“There’s no other way,” Dorian said.
The act of sharing magic was not one to be undertaken lightly, especially when there was an imbalance of power between participants. Echo was human, but she contained a force that made Dorian’s magic pale in comparison. It would be so easy to take his magic now that it was being so kindly offered, and to keep taking it. She could drink him dry. The firebird roiled inside her, aching to tap into that well of magic right in front of it like a starving woman falling upon a sumptuous feast.
But Echo was not ruled by her beast and its urges. She could—she would—fight it.
Echo placed her hand above Dorian’s. The moment her skin touched his, power flared up between them, raw and vibrant. The firebird burned brightly inside her, but Dorian’s magic had another feel to it altogether. His was gently rolling waves and the deepest fathoms of the sea. His was the coursing river and the drizzling rain. The beast inside Echo rolled around in all that magic, luxuriating in its warmth. She took only what she needed and not one drop more.
Echo repeated the final phrase of the chant, the one that focused on the location of that which was lost. The image in the blood grew smaller as the range of the spell widened beyond the room with its shadows and chains and captive prince.
The blood congealed into shapes: winged statues and soaring columns and an altar set onto a dais. It was a church or a temple or some other place of worship. The ceiling had caved in in places, and beams of light fell on the frieze behind the altar. It depicted a dragon standing atop a heap of bones and swords and flags. One clawed foot crushed a skull; another bent a sword in its grip.
“I know where he is,” Dorian said, breathless, as if he couldn’t quite believe it. His hand squeezed Echo’s shoulder once before severing their connection. Echo felt it snap like a rubber band, a sharp discomfort, and then nothing but the memory of sensation.
Her elation was powerful enough to disrupt the spell. She lost the rhythm of her chanting and suddenly the bowl was just a bowl and the blood was just blood, diluted in water.
A wave of dizziness hit her when the magic dissipated. She would most likely suffer for it later. A headache, probably. Maybe even some nausea. But right now she couldn’t be bothered by the limitations of her aching human body.
“Where is he?” Echo said. “What was that place?”
“It’s an old ruin,” Dorian said. His eye was still on the scrying bowl, reluctant to let go of the image of his prince, wounded and chained but alive. “It was a Drakharin temple, centuries out of use. Caius and I went there once a few years after I entered his service. It’s rumored to be haunted. Young men go there to prove how unafraid they are and come back uniformly terrified.”
“Oh, this’ll be fun,” Jasper said. Echo had nearly forgotten he was there.
Ghosts didn’t frighten her. She lived with them, every day, in the confines of her head. A haunted ruin was nothing in the face of her desire to find Caius and break him free of those chains. “Do you remember how to get there?”
“Of course.” Dorian sounded offended she’d even felt the need to ask.
“Then we leave at dawn,” Echo said. “Bring weapons. I have a feeling we’re going to need them.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ivy hated hospitals.
Hospitals, it would seem, hated Ivy in return. She’d never been inside one as a patient—the Avicen took care of their own, not to mention that it would be something of a colossal disaster for Ivy to be dissected because a human doctor had discovered her and decided to find out how she ticked. She’d avoided them at all costs, knowing that nothing good lay within. Human medicine seemed barbaric to her; how they made do without the aid of magic was a mystery.
She stared up at the imposing bulk of Lenox Hill Hospital—where, according to the evening news, the survivors of the attack on Grand Central had been transferred after their condition had stabilized—and wished that she’d paid more attention to Echo’s particular brand of deviancy. Turns out, only half watching someone else pick a pocket didn’t actually teach one how to do it oneself. Until that morning, Ivy had been perfectly content to allow Echo to be the resident criminal mastermind in their little group of friends, but now she would have given her left arm—or at the very least, a kidney—to have Echo by her side.
It wasn’t the first time Ivy had found herself missing Echo since her best friend had departed New York on a mission to find Caius…if there was anything left of him to find. Ivy kept that thought to herself. The fragile hope she’d seen in Echo’s and Dorian’s eyes had been too delicate for her to shatter with pessimism. This time, though, the pang of Echo’s absence was less sentimental and more pragmatic. There was a pickpocket-shaped hole in Ivy’s life, and she felt it keenly as she watched doctors and nurses and security guards walk in and out of the hospital’s main lobby, ID cards dangling from lanyards, pockets, and lapels. If she could only get her hands on one of those, she wouldn’t need to worry about finding an alternative way to get inside. Echo had it right: being an upstanding citizen was a giant waste of time.
As it stood, Ivy had vials of bloodweed elixir burning a hole in her bag and she needed to get into that hospital. And the only way she could think of to sneak past the guards, and the nurses, and the patients, and the patients’ families, and the people who were basically everywhere, all the damn time, was to go to a place she had absolutely zero desire to visit. It would be far less glamorous than using an ancient spell to break into the Louvre, that was for sure.