His gaze dropped to their joined hands. “I’ll be the only one who will.”
Echo did not dispute that.
There was such profound sadness in his expression. For the sister he was about to lose. For the people he’d already lost. Echo leaned into him, resting her head on his shoulder. After a moment, she felt his cheek press against the top of her head as he let himself lean on her. His breath stirred the flyaway strands of hair near the crown of her head.
“What will you do?” Caius asked. “After?”
After they had saved the world from being torn to shreds by a madwoman’s whimsy. After they had laid to rest gods knew how many of their friends. Echo pushed the thought away. Harsh realities could wait just one more day. Tonight, she wanted something different, something sweeter.
“Retire at the ripe old age of seventeen,” Echo said. “Move someplace warm. Grow tomatoes.”
Caius huffed a little laugh into her hair. A thought struck her suddenly. Not at the ripe old age of seventeen.
“What day is it?” she asked, raising her head.
“Tuesday,” Caius replied.
“No, I mean the date.”
“October twelfth. No. The thirteenth now. It’s past midnight.”
October thirteenth. Ten days past Echo’s birthday.
“I’m eighteen,” Echo said. She hadn’t forgotten a birthday in years. Her biological family hadn’t given her many fond memories, aside from a sad supermarket cake the year she turned six, but the Ala had seen fit to commemorate the occasion every year after taking Echo in. The Avicen didn’t put much stock in birthdays, not once they’d reached full maturity, but the Ala knew it mattered to humans and therefore to Echo, and so it had mattered to the Ala. But with all the commotion of the past several weeks, Echo hadn’t given much thought to the inexorable march of time.
“Since when?” Caius asked.
“Ten days ago.” A sliver of a memory pressed at her. It felt like lifetimes ago when Ivy had jested about throwing Echo a party. She’d forgotten that, too. “Ivy wants to have a Great Gatsby party.”
Caius’s ghost of a smile transformed into a real one. Small and tender, but real. “Does she know how that book ends?”
“I’m surprised you do.” It was human literature, after all.
Caius gestured to the walls of shelves, lined with hundreds of tomes. “I’m well-read.”
“Touché.” Echo sighed and rested her temple against his shoulder, finding comfort in the solidity of his presence. “For the record, Tender Is the Night is Fitzgerald’s best book.”
“Agreed.” He angled his head to press his lips against her temple. The feel of his mouth against her skin sent a shudder of warmth through her body. “Happy birthday,” he said softly. “And to think, I didn’t even get you a gift.”
Echo smiled into his shoulder. This was better, this comfortable back-and-forth. Far better than talk of death and dying and losses so great they were nearly impossible to comprehend. “How about a song?”
She felt Caius smile. “I think I can manage that.”
Echo sat up so her head wasn’t resting on his shoulder, but she didn’t move away. Her thigh pressed against his in a warm line of contact, and she could feel the slight shifting of muscle as he worked the pedals. Music spilled from his fingertips, filling the room with a gentle tune that Echo knew as well as the beat of her own heart.
The magpie’s lullaby. It had been Rose’s song once, a long time ago. And then it was Echo’s. And now it was theirs. With deft hands, Caius twisted and pulled the notes, rearranging them into something altogether different and achingly beautiful.
When the last note rang out, Echo looked up from watching Caius’s hands dance over the keys, calloused from weaponry but no less elegant in their movements. He was looking back at her, his eyes gone even darker with what Echo recognized as longing.
“Kiss me,” she said.
He did.
His hands came up to cradle her face, cupping her jaw as if she was something delicate, something worth treasuring. This time, there was none of the soft hesitance of the kiss they’d shared at the camp in Iceland. It was all firm pressure and confident insistence.
Echo brought her own hands up to trace the lines of his throat, along to the dip of his collarbone, down the ridge of his sternum, skating over the jumping muscles of his abdomen, around to the sides of his stomach. Her explorations brought a groan to his lips, muffled by the press of her mouth.
He broke away, breath stuttering, uneven. “Echo…”
Her lips tingled in the absence of his. “Do you want to stop?”
A rueful smile broke across his face. “That is the last thing in the world I want, but…”
“But what?”
He drew in a breath, as if preparing himself to pull away from her. “Maybe we should.”
Oh, hell no.
Echo wrapped one hand around the back of his neck and brought him in close. “Caius. We could die tomorrow. And if we do die, I don’t want to die regretting the things I haven’t done.”
Caius stared at her, his expression carefully shuttered. “I’m not certain that’s the most solid foundation upon which to base one’s decisions.”
“Caius, I—”
He held up a hand, but his steady gaze faltered, as if even breaking that much contact with her caused him physical pain. “I do not want you rushing into something you aren’t prepared for because you feel like you won’t have other chances. You will, Echo.”
Echo thought his confidence was rather optimistic, but she didn’t argue. “I know myself, Caius. I know what I want and I know what I can handle.”
His hand returned to its post on the curve of her hip, impossibly warm even through a layer of denim, hot as a burning brand. “And what if I can’t?” he asked, voice whisper soft. “I haven’t—not since Rose.”
Oh. Oh.
Echo said the first thing that came to mind. A terrible habit, one she really ought to consider breaking. “Well, I don’t think the mechanics of it have changed much in the past century.”
That pulled a startled laugh from Caius. “You are yourself,” he said, chuckling. “And no other.” He inclined his head to press a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “And I would not have you any other way.”
Echo swallowed thickly. He had said something to her, months earlier, before he’d been taken from her. Three small words that contained multitudes. She hadn’t said it back then. Wasn’t sure she could say it now. But she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to.
Love was not as it was described in fairy tales. It was terrifying. Not in a giddy, heady way, like tumbling down the steepest slope of a roller coaster. It was terrifying in its enormity. It had the power to crush, to destroy, more thoroughly than any weapon. No one ever warned about the terrible cost of that ache, that need. It chipped away at one’s defenses like a siege on a castle’s walls, claiming ground until there was nothing left it had not touched.
It was a cliff one had to jump off to know the true depth of its valley.
And so she jumped.
“I love you,” she said. Simply. Succinctly.
Something like pain, but not quite, flickered across Caius’s face. “Truly?”