“Will you stop pacing like a caged tiger?” Rowan glanced up from the sizzling pan. “You’re driving me nuts.”
“I’m not pacing,” Echo said as she paced. “I’m wallowing in the winter of my discontent.”
Rowan rolled his eyes and went back to the stir-fry.
Dorian and Jasper were off awaiting the arrival of one of Dorian’s contacts within Wyvern’s Keep. Thanks to the mirrored pendant Ivy had delivered to Caius’s network of loyalists inside the keep’s virtually impregnable walls, Dorian and those still loyal to Caius were able to communicate. The mirror was magically tethered to Dorian’s sword. If he wrote something in blood on the steel blade, it would appear on the mirrored side of the pendant within the keep. As far as Echo knew, Dorian and his allies were communicating via a kind of symbolic Morse code or Drakhar runes or something. She hadn’t paid much attention to the details.
“What if Dorian’s contact doesn’t show?” Echo asked. It wasn’t the first hypothetical she had posed in the hour since Jasper and Dorian had departed the cabin, and Rowan answered it with a magnanimity born of patient repetition.
“They’ll show.”
“Yeah, but what if they don’t?”
Rowan’s shoulders rose and fell with an inaudible sigh. He was probably counting to ten. “If they don’t show, then we try again.” Echo opened her mouth to pose another pessimistic question. She was full of them. But Rowan continued. “And if that doesn’t work, then we’ll find another way.”
There was no other way. They had spent weeks racking their brains trying to think of another way, but this was all they had come up with. Echo swallowed her objections and accepted Rowan’s determined optimism.
“You’re being awfully nice about all this,” Echo said.
Rowan placed the wooden spoon on the countertop and wiped his hands on a towel he’d thrown over his shoulder. He looked awfully domestic.
“You’re my friend,” Rowan said.
That was a gross simplification of the mess of their entwined lives, but Echo allowed it.
“And no matter what, I don’t like to see you suffer. I know you feel responsible for what’s happening to Caius, which I think is absurd, but I also know there’s no talking you out of something once you’ve decided to shoulder the blame.”
It wasn’t the first time they’d had this conversation. They both let a long moment pass in silence, an acknowledgment of the back-and-forth they now knew by heart. There was no need to repeat it all out loud.
“And,” Rowan said, turning back to his stir-fry, which was sizzling quite happily, “even if I don’t like him, I can admit that Caius is maybe not a completely terrible person and he probably doesn’t deserve whatever his batshit insane sister is doing to him.”
That was the nicest thing Rowan had ever said about Caius.
“Color me shocked,” Echo said.
“I know,” Rowan said. “I’m really growing as a person.”
Before Echo could hit him with a witty retort, the phone in her pocket rang. She dug it out as Rowan stirred the vegetables with a studied fastidiousness. The Ala’s number flashed across the screen. Echo answered with a swipe of her thumb.
“Miss me already?” Echo said.
“I have a task for you.” The Ala’s clipped tones were all business. So not a social call, then.
“Well, hello to you, too,” Echo said. She thumped the heel of her boot on the floor to get Rowan’s attention. He turned the burner down and joined her at the table. Echo put the phone on speaker. “What’s going on?”
“Our scouts have come back to Avalon with some interesting reports. While you wait for your friends to return, I would like you to follow up on the reports. I do know how much you loathe waiting.”
Echo suppressed a sardonic grin. “Define ‘interesting.’?”
“Drakharin,” the Ala said. “In Avicen territory.”
Rowan leaned closer to the phone. “What makes this incursion special? We have spies in their territory. That’s always been the case.”
“According to my scouts, these individuals don’t look like spies. Or warriors,” said the Ala. “They appear to be civilians. And aside from avoiding human settlements, they don’t seem to be hiding. It’s almost as though they want to be found.”
Echo frowned. “That’s unusual.”
“Most unusual, yes.” The Ala’s voice went distant and muffled as she spoke to someone nearby. When she returned, her voice sounded harried. “As we are short on numbers, I was hoping you would be able to track these Drakharin down and assess the situation. They might react better to you than to Avicen scouts.”
Echo wiggled her fingers. “Because I’m feather-free?”
“Indeed.” Another short, muffled conversation followed. The Ala sounded impatient, a trait she seldom displayed. “I’ll send you the location. I take it this won’t be a problem.”
The scent of smoke drifted through the kitchen. Rowan jumped up with a bitten-off curse. His vegetables were burning.
“Nope,” Echo said. Rowan was frantically waving the towel in the air to clear the smoke. The stir-fry was a lost cause. Maybe they’d be able to pick something up on the way. “Not a problem at all.”
—
Echo blinked against the beaming Cairo sun as she peeled off her leather jacket. Normally, she didn’t balk at wearing layers, no matter how inappropriate the climate—the leather jacket suited her aesthetic—but the heat was oppressive. When she said as much to Rowan, he merely shrugged and said, “Could be worse. At least it’s a dry heat.”
At least. Echo still wanted to crawl out of her skin and die.
The Ala had sent Echo a set of coordinates via text message. She had also appended a series of incomprehensibly selected emojis to the end of the text, as was her fashion. Echo didn’t know what an alien head, smiling poop, and a wineglass meant, but ever since she had shown the Ala how to send them, every text from her was punctuated with an increasingly incongruous and baffling array.
Echo had replied with a simple “Thanks. On it,” followed by her own emojis: baby chick hatching from a shell, fire, stars. She thought it made a good enough signature for the firebird.
The Ala’s instructions had led them to a bustling Cairo side street in a neighborhood teeming with tourists and locals alike. Sidewalk stands were packed from top to bottom with vibrant fabrics and hanging lamps in all colors of the rainbow. Echo wondered if they were authentic, or the schlock put out to tempt tourists’ wallets. Probably the latter.
“It’s weird that Drakharin would come this far into a city as populated as Cairo,” Echo said. “They’re usually a lot warier of humans than the Avicen. Centuries of isolation doesn’t exactly enamor them of being in close quarters with a race they don’t like.”