The pivotal moments in one’s life happened in slow motion. It was the universe’s way of forcing every moment to be experienced in its fullest, most excruciating detail. The speed of objects slowed to a molasses crawl. The air stilled. The earth held its breath.
Watch, the universe said.
Watch him fall.
Watch him take the demon with him.
Watch the darkness follow.
Watch the blackness swallow them up and disappear behind them.
Watch nothing stand in the place where someone had once stood.
Echo watched and felt threads of magic slip between her fingers as the ripped seam in the fabric of the world sewed itself back together because of Caius. Because he had been there and now he was not.
He mended the holes in the world only to tear one open in her chest.
The sound of gunfire rattled against the night, petering out as the shadows broke apart. The sky shuddered, heaving a great sigh as its broken shards re-formed into something whole. The ozone tang of the in-between faded like a bad dream.
Echo couldn’t tear her eyes away from the spot where Caius had stood, where he had offered her one last piercing look before plunging himself and his sister into the abyss, taking the kuçedra with him.
Her heart sputtered against her ribs, an engine that wouldn’t properly start.
Caius was gone.
Caius was gone.
Echo pushed herself off her knees and stood. Her body was still swollen with magic, far too much for any one person to bear. Her bones were as heavy as stone. With unsteady steps, her feet carried her along the fissure still wide-open in the asphalt. But it was a mundane disruption in the topography of the street. A wide crack running the length of Fifth Avenue as far as Echo could see. No shadows leaking onto the cement. No unfathomable black depths threatening to spill over into the world. The avenue was ruined, but it was a normal ruin. It could be repaired with gravel and tar and paint, a scar scabbed over.
She dropped to her knees. Her fingers traced the ragged edge of the pavement as if she could tear the world back open and pull him out. The knowledge that she couldn’t stole the air from her lungs, suffocating her in its terrible immensity.
To be lost in the in-between was to be claimed by the great tracts of nothingness in the void. To be lost in the in-between was to be lost forever.
“Echo!”
She didn’t turn at the sound of her name. She couldn’t shift her gaze from the spot where Caius had been seconds, minutes earlier. Time had become elastic for her.
How long had it been since his hands had been on her hands, lacing their fingers together as they fell asleep in the library of Wyvern’s Keep? How long since his lips had traced a path down her throat from the patch of skin just below her ear to the juncture of her neck? How long since he had played the magpie’s lullaby for her on the piano? Hours. Not even a whole day.
“Echo.”
The voice was closer now, cutting through the shrill ringing in her ears. Hands landed under her arms, trying to pull her up. Echo reached behind her to brush them away, but the owner of the hands was persistent.
“Echo.”
Someone dropped down to a crouch next to her.
“Look at me,” came the voice. A hand gently pressed against her chin, forcing her eyes away from the spot to which they had been riveted.
The Ala gazed at Echo, her raven-black feathers matted with soot and sweat and blood. Her obsidian eyes were unspeakably sad.
“He —”
Echo couldn’t get the words out. Words had a power all their own, and if she spoke the ones she could not say, then they would be imbued with a power she did not want them to have. They would accelerate the moment, solidify its reality. They were a finality to which she was not ready to commit.
He’s gone, she did not say.
But the Ala didn’t need her to say it. She knew. She must have seen. No one understood magic or the in-between like the Ala.
Echo was distantly aware that a trembling had taken her chin. Her vision blurred. Her head swam. She was going to be sick.
The Ala’s brow creased. Wordlessly, she pulled Echo into her arms, whispering soft Avicet words into Echo’s hair as Echo shattered against her, a wave breaking against rocks.
“I’m so sorry, dah re’ain.” “My child” in Avicet. Not a phrase the Ala used often. The power in those words prodded at Echo’s wounds. “But there is work yet to be done.”
Gently but firmly, the Ala pushed Echo inches away, just enough for her to look upon the devastation that remained.
The broken sky had been healed, but all around them was ruin.
“They need you, dah re’ain.”
Echo lurched away from the Ala, falling back against the street, the scrapes on her abraded palms reminding her of their existence. Who needed her? What else did she have to give? She had nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
As if she could read Echo’s thoughts, the Ala took Echo’s hand in her own and said, “Look.”
Echo looked.
Her veins were not black.
They burned brilliantly, subdued by the shield of her skin, but bright enough to make it look like she had light flowing through her veins. Her skin had taken on a strange luminescence.
“What is this?” Echo asked, staring at her oddly translucent flesh. Those words came easier. They were less awful. Now that she had seen the light in her veins, she felt it. Her body burned as if she had the world’s worst fever. Her skin was too tight against her skeleton.
“Magic,” said the Ala. “You took it into yourself. And now you have to release it.”
Echo shifted her gaze back to the Ala, swallowing past the sickness threatening to rise. It was too much for her. It was all too much. “How?”
The Ala answered as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Share it.”
She helped Echo to her feet, bracing Echo’s elbows with her cupped palms, holding her steady as if she knew that Echo would crumble without her. The Ala guided Echo away from the gravitational pull of the place where Caius had disappeared into the blackness of the in-between, her arm a solid weight against Echo’s shoulder blades, pressing Echo onward to witness the chaos Tanith had left in her wake.
The sickness swirling within Echo swelled with every step she took. There were bodies all along the street, draped in white cloaks and clothed in camouflage. Armed with swords and guns. Not bodies, she reminded herself. It didn’t help to think of them as bodies. People had bodies. These were corpses. If they’d had souls, they’d long since fled.
Echo reached out to touch the sloped shoulder of a fallen Avicen she recognized but whose name she could not remember. The pulsating glow of the magic in her veins dimmed the closer her hand got. The Ala placed a hand on her wrist, pulling her away.
