“Like the one that attacked the Nest,” Rowan replied. He rolled his shoulders as if fending off an ache, jostling the bow he’d slung across his back. Echo had a vague recollection of him telling her he was much better at ranged weapons, much to his chagrin. He’d always thought swords looked cooler. “But smaller. A lot of them.”
A shudder ran down Echo’s spine at the mention of the vile creature that had decimated the Avicens’ home and a good chunk of Grand Central. A nightmarish entity, formed of writhing shadows and screaming souls. Before Tanith had bound herself to the ku?edra, it had gone in search of its counterpart, sniffing out the firebird in the places where her presence was strongest. And Echo had led it right to the Avicens’ doorstep.
Rowan pulled an arrow from his quiver, showing them the red-tinged head. “It’s bloodweed,” he said. “I thought if it could stave off the infection, or whatever was literally sucking people dry of their life force, then it would hurt those things. Nothing else did.”
It was a clever solution, and Echo felt a brief swell of pride in Rowan for having thought of it. “But you beat them back?”
There wasn’t a shadow beast in sight.
Rowan heaved a tired sigh. “For the moment, yeah. But they keep coming in waves.” He jerked his head up at the breach in the sky. “They’re falling through that thing.”
Echo peered up at the rip in the in-between. It wasn’t swallowing the clouds around it like a black hole the way she had imagined it might, but there was a void in its immediate vicinity that took her a moment to puzzle out. Starlight, faint through the dense smog that blanketed the city, peeked through the smattering of thin clouds everywhere but near the tear. “It looks like it’s swallowing the light around it.”
“Yeah,” Rowan said. A layer of grime coated his clothes, along with patches of drying red that Echo hoped was not his blood.
A commotion drew their attention to the cluster of Drakharin behind them. Dorian’s voice, sharp as a knife, cut through the crowd as he pushed his way forward. “What the hell is he doing here?”
Echo followed Dorian’s vicious gaze.
Oh.
Among the Avicen stood a single warlock, who’d been hidden behind the bulk of their group. He had starlight eyes full of magic and mischief. Hair as black as night. Skin a burnished gold.
Quinn. He’d been a prisoner of the Avicen since he’d tried to betray Dorian (and Ivy and Jasper) months earlier, but someone had let him out of his cage.
The warlock held up his hands in a placating gesture, as if Dorian were a temperamental colt that needed calming. “Would you believe me if I said I’m here to help?”
“No,” said Dorian and Jasper in unison. Dorian’s sword dripped with the bloodweed elixir being passed around. Jasper’s gaze dripped with disdain.
Quinn lowered his hands. “Then believe this: If that crazy bitch has her way, this world will crumble, taking every single one of us with it. Including me. I’m here to help myself. Helping the rest of you is just a fortunate by-product of my own self-interest.”
“That’s enough,” the Ala said. “We can’t afford to be precious about our allies.”
Dorian looked ready to argue, and Echo didn’t blame him. She wasn’t sure about having the warlock at their back, even if his reasoning was grotesquely sound.
“We need all the help we can get,” Rowan said decisively. That, however, was not what halted the words on Dorian’s tongue. Echo felt it before she saw it: a growing malevolence. Rowan’s expression mirrored her own. A frown spread across his features as he glanced upward. “Ah, crap,” he uttered, more tired than surprised. He slung the bow off his shoulders and slotted the arrow into place. “Incoming.”
The Ala looked toward the breach, uttered an incredibly descriptive curse in Avicet and drew her sword. The others followed suit, even the still-skittish Drakharin. Rifles swiveled upward. One of them caught the light just enough for Echo to see that the tip of the barrel had been coated in the bloodweed concoction.
Echo gazed up at the gaping maw of the in-between. Shadows swirled from its unfathomable depths, taking form as they poured forth, solidifying into loosely defined beasts. Their amorphous forms shifted from one shape to another. The ku?edra had looked like a dragon when it had attacked the Nest, taking the form of that which the people in its immediate vicinity feared the most, but now every soul in New York City was watching the breach spew forth monsters made of Darkness, projecting their own fears onto them, forcing them to adopt forms too varied to truly congeal into coherence.
With her free hand, the Ala tossed a thick plastic bottle toward Echo, a wide-mouthed purple container emblazoned with the logo of New York University. She caught it, surprised by the warmth radiating from it. “For the rest of their weapons,” said the Ala. Her arched eyebrows said the rest: You are your weapon.
Echo slid the dagger from her belt, unscrewed the bottle, and dipped the blade into the bloodweed mixture. The smell assaulted her nostrils while she held the open bottle in her hand, but the odor lessened once the liquid met steel. Fascinating. She passed the bottle to Caius, trusting he would distribute it among his troops—their troops, she supposed.
Be ready, Echo, whispered a voice at the back of Echo’s mind. Rose’s own fear slithered around inside Echo’s skull. Tanith will not fall without a fight.
Rowan nocked an arrow and then let it fly. It pierced what passed for a hide on one of the creatures. A shrill, unnatural shriek sliced through the air. Echo clapped her hands over her ears, but Rowan seemed unaffected. Maybe he’d grown used to the sound of those things dying. “Echo, you either have the best timing…,” Rowan said as he retrieved another arrow from his quiver. There were a dozen left, maybe fewer. “…or the worst. Either way”—he let loose another arrow, his hazel eyes already seeking out his next target—“welcome home.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It should have been a five-minute walk, maximum, from Grand Central to the library on Fifth Avenue at a leisurely pace. Fifteen if Echo made her routine stop at the Sephora on Forty-Second Street for a little casual shoplifting—pricing lip gloss at sixty dollars a pop was the real crime—but now the streets were even less welcoming than they were at rush hour, and that was saying something.
A car—an entire car, airborne—whizzed past Echo’s head a second before a hand clamped down on her arm and pulled her into the doorway of a bank, away from the things that were tearing apart the street with a grotesque, oddly childlike glee.
Echo looked up into the face of a National Guardsman, who stared back at her with wide blue eyes. She and the guard were pressed closely together, and the butt of his rifle dug into her shoulder. His hands were shaking so badly, Echo would have been shocked if he managed to shoot anything he actually meant to shoot.