It was unbelievable to think that Echo could be here, walking these halls so freely, when everything she had ever been told dictated that this was a place where she would never be safe. Wyvern’s Keep was the dragon’s den. The seat of Drakharin power. She would never be Avicen, but she had always been their ally, and this was the place they feared most, home to the most fearsome figure of Drakharin lore: the Dragon Prince. Echo knew him to be real, to be flesh and blood, as she was, but to the Avicen he was a monster of mythical proportions. He was the bogeyman they told their children about to scare them into their best behavior. She had not known what Caius was when she had first met him. He had told her that he was a mercenary hired by the prince, and she had believed him. She’d had no reason to doubt him. But the truth had outed itself, as it was wont to do. She had come to know him for who he was. She had come to know the truth of him – not his title; titles could be won and lost – but the solid core of him. After all this time, she liked to think that she knew what made him tick. He was fearsome, that much was undeniable, but he was also kind and loyal, possessed of a wit she grudgingly admitted was as quick as hers, if not quicker. He held within himself layers that a dark, secret part of her wished she had the luxury to explore.
But time was not on their side. Caius had assigned Dorian the task of weeding out those soldiers still loyal to Tanith and remanding them to the keep’s dungeons while Drakharin mages and scouts worked to track Tanith’s location. Echo hadn’t been given a task, and while she appreciated having a night off, she knew the reprieve would last only until morning.
She knew she should probably catch a few hours of rest, but her nerves were still electric, so she stalked the halls of the keep, relishing the free passage granted to her by the Dragon Prince himself. Within these walls his word was law, and while the guards she passed on her meandering journey glared at her with barely concealed suspicion, they would not raise their weapons to her or question her right to be there. Their rightful prince had spoken, and they would listen.
She was not sure where she was going. All she knew was that she needed time away from all the people crowding into the great hall – miraculously clean of blood, as if none had ever been shed – who were celebrating the return of their lost prince and his declaration of peace. As if they weren’t the reason he had been driven from these walls. His sister might have stolen the throne out from under him, but they were the ones who had allowed it to happen.
Echo trailed her fingers along the embroidered tapestries lining the walls. An aimless series of twists and turns had brought her to a quiet part of the keep. The voices of the celebration raging below had long since faded to silence. The corridor was dimly lit by sconces. The glimmer of firelight illuminated her path, undulating against the red runner that ran the length of the hallway.
At the other end of the corridor, a door stood ajar. Echo took one curious step forward, then another. That narrow opening glowed with a soft amber light that beckoned her forward. She was halfway to the door when a mournful tune drifted from the room. Someone was inside, coaxing sad notes from a piano’s keys.
Her footsteps were quiet as she approached. She couldn’t quite make out who was sitting at the piano; all she could see was a shadow falling across the plush red rug covering the stone floors, the vague impression of a person curved over the keys, the edges of their form flickering in the unsteady light of candles. Curiosity got the better of her, and she pushed the door open a little more.
The hinges squealed.
Abruptly, the music stopped.
Echo was already backing away. “Sorry, I just —”
“Echo?”
Caius’s voice froze her to the spot.
“You can come in,” he said, picking up where he’d left off in his playing. “No need to skulk about like a castle ghost. We have enough of those as it is.”
Castle ghosts? She filed that away to ask about later.
Echo entered the room, pushing the door closed behind her, the thick wood meeting the doorjamb with a meaty thud. The silence felt complete, as if the door were more than just a physical barrier from the sounds of the party drifting through the halls of the keep.
She took a moment to drink her fill of the room’s opulent decor. Thick carpeting covered nearly every inch of the stone floor, the same slate-gray as the rest of the fortress. Tapestries lined the walls, their silken threads shimmering in the amber glow of firelight. Candles sat at strategic positions around the room, illuminating the space just enough to grant it a sleepy, intimate warmth. Some had been placed in brass candleholders, but others had simply been wedged into the pools of wax left by their predecessors. The effect they created, combined with the plush furnishings and shelves packed to bursting with leather-bound books, reminded Echo a little of the Ala’s chamber at the Nest. That had felt like home, and so did this.
It also felt undeniably like Caius.
A gleaming black piano sat in the far corner of the room, its polished surface reflecting the light of the candles and the silver moonlight that fell through the only open window. On the matching bench in front of the piano sat Caius, his fingers resting gently on the keys. He watched Echo approach through heavy-lidded eyes, his head tilted quizzically.
“I take it you also found yourself in need of a break from the festivities,” he said as Echo drew nearer.
A sofa and two chairs sat at the center of the room in front of an unlit fireplace, and a daybed upholstered in rich emerald fabric was positioned near the open window, but there were no seats close to the piano. Echo went to stand next to it. She felt suddenly awkward, like a wallflower at a high school dance. Or how she imagined a wallflower at a high school dance would feel. She’d never attended one herself. Everything she knew about high schools she’d learned from Gossip Girl.
Wordlessly, Caius slid across the bench, making enough space for Echo to sit beside him. She sank down, the wood creaking slightly under the added weight.
“Your people know how to party,” Echo said. “A little too well.”
A faint smile whispered across his lips. “That they do. And they take great pride in it.” His fingers plucked out a half-considered melody. “To the outside world, we’re known for our passions on the battlefield. Our lust for action. Our desire for victory at all costs. Not many know that all that comes from a yearning to live life to its fullest. To savor each and every moment with zeal.”
Hearing the words “passion,” “lust,” and “desire” in the dimly lit setting, with his thigh pressed against hers and their shoulders brushing, was a bit much. Caius arched an eyebrow at her. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had to. He was too smart not to.
Echo thought about putting an inch or two between them. She didn’t. The pressure of his body against hers was nice. He was warm and solid, and she found she liked it very much. “That’s a very poetic way of describing the shenanigans going on downstairs,” she said. “I saw one guy puking into a vase made of solid gold.”
He huffed out a small laugh. “Ah, my people do nothing by halves, that much is true.”
“And what about you?” Echo nudged him with her shoulder. He nudged back. “Not in the partying mood?”
Caius shook his head, his dark bangs falling over his forehead, long enough to brush the tops of his eyebrows. He shook his head like a shaggy dog to get them out of the way. The gesture was oddly endearing. “Not particularly.” He dragged his fingers across the piano keys. Not enough pressure to make a sound, though they gave slightly under his touch. “I find myself in a rather contemplative mood.”
Echo watched him consider the notes he could play. There were words left in him. She could practically feel him vibrating with their unspoken potential. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He was silent for a moment, fingertips resting on the keys. He pressed down on one and a single lonely note floated into the air. They listened to it soften, then fade.
“I’m going to have to kill my sister, aren’t I?”
Echo turned her head to face him fully. His bangs had fallen forward again, masking his eyes. Save for the slow rise and fall of his chest, he was still.
It was an awful thing to contemplate. A truly horrific thing to consider, taking the life of someone one had loved, in the not-so-distant past. Probably. She had no siblings, not by blood, but Ivy was as close to a sister as Echo would ever have, and the notion of doing anything to cause her physical pain made her stomach turn. She couldn’t imagine having to kill Ivy, to know with such wretched certainty that she would have to kill her. Couldn’t even imagine Ivy doing anything to deserve it. Echo watched that great and terrible weight settle on Caius as he slouched on the bench, his shoulders curving over his hands, which still rested on the keys.
“Caius …”
She didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t wrong. There was no disputing it. Tanith – and the monstrous thing riding her – had to be stopped. Permanently. And Echo wouldn’t shed a tear over it. She sincerely doubted she’d lose a single wink of sleep over the death of someone who had caused so much pain, such intense and prolonged suffering. It wasn’t like Ruby. Even if Echo had to sink her dagger into Tanith’s heart herself, it would never be like Ruby, who had done nothing but follow the orders of a man she idolized. Killing Ruby had been a tragedy. Killing Tanith would be a triumph.
But it was hard to feel triumphant in the face of Caius’s pain. Echo inched her hand closer to his, waiting for him to withdraw. He didn’t. She twined her fingers with his and he turned his hand over to better grasp hers.
“I’m sorry,” she said. And she meant it. She would not regret Tanith’s death. But she would regret, for the rest of her days, the stain it would leave on Caius’s soul, no matter how justified killing her might be.
He looked at her, his green eyes nearly black in the dim light. “Is it wrong to mourn her? After all she’s done?”
Echo shook her head. “No.”
His gaze dropped to their joined hands. “I’ll be the only one who will.”
Echo did not dispute that.
There was such profound sadness in his expression. For the sister he was about to lose. For the people he’d already lost. Echo leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder. After a moment, she felt his cheek press against the top of her head as he let himself lean on her. His breath stirred the flyaway strands of hair near the crown of her head.
“What will you do?” Caius asked. “After?”
After they had saved the world from being torn to shreds by a madwoman’s whimsy. After they had laid to rest gods knew how many of their friends. Echo pushed the thought away. Harsh realities could wait just one more day. Tonight, she wanted something different, something sweeter.
“Retire at the ripe old age of seventeen,” Echo said. “Move someplace warm. Grow tomatoes.”
Caius huffed a little laugh into her hair. A thought struck her suddenly. Not at the ripe old age of seventeen.
“What day is it?” she asked, raising her head.
“Tuesday,” Caius replied.
“No, I mean the date.”
“October twelfth. No. The thirteenth now. It’s past midnight.”
October thirteenth. Ten days past Echo’s birthday.
“I’m eighteen,” Echo said. She hadn’t forgotten a birthday in years. Her biological family hadn’t given her many fond memories, aside from a sad supermarket cake the year she turned six, but the Ala had seen fit to commemorate the occasion every year after taking Echo in. The Avicen didn’t put much stock in birthdays, not once they’d reached full maturity, but the Ala knew it mattered to humans and therefore to Echo, and so it had mattered to the Ala. But with all the commotion of the past several weeks, Echo hadn’t given much thought to the inexorable march of time.
“Since when?” Caius asked.
“Ten days ago.” A sliver of a memory pressed at her. It felt like lifetimes ago when Ivy had jested about throwing Echo a party. She’d forgotten that, too. “Ivy wants to have a Great Gatsby party.”
Caius’s ghost of a smile transformed into a real one. Small and tender, but real. “Does she know how that book ends?”
“I’m surprised you do.” It was human literature, after all.
Caius gestured to the walls of shelves, lined with hundreds of tomes. “I’m well-read.”
“Touché.” Echo sighed and rested her temple against his shoulder, finding comfort in the solidity of his presence. “For the record, Tender Is the Night is Fitzgerald’s best book.”
“Agreed.” He angled his head to press his lips against her temple. The feel of his mouth against her skin sent a shudder of warmth through her body. “Happy birthday,” he said softly. “And to think, I didn’t even get you a gift.”
Echo smiled into his shoulder. This was better, this comfortable back-and-forth. Far better than talk of death and dying and losses so great they were nearly impossible to comprehend. “How about a song?”
She felt Caius smile. “I think I can manage that.”
Echo sat up so her head wasn’t resting on his shoulder, but she didn’t move away. Her thigh pressed against his in a warm line of contact, and she could feel the slight shifting of muscle as he worked the pedals. Music spilled from his fingertips, filling the room with a gentle tune that Echo knew as well as the beat of her own heart.
The magpie’s lullaby. It had been Rose’s song once, a long time ago. And then it was Echo’s. And now it was theirs. With deft hands, Caius twisted and pulled the notes, rearranging them into something altogether different and achingly beautiful.
When the last note rang out, Echo looked up from watching Caius’s hands dance over the keys, calloused from weaponry but no less elegant in their movements. He was looking back at her, his eyes gone even darker with what Echo recognized as longing.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He did.
His hands came up to cradle her face, cupping her jaw as if she was something delicate, something worth treasuring. This time, there was none of the soft hesitance of the kiss they’d shared at the camp in Iceland. It was all firm pressure and confident insistence.
Echo brought her own hands up to trace the lines of his throat, along to the dip of his collarbone, down the ridge of his sternum, skating over the jumping muscles of his abdomen, around to the sides of his stomach. Her explorations brought a groan to his lips, muffled by the press of her mouth.
He broke away, breath stuttering, uneven. “Echo …”
Her lips tingled in the absence of his. “Do you want to stop?”
A rueful smile broke across his face. “That is the last thing in the world I want, but …”
“But what?”
He drew in a breath, as if preparing himself to pull away from her. “Maybe we should.”
Oh, hell no.
Echo wrapped one hand around the back of his neck and brought him in close. “Caius. We could die tomorrow. And if we do die, I don’t want to die regretting the things I haven’t done.”
Caius stared at her, his expression carefully shuttered. “I’m not certain that’s the most solid foundation upon which to base one’s decisions.”
“Caius, I —”
He held up a hand, but his steady gaze faltered, as if even breaking that much contact with her caused him physical pain. “I do not want you rushing into something you aren’t prepared for because you feel like you won’t have other chances. You will, Echo.”
Echo thought his confidence was rather optimistic, but she didn’t argue. “I know myself, Caius. I know what I want and I know what I can handle.”
His hand returned to its post on the curve of her hip, impossibly warm even through a layer of denim, hot as a burning brand. “And what if I can’t?” he asked, voice whisper soft. “I haven’t – not since Rose.”
Oh. Oh.
Echo said the first thing that came to mind. A terrible habit, one she really ought to consider breaking. “Well, I don’t think the mechanics of it have changed much in the past century.”
That pulled a startled laugh from Caius. “You are yourself,” he said, chuckling. “And no other.” He inclined his head to press a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “And I would not have you any other way.”
Echo swallowed thickly. He had said something to her, months earlier, before he’d been taken from her. Three small words that contained multitudes. She hadn’t said it back then. Wasn’t sure she could say it now. But she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to.
Love was not as it was described in fairy tales. It was terrifying. Not in a giddy, heady way, like tumbling down the steepest slope of a roller coaster. It was terrifying in its enormity. It had the power to crush, to destroy, more thoroughly than any weapon. No one ever warned about the terrible cost of that ache, that need. It chipped away at one’s defenses like a siege on a castle’s walls, claiming ground until there was nothing left it had not touched.
It was a cliff one had to jump off to know the true depth of its valley.
And so she jumped.
“I love you,” she said. Simply. Succinctly.
Something like pain, but not quite, flickered across Caius’s face. “Truly?”
She nodded.
He kissed her, and they collided like stars.
Echo broke away just long enough to stand and tug him toward the daybed near the window. He followed, his hand warm in hers.
The backs of her knees hit the cushion and her legs, already wobbly, folded under her. She sank into the seat, pulling Caius after her. She thought it would be awkward, to be so entwined, but it wasn’t. The parts of her that she found ungainly fit against his body as if that was where she was meant to, had always been meant to be.
His hands traveled up her waist, his face buried in the crook of her neck. Her body was alight. She was a supernova, filling the sky with light.
Her brain processed sensation in fragments. A kiss pressed to her jugular as if to calm its frantic pulsing. A hand tracing the side of her torso, from her hips. Up and up and up. He trailed his mouth against her skin, his nose pushing against the collar of her T-shirt.
So close. Too close. His breath ghosted over the cotton shielding the black mark from view, and though Echo knew the effect was all in her head, the scar seemed to shrink from his touch, chased back into the deepest recesses of her being by his warmth.
“Don’t touch me,” Echo said. Caius’s response was immediate. He withdrew completely, sitting back on his haunches, hands upraised as if to suggest he meant no harm. She smiled to soften her words. “No, it’s fine. Just … not there.”
She tugged her shirt up. A frown creased his brow. She glanced down. A thin tendril of black had snaked upward, peeking over the collar of her shirt. It was hardly a millimeter, but it was enough.
“Echo,” Caius breathed, voice low, as if he already knew the answer and was dreading it. “What is that?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Echo.”
“Fine.” She sat up and shrugged out of the leather jacket she was still, for some ungodly reason, wearing. The T-shirt followed it, leaving her in nothing more than her jeans and a black sports bra, but there was no self-consciousness in her disrobing. It wasn’t longing that colored his stare, but concern.
He reached for her, his fingers falling short of the scar. She had told him not to touch it, and he respected that boundary.
“When did this happen?”
“At Avalon,” Echo answered. “When Tanith attacked. I’m not even sure how.” She looked down at the mark. “Lucky shot, I guess.”
Caius tore his gaze away from the scar to meet her eyes. Without her jacket and her shirt and the warmth of Caius’s own body heat, she was cold. A shiver skittered down her spine. Caius’s gaze softened.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the scar.
Echo’s shoulder hunched, as if that would make her seem smaller. “I don’t know if it’ll hurt you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think it will.”
“How can you be sure?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shallow shrug. “You burned the poison out of me once. You saved me. You protected me then. And I think your power is protecting you now.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Echo nodded.
His fingers brushed her skin, sending an entirely different kind of shiver dancing along her bones.
Nothing happened. The skin of his fingers remained the golden tan it always was. He traced the lines of the scar as if he were mapping the branches of a tree. As if it weren’t a grotesque stain splashed across her flesh.
“You will fight this,” he said softly, leaning back into her space. Already she felt warmer. “You will fight it and you will win.”
“I’m not sure I can.” Her words puffed against his skin.
He pressed his lips to hers, silencing her doubt. His hand splayed across the scar, covering it with his palm. She let herself collapse against him, lighter now that she was no longer carrying her secret alone.
He pulled away, close enough to touch her everywhere she wanted to be touched, but far enough for her to feel the force of his gaze, steady and full of love.
“You will,” he said, his voice devoid of even the slightest doubt. “And there isn’t a force in this world that will tear me from your side when you do.”
A riotous mess of emotion bubbled up in Echo’s chest, well beyond the capacity of words to describe. And so she abandoned them wholly and leaned in to kiss him again. And again. And again.