The Girl at Midnight

by The Girl at Midnight (ARC) (epub)

  Echo slipped her fingers under Caius’s shirt, warming them against his skin. His hands dropped to wrap around her waist, and he arched into her touch. A strangled sound escaped him, like a man gasping for breath after drowning. Breathing heavily, he shuddered in her arms and squeezed his eyes shut, forehead falling to rest against hers. Her touch was light, but Caius reacted as though he hadn’t been touched in years. Maybe he hadn’t. Echo flattened her palm against his lower back, right above the waistband of his jeans. Her skin felt aflame.

  “Echo.” It was a whisper, breathed into her hair.

  She reached up, closing the inch that separated them to brush her lips against his. He made that desperate strangled sound again. This was what she needed. A distraction. A way to feel something besides regret. But after a few seconds, his hands dropped from where they rested against her waist. He followed the line of her arms to grasp her forearms, pulling her away from him. The distance was practically negligible, but it was enough for Echo to curse the cold that settled between them. He’d been so warm. He let his head drop, close enough for his bangs to brush her cheekbones.

  “Not like this,” he whispered. “Not like this.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Even after he pulled away, Caius could still taste the subtle mint of Echo’s lip balm. She sagged against him, forehead falling against his chest. When she spoke, her words were muffled by his jacket.

  “I did it for you.”

  Caius stroked the soft skin on the undersides of her wrists with his thumbs. “I know.”

  She rubbed her face against the space between his collarbones. He could feel a slight dampness on her cheeks through his shirt.

  “Why did I do it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean, would you have done the same for me?” Echo peered up at him, brown eyes bloodshot and shiny. She lifted her head just enough so that Caius’s skin tingled with the fleeting warmth of her cheek. Something quite like pain seized at his chest. He would have. Without a moment’s hesitation.

  “Echo—”

  And then she was crying. Caius wanted to cry with her, but he had run out of tears so long ago. There was nothing he could do for her beyond sliding his hands up her arms and around her shoulders, pulling her closer, smoothing the mess of her hair. She sobbed her guilt against his chest while he whispered soft Drakhar nonsense into her ear. She didn’t understand his words, but the sound of his voice seemed to soothe her. After a while, her sobs faded to hiccups and then, finally, to silence.

  Caius held her as he sank to his knees, pulling her down with him. He rested his back against the trunk of an oak tree, stretching his legs out in front of him. Echo pulled her knees close to her chest, burrowing into the space between his arm and his body, her thighs resting against his own. She fit against the curve of him as though she’d always been there.

  They sat like that long enough to watch the sun’s descent as it dipped below the horizon, the stars pricking their way through the velvety indigo of dusk. The only noise to keep them company was the sorrowful song of the thrushes nesting in the trees as they bid farewell to the sun. Caius closed his eyes and listened to the quiet sound of Echo’s breathing.

  He hummed a lilting tune into her hair, the same one he had heard in his dreams for so many years. She shifted in his arms, hair brushing the sensitive skin of his throat.

  “How do you know that song?” Echo asked. “The magpie’s lullaby. I thought it was an Avicen thing.”

  “It is.” His chin slid against her forehead when he spoke, but she didn’t seem to mind. “Someone taught it to me, a long time ago. The girl I told you about.”

  “Rose … she was Avicen, wasn’t she?” Echo shifted, and her hair tickled his cheek. “What happened to her?”

  He hesitated. Some wounds were not so easily reopened. Her breath ghosted, warm and soft, against his collarbone.

  “There was a fire,” Caius said, brushing away an errant strand of Echo’s hair. “She died.”

  Two sentences. That was all it took to sum up their story. The neatness of it felt like another death. Echo’s arm tightened around Caius’s waist. Just like that, his darkest secret, the one known only to him and his sister, was bared to the dying light of the Black Forest.

  “And the fire,” Echo said, fingers drawing small circles on the skin at his side. His shirt must have ridden up when he sat down. It was the nicest thing he’d felt in years. “Was it an accident?”

