He narrowed his eyes, just a hair. “Why?”
She hadn’t even told Ivy about the way the locket had showed her the path to the dagger as clear as day, its pull growing stronger the closer she got. But if she was going to work with Caius to find the firebird, she would have to start trusting him at some point. Trust, she knew, was a funny thing. It had a habit of biting people in the ass more often than not. But she had to work with what she had, and what she had was Caius.
“It’s how I found the dagger,” she said. “It led me to it.” She waited, drumming her fingers on her thigh.
With a sigh, he pulled the chain over his head. He held the locket in his hand, but he didn’t offer it to her. “How?”
Oh, if only she knew. That would have been nice. That would have been just peachy.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just kind of drew me toward it.”
Caius studied the locket. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Look, dude, I don’t know how to explain it. I just know that it worked.” Echo held out her hand and after a lengthy moment, he placed it in her palm. The second it touched her skin, a surge of energy went through her, stealing the breath from her lungs and weakening her knees. Caius caught her by her elbow, and the locket throbbed even harder.
“I’m fine,” she gasped. “I just …”
And she was off, striding down the hall, locket vibrating in her palm. Any other day, she would have slowed down to appreciate the architecture of the Met’s lobby, with its high domed ceilings and plentiful skylights, but the locket’s pull grew stronger with each step, propelling her forward.
Caius jogged to catch up to her, his long legs easily keeping pace. He looked down at the locket in her hands. “What is it—”
She held up her free hand. “Shush.”
A small part of Echo, the tiny bit left of her that wasn’t in the thrall of the locket’s siren song, marveled at the fact that he did indeed shush.
A fallen guard, knocked out by her spell, blocked the entrance to the Greco-Roman sculpture hall opposite the Egyptian wing. She stepped over his prone form, half-blind to the majesty of the room. Moonlight filtered in through the skylights, making the bleached white sculptures of forgotten gods and goddess shine as if from within. It was stunningly beautiful and absolutely irrelevant.
“It’s here,” Echo said. She broke into a run, swerving around a massive Ionic column in the center of the long corridor. The next room held even more sculptures, but it was the glass display cases lining the walls that captured her attention. “It’s here, Caius, I can feel—”
She skidded to a halt in front of one of the cases so suddenly that Caius crashed into her. He grabbed her arms to steady them both, and his hands felt like burning brands through the leather of her jacket. She pulled away from him, and the fire abated, but she could still feel heat rolling off him in waves.
“Echo.” She could hardly hear Caius past the ringing in her ears. “Echo, where—”
“Here.” She laid her palms flat on the glass case before her, peering in. An ancient marble urn dominated the center of the display. Dancing figures were carved into its sides, bound together by swirling vines, and its lid appeared to be fused shut. One of the figures held a key in its upraised hand. This was it. Echo knew it as surely as she knew her own name.
“Break it,” Echo said, stepping aside. “Break the case. It’s in the urn, I know it.”
“Are you—”
“Just break it, Caius.”
He looked at her as if she were a woman possessed. She was a woman possessed. But whatever his reservations, they were nothing compared with the fire she felt when she laid eyes on the urn.
“Give me my knives,” he said.
Echo reached into her backpack and pulled them out. He had thrown an unholy fit when she had insisted on carrying them, but one couldn’t walk around Manhattan openly armed. She handed them to Caius. Trying not to bounce on her toes in her excitement, she watched as he fastened the leather straps across his chest and unsheathed only one. He smashed through the case’s glass with the hilt of the knife; then he sheathed it and grabbed the urn.
“Are you absolutely sure?” Caius asked. “I need you to be certain before I deface a culturally significant artifact.”
“Oh, for the love of—” Echo elbowed him with all of her strength. The urn slipped through his fingers and smashed to the ground, bits of marble scattering across the floor. A flash of silver drew her eye. There it was. A skeleton key, small and unassuming. The only adornment of which it could boast was a vine twisting around the bow and stem, tiny thorns dotting its surface. Echo pushed past Caius and picked up the key.
