by Melissa Grey
“Drink it,” Jasper said, his tone softening. “The sugar will help keep you awake. And the soul-cleansing embrace of chocolate might make you slightly less gloomy.”
With a grudging sigh, Dorian lifted the mug to his lips and took a tentative sip. Jasper had made sure it wasn’t as excruciatingly sweet as his own. Dorian didn’t appreciate the beauty of sugar the way he did. It probably would have damaged Dorian’s street cred if all that world-weary stoicism enjoyed a doughnut every once in a while. Jasper blew on his own cocoa. It was a touch too hot to drink. But Dorian ignored the way the cocoa must have scalded his tongue. Perhaps his guilt was making him feel self-destructive, as if he deserved the pain.
Jasper’s amber eyes narrowed. “That cocoa is approximately eight million degrees. Let it cool down first.”
Dorian took another sip.
Idiot, Jasper thought.
He watched Dorian drink in stubborn silence, his brow wrinkling in contemplation. Jasper was more perceptive than most people thought—raging narcissism was a mask he hid behind so that no one ever suspected how closely he was watching them—especially where it concerned Dorian. Especially since that night at Avalon, before Dorian had found out about Caius’s abduction. Jasper knew that Dorian felt as though he’d truly failed the one person he’d sworn to protect. It had been a wonderful, joyous night, and in the weeks since then, Dorian had been acting as if he deserved neither joy nor wonder in his life.
“Didn’t we talk about you punishing yourself?” Jasper asked.
“I’m not punishing myself,” Dorian lied.
Jasper was kind enough not to call him on it.
Outside, an insistent autumn rain pounded against the sidewalk, painting the city in shades of gray.
Jasper cradled the mug in his hands, leaning down to blow gently on it again. His cocoa was still this side of scalding; it needed a few minutes before it was drinkable.
Silence—as complete a silence as one of the busiest cafés in the middle of Edinburgh ever saw, anyway—descended on the table he shared with the man who was potentially, possibly, definitely-not-but-definitely-maybe his boyfriend. They hadn’t had that conversation yet, and judging by the storm clouds that perpetually flitted across his maybe-boyfriend’s eye as his maybe-boyfriend contemplated the fate of a man who was not Jasper, it wasn’t a conversation they’d be having anytime soon. Bigger fish to fry and so on. Jasper sipped his cocoa and burned his tongue.
Dorian drummed his fingers on the worn wooden tabletop. In the past few hours, he’d already fidgeted with the salt and pepper shakers, peeled the label off a defenseless bottle of Heinz ketchup, and ripped no fewer than five napkins to shreds. His hands refused to be idle. Jasper knew they itched to reach for a blade—sharp, deadly things were comforting to Dorian in a way that Jasper should not have found quite so appealing—but stillness had been forced upon them while Dorian waited to hear back from his contact within Wyvern’s Keep. Nothing to do but wait, and in the meantime, destroy the table settings. The silence stretched.
Jasper ached to reach across the table and take Dorian’s agitated hands in his own, to stroke the scars and calluses on them until the tension bled from them, but he knew it would do no good. Dorian had turned down Jasper’s offers of comfort at every turn. Gently, of course. He was always so gentle with Jasper, as if sensing that gentleness was the sort of thing with which Jasper was desperately unfamiliar, but there was no amount of softness that could take the sting out of his refusals. Jasper kept his hands wrapped firmly around the warm ceramic of his mug and ignored the hairline fractures forming in his heart as he watched Dorian tear himself to pieces.
“You know,” Jasper said, “this is probably the worst date I’ve ever been on.”
Dorian grunted in response, his eye drifting to the door, as it had been throughout the hours they’d been sitting there. His contact was late. Two hours and twenty-seven minutes late to be exact, but who was counting? Certainly not Jasper.
