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.
EPILOGUE
The battle came to an end and the rebuilding began. Together, Avicen, Drakharin, and human tended to their wounded and mourned their dead. Nothing would be what it once was, but that was perhaps not the worst possible outcome. Days passed in a fragile camaraderie, burdened by the weight of all that had been lost.
Echo made her way to the roof of the ruined library—or what was left of it—scaling piles of rubble and partially collapsed stairways until the sky opened up before her. Clouds the color of smoke and ambient light crowded the heavens, obscuring her view of all but the most stubborn stars.
It was easier to think up here. She felt closer to the sky.
Slowly, she let herself relax. Her body felt the strain of the past few hours, days, months. She ached in places she didn’t know a person could ache. But despite her bruised and battered body’s litany of complaints, she felt the weight of all that had transpired slip away like grains of sand between her fingers. She knew that the worst was yet to come. The burden of those who survived the war was dealing with the ruin it left in its wake. Loss was not a wound that could be carefully sutured. It would rise up like a flaring infection once the thrill of adrenaline worked its way through her. But for now, she had the relative silence of the city and the quiet companionship of the stars.
Things were quieter this far above the ground. She wanted quiet. Needed it. But she also needed a place that had made her feel like herself. And the library was that place. It always had been. It was broken, but then, so was she. The library would bear the scars of its suffering for the rest of its existence, but then, so would she.
Echo closed her eyes, shutting out the night sky and the stars and the crescent sliver of the moon that peeked out from behind a veil of clouds.
“Are you there?”
She asked this aloud, though she knew she was unlikely to get an answer, much less one spoken out loud, with all the body and volume of a person’s voice.
She waited.
Silence greeted her words, and her heart sank a few centimeters.
It was possible that her mind had been playing tricks on her ever since the battle. Trauma had a way of addling the brain. Loss wreaked havoc on the human mind, and Echo, it would seem, was not immune to its influence.
She let out a sigh, preparing herself for the climb back down. There was so much to be done. Explanations to be made to the human residents of New York, who were still reeling from the revelation that an entire society had existed beneath their feet while they had been none the wiser. There were injured people who needed looking after. Dragons to find. The one that had joined the fray had taken off after the last shadow beast had dissolved into nothingness, its great and terrible wings carrying it far away. Echo suspected the human military had tried to capture it, but like any magical creature worth its salt, it had evaded them. Just as the Avicen had done for millennia. Until now.
Echo stuffed her hands into her pockets and turned away from the edge of the roof.
There was nothing for her to see. Nothing for her to hear. Nothing for her to feel.
She hadn’t gone more than three steps when she felt it.
She stopped. Closed her eyes. Strained her senses, both mundane and magical, as far as she could.
There.
A tiny tug.
The vessels had left her days ago. The firebird had done its job. It had brought about the war’s end. It had made room for a new future to grow. But when she was tired—which was always—she felt a shadow of their presence, like a perfume hanging in the air after its wearer had left the room.
Sillage, she thought. French. The trace of a person left behind after he is gone.
Her ears strained and she heard it. A faraway voice, as soft as the chiming of a distant bell, humming a tune almost too soft to hear.
Echo hummed along, reciting the words in her head.
One for sorrow.
Two for mirth.
The tug grew stronger, as if it were trying to pull her in a particular direction, but not one that was restricted by the limits of the physical plane as she understood it. There was a sense of summoning to the tug. A persistence that verged on obstinate.
The vessels had left. All but one.
Echo breathed the name into the evening air, her hope almost too much to bear. “Rose?”
She didn’t get a response, but she didn’t need one. She knew.
Rose had made her a promise, and Echo knew there was nothing in the world that would stop her from keeping it. Not the laws of physics. Not the known limitations of magic. And certainly not something as pedestrian as death.
“Where are you?” Echo asked.
Again, there was no answer. Not yet. But Echo thought that one was on its way, striving toward her. She could feel the shape of it in her dreams, and for once, she didn’t run from them.
The first night after the battle had been the worst. She thought she would be fine never sleeping again. She hadn’t wanted to face the morning when she knew she’d be forced to remember all that had passed. All she’d lost.
But that wasn’t what happened.
So fiercely had she dreaded the first morning in a world without Caius that she’d almost missed it, nestled as she was in that liminal space between sleeping and waking, when nothing was certain and all things were possible.
A ghost of a touch. A phantom breath on her cheek. The quiet humming of a lullaby in a voice that was decidedly masculine. All of them too real to be the product of an imagination desperate to cling to even the slimmest hope.