“It’s too late for them. But there are others you can help.”
The Ala led her to a small huddle of humans. Two men leaned over the body of a boy. Blood soaked the front of his uniform, so much that the fabric was almost black. Most of the skin she could see was covered in wicked gashes made by something with claws. It took a moment for her brain to assemble the pieces of his face into one she knew.
The boy who had covered her with gunfire. The boy who’d saved her.
He was near death. Echo slid to her knees beside him. The light inside her brimmed, eager to be let out of its mortal cage.
“How do I help him?” Echo asked the Ala.
“Put your hands on him,” the Ala replied.
Echo did as she was told, placing one on his hand, the back of which was curiously pale, the other on his cheek. Her fingers slicked with blood. The soldiers didn’t stop her. They seemed numb as they watched her.
“And push.”
Echo pushed.
The magic didn’t need much coaxing. It flowed outward from the core of her body, through veins and arteries, over bone and muscle. It spilled from her skin and across the boy’s, motes of light dancing with joy, put to a purpose.
A moment passed in tense silence as the Ala and the soldiers and Echo watched. Then another moment.
“It’s not wor —”
A ragged gasp burst from the boy’s lips as his chest heaved with breath.
One of the soldiers, the one who’d been cradling his younger comrade’s head in his lap, shot Echo a bewildered look. “How did you …”
But his question died on his lips. Perhaps he knew she wouldn’t be able to provide an answer.
The Ala helped Echo up and led her to the next victim, and the next, and the next. Every time, Echo put her hands on someone near death and breathed her magic into them. But it wasn’t really her magic. Magic, despite what Tanith and so many like her believed, could not be collected. It could not be hoarded. It defied ownership. The magic belonged to Echo as much as it belonged to the Ala and the human soldiers and the Avicen civilians who had taken up arms to defend the only home they had ever known.
The magic left Echo and went into them, healing their wounds, filling them with life like sunlight on soil. With every wounded person she tended to, she felt a tether in her snap, like an anchor had been severed, leaving a boat to float free, far away from her. She recognized the sensation as she felt the presence of the firebird vessels lessen. They had lived in her like white noise – her own private Greek chorus, bearing witness to her triumphs and her tragedies – and now they were falling silent, dissipating with the magic she was releasing into the people who needed it more than she did. The Ala helped Echo stand and walk and heal.
Somewhere in the distance, a broken sob cut through the sound of survivors scuffling about, dazed. Echo stumbled. She knew that voice. It was broken and jagged, but she knew it.
Jasper.
Echo pushed away from the Ala and the huddle of soldiers and broke into a run, careening toward the source of that horrible broken sound.
When she found them, she almost couldn’t bear it.
Jasper knelt on the ground, his jeans torn, his shoulders shaking, his arms streaked with blood. Most of it was not his. His feathered head was bent over Dorian’s face, partially hiding it from Echo’s view. Ivy knelt beside Jasper, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding a cloth to Dorian’s face. She raised her eyes to Echo, and there was a hopelessness in them Echo had never seen before.
Echo let her legs fold under her as she joined them. Dorian was so still.
“Let me see,” she said.
Jasper wrapped his arms tighter around Dorian, his shoulders shaking.
“Jasper,” Ivy said gently. She pulled the cloth away and pried his arms looser as he finally looked up, seeing Echo for the first time. Confusion flitted across his face at the sight of her still-bright veins, but it was swiftly replaced by absolute, utter despair.
Echo had never seen him look so wretched. She looked away from his stricken expression and down at Dorian’s face, and that was worse.
There was a mass of blood and flesh and bone where his one good eye had been.
Jasper’s voice was hoarse from crying. “Help him.”
She could. She would.
Echo reached for Dorian’s face. Her hand hovered over the worst of the wounds. She didn’t want to touch him. He wasn’t moving. His chest rose and fell in the shallowest of breaths. He was, perhaps, past the point of pain, but she didn’t want to cause him any more.
“Please,” Jasper breathed, his nose pressed to the crown of Dorian’s head, his voice muffled by silver hair.
Echo laid her hand against Dorian’s bloodied face. It didn’t look like there was much left to salvage. Skin against skin, she could feel the thread of life left in him, flimsy and weak and almost worn down to nothing. He was nearly gone.
The magic in her reached out. It was thinner now, but she gathered it around herself and fortified it with her own reserves of strength. And she pushed.
She had saved so many. And none of it would matter if she couldn’t save him. If she couldn’t wipe that despair from Jasper’s expression, the hopelessness from Ivy’s.
All those lives saved. And still, she was powerless to help the one person she so desperately wanted to save.
Caius was gone.
The in-between had claimed him, and there was nothing she could do. The magic flowed through all of them, as bright as starlight.
The vessels left Echo. They let her go, finally finding their own peace after all those years, centuries, millennia tied to the firebird and its magic.
She poured the last vestiges of magic left in her body into Dorian, guiding it with her will. Wishes, the Ala had told her a lifetime ago, had power. And she wished for Dorian to be whole, wished it with every last spark of strength she had. The world went dark at the corners of her vision as the magic grew stronger and her body grew weaker.
Lashes fluttered against her palm.
The last thing she heard before darkness – a gentle darkness, so different from the malevolent one that had done all this – was a familiar voice. One that had sung the magpie’s lullaby Echo so loved a century before she had even been born. A voice she knew as well as her own, that inhabited the place between life and death, neither one nor the other. In-between. A voice Caius had loved as he had come to love Echo.
Rose’s presence hovered at the edges of Echo’s mind, lingering long after all the others had faded, and made a promise.
I’ll find him.