An abrupt stillness fell over Dorian, his one good eye riveted to the door. Jasper swiveled in his seat to see what had caused Dorian’s shift, but all he saw was a twentysomething hipster entering the café, newsboy cap pulled low to protect his eyes from the drizzle that had been constant since their arrival in Edinburgh. The man fit the description Dorian had given Jasper before they’d left their nondescript little hostel—dark hair, thick eyebrows, strong jaw, prominent nose—but he was human. Not their guy. Jasper watched as the man bantered with the girl behind the counter before placing his order. With a sigh, he turned back to face Dorian just in time to see the Drakharin’s shoulders droop. He looked deflated, as if the surge of expectancy had taken something vital out of him.
Jasper opened his mouth to reassure Dorian that everything was going to be okay—a saccharine platitude that he wasn’t sure he could deliver with a straight face—when the bell above the door tinkled again. A stillness passed over Dorian as his one eye tracked someone approaching their table. Jasper chanced a look over his shoulder. A young man neared, his slate-gray eyes resting on Dorian.
He walked past their table and went into the men’s room.
Curious.
They waited in silence for a few minutes. Dorian said nothing. He simply sipped his cocoa with what would have looked like nonchalance to anyone but Jasper. Soon enough, the man exited the bathroom and walked right out of the café.
Without a word, Dorian got up and entered the bathroom.
A dead drop. Jasper smiled into his cocoa. In the loo. How clandestine.
When Dorian reemerged, there was a small, vial-shaped bump in the front pocket of his trousers. He sank back into his seat and picked up his mug.
“We should wait a few minutes before leaving,” Dorian said quietly.
“Do you think we’re being watched?” Jasper had scouted the café before they’d chosen it for their rendezvous. He hadn’t noticed anything or anyone suspicious, but it was possible he had missed something, even with eyes as keen as his.
Dorian shrugged. “Probably not,” he said. “But I find it’s always best to assume the worst and be pleasantly surprised when it fails to come to pass.”
Jasper snorted into his cocoa. “That’s remarkably optimistic coming from you.”
A smile ghosted across Dorian’s lips. Jasper’s heart gave an embarrassing lurch at the sight of it. “What can I say?” Dorian’s tone was casual, but one hand rested on his pocket and its precious cargo. “Our day just got a whole lot brighter.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
If there was one thing Echo had learned about magic in her seventeen years of existence, it was that ritual was of the utmost importance.
What made magic work wasn’t the specific accoutrements each individual spell called for—it wasn’t the cloying incense or the softly glowing candles or the particular arrangement of herbs and flowers around an altar. Each and every item served its purpose, but that purpose wasn’t the mechanism of the magical event. Magic was powered by will. That was the most fundamental tenet of spell work. One had to believe that they possessed not only the ability to perform a spell but also the strength, energy, and focus. Doubt was the surest way to self-sabotage, and a lack of concentration was just as deadly to a spell’s success as a lack of confidence. The supplies themselves worked no magic—they were there to serve the needs of the caster. In this case, Echo.
It was all an elaborate process to get one’s head in the game. In the zone, Echo thought. This spell was more complex than what she was used to. Anything that reached across distance required a great deal of power and therefore a great deal of focus. She lit a bundle of sage with one of the candles that cast a warm, buttery glow on the cabin’s walls. The scent reminded her of the healing chambers at the Nest. Sage was said to keep away negativity, and it was used as an all-purpose cleanser for rituals. It was sort of like the Windex of magic. The smell brought back memories: her first trip to the healer, cradling a broken arm, the Ala a warm, comforting presence at her ba
ck as magic stitched together the splintered bone quicker than her human body would accomplish on its own. Visiting Ivy during her apprenticeship. The smell had clung to Ivy for weeks as the senior healers had kept the apprentices busy with quotidian injuries too minor for their attention: burns, fractures, headaches, upset stomachs. The Avicen were a hardy lot; they rarely fell ill, but they weren’t indestructible. They got hurt as easily as anyone else, a fact Echo could not afford to forget. All those fragile lives cradled in her hands, as delicate as spun sugar, and as easily crushed.
The scented smoke filled the small room, and Echo set the sage aside in a small metal bowl, where it would continue to burn on its own. She drew in a deep breath, then another, letting the sage work its unique magic, relaxing her, opening up her mind.
One by one, the voices in her head fell silent. As she had grown used to their presence, the sound of the previous vessels had faded into the background, like chatter heard between radio stations. The white noise had filled the gaps she hadn’t known were there. Now the quiet was unnerving—Echo thought she would feel relieved for the voices to be gone, at least for a little while, but her mind felt curiously empty, as if the presence of the vessels had left her irreparably changed. Without the soft murmur of those voices, she didn’t feel quite whole. And that was more unnerving than she cared to admit.
Echo poured water into the silver bowl pilfered from Perrin’s shop. The spell in the book she had consulted called for water taken directly from the source—clean, unsullied by pollution—but since they didn’t have enough shadow dust to gallivant about the globe, a bottle of Poland Spring would have to do. It had spring in the name; as far as Echo was concerned, that meant it pretty much came from Mother Nature herself.
She was vaguely aware of the presence of other people in the room. Dorian had not even needed to insist on being there. The fact that he would be was a given, and Echo was grateful, even if his smoldering unease was hard to ignore. The spell warned that the images the caster would see might be incoherent or disjointed. The firebird gave her a little extra—a lot extra—power to push the spell harder and further, but Echo was no Seer. It took a very particular skill to make sense of magical visions, a skill Echo had never needed to develop. Dorian might recognize things Echo would not if Caius was being held someplace familiar.
Jasper sat beside Dorian, his perfect stillness in stark contrast to Dorian’s restlessness. Another given: that Jasper would not leave Dorian’s side when he was quite so fragile. Not that either of them would ever admit that out loud. Maybe not even to each other. Not in so many words, anyway. Their relationship still did not entirely make sense to Echo, but that was not the mystery she was preparing to solve.
Echo paused, her hands hovering over the implements gathered on her makeshift altar. She had read the spell a dozen times to memorize it and then a dozen more just to be sure, but still…It was so quiet in her head. It would be nice to have another voice ground her.
“Tell me again what I’m supposed to do,” Echo said. “I didn’t forget, I just…”
Dorian seemed to understand exactly what she needed. He spoke softly so as not to disturb the quiet atmosphere of the room primed and ready for magic. “You’re going to say the chant. Then you’re going to take the vial”—he indicated the small glass bottle beside Echo’s right hand with a nod—“and you’re going to pour it into the bowl. Then you repeat the chant. Focus on Caius. Think of him and only him. Clear your mind of anything else. The blood should start to form shapes if the spell is working. And then…” He trailed off, his words laced through with fear and longing.
Echo finished the sentence for him: “And then we wait.”
What remained unspoken: the possibility that Echo would see nothing, that the blood would swirl in the water, imbued with no magic, take no form. The spell only worked on the living, after all, and if Caius was…
No.
It didn’t bear considering.
Echo reached for the glass vial containing Caius’s blood. Silver vines adorned with miniature flowers wrapped around it. The flowers were so perfectly carved that Echo was sure it had to have been done by magic. No hands could craft something so delicate so immaculately. A deep emerald-green wax sealed the stopper. A crest had been pressed into the wax—Caius’s heraldry. Echo had seen it on the tunics of the guards at Wyvern’s Keep and on the locket Caius had gifted to Rose a century ago. Now it hung from Echo’s neck, tucked beneath her shirt. She hadn’t taken it off since Caius was kidnapped. Not even to shower. It remained, a weight around her neck, a pressure against her heart, and it would remain there until she found him. It was not a matter of if, only of when. She refused to accept anything else.
“Jasper,” Echo said. “The incantation.”
A book slid into her line of sight, open to a page covered in painfully small script. It would have been illegible to anyone who hadn’t spent years deciphering the Ala’s atrocious handwriting.
The words were in Avicet, but they rolled off Echo’s tongue with practiced ease. Months ago, pronouncing the incomprehensible phonemes of the language would have been impossible, but now she spoke it as fluently as if it were her first language. Even though it wasn’t her mother tongue, it was Rose’s. And what Rose knew, Echo knew. She clutched the vial tightly and let her mind retreat, allowing Rose’s consciousness to pierce her waking brain further than she ever had before.
