The Girl at Midnight

by The Girl at Midnight (ARC) (epub)

  Caius had a little not-laugh to go with his little not-smile. “It wasn’t easy. Not with that white carpet.” But the not-laugh and the not-smile faded as he spoke. Echo was sad to see them go. “Tanith thinks the only way to win is in a fury of fire and blood. But fire only brings about death, and blood only brings about more blood.”

  It was an impressive answer, but Echo was oddly dissatisfied with it. They’d reached the main path, and the proud stone facade of the Met was visible across the park. The skin between her shoulder blades tingled, as if someone was watching her, but when she turned, all she saw were a few joggers and a hot-dog vendor. Altair probably had someone out looking for her, and she knew the paranoia wouldn’t dissipate until they were clear of New York. She scanned their surroundings as she asked, “Do others agree with you? I’ve never heard about any peace talks between the Avicen and the Drakharin.”

  The sun beat brightly down upon them. Caius kept his head bowed. The few scales the sunglasses didn’t shield glittered, sort of like a fish in sunlight. “That’s because there haven’t been any.”

  Echo waited for him to volunteer more information, but when he simply walked in silence, she asked, “Why not?”

  Caius let his answer percolate. They were nearly to the park’s exit when he finally spoke.

  “War is like a drug,” he said. “You spend so long chasing victory that you become blind to the fact that you’ll never find it. It had never even occurred to me that peace was possible, not until …”

  He let his words trail off. His voice had the same strangled quality to it that it had the night before, when he’d given her the dagger.

  Echo hazarded a guess. “Until the girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Must have been some girl.”

  “She was.”

  Caius fell quiet again as they approached Fifth Avenue. Echo let him have his silence. She couldn’t help but wonder about the woman who had captured his heart. She couldn’t imagine Caius—stoic, serious Caius—in love. The idea was like Jasper’s blazer. Ill-fitting.

  When they reached the Met’s front steps, Echo came to a stop. A crowd of tourists clustered at the foot of the grand staircase, posing for pictures.

  “An hour before closing time,” Caius said. “What now? You’re the expert.”

  The heady excitement she always felt before a job rose. Echo tried to control her face so that she didn’t give away just how pleased she was by his words. When the little not-smile flashed across Caius’s lips, she knew that she had failed. C’est la vie.

  “Now,” Echo said, plopping down on the steps. “The fun part starts.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Ivy was sure she’d lived through more awkward situations than this, but she was hard pressed to think of any. After Caius and Echo left, Dorian pressed his lips tightly into something she couldn’t quite call a pout even if it was perilously close. He spent a considerable amount of time sitting on the edge of Jasper’s bed, wiping his sword down with supplies Jasper had conjured up from the depths of his closet. If he cleaned it any more ferociously, she was sure the steel would begin to erode.

  She was content to let Dorian stew in his own juices, but Jasper had other ideas. From her seat on the sofa, cradling a warm cup of tea in her hands, she watched the scene unfold. It was better than TV. Besides, it wasn’t like Jasper even owned a television. His loft—with its plush white carpet, stained-glass windows, and stolen art collection—was entirely too posh for something so pedestrian.

  Jasper held a sweater out to Dorian. It was a pretty cornflower blue that looked incredibly soft, even from this distance.

  “Try it on,” Jasper said.

  Dorian didn’t bother looking up from the sword on his lap. “No.”

  “In case you forgot, your shirt is currently sporting a sword-shaped hole in it,” Jasper said. “Kind of like you.”

  Ivy didn’t want to laugh, but Jasper made it difficult to resist. He was easy to be around, and Ivy appreciated that. She needed a buffer between herself and Dorian, and Jasper had been more than willing to keep them both distracted.

  “Besides,” Jasper said, dangling the sweater next to Dorian’s face. “This shade of blue brings out your eyes. Sorry. Eye.”

  If looks could actually kill, Jasper would have been brought down by Dorian’s dark stare. Ivy thought he might be teasing the Drakharin for her benefit as much as for his own amusement. Dorian appeared to be on the verge of doing something truly regrettable, but he gingerly laid the sword aside and took the sweater from Jasper’s hands.

  Interesting. Maybe he wasn’t so easy to read after all.

  “Attaboy,” Jasper said. “Let me help you.”

  Dorian jerked away from Jasper’s hands. Ivy caught the way Dorian’s jaw clenched, and his eyes narrowed, ever so slightly. He was in pain. The part of Ivy that had drawn her to apprentice as a healer poked at her persistently as if trying to convince her to help him. The part of her that wanted to see him suffer squashed it down.

  “I don’t need your help,” Dorian said, though it was clear to Ivy, and probably also to Jasper, that he did.

  To call Jasper’s sigh exasperated would be to call a hurricane a spot of rain. “There’s no shame in accepting help when you need it, Dorian.”

  With a glare, Dorian relinquished the sweater. “Fine,” he gritted out through clenched teeth.

  Jasper took the sweater from Dorian’s hands and, with a gentleness that surprised Ivy, helped him pull it over his head. Ivy was beginning to think that all parties involved would escape the ordeal unscathed when Jasper said, “It’s funny. I’m usually better at taking clothes off than putting them on.”

  Dorian sputtered. It was the only word Ivy could think of to describe the noise he made. A flush so deep it was almost scarlet crawled up his neck, painting his incredibly fair cheeks a lovely shade of crimson. Ivy almost sympathized. Her own white skin had a tendency to broadcast her embarrassment just as loudly. Between Dorian’s violent blushing and the tufts of silver-white hair sticking up at odd angles it was hard to believe that he’d ever been terrifying. Jasper smoothed the Drakharin’s unruly locks down while Dorian made a sound that was somewhere between a gurgle and a gasp. Ivy hid her smile behind her mug.

  “You’re cute when you blush,” Jasper said.

  Shockingly, Dorian didn’t come back at Jasper with a pointed barb or a surly retort. He simply blushed even more furiously and pushed his arms through the sleeves of the sweater with a small pained exhalation. Jasper winked at Ivy over Dorian’s shoulder.

  What a ham, Ivy thought.

  Blowing on her steaming tea, Ivy settled back against the sofa. Its purple cushions were just the right amount of squishy. She took a sip of her tea and watched the two of them bicker.

  Yup, she thought, way better than TV.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Caius watched Echo study the blueprints Jasper had provided, planning a way inside. She was so earnest, so focused that he left her to it. After they’d made camp on the steps, she had pressed a crumpled pile of green paper currency in his hand and ordered him to buy her a hot chocolate while she schemed. He had stared at the bills for a solid thirty seconds before moving on in search of a street vendor. It was the first time someone had so blatantly ordered him around in decades. He had gotten himself a hot chocolate, too. It was surprisingly nice.

  Getting in would be the easy part, but there was something fascinating about the way Echo pored over the map, nose scrunching every so often in concentration, errant strands of hair stubbornly falling in front of her face. She had been at it for about fifteen minutes before Caius finally spoke up.

  “I can transport us in,” he said.

  Echo’s head shot up, startled, as if she had forgotten he was there. They were sitting on the Met’s front steps, right in front of the museum they planned to burgle. Echo had been endlessly amused by the idea of planning a heist right under the guards’ noses. Caius thought it was a nee
dless risk, but she had been so enthused that he couldn’t not indulge her.

  “What?” she said, stretching her legs. She’d spread the blueprints out on the step above the one on which she sat and had been still for so long that her joints must have been unhappy.

  Caius waved the paper cup in his hand toward the vendor selling sausages wrapped in bread from a cart on the sidewalk. Echo had called them hot dogs, but as there were no dogs involved in their making, he didn’t understand why.

  “I had a lovely chat with that man over there while you were busy scheming. He said his favorite attraction in the museum was the Tomb of Perneb. Apparently, it’s situated on the ground floor of the museum, where it gets a significant amount of foot traffic.” He took a sip of his cocoa, feeling rather proud of himself. Perhaps he was better suited to the life of an outlaw than that of a prince. “Egyptians didn’t view their tombs as monuments of death—they saw them as places of transition between life and what lay beyond.”

  Echo nodded slowly. “Meaning, a tomb would be the perfect place to access the in-between.”

  He raised his cup in a toast. “Precisely.” He swirled the last bit of chocolate sludge in his cup, watching it mix with the remaining milk. “It’s the same principle behind travel over natural thresholds, like intertwined cherry blossom trees. The cycle of life and death gives them power. That was a rather impressive escape, by the way.”

  She blushed, accepting his compliment with a shy smile. That was nice, too. She took a hurried sip of her hot chocolate. “How did you know?”

  “Dorian told me,” he said.

  Her smile wilted. “Of course.”

  “You don’t like him very much,” he said. The sun was setting behind them, and the tall buildings lining the avenue cast a sea of angular shadows on the sidewalk.

  “He hit Ivy.”

  Caius stared into his cup. Powdery chunks of chocolate slid to the bottom. “I know. And that’s not like him. Dorian is like a brother to me. I know him. He’s not the sort of man who does things like that.”

  “Are you defending him?” Any trace of shy sweetness was long gone.

  “No.” He set his cup down and watched the last of the daytime staff depart. The only people inside now would be night guards. “No, I’m not. It’s just … this war takes its toll on people, even good men like Dorian.” Echo frowned, but Caius continued. “And he is good. But war makes monsters of us all, and the people who least deserve it pay the highest cost.”

  Echo sighed, and her shoulders sagged, her anger seeming to dissipate with the motion. Modest progress, but still progress. Caius was struck by the overwhelming desire to know what was going on behind her eyes, to know what she was thinking. He rolled his head, letting his gaze wander from hers. There were more important matters at hand than his fledgling fascination with a thieving human girl.

  “That is why this war needs to end,” he said. “There are no victors in a conflict such as this. Just death and destruction.”

  Echo looked at him for a beat, then nodded, shifting her gaze to some point beyond his shoulder. She bit her lower lip absently. “You know,” she said. “You talk a lot in generalities. I mean, I get that you’re a bigger-picture kind of guy, but you have to have some personal stake in this. It can’t just be for the greater good.” She turned back at him, pinning him to the steps with a look that was more astute than Caius was comfortable with. “Nobody’s that good. Nobody’s that selfless.”

  Caius examined the contents of his cup, imagining that he could read the chocolate dregs at the bottom like tea leaves.

  “Not even opportunistic mercenaries?” he asked.

  “You don’t seem like any merc I’ve ever met before.”

  “Hang out with many, do you?”

  “Friends in low places and all that.” Echo cocked her head to the side. A crisp breeze picked up a strand of her hair, made it tickle the bridge of her nose. She pushed it behind her ear, but it stubbornly slipped loose. With a sigh, she added, “And don’t think I haven’t noticed that you dodged the question.”

  He smiled. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re infuriatingly clever?”

  “Often,” she replied. “Now spill.”

  He dropped his eyes to the chocolate sludge, willing it to give up its secrets. But unlike tea leaves, it had none to give.

  “The woman I told you about last night,” he said. “She was a soldier, but not by nature. She was conscripted for service, and it cost her everything.” It was the truth, unencumbered by details. He continued, words stretching in the late-afternoon sun after being silenced for so long. “She was good, in a way so few people are. She liked to sing. Had the loveliest voice I’ve ever heard. She was fond of puzzles and couldn’t abide the taste of pears.” The corners of his eyes stung, and he was glad Jasper had lent him sunglasses. “I thought that was endlessly funny. She always smelled like pears, but she couldn’t stand the taste of them.”

  Echo let the silence between them marinate for a few moments before asking, “What was her name?”

  Outside of his dreams, Caius hadn’t spoken her name since the day she died, the day Tanith brought the cabin down around them in a fire she convinced him was for his own good. He breathed that single syllable into the air. “Rose.”

  If Echo chewed her lower lip much more, she would make herself bleed. He was beginning to learn her little habits, those small things that were uniquely hers. Biting her lip was a tell. She was uncertain about the course of their conversation. Caius couldn’t really blame her. “When did you meet her?” she asked.

