“You heard what the mage said,” came Tanith’s voice. Caius tore his eyes from the seal to look at her and immediately wished he hadn’t.
The crimson had bled out of her eyes and been replaced by an inky black, which made it seem as if another mind was looking out from behind his sister’s eyes. Dark veins ran up her bare arms, twisting and twining like the branches of a tree in winter. The color had been drained from her lips, giving her the sickly, pale appearance of a corpse dredged up from a river. Caius wanted to close his eyes again. The thing standing in front of him was not his sister. He could not think of her as such. His sister had been a being of fire and gold, blood and steel. This…this was something else entirely.
Cold fingers clamped around his chin. The second Tanith’s skin touched his, he felt the energy seep out of him. He had so little left to give that it reduced him to a slow trickle, a painful sludge. Tanith pulled his power from him as if she were gutting a beast she had felled in a hunt.
“I need more power,” said Tanith. “And you, Caius, are the perfect conduit. You are my blood, my flesh. We once shared a womb, and now we share magic.” Caius’s vision blurred at the edges as his sister continued to talk. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
It was not.
Finally, his well of power ran dry and she released him. It took everything he had not to slump to the floor, half dead. He felt as bad as Tanith looked.
As he watched through slitted eyes, Tanith turned to the seal and projected her stolen power toward it. With the screech of metal snapping, another crack split the surface. Then another. And another. Magic churned the air, wild and uncontrolled, threatening to devour them all. The mages Caius had heard before threw up a barrier around the seal, a flimsy circle of magic that wouldn’t hold all that erratic power for long. The wrongness of it all compounded. He didn’t understand what he was seeing, but he knew it wasn’t right.
“What are you doing?” Caius asked, looking at the broken seal. His voice echoed inside his head, rattling around his skull painfully. The minor healing had already been undone by Tanith’s leaching of his power. “What is this?”
The thing that was not his sister turned from the seal and fixed its unsettling black gaze on him.
“For a new world to be born, the old one must first make way.” Tanith’s lips split into a ghastly smile as she gazed at the cracked seal. “This, my dearest brother, is the end. And the beginning.”
CHAPTER THREE
“You know, I’ve never actually eaten a hot dog from here before,” Rowan said. He zipped his track jacket all the way up to his chin and thrust his hands into his pockets.
Echo looked up at the board behind the counter at Crif Dogs. They had just emerged from the phone booth at the back of the restaurant after exiting the Agora. No one had looked askance at two people making their way out of the very small booth. The hidden market might have been practically abandoned, but the entrance enchantment that encouraged potentially curious onlookers to avert their gazes held firm. Echo wondered if the magic would need topping up soon. She wondered who would do it.
“Do you want one?” Echo asked, hefting her backpack higher on her shoulder. The bowl was heavy, but also comforting in its heft. “I think I have enough cash on me.”
At the prospect of a potential sale, the blue-haired girl behind the counter lowered her magazine to peer at them over its pages.
Rowan shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you to stoop so low as to exchange actual money for food.”
The blue-haired girl rolled her eyes and went back to reading her magazine.
“Yeah, I’d hate to make a habit of that,” Echo said, trying to keep her tone light, but unable to fight the note of impatience that seeped into it. “Besides, I kind of just want to get back to Avalon and the Ala.”
“Right,” Rowan said as he reached for the door. The little bell on top of it jingled as they left the shop. “Princes to save.”
“Just another Tuesday,” Echo said.
Rowan’s words were flippant, but they made something tighten in Echo’s chest. She hoped there was a prince left to save after Tanith was done with him. A brisk wind bit into their cheeks as they made their way westward on St. Marks Place toward the Astor Place subway station. Summer had fled and autumn had snuck up on Echo without her noticing the change of seasons. One day it had been muggy and hot; the next, falling leaves and pumpkin-flavored everything. Time was marching on faster than she liked, and every day that went by without Caius felt longer than the last. Echo trudged ahead, hands burrowed in the pockets of her leather jacket, head down against the wind.
An elbow jostled her in the side when she went three blocks without uttering a single word. Echo shot Rowan a look. It was still hard to be near him, but it was getting easier. Slowly. There was too much baggage between them for reconciliation to be swift and painless.
“You all right?” Rowan asked, even though Echo was pretty sure he knew that she wasn’t.
She nodded, and he let her have the lie. “Yeah, I’m just…”
“Worried about him,” Rowan supplied when her sentence failed to find its ending.
“I know you don’t like talking about Caius,” Echo said.
They drew to a stop across the street from the subway station and waited for the light to change. A bus rolled past, spewing acrid fumes.
“Caius is okay,” Rowan said, tapping one foot as the light switched from green to red and yellow cabs, undeterred by traffic laws, blasted through the intersection. “I’ve decided that if you like him, he can’t be that bad.”
Echo’s eyebrows crept up. “Never imagined I’d hear you say that.”
Rowan ducked his chin into the high collar of his jacket, long legs gobbling up the crosswalk as Echo broke into a half jog to keep up with him. “I don’t like seeing you sad. And him being gone is making you sad, so I’m gonna help you get him back.”
Echo let his words marinate as they clambered down the steps into the train station. It was late morning on a weekday. The platform wouldn’t be too crowded, and the utility closet on the far end of the northbound track was usually secure as a gateway to the in-between.
There was no attendant in the station booth, so Echo hopped the turnstile. Rowan swiped his MetroCard behind her. He’d always been more lawful than she was.
They were halfway down the platform when Echo spoke again. “Thank you,” she said.
“What for?” Rowan asked. He already had the pouch of shadow dust in his hand, ready to smear some on the doorjamb.
Echo shrugged. Things felt complicated, and if there was one thing she hated having to articulate it was complicated feelings. “For being my friend,” she said succinctly.