Tanith rolled onto her knees, shivering with the aftershocks of electrocution. Burn marks were scored into her armor. With unsteady but quick hands, Tanith unbuckled the chest plate and let it clatter to the ground. Without the heavy armor wearing her down, she knelt back onto her heels and inhaled deeply. “There. That’s much better.”
You have no idea, Echo thought. Before Tanith could recover any further, Echo ran at her, the dagger naked in her hand, the magpie wings on the hilt digging into her palm. Tanith’s corrupted eyes widened as she struggled to get into a defensive stance, but Echo was too fast. The blade found its target—an opening on the side of Tanith’s armor—and sank through her leather tunic with ease. Echo felt the air punched out of Tanith’s lungs with the force of the blow. Steel scraped against bone as Echo drove the dagger between Tanith’s ribs, aiming for the heart. If Tanith even had one.
Resistance slowed the dagger down as the widest part of it reached the space between Tanith’s ribs. Echo tried to drive it deeper, but Tanith’s hands came up to trap hers, stopping her.
Tanith grunted in pain, but her lips curled into a wobbling smile. “Is that all you’ve got?” She leaned forward and yanked Echo’s hands—still closed over the hilt of the dagger—closer, burying the blade even deeper into her own chest. Black bile bubbled from her mouth. “I told you it felt good.”
That same black ooze poured over their joined hands, pulsing with each beat of Tanith’s heart. It scorched Echo’s skin, burning a thousand times worse than any fire she had ever felt before. Echo tried to pull her hands back, but Tanith held firm.
“You want to kill me? Make me suffer?” Tanith’s voice cracked with the effort of speaking, but there was a clarity in her eyes that sent Echo’s stomach plummeting. “Then do it.”
That small part of Echo that screamed at her to stop, that this wasn’t what she wanted, faded to silence.
She did want to kill Tanith. She did want to make her suffer. And so she would.
Echo cast her gaze around at the shattered facade of the library, at the still bodies that littered the street, at the white-feathered head darting between the fallen, trying to see who could be saved and for whom there was no hope. She thought of Caius, tumbling from the rooftop. Of Dorian, his handsome face a carved-up ruin. Of Jasper, begging him to stay awake. Of the homes lost and the hearts broken and the lives destroyed because of one person’s thirst for power.
The tips of Echo’s fingers tingled with magic. She didn’t try to hold it back or rein it in. She simply let it go. Fire erupted from her hands in swaths of black and white, like the feathers of a magpie. It ran down the length of the blade as if the steel were a conduit channeling her magic into the wound on Tanith’s chest. Tanith angled her head up and looked at Echo through the flames. For a moment, the black seemed to flee from her irises, leaving them the red they used to be. Her brow wrinkled in a frown, oddly delicate on her features. But in the next moment, her eyes were black once more. An illusion, Echo thought. Her mind playing tricks on her.
“This ends now,” Echo said. She pushed the fire toward Tanith, who was still kneeling on the ground, weak from electrocution. Who was the most vulnerable Echo had ever seen her. Who was…smiling?
The fire did not burn her.
The metal of Tanith’s remaining armor began to glow, hot as an ember, but her skin was radiating with Echo’s light. It didn’t char her flesh. It sank into it. Tanith was absorbing it.
All of it.
Echo tried to pull back, but it was too late. Tanith lurched forward and grabbed Echo’s arms, pulling her into a gross parody of an embrace.
“You’re not wrong.” Viscous black liquid escaped from the corners of Tanith’s mouth. “This ends. This war. This thing between us. And so does everything else.”
Tanith’s fingers dug into Echo’s wrists. Sharp pinpoints of pain lanced through Echo’s arms, straight to her core. Something tugged at her—not physically, but at the deepest recesses of her being. It felt like a hook had been sunk into her gut and was pulling her organs out. But she had no wounds. She didn’t bleed.
The tugging sensation grew stronger as Tanith’s smile grew darker, more feral. Again Echo tried to pull her hands away, and again Tanith tightened her hold, refusing to let Echo go.
Tanith leaned in and spoke into Echo’s ear, her voice a harsh whisper. “Look around you, little firebird. Your friends are dead and dying. Your allies fall, one after another. The humans you tricked into trusting you are crumpling like toy soldiers.”
Echo looked. A man in fatigues—no, a boy, for he could not be a day over nineteen—was lying on the ground, his face toward the heavens, his eyes open and unblinking. The front of his uniform had three long gashes, from one shoulder all the way to his waist. Blood smeared the greenish camouflage, but his heart had ceased its beating and the blood trickled to the asphalt in an unhurried descent. Not three feet from him was an Avicen soldier, facedown in the street, white cloak stained crimson, sword still clutched in lifeless fingers.
The fighting had not come near them, and only then did Echo realize why. A ring of shadows had sprouted all around, an impenetrable barrier of velvety blackness cutting them off from the world beyond its border. The only people in the circle were Echo, Tanith, and the dead.
She couldn’t see through the shadows as they rose higher, as if sensing her attempt to spot a familiar face through the darkness. Caius may have survived the fall, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. Ivy was no fighter. Rowan was still green, despite his conviction. Dorian was probably already dead. And Jasper. Jasper would do something stupid seeking revenge and get himself killed. They didn’t stand a chance. Not one of them.
Not unless Echo put an end to it. All of it.
That blinding rage returned, churning in her blood with the ferocity of some ancient war cry, pulsing through her veins like the beating of a battle drum. A snarl rose from deep inside her chest, and she shoved every ounce of magic she had at her disposal into Tanith, wildly. Desperately. The tugging ceased as she opened the floodgates of power, hoping to overload Tanith just as she’d done with the fire and electricity.
But Tanith’s smile only widened, her lips cracked and oozing tar-black blood. The ground shook beneath them, like the warning shocks of an oncoming earthquake.
And Echo realized that she had been mistaken. Tremendously, catastrophically mistaken.
The scar on her chest burned, as if trying to tear a hole in her heart to match the one in the sky.
It was not a scar at all.
It was a seed. A small kernel of shadows, left to germinate in her soil, where it would be tended, where it could grow. Echo felt herself cracking like concrete losing a battle to stubborn roots.
It was a scar. It was not a scar. It was a seed. It was not a seed.
It was a keyhole.
The shadows reached inside her and turned. Tanith smiled.
“Yes, that’s it. Just like that. Embrace your darkness.” Her fingers dug deeply enough into the flesh of Echo’s wrists to draw blood, a screaming red against her skin, so unlike the unnatural black of Tanith’s. “Let. Me. In.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE