in the soft glow of the candles on her dressing table. The road to the firebird had led him here, picking up traces of the girl he’d loved and lost so long ago. He had to know how Rose fit into all this, had to make sense of the scattered puzzle pieces she’d left behind. “I’m going after the girl myself,” he told Dorian, “but not as the Dragon Prince. This is personal. She has something of mine, and I’m going to get it back.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Echo emerged from the Astor Place subway station, the locket weighing heavily around her neck. She didn’t dare go back to Grand Central, not when there was a chance that the Drakharin had been able to track her through the in-between. Her hands still shook from adrenaline, fingers sooty with the remnants of shadow dust. Before she did anything else, went anywhere else, she needed more. If they found her, she needed to be able to make a break for it through whichever gateway was nearest. Zipping her jacket against the wind, she started down Saint Mark’s Place. One quick stop at the Agora to get more dust from Perrin, and then onward to the Ala.

  She sucked in a deep breath, losing herself in the crowd of anonymous pedestrians. She was afraid that if she closed her eyes she would see the bright red of the old woman’s blood gleaming on the one-eyed Drakharin’s blade. It had been so shiny, like liquid rubies. Even with the blaring horns of rush-hour traffic, Echo could still hear the woman’s last, rasping breaths.

  Echo fumbled for the locket, slipping the chain over her head. There had to be something in it, something the Drakharin wanted badly enough to kill for. She tried to pry it open at the seam, but the clasp was old and warped, as if it had been smashed shut. It was jammed. Whatever secrets it held would stay secret until she or the Ala managed to coax them free.

  With the locket clutched tightly in her fist, Echo shoved her dirty hands in her pockets as Crif Dogs’ cheerful sign came into view. The blue-haired girl was still behind the counter, feet propped up, as if she hadn’t moved since Echo had last been there. Echo didn’t bother smiling this time, breezing past the crowded tables to the phone booth, speaking the password into the receiver on autopilot. She was halfway through the labyrinth when she heard voices. Voices she recognized. Biting back a curse, Echo ducked back behind a corner, praying to every god there was that she hadn’t been seen.

  “She’s planning something. I can feel it in my bones,” the speaker hissed. It was Ruby. Teacher’s pet to Altair. Training partner to Rowan. Mortal enemy to Echo.

  Crap. Echo pressed herself against the wall, the edges of an alcove digging painfully into her back.

  “I can’t bring the Ala herself before the rest of the council without evidence of wrongdoing, Ruby.”

  The second voice was deep, with a hint of rumble, like thunder. Altair. Double crap. Triple crap. Infinity crap.

  Daring a glance around the corner, Echo swore silently. It was just the two of them, but it was enough. Altair, white feathers smooth against his head, matching the white of his Warhawk cloak. The deep brown feathers on his arms were almost black in the dim light of the labyrinth. Ruby’s cloak, dark and shiny as an oil slick, blended with the black plumage on her arms and head, and she was all but lost in shadow. When she was in armor, she had to wear Warhawk white, and the brightness of it made her look sickly and sallow. Echo had heard that Ruby had learned to bend shadows to her will, but she’d never seen her actually do it before. It was one of the reasons she was among Altair’s favorite recruits. Magic came easily to the Avicen—far easier than it did to Echo—but Ruby was unusually talented for someone her age.

  “After what you just saw?” Ruby asked. “How much more proof do you need?”

  “You forget yourself, Ruby. I’m your comman
der, not your friend.”

  Embarrassment laced its way through Ruby’s voice. “I’m sorry, sir. What would you have of me?”

  Echo’s stomach performed an impressive bout of calisthenics. If Altair started digging into the Ala’s business, he wouldn’t stop until he uncovered their plans to find the firebird. Calling Altair persistent would be a massive understatement.

  “All I know is that the Ala has been sending that human girl of hers out,” Altair said. “She’s running errands for the Ala that no one else knows about. Keep an eye on her. The Ala may trust her, but she’s not one of us.”

  “I never understood why we let her stay,” Ruby said. Echo bit the inside of her cheek so hard she was in danger of drawing blood.

  “Sentiment.” Falling from Altair’s lips, the word was profane.

  Ruby said something that Echo didn’t catch, but she didn’t need specifics to hear the snideness in her tone. She needed to get out of there before they found her hiding in the dark like this, yet she couldn’t go back, not without more shadow dust. Zipping the locket into her pocket, she squared her shoulders and rounded the corner. At the sound of her footsteps over the mess of loose planks that made up the labyrinth’s floor, two pairs of eyes snapped to her.

  Echo wiggled her fingers at them, silently relishing the way Ruby’s lip curled in a sneer. The feeling was mutual. “Howdy.”

  Altair stared at her, the orange and black of his eagle-like eyes as sharp as ever. “Echo” was all he said before nodding at Ruby once and turning to leave. He walked down a corridor that would lead him to the tunnels beneath Astor Place, shadows swallowing his retreating form.

  When Echo turned back to Ruby, she was greeted to the least amicable smile she had ever seen. She felt small, alone with Ruby like this. As much as Altair considered her an inferior being, she’d felt safer when he was there. He was a by-the-book sort of guy. Echo wasn’t so sure about Ruby.