It was a rush, heady and wonderful, and Echo laughed. She could feel Caius watching her, probably wondering if she had completely lost her grip on reality. And maybe she had, but she didn’t care. The locket ceased its painful pulsing, and the key felt like sunlight in her hands. She turned to him, and her laughter fizzled. She held the key so tightly its thorns dug into the soft flesh of her palm. She looked up at Caius, and it was as if she were seeing him for the first time. He was beautiful, had always been beautiful, but this time, the locket surged once more as if to agree.
CHAPTER FORTY
“That was easier than I expected,” Echo said. Caius watched her studying the key. Her earlier intensity simmered beneath the surface, and he could see her body thrum with the energy of it. She turned the key over in her palm to run a finger along the delicate inscriptions it bore. “That’s weird. I think these are Drakhar.” Not a language one would have expected to find in a human museum. She offered the key to Caius. “Can you read it?”
Their fingers brushed when he took the key from her hand, and a shock ran up his arm, stronger than static. Echo yanked her hand back, flexing her fingers.
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
“It’s all right,” he said, rubbing his palm on his thighs. The back of his neck still tingled. “Let me see.”
He squinted at the runes written on the key’s stem. They were old, older than Caius even, but he knew them. “‘To know the truth, you must first want the truth.’ I’ve seen that before.”
Echo peered over his arm at the key. Even with his jacket on, he was hyperaware of her hair brushing his shoulder. “Where?”
He shook his head, puzzled. “It’s an old Drakhar saying, but it comes from somewhere very specific. It’s written above the entrance to the Oracle’s cave.”
“An Oracle?” she asked, eyebrows inching up. “Really?”
“Really.”
Echo whistled, long and low. “My life just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” she said. “And have you met this Oracle before?”
Caius nodded. “Once.”
“Why?”
He wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her who he was. He wanted to tell her that visiting the Oracle was the first thing he had done as the Dragon Prince, just as every prince before him had. He wanted to tell her what the Oracle had told him. In that moment, he wanted her to know him, all of him. Yet, all he could say was, “That’s personal.”
Echo held his gaze for a beat before shrugging. “Whatever. Back to Jasper’s and then off to see this Oracle of yours?”
Caius’s teeth sank into the flesh of his cheek, considering his next words. The Oracle knew who he was. If they went to her, there was a chance—and a large one at that—that his deception would be exposed, that Echo would see him for who and what he truly was. Wanting her to know him, the real him, was a nice thought, but only in the abstract. The reality of it would shatter their fragile partnership. He’d already figured out that she wasn’t the kind of person who put her trust in others easily, and the depth of his lie would stretch the bounds of forgiveness, he was sure of it.
Echo poked him in the side with a gentle elbow. “Earth to Caius. You still with me?”
He cleared his throat and offered her a quick nod. “Yes, sorry.” She canted her head to the side, waiting for
him to answer her original question. The Oracle. They had to go see her. While he could have ventured to the Oracle’s alone, he felt, deep in his bones, that he needed Echo to find the answers he sought. The maps had come to her, and though he couldn’t decipher why, he knew that she was tied to this quest, as inextricably as he was. There was no way around it. He would tell her the truth. Soon, but not now. He looked down at her, slipping on a small smile he didn’t quite feel, and nodded again. “We’ll leave tomorrow. The Oracle isn’t going anywhere.”
They walked back through the sculpture hall at a much slower pace than they’d entered. Marble gods stared down at them, beautiful enough to break the hardest heart. The guards were still out, the cameras were still down, and Caius was one step closer to the firebird. Perhaps they would reach the end of this journey together, unscathed. He pivoted, turning in a slow circle. “I almost don’t want to leave.”
Echo practically skipped down the hall, still holding the key tightly. Face breaking into a lopsided grin, she asked, “Why not?”
