Reina led them to a cave half a day’s walk from the settlement. Echo lost count of how many mosquitoes had feasted on her flesh.
“The seal is through this cave,” Reina said. “It goes deep into the mountains. Our mages have been holding the seal together as well as they can, but I fear it is only a matter of time before they can contain it no longer. Perhaps the Ala’s mages will be able to help, though I am not hopeful. But first, I will show you what happened to the guards we had stationed here before the Dragon Prince gifted us with the broken seal’s chaos.”
“Tanith must have come here after Echo rescued me,” Caius said. “I’ve never seen this place before. She must have siphoned enough magic from me to break the seal on her own.”
A round space near the front of the cave served as a makeshift infirmary. Mages wearing the same lightweight armor as Reina’s scouts moved among their patients, brandishing bundles of cloying incense and various potions in colorful glass vials.
Two Avicen lay on pallets on the cave floor. Their skin was waxen and pale, and a thin wheezing sound rose from one with every indrawn breath, as if the continued act of living was proving far too much for him to handle. The other dozed, eyes moving wildly under closed lids, head twitching infinitesimally, as if he was lost in the throes of a terrible nightmare.
Echo drew closer, squinting in the dim light.
The wheezing one cracked his eyes open at her approach. His eyes rolled madly, trying to focus, but they were covered in a milky bluish film. Cataracts. He croaked out an inquiry in a hoarse, tired voice. One of the mages answered in that unfamiliar dialect. Echo recognized the Avicet words for “fire” and “bird.”
Wrinkled, flaking skin stretched over a once-proud bone structure. The Avicen’s eyes were sunken, and his hair hung in graying clumps, exposing patches of bald, pockmarked skin.
Echo had never seen an elderly Avicen before. It wasn’t that they didn’t grow old; they aged, but incredibly slowly. As children, they developed at the same pace humans did, but once they reached full physical maturity, their bodies slowed. The Ala had tried to explain it to Echo once – something about magic counteracting the process of cellular degeneration – but Rowan had shown up with a bag of potato chips and a stack of bootleg Disney DVDs and Echo had been thoroughly distracted. She remembered enough, though, to know that this never should have been possible.
“Their magic was leached from their bodies,” said Reina. “Our people are not kept alive by the simple beating of a heart. Magic sustains us. Without it, we wither like leaves fallen off the tree.”
“It’s like the man Ivy saw at the hospital,” Echo said. At Reina’s questioning look, Echo shared all Ivy had related to her. The twenty-three-year-old aged well beyond his years. The sickly feeling of his tainted aura. The presence of the kuçedra lingering like a noxious cloud around him.
Reina’s expression darkened. “The Dragon Prince feeds on them to make herself stronger. Perhaps it is not only magic she craves but life itself.”
“That about sums it up,” Echo said, looking back down at the stricken Avicen. “These two were unlucky enough to get in her way.”
“They were tasked with protecting the seal. Our tribe has always done so. It is one of the reasons we stayed here.” Reina knelt beside the pallets and said a short prayer in Avicet. “They gave their lives for their sacred duty. Now follow me, and I will show you just what they were protecting.”
The seal could hardly be called such anymore. A dozen Avicen mages formed a circle around the rift. Torches stuck in the ground illuminated the cavern but failed to pierce the darkest depths of the broken seal. Writhing black tendrils of the in-between lashed at the barrier the mages had constructed around the broken seal, as if testing the limitations of their magic. Violet and the other mages who had accompanied Echo’s group from New York had already joined the circle, adding their power to the barrier.
Reina prevented them from going more than a few feet into the space. Caius pushed to the front of the group, a grim expression on his face. The Avicen of the rain forest had barely given him a second glance, and now Echo understood why. The threat they faced in the heart of their own territory was far more frightening than a single Drakharin in their midst.
Echo could feel the hot pulse of the in-between beating at the shimmering field, aching to be set free. The scar on her chest throbbed in time with the rift, as if the shadows peeking through the hole in the universe were calling to it, beckoning it to join them. Echo gritted her teeth against the sensation. “It looks like it’s about to burst at any moment.”
And she did not want to be near the broken seal when that happened.
“This is the best we’ve been able to do.” An incongruous growl of frustration escaped through Violet’s clenched teeth. Her pink and lavender feathers, which normally fell in soft waves around her shoulders like a candy-colored cloak, were mussed, with strands sticking up as if agitated hands had run through them and pulled them. Echo had seen her often in the Agora, a smile a seemingly permanent fixture on her softly angular face, and at Warhawk training when Echo had gone to spy on Rowan after he first joined their ranks. Yet never had she seen Violet look quite so disheveled. “It won’t hold,” Violet said.
Reina shook her head. “Why tamper with the seals?” She looked down at Echo. “You have faced her in combat. What do you suspect?”
“Tanith is a grade A psychopath,” Echo said. “She wants to build a new world, to remake it in her image. But first she has to tear this one down.”
Reina made a disgusted noise. “And she thinks she can build a world atop the chaos she has unleashed? Fool.”
Caius approached the circle. Reina didn’t try to stop him. He crouched, studying the Avicet runes carved into the dirt. They were slightly darker than the soil.
“You sealed them with blood,” Caius observed.
Reina nodded. “It was the only way to hold the barrier together, but it is a temporary measure. We can hold the in-between back, but we cannot close the seal altogether.”
Violet said something in Avicet to the mage next to her. “They think Tanith’s blood might be able to close it,” she then said to Caius, “but I take it you’re not walking around with any of that.”
“Sadly, no,” Caius replied. He stood. “But what about my blood? Tanith is my twin. Our blood is identical.”
“It was identical,” Violet replied. One of the mages who had accompanied Reina and Echo’s group tapped Violet on the shoulder. Violet dropped her arms and stepped back, and the mage took her place. “Tanith’s blood has been tainted,” Violet said. “Altered. Irreparably, I’m guessing.”
A look flickered over Caius’s face, there and gone before anyone could see it. Except for Echo. His features hardened into an implacable mask, showing no hint of the emotions that lay beneath, but Echo had seen them – the grief, the loss – written on his face as though Tanith had carved them there. It was so easy to forget that their enemy had been a person once. Not a good person – not in Echo’s reckoning – but Caius had loved her. He probably still did. The bonds of family were not so easily severed.
Altered. Irreparably.
It was a succinct way of saying there was no hope for Tanith, that she was beyond saving. Echo watched Caius’s hope sputter and die in that one fleeting expression. Then it was shelved wherever he put all his other inconvenient emotions. Echo had thought she was good at compartmentalizing, but Caius had perfected it, made it an art form.
“It’s worth trying,” Caius insisted. He rolled up one shirtsleeve, not waiting for Violet to object. “Do it.”
She did it.
The blade sliced through the skin of his forearm with ease, so sharp it took a second for the blood to well. Scars stood out along his arm, pale and shiny against the tan skin. Violet led Caius by his bleeding arm around the circle, fortifying the Avicet runes with his blood. The barrier shimmered so brightly it became nearly opaque. Echo felt the grasping energy of the in-between recede.
“I don’t believe it,” Violet said, gazing at the circle with awe. She let go of Caius’s arm. “It actually worked.” She reached a hand toward the shining barrier and closed her eyes. After a moment, she said, “It’ll hold. For now, at least. We’ll need Tanith’s blood to close it for good.”
Caius was pale when he rejoined the group. Reina studied him with an appraising look, as if taking his measure. She made a gruff sound of approval. “I suppose you have your uses after all,” she said.
Caius offered her a tight smile in response and looked at Echo. “How many broken seals are on that map?”
Echo fished the map out of her backpack and unfolded it. A dozen Xs were scattered across every habitable continent. “Eleven more.”
Reina clapped Caius on the shoulder, with enough force that he nearly staggered under her hand. “Rest up, Dragon. You’ve got a lot of bleeding to do.”