“Our training didn’t cover this,” he said with aplomb, despite the trembling of his voice. Echo’s estimation of him went up several notches.
“Really? I thought magical monsters and the sky being ripped a new asshole would have been covered in basic.” A storm still raged inside Echo, but quipping was reflexive. It grounded her. Helped her think beyond the blinding rage that urged her to tear her way through the ruins of Midtown Manhattan with as much mindless ferocity as the creatures wreaking havoc around them.
Echo peered around the young man’s shoulder. And he was young. If he was a day over twenty, Echo would have bought a hat just for the sake of eating it.
The rifle shifted, grinding into Echo’s shoulder. The soldier swallowed thickly before speaking. “What are those things?”
Those things continued their rampage up and down the street, tearing up slabs of sidewalk and wrapping their sinuous bodies around abandoned vehicles, seemingly for no greater purpose than the satisfaction of crushing them like boa constrictors in a frenzy of screaming metal. They looked like the shadow beast that had torn its way through the Nest searching for Echo all those months earlier. The monstrous entity that was responsible for the hole in the ground where Grand Central’s main concourse used to be.
“Shadows,” Echo said. “Scary shadows that can tear through you like tissue paper.”
“Yeah, I got that, but what are they?”
There was no time for a lesson on the metaphysics of the ku?edra and vessels and Tanith’s homicidal tendencies, so Echo just shrugged and said, “Cover me.”
Before the guardsman could stop her, she darted out from the alcove and ran the length of the street. She heard her name shouted behind her—by Caius, maybe—but the voice was swallowed by the sound of one of the shadow beasts screaming with what sounded like joy as it spotted her. The marble hulk of the library was just at the end of the block. Ivy was in there, somewhere, with Tanith, and Echo would be damned if some baby shadow-dragon thing was going to get in her way.
The shadows scrabbled toward her, tripping and tumbling over one another in their eagerness to be the first to rend her flesh wide open, to spill her blood, bright red and full of life, across the filthy city streets.
Echo was nearly at the intersection. The shadows converged, and through the cacophony, she heard a male voice ring out into the night.
“Get down!”
There. An overturned news van, its satellite cracked down the middle and pointing toward the asphalt. Echo dove behind it, her palms scraping hard against gravel, her boots churning dirt and dust as she took cover.
A hailstorm of gunfire erupted, bullets raining down right where she’d been standing, right where the shadow beasts had lunged for her. They broke apart like a fractured cloud, ink-black particles dispersing into the darkness of night.
For a handful of seconds, there was silence.
Echo peered around the side of the van and saw the guardsman who’d pulled her into the alcove wave at her. She tossed him a crooked salute. The remaining shadow monsters were drawn to the source of the gunfire and forgot her for a moment.
A moment was all she needed.
She got to her feet and kept going, toward the library—her library—stark white against the blackness of the night, a stone monument huddled beneath the hole in the sky.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Echo took the steps two at a time, white marble flying beneath her feet, heedless of the aching burn in her lungs and the protestations of her sore muscles. Her heart pounded high in her throat, a throbbing litany of fear and desperation that propelled her forward. Sparks cascaded from her fingertips. Power boiled in her veins, eager to be unleashed with the full force of her fury behind it.
“Echo, wait!”
Caius’s voice rang up the steps after her, his words reverberating around the empty corridors.
Echo barreled through the entrance to one of the library’s staff-only wings and then through a nondescript door that led to the stairs.
She didn’t slow down. She didn’t look back. Caius’s footsteps sounded behind her as he followed her, boots pounding against stone, but waiting was not an option. A fresh shower of sparks singed a wooden plaque mounted on the wall as she passed. She could picture the knife scoring its way across Ivy’s pale flesh. How red her blood would be against all that white. Echo put on an extra burst of speed as she climbed up the last flight of stairs to the roof.
The door had already been kicked open. The remains of the padlock that had held it shut—which Echo had picked hundreds of times—hung from the mangled backplate. Burned into the rusted metal of the door was a handprint. Tanith’s, Echo assumed. Rubber marks lined the floor, the kind sneakers left on waxed floors. Maybe Ivy had struggled as Tanith had dragged her, throwing the weight of her body back with all her might, her strength nothing compared with Tanith’s, refusing to be led like a lamb to the slaughter.
Echo flung the door open and stepped onto the roof. Wind whipped the loose strands of her hair around her face. Smells assaulted her once she was out in the open. Acrid smoke, throat-clogging ash, and the electric charge of the in-between, distinct and powerful even in the chaos of the battle raging below. Another scent cut through the olfactory clutter: the sharp, coppery tang of blood, freshly spilled. A gray haze crowded the edges of Echo’s vision. If Ivy was dead, if she was too late…
“Echo, so glad you could join us.”
Tanith emerged from behind a large air-conditioning unit, its sloping aluminum vent incongruous next to the battered gleam of her golden armor. Blackened veins branched across the angular beauty of her face. She looked worse than the psychic projection she had left in the Drakharin temple. The ku?edra was devouring her, slowly but surely. Echo understood with sickening clarity the emaciated corpses, the poor souls drained dry of life and magic. Stolen vitality was the only thing keeping Tanith alive. She held Ivy in front of her, one arm around Ivy’s waist and arms, while her other hand held the knife to Ivy’s throat at an angle that forced her head up and back, cruelly exposing the soft skin of her neck. Ivy’s black eyes were wide with fear, and tears had made tracks through the dirt on her face, but she was alive. She was alive.
The door banged against the wall behind Echo as Caius finally caught up to her. He was panting, each breath accompanied by a wet rattling sound. It had been one fight after another, and he hadn’t had the time to properly heal. Magic could only do so much for him when it was magic that had caused him so much pain.
“Oh, and you brought company,” Tanith said, forcing Ivy to inch ahead in front of her. “Hello, Brother. Miss me already?”
The gash in the sky seemed even larger from this higher vantage point. There weren’t any towering buildings to block Echo’s view of it. It was bared to her in all its great and terrible glory.