He smiled again, and it was real this time. He spread his arms wide and said, “Art.”
“Do the Drakharin not make art?” Echo asked.
“They do,” he said. But Drakharin art had never moved him the way these works did. It had never screamed its presence at him, had never demanded that he recognize its immediacy, its fragility. He looked at Echo to find her looking back at him. There was something in her, some sense of cosmic impermanence that mirrored the museum’s paintings and sculptures. “But it’s all about battles and victors and commemorating something awful and bloody. There’s no beauty. No softness. No … art.”
Echo’s grin flashed across her face. There and gone. “There’s no art in Drakharin art?”
His smile was pulled from him, against his will, a hostage of Echo’s charm. He doubted she knew just how charming she was. He thought about telling her, but she seemed like the kind of person on whom compliments were wasted.
“When you say it like that, it sounds so eloquent.” He came to a halt in front of a decapitated Aphrodite. Even without a head, its presence was so strong, so mighty, that he was convinced that if he only stood still and watched long enough, he would see the delicate drapery on its chest rise and fall with breath.
“Some things demand to be noticed,” said Caius. “They grab you and shout, ‘I am here! See me!’”
He could feel Echo watching him. “And does Drakharin art not do that?”
When he turned to her, she was looking back at the statue, but a few strands of her hair swayed slightly, as if she’d snapped her head around fast.
“No,” Caius said. “I don’t think we know how to do that.”
“Why is that?” Echo reached a hand out to Aphrodite’s stone foot. She peered up at the statue, her fingers hovering close but not touching. She was so perfectly still that she could have been carved from marble. There was something monumental about her in that moment. He was beginning to understand what drove a certain breed of man to make art.
When he spoke, his words were soft and quiet, so as not to disturb the absolute stillness of the moment. “We live too long. We remember too much. We don’t know what it’s like.”
Echo turned back to him, exhaling a light sigh. It was as though the room breathed with her. “What what’s like?”
“Forgetting,” he said. “The fear that we will die and no one will remember that we were ever there. That someday, everyone we know and everyone who knew them will be gone and forgotten, and no one will be left to remember our names.”
Echo frowned, but her face was lovely still. “That’s so sad.”
“And that’s why it matters. Humans make art to remember and be remembered,” said Caius. “Art is their weapon against forgetting.”
“That’s beautiful.” Echo was standing very close to him now. He noticed, for the first time, the faint dusting of freckles across her nose. There were a great many things that he found beautiful in that moment. He searched for the words to tell her just that when the shadows around them exploded.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Echo knew who it was before the darkness coalesced into shape, black feathers fluttering around a figure at the opposite end of the corridor, blocking the way to the lobby. There was only one person who could wrap themselves in shadows like that. Ruby emerged from the darkness, her cloak dragging over the marble.
“Hi, Ruby,” Echo said, slipping the key into the zippered pocket of her jacket. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Ruby’s smile was as false as ever. “Echo, always nice to see you. But I have a feeling you’d much prefer to see who I brought with me.”
A figure stepped out from the shadows behind Ruby, and Echo’s heart stuttered in her chest. “Rowan?”
He looked almost exactly as he had when she’d left him in the Avicen cells. The bronze armor had been swapped for jeans and a black hoodie, but the concern in his eyes and the tight set of his jaw were the same.
“Echo?” Rowan asked. “What are you doing here?” His gaze darted between Echo and Caius. “With a Drakharin?”
“Get back,” Caius said. He shoved Echo behind him, drawing both knives from the sheaths on his back. It felt like hiding, but Echo was glad to have him as a buffer between herself and Ruby. A Drakharin shielding her from Altair’s favorite lackey. If Ruby didn’t kill her, the irony would. Rowan’s gaze bounced between Caius and Echo as he tried to puzzle out why and how their strange alliance had come to be. Echo wanted to explain it to him, but she didn’t think Ruby would tolerate a lengthy chat.
“Caius,” Echo said, placing a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. Rowan’s a friend. He won’t hurt me.” She tripped over the word “friend,” hating the way it felt on her lips, regretting how it made Rowan flinch when she said it. He was staring at her so hard, she felt as though she would break. There were a million things she wanted to tell him, but she didn’t think any could quell the feeling of guilt that curdled in her stomach. She was standing side by side with a Drakharin, letting herself be protected by him. To Rowan, it must have looked like betrayal.
Caius shot her a quick, quizzical glance, but he didn’t argue. He jerked his head at Ruby. “And what about her?”
Ruby drew a wickedly long sword, and the sound Echo made was embarrassingly close to a whimper. There was a reason Ruby was Altair’s favorite recruit, and it had nothing to do with her sterling personality.
Echo swallowed. “Um, not so sure about her.”
Ruby glided toward them as if she had been waiting for her close-up. “Hiding behind your new boyfriend now, are you? I want to say I expected more from you, but it would be a lie.”
Rowan recoiled as if struck.
“He is not my boyfriend,” Echo said in a rush. The situation was deteriorating faster than she could handle. Half of her was happy to see Rowan, to know that he was looking for her, that he cared enough to come after her. The other half almost wished he hadn’t. Getting in and out of the museum should have been simple. This … this was not simple.
Caius kept his eyes on Ruby, long knives held at the ready, but he angled his head toward Echo when he said, “Really? That’s what you’re worried about?”
“The truth is very important to me, Caius.” So maybe her priorities needed work. She looked back to Rowan and Ruby. “What are you two doing here?”
Rowan stepped forward, placing a hand on Ruby’s arm. She didn’t look happy to be held back, but she didn’t fight him.
“The wards were tripped when you got back to the city,” Rowan said. “Altair had us tracking you. He knew I let you out, so he said I had to bring you back. It’s my … penance.” He inched forward, warily, but when Caius gripped the hilts of his knives as if preparing to strike, he paused. “Echo, what is going on?” He gestured to Caius. “And why are you with him? What happened to Ivy?”
“Ivy’s okay,” Echo said. “Rowan, I know this looks bad, but I can explain.” She tried to step around Caius, but his
arm shot out, blocking her path. Rowan looked at Caius’s arm as though he wanted to rip it off.
“We didn’t come here to listen to your excuses, traitor.” Ruby brushed past Rowan but left a comfortable distance between her own sword and Caius’s blades. “I knew it was a mistake taking you in. The Ala should have drowned you like the runt you are.”
The muscles in Caius’s back tensed at Ruby’s taunt, and for some insane reason, that struck Echo as the most miraculous thing that had happened all day. Rowan said nothing in her defense, and Echo tried not to think about how much his silence hurt.
Ruby raised her sword, but stayed where she was. “To be honest, I should thank you. You led me right to the next step in finding the firebird. Altair will be pleased. He’ll be even happier when you’ve been arrested. Escaping from the cells was one thing, but this?” She waved her sword at Caius and Echo. “This is a whole new level of wrong.”
Echo’s throat tightened, and she hated Ruby more than she ever had. She looked at Rowan, but he’d averted his gaze, choosing instead to stare at the floor. “Rowan?” she asked. “Were you sent here to arrest me?”
Rowan dragged his eyes up to meet hers. “Yeah, technically, but—” he groaned low in his throat, raking his hands through his hair. “Altair just wants us to bring you back. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
With a snort, Ruby shook her head. “Don’t lie to her, Rowan.” She turned back to Echo, pale blue eyes glinting in the darkness. “Our orders are clear. We’re to bring you before the council. The charges leveled against you are almost impressive. Withholding secrets pertinent to the security of the Avicen people. Breaking out of prison. And now, I’m sure cavorting with the enemy will be added to the list.” She tilted her head to the side, never breaking eye contact with Echo. “Do you know what the penalty for treason is?”
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