The Girl at Midnight (27 page)

Echo ran as if she had wings on her feet, skidding around a corner and knocking over at least one priceless artifact, adrenaline singing through her veins. When she rounded the last corner, her breath caught. Ruby was sprawled on the floor, groaning in pain, while Caius towered over Rowan, knives still in hand.

“Caius, no!”

At the sound of Echo’s shout, Caius paused, turning to look at her. Behind him, Ruby pulled herself to her feet. Her sword arced through the air, and Echo ran as she never had before, tackling Ruby with a wordless yell. She had just enough time to see surprise flash across Caius’s face before they fell to the ground in a tangle of limbs and feathers.

Echo’s blade was lodged in Ruby’s back before she even realized she’d raised it. Ruby twitched beneath her, sword forgotten as her hands scrabbled at the marble floor, fingers slipping in her own blood. Echo pulled the dagger free from between Ruby’s shoulder blades, and the wet squelch made her stomach heave.

“Echo, we have to go.” Caius’s voice was muffled by the ringing in Echo’s ears. Her hands were slick with crimson, and she didn’t know what to do with them.

Caius grabbed her by her upper arms and hauled her to her feet. Her boots slid in the puddle of blood that was forming beneath Ruby’s still-twitching body, and she fell against Caius’s chest. He wrapped an arm around her—Echo hadn’t even seen him sheathe his knives—and half carried, half dragged her back toward the lobby. She twisted in Caius’s arms to peer over his shoulder. Ruby was nothing more than a black pile of feathers. Rowan crawled over to Ruby’s body, hands hovering uselessly over the wound in her back. He looked so lost.

Echo’s feet felt as if they belonged to someone else, and she stumbled as Caius led her back toward the Tomb of Perneb. Her legs were clumsy, as though she’d forgotten how they worked. Caius pulled her along, out of the sculpture hall, through the lobby, and back to the Egyptian gallery, and when he finally stopped at the tomb’s entrance, Echo closed her eyes. The last image she had of Ruby was seared into her retinas. She knew it was a sight she would never forget, no matter how hard she tried. All she could think, even as Caius summoned the black smoke of the in-between, was that Ruby’s blood had been as red as her name.

Echo barely remembered getting back to Jasper’s. She was certain that she’d been covered in blood and that Caius had all but carried her out of the Met, but beyond those general brushstrokes of a story, the finer details of the picture were grainy, half-focused images. She remembered the curve of Rowan’s back as he knelt over Ruby’s body, the inky swirls of the in-between as Caius conjured them a way out, and the nave of the cathedral, where he must have taken them. She wanted to laugh at his resourcefulness when it came to finding handy thresholds—a nave, who knew?—but she couldn’t feel anything beyond a yawning emptiness inside, a chasm that had been hollowed out in her chest. She felt as if she had been the one left to die on a cold marble floor. It was a selfish thought. Another thing to add to the bottomless pit of regret that had taken up residence where her stomach used to be.

The images began to crystallize after they arrived at the cathedral. Ivy, shining and white, big black eyes clouded with concern. Jasper’s worry made noticeable through his uncharacteristic silence. Dorian had nearly bled out on his Egyptian cotton sheets, and Jasper had quipped the whole way through, but when Echo burst through his front door covered in someone else’s blood, he hadn’t once lamented the state of his impractical furnishings. It was fascinating, the way they treated her. As if she was traumatized. She must have been, but how would the traumatized know? How could they tell? How could they see anything objective past the impenetrable force field of their own trauma?

Echo curled into a ball and rubbed her face into the pillow. It was memory foam or something like it. Her hands knotted together under the blankets. Someone had scrubbed them clean, leaving her skin dry and raw. She slipped them free of the blankets, looking at her knuckles, then at her open palms. Her skin was grayish in the darkness. Not a speck of blood remained. It was strange to think that they’d been slick with it just hours ago. Or had it been days? Time had become elastic, stretching loose and snapping tight.

She brought her fingers up to her lips, remembering the way Rowan’s had felt against her skin when he’d helped her escape from Altair’s jail. The way he’d looked at her as if she mattered more than he could have said in that moment. The warmth of his breath as he spoke. She wondered what he would think of her now. If he would ever be able to forgive the girl who had buried a knife in someone’s back. The girl who was officially a traitor and a murderer. She let her hands fall back onto the blankets. Rowan was at home in the
Nest—
his
home, not hers; it could never be hers, not now, not after what she’d done. And she was here, an ocean away, huddled under a mound of blankets.

Jasper’s loft was too high up for the orangey glow of Strasbourg’s streetlights to reach them, but the stained-glass windows caught the bare bits of starlight that pricked at the sky. Echo didn’t know what time it was, but it must have been late. Sheets rustled elsewhere in the loft as someone shifted in their sleep. She pulled the covers up to her chin and wondered about their sleeping arrangements, since she’d evidently claimed Jasper’s giant bed for herself. Ivy must have tucked her in, but she couldn’t really remember that, either. She studied the sleeping form on the chair beside her bed, the only person she could see from her cocoon of blankets.

Caius.

He must have started the night off sitting like a normal person, feet on the ground, legs stretched out, but he’d twisted as he slept. He was cradled in the chair, long legs draped over one arm while his back rested on the other, head slightly bowed so his bangs brushed the scales on his cheekbones. He reminded Echo of a statue, beautiful and serene.

From that moment in the Met—when something had fractured deep inside her—Caius had been her one constant. Through the broken shards of her memory, she remembered the feel of his hands as he hauled her up, grip as strong as iron, but strangely gentle, as if he was trying to hold the broken bits of her together even though it was futile. She was Humpty Dumpty, and she’d already tumbled from the wall.

She wasn’t sure what it was that glued him to her side.
Kindness, perhaps. Or maybe guilt. She had, after all, saved his life. The moment he’d picked her up, he’d begun to feel like her anchor. Like a piece of driftwood she clung to in her sea of guilt and despair, knowing that if she let go, she would drown.

She closed her eyes and tried to will herself to sleep. Since getting back, she’d heard only scraps of conversation. The inscription on the key, the one Caius recognized, was explained. His voice had drifted in and out as he told the others about the Oracle. Something about the Black Forest, and a cave, and how they would all wait until she and Dorian were up to snuff before departing.

She would have gladly traded places with Dorian in an instant. A sword wound seemed easy compared with this. In one way, out the other. Nice and clean. There was nothing clean about how she felt, little pieces of herself scattered around like broken porcelain. She drew in a shaky breath, trying to quell the unease in her gut. This was what guilt—real, undeniable guilt—felt like. It was a weight settling on her rib cage, crushing her with the force of a pile of stones. She wondered if it would ever let up, if she would ever scrub the image of the blood on her hands from her mind. If she even deserved that kind of reprieve, or if the magnitude of her sin was so great that she would carry it with her always.

Echo hadn’t even realized she’d started crying until she felt the brush of callused fingers on her face, wiping at her cheeks. She opened her eyes, lashes sticky with tears, to find Caius crouched beside the bed. She hadn’t heard him rise, but there he was, eyes nearly black in the darkness.

“Hey.” The word sounded strange coming from his mouth, as if it wasn’t something he ought to say. Echo swallowed past the lump in her throat. Caius didn’t seem to mind her silence. “We were worried about you.”

She wasn’t sure when their strange little group had coalesced from “us” and “them” into a single, cohesive “we.” Stranger things had happened, she supposed. His soft, kind eyes tugged at something inside her chest, a reminder that her heart was still there despite how empty she felt.

Caius’s fingers traced the lines of her face, from cheekbone to chin, his touch as soft as a feather.

“If you’re feeling up to it,” he said, “we’re going to head out soon. The Oracle will tell us what we need to do next.”

Again with the “we.” He sounded so confident, but Echo had a feeling that it was feigned certainty, put on for her benefit. The notion that he was trying to make her feel better, even in a minor way, made the tiny, broken things inside her flutter, as though maybe they were considering gluing themselves back together. She liked the way his voice sounded in the dark, soft and low, as if it was meant just for her. She closed her eyes and buried her face in the sheets.

Caius heaved a sigh, but it wasn’t an angry or frustrated one. It was, perhaps, a little bit sad. As if he, too, mourned the loss of whatever part of her had been left to die alongside Ruby. He stayed there, cradling her face for a minute more. The edge of the bed dipped as he balanced his other hand on it, pushing himself to his feet. Echo wanted to ask him not to leave, to keep his hand where it had been, tracing her cheek with his thumb, but she didn’t have the words.