When she reached the part of the spell that called for a piece of the missing, she broke the wax with the tip of her dagger. The stopper slid free with an audible pop. Echo tipped the contents of the vial into the silver bowl. Blood spread through the clear water like scarlet clouds.
Echo watched the water stain crimson and repeated the words of the Avicet chant. The blood didn’t settle. It swirled and eddied in the bowl as if it had a life of its own, dancing with the rhythm of Echo’s voice. There was a sound of other voices whispering, feminine voices. Not Dorian or Jasper. Echo almost looked up from the silver bowl, but her connection to the magic was only just building. If she looked away now, it would snap, like a too-thin rope trying to keep a boulder from rolling downhill. The voices joined hers in a susurration of ghostly chanting. As they rose and fell with the intonation of her voice, Echo realized what they were: the vessels, lending whatever traces of magical strength they had to her. The thought warmed her and did what the vessels wanted: it made her stronger.
With the added force of the vessels’ chanting, Echo let her own words fly from her lips on autopilot. In order for the spell to work, she had to focus on the object of her desire.
Caius.
Desire was the most critical impetus behind all magic. It was the most basic form of willpower. A desire strong enough could move mountains, heal wounds, inflict pain; could summon fire and ice and wind and all the forces of nature. Desire could turn a human girl into a being of flame and fury until all there was left in her wake was ash and smoke.
She thought of Caius, flitting from one memory to the other, refusing to fall into any single one lest that throw the spell off course. It wasn’t enough to simply remember with perfect clarity the line of his jaw or the sound of his laugh or the wrinkle that formed between his brows when he was mad. Her vision of Caius needed to encompass the totality of him, not merely be a snapshot of his existence.
She started from the beginning: the first time she had ever seen him, his face bathed in moonlight and shadow. They had stood on the opposite sides of a war begun long before either of them had been born. She had gone to steal something from a museum and he had followed her there. He, a prince in disguise. She, a thief with a penchant for trouble. They had fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, though neither one had known it at the time. She had needed him to show her to her destiny, just as he had needed her to help him find his own.
They had not remained locked in those two identities for long. Echo had become an ally—however reluctant—and Caius had fallen from his throne. Both of them had been set adrift, u
nmoored from the truths they had taken as absolute.
She remembered the way his hands felt wrapped around her wrists the first time she kissed him. His thumbs had rubbed circles into her skin, tracing the lines of her veins. His lips had been warm, and softer than she had expected. The kiss had been slow. So painfully slow. And brief.
Not like this, he had said.
She hadn’t understood it then, but she did now.
Caius hadn’t been ready. Neither had she. Echo hadn’t possessed the foresight to know it then, but he had seen it in her. He had known. And he had pushed her away. Despite how badly starved he was for touch, for even the most basic expressions of affection, he had pushed her away. He had denied himself for her benefit. But he had let her take her comfort from him. Had allowed her to fall asleep safe in the circle of his arms on the forest floor, the two of them entwined together against an uncertain future.
And then she had stumbled into the Oracle’s lair and learned the truth of Caius’s identity, and then into the room in which the Oracle had said Echo would find the firebird. In it, she had found only herself.
From memory, she conjured the sight of Caius in battle, his face speckled with the blood of the foes he had slain. He was most himself in the middle of a fight. He didn’t relish it the way Tanith did, but it was as if the part of him he held tightly on a leash was unchained and let free. He fought like a dancer, all lithe grace and sinuous muscle.
Echo remembered the way he had kissed her after that. Soft and tentative, an exploratory gesture.
She indulged in the sense memory of his hand in hers as they walked down a crowded London street. A perfect moment, and one easily shattered but never lost.
She called forth the smell of his skin during a time she had sought solace in his embrace. Woodsmoke and apples and something indefinable and otherworldly. Something magical. A scent uniquely his own.