  Caius shook his head, rubbing his cheek against Echo’s hair. “No. Someone found out about us. They said Rose was a spy.”

  “Was she?”

  Shrugging the shoulder opposite Echo, Caius answered as truthfully as he could. “I don’t know. I like to think so. If she was, then maybe her death would be easier to bear.”

  He couldn’t see Echo frown, but he could feel the set of her jaw against his clavicle. “Is it?”

  Caius’s shaky exhale stirred the hairs atop Echo’s head, and she squirmed slightly, as if tickled. “No,” he admitted. “Not really. Not at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Echo whispered. With her lips brushing against his throat with each word, he felt it more than heard it. He shivered and tightened his arms around her. Night continued to settle, painting the forest violet.

  “It was a long time ago.” If Caius kept saying it, then maybe it would begin to mean something.

  “It must hurt.” Echo shifted again, stretching her legs out next to his. She reached for the key that hung around her neck, stroking it lightly. She’d slipped it on that morning, along with the locket, before they left Jasper’s. “Remembering.”

  And it did. But the only thing worse than remembering the feel of Rose in his arms, the softness of her black and white feathers, the sound of her voice when she sang quietly to herself, would be forgetting it.

  “It does,” he said. “But memories make us who we are. Without them, we are nothing.”

  Echo hummed in response. The distant sound of birdsong gave way to the gentle chirping of crickets in the dark and the lonely hoot of an owl in the distance. A chill was beginning to set in. It was late spring, but remnants of winter clung to the forest like a lover reluctant to say goodbye. Caius whispered a soft Drakhar spell into Echo’s hair—it was a simple thing, a spell to keep warm. The words came without him having to think about them—he’d said them enough during long, cold nights of battle and bloodshed. The feeling of Echo in his arms was much nicer than that.

  The part of himself that craved the touch of another person, the feel of warm skin against his own had died with Rose, burned out of him with Tanith’s flames. But Echo had burrowed her way inside, past centuries of stone walls, and found the dying embers of the man Caius had been. She was bringing him back to life, slowly, as if coaxing a stubborn fire. He stroked the soft hair at the nape of her neck and breathed in time with the rise and fall of her chest as she dozed off. Soon enough, he, too, fell asleep. For the first time in days, he did not dream of fire.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Echo blinked awake to the sound of birdsong. Larks crooned at the rising sun while warblers sang their lullabies. She settled deeper against Caius’s chest and breathed in. He smelled, just faintly, like wood. And apples. It was cozy. When he’d talked to her in Drakhar the night before, it was the first time she’d ever really heard it spoken, aside from a few indistinct bits of conversation between Caius and Dorian. The Avicen claimed it was a guttural language, with inelegant vowels and harsh consonants, but when Caius spoke it, whispering words into her hair, it was melodic, almost lyrical. It was beautiful.

  Her first time waking up next to a person of the opposite sex wasn’t quite what she’d expected. In her fantasies, there had been no stubborn sharp-edged stones digging into her thighs, no gnarled twigs stabbing at the sliver of bare skin between her jeans and T-shirt, no awkward cramps in her neck from falling asleep mostly upright. And in those fantasies, the person resting beside her had always been Row
an.

  Echo shifted so she could see Caius’s face. He looked younger asleep, softer. His dark lashes were stark brushstrokes against his cheekbones, scales barely visible in the dawn light. She let her eyes roam over him, trying to commit each detail to memory. This quiet reprieve wouldn’t last, but she didn’t want to let it go. She closed her eyes, resting her temple against the curve of Caius’s shoulder. She wasn’t sure if she was imagining it or if the locket and key dangling from the chain at her breast were actually thrumming in time with the thumping of his heart. Even the dagger in her boot felt warmer through the fabric of her jeans, but it was nothing compared with the heat radiating off Caius. When she was held against his side like this, it was almost too much. She slid down, pressing her ear against his chest. Thump. Thump thump. It was a good heartbeat. A solid heartbeat. It felt as though her own were skipping a few beats to match it.