His voice drifted to her through the darkness as he
settled back into the chair. “Get some rest, if you can. It’ll be a long day tomorrow.”

Echo listened for the barely audible sound of his breathing and paced her own to match it. Sooner than she thought possible, she drifted into slumber, lulled by the rhythm of Caius’s breath, in and out, in and out.

Caius looked around as the swirling black tendrils of the in-between faded into the station platform. It was grimly industrial. In the early-dawn light, a single smokestack towered above the trees, painting the sky charcoal with its noxious plumes. His eyes drooped shut as he stretched, groaning through the symphony of popping joints in his shoulders and arms. He’d spent the past day and a half sleeping in a chair by Echo’s bedside, all the while pretending not to see the quizzical glances Dorian kept sending his way.

The Black Forest was visible from where they stood, the tops of the trees jutting into the sky, but their destination lay deep within it. The station sat on the edge of the forest, but it was still a day’s walk from where they needed to be, two if they stopped to rest. With Dorian injured and the rest unaccustomed to arduous hikes, they would have to move slowly.

The others got their bearings around him, and he watched as Echo inhaled deeply, one hand resting on her
stomach. She had come back to herself in stages, and the effort it cost her to shake off her disorientation long enough to point out the Appenweier train station on a map had been noticeable. Beyond hushed exchanges with Ivy and Jasper about food and logistics, she hadn’t spoken much. After Caius had brushed her tears away in the night, she’d avoided his gaze, eyes darting to the side every time he looked at her. He didn’t need words to know what was wrong. He’d been similarly withdrawn after his first kill, all those years ago, and then, his victim had been a stranger. An Avicen soldier who’d fallen afoul of Caius’s blade. But Echo had known the person she’d killed. He offered up a silent prayer to any god that might be listening that it would be the last time her hands were stained with blood. Taking a life was no easy thing to bear. It changed a person in fundamental ways, as the pieces of one’s old self fractured and re-formed to accommodate a new and horrible truth: the world would keep on spinning, no matter how guilty or wretched a soul felt. You had to go on living, even when there was a dead body in your wake.

The brisk dawn air seemed to give Echo back some of the vigor she’d lost. He was glad to see the subtle pink in her cheeks as her hair whipped around her face, but she was still pale and drawn, shoulders hunched in on herself as though she could hide where she stood. In a short span of time, she’d lost everything—her home, the trust of the people she considered family. She hadn’t explained to Caius her relationship to the Avicen, but it was clear, from the way she interacted with Ivy and Jasper, that they were
her people
, more so than humans. And when word reached the Nest
that she’d spilled Avicen blood, he supposed they would gladly sentence her to death. Regret swelled in his chest, not for himself, but for Echo. She may have been a thief, but she was no murderer, not by nature. A sudden chill bit at his skin, daring the wool of his jacket to try to stop it.

“Honestly, Caius, you couldn’t get us any closer?” Jasper said, flipping up the collar of his coat.

Caius swallowed a retort unfit for polite company. As much as he would have liked to argue with Jasper, the station was bleak and deserted, emphasizing just how cold it was.

“As I explained to you earlier,” he replied, “the area surrounding the Oracle’s cave is null. The in-between cannot be accessed from within her borders.”

“I get that there’s a magical no-fly zone.” Jasper rubbed his hands together before shoving them into the pockets of his coat. “I’m just a touch disappointed that this was the best you could do.”

Caius inhaled, counted to five, then exhaled. “My apologies, Your Highness.”

“Apology accepted.”

Caius rolled his eyes. Only Jasper would have the gall.

Kicking aside a filthy chunk of stubborn spring snow, Jasper sniffed haughtily and added, “Too bad I’m fresh out of dead bodies to hide. This place would be perfect.”

Dorian snorted. Caius shot him his best glower, and Dorian cleared his throat, tucking his chin into his collar. The coat Jasper had lent Dorian was a deep navy, much the same shade as his eye patch. Caius hadn’t failed to notice that Jasper didn’t bother to color-code the clothes he passed on to him.