  “A long time ago,” he said. Rose’s name had been carried aloft on the wind, and it had taken some of his reserve with it. It was easier to speak to Echo now, easier to breathe. “Longer than you’ve been alive. Longer than your parents have been alive. Speaking of which, where are your parents? Don’t seventeen-year-olds normally have those?”

  “Normally, yeah.”

  Caius waited for her to speak. If he pushed her, he had a feeling she would clam up, hiding the details of her past like an oyster jealously guarding a pearl.

  She sighed. “I don’t have parents. Well, I did once. But I left home a long time ago and never looked back.”

  “Why?”

  Echo was silent, staring at the blueprints as if she could singe them with her eyes. She kept her gaze downcast when she said, “They weren’t very nice people.”

  A woman pushing a stroller walked past the steps, a rosy-cheeked toddler trailing after her. Echo watched them pass, a look of such wistfulness on her face that Caius’s heart ached for her, just a little. He had only vague memories of his parents. They had been distant, as noble families tended to be, but never cruel.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. It was inadequate, but it was all he had.

  She waited a beat before answering, watching the mother and her child cross the street. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  He hadn’t meant to upset her. Upsetting her was upsetting to him in a way that, in itself, was more than a little disconcerting. He wasn’t sure he wanted to begin puzzling out why. He wanted to fix it, so he went with the only thing he knew would put a smile on her face.

  “So,” he said, ignoring the way her eyes were still cautious and a little bit steely. “Tell me about these blueprints.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The Tomb of Perneb was more claustrophobic than Echo remembered. As the black wisps of the in-between faded into the tomb’s sandy stone walls, she brought a hand up to steady herself. When her palm connected with the soft wool of Caius’s sweater, she yanked her hand back. He quirked an eyebrow at her, as if he wasn’t at all bothered to be sharing personal space. She took a step back, pressing herself against the wall.

  “Well, this is cozy,” she said, shouldering past Caius. “Let’s go.” When she exited the tomb into the Egyptian wing, she breathed in deeply. Her thoughts were less scattered with some distance between herself and Caius. He disarmed her, and she hated it
. Behind her, he barely made a sound as he exited the tomb, and she felt his presence at her back like a hovering ghost. She dropped to her knees, sketching out the same Avicet rune she’d used at the Louvre to put the guards to sleep and deactivate the cameras.

  Caius was silent as she cast the spell. Echo snuck a surreptitious glance at him. The dim blue glow of the museum’s security lights illuminated the planes of his face with the gentleness of a lover. It wasn’t the worst view in the world. Guilt tickled at her conscience. She had a boyfriend. His name was Rowan, and he was wonderful, and she shouldn’t be making eyes at some random mercenary she had picked up on her travels.

  “Echo?” Caius asked, brow arched. He was looking right at her. So maybe she wasn’t half as subtle as she thought she was.

  “Yeah,” she mumbled. “I was just … thinking about our next move.” She cringed inwardly. Real smooth.

  He nodded, but not as if he bought it. Oh, well.

  “That was a nice charm you worked,” he said. “With the Avicet rune. Clever and clean.”

  She willed herself not to blush. Her traitorous skin did not oblige. She pushed herself to her feet, brushing imaginary dust off her jeans. “Thanks.”

  “Right,” he said, gazing around at the granite sculptures surrounding the tomb. “So, any idea what we’re looking for?” Caius looked back at her. “You know, I never asked you how you found the dagger at the Louvre. I assumed you knew what you were looking for, but that map doesn’t tell you much beyond general location.”

  And that was the tricky part. She couldn’t begin to explain how or why the locket had pulsed in her hand that night, leading her straight to the dagger. Every step of this quest for the firebird seemed to bring on more questions than answers. But if it had worked once before, then maybe it would work again.

  “I need the locket.” She’d watched him slip it on that morning, tucking it into the neck of the borrowed sweater. He’d kept it with him at all times after taking it from her, and Echo burned with a ferocious curiosity to figure out why he guarded it like a dragon hoarding treasure.