  There was a sense of rightness to being in Caius’s arms. It was the sort of rightness she’d never felt before, not even with Rowan. It was almost like … belonging. Like home. Echo squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her cheek against his chest, feeling the soft scrape of wool against her skin. But she had to remember that Caius was not her home. She already had a home.

  Do you? a nasty little part of her whispered.

  Shut up, Echo whispered right back.

  She turned in the circle of Caius’s arms and looked around. Drakhar runes had been drawn in the dirt nearby, alternating with a line of stones to form a circle. Dorian must have come after them in the night to cast a protective ward. Heat pricked at Echo’s cheeks at the thought of another person finding them like this, wrapped around each other with a familiarity they shouldn’t have felt. But as embarrassing as the thought of Dorian and his judgmental one-eyed gaze was, Echo was glad it hadn’t been Ivy who found them. Her best friend had stuck with her through a decade’s worth of questionable life choices, but even the most tolerant of people had their limits. Echo snuggling with a Drakharin mercenary just may have been Ivy’s.

  When she pulled away from Caius, slipping out from under the jacket he’d wrapped around her in the night, the brisk morning chill came as a shock. Echo walked away from Caius without a backward glance even though something deep inside her screamed at her to turn around, to crawl back into his arms and nestle into his warmth. She trampled through the underbrush, heading back to where the others had camped for the night. It took a herculean effort, putting one foot in front of the other, keeping her eyes locked forward, but it was the right thing to do. It had to be. Yet with every step she took closer to the Oracle, to the firebird, to whatever great and unknowable destiny loomed before her, she was beginning to feel more and more as if she had no idea what was right anymore.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  The walk was longer than Caius remembered. They’d spent the entire day and the better part of the night navigating the forest’s increasingly uneven terrain, and it was nearly midnight by the time they reached the waterfall hiding the path to the Oracle’s cave. It was modest, at least when compared with the Triberg Falls on the other side of the Black Forest. Unlike Triberg, this waterfall wasn’t crawling with tourists and their cameras. No human or Avicen had heard of it, and few Drakharin knew of its existence. The location was a secret, albeit a poorly guarded one. It was meant to be passed down from one Dragon Prince to the next, but most of the nobles of the court knew where to find it. Curiosity motivated many a Drakharin to seek out the Oracle’s services, though officially, they were limited to the elected prince.

  Caius tried to imagine Tanith here, in all her golden glory, glittering among the soft green willows still lush despite the frost tickling at their leaves. He couldn’t. This was no place for fire and steel. He glanced back at the rest of their party. For all her big-city charm, Echo carved out a place for herself in the forest as if she belonged, taking to it as naturally as a bird to air.

  He’d woken alone with the faint scent of her shampoo clinging to his shirt. As much as he ached to close the distance between them, he couldn’t. For every step he took toward her, she took one farther away. For hours, they’d marched on in relative silence, though every now and then, Caius overheard Jasper’s quiet voice attempting to needle Dorian into conversation. It had taken them longer to reach the falls than he had anticipated. Dorian’s injury had been aggravated by their journey, slowing their progress, though his captain would never admit it. The sun had set hours earlier, and the moon was high in the sky. The words on the map, scrawled in Rose’s hand, echoed in Caius’s mind.

  The bird that sings at midnight, he thought, remembering the familiar sight of Rose’s handwriting on the crinkled page, from within its cage of bones, will rise from blood and ashes to greet the truth unknown.

  It was a lovely rhyme, if more than a little ominous. It told Caius nothing useful, but then he’d never had much of an ear for poetry. With a sigh, he climbed the mossy stone steps leading to the falls, the others clambering behind him with less grace.

  “Ugh,” Jasper retched. “Water.”

  “That does tend to accompany waterfalls.” Dorian’s smile flashed, brilliantly. Dorian, of all people, joking with an Avicen. Caius could hardly believe it. Perhaps he and Echo weren’t the only ones to have been changed, irreparably, by their journey.

  Jasper returned Dorian’s smile with one of his own. “And here I was, thinking that was just a vicious rumor.”

  “Tough it up, Jasper,” Echo said, holding out a steadying hand to Ivy as her friend slipped on cold stone. Echo’s eyes flicked up to Caius’s, but she didn’t hold his gaze for long. “This our stop?”

  “Yes,” Caius said.

  Echo breezed past him to duck beneath the falls, her arm brushing against his sleeve. His heart thudded in his chest as if it were trying to pound its way out.

  Jasper sidled up next to Caius, still hopelessly pretty despite his grimace. “We have to go under that?”

  Caius answered by doing just that, bowing his head against the falling water. Jasper’s plaintive protest—“But my plumage!”—was swallowed by the damp, dark silence of the cave tucked away behind the falls. Loose pebbles and crumbling moist earth bordered an underground lake. The water refracted scraps of moonlight that fell between the gaps in the stone overheard, sending light skittering across the lake’s surface like stars.

  Echo stood on a long, narrow dock, near where a small boat bobbed in the water. Brows knitted in concentration, she stared across the lake that separated the falls from the rocky shore that led to the Oracle’s cave. The rotting wooden slats groaned under Caius’s feet, but Echo didn’t turn as he approached. He moved to stand beside her, not close enough to touch, but close enough that he could feel the hum of her presence across the inches that divided them.

  “We’re close, aren’t we?” She didn’t face him as she spoke, arms crossed and eyes searching. Caius studied her profile, her features half in shadow.

  “The entrance to the Oracle’s sanctum is right across the lake,” he said. “The boat will take us there. It’ll only hold two, so I’ll ask Dorian to stay behind with Jasper and Ivy.”

  Echo frowned, shaking her head slightly. “No, not like that. It’s something else. I can feel it, like a balloon that’s been blown up too much and is about to burst.” She looked at him then, eyes shiny with the reflection of light off the lake’s surface. “What did she tell you when you came here? The Oracle, I mean.”

  With a little puff of laughter, Caius said, “To follow my heart.”

  Echo arched a single eyebrow. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Wow. Useful.”

  “Hardly.”

  She held his gaze for a moment longer, silent, contemplating. He wanted to ask her what she was thinking, what she feared, what she wanted, but Jasper’s grumbling and Ivy’s soft voice drifted to the end of the dock, reminding Caius that they weren’t alone.

  In the blink of an eye, the spell was broken.

  “
Great.” Echo started toward the boat. “Let’s hope she’s got something better than fortune-cookie wisdom for us this time around.”

  “Wait.” Caius grabbed her arm before she could go any farther. She snatched it back as if his hand had burned her. It was the first time they’d touched since that morning. Echo glowered at him, but stayed put. “Before we go,” he said, “there’s something you need to know.”

  She nodded slowly, as if she was ready to dislike what he was about to say.

  Smart girl, he thought. So much of Echo reminded him of Rose. She was intelligent and brave and fiercely protective of the people she loved. And like Rose, she burned so brightly it was hardly a surprise that he was drawn to her flame. He hoped her story had a happier ending than Rose’s, that he could give her the peace he couldn’t give Rose. If war had taught him anything, it was that it took the people who deserved long and happy lives and gave them short, brutal ones instead.

  Caius pushed the thought away. “The Oracle doesn’t impart her wisdom for free,” he said, peering across the lake. He could just barely make out the entrance to the Oracle’s cave. “We have to pay for it.”

  “Yeah, well, I left my euros in my other pants,” she said.

  He huffed out a laugh. He was glad she hadn’t lost her sense of humor. “If only it were that easy. The Oracle doesn’t want money. She’ll want a sacrifice, a gift that has special meaning to you. Something that you part with at great cost.”