Only the sparsest details of the circumstances surrounding her scraped knees and mussed hair remained in Echo’s memory. Some Aviceling had tried to prove himself to his friends by picking on the human girl, most likely. But what had stood out so strongly to Echo was the Ala’s endless compassion. That she hadn’t chastised Echo for fighting back. And especially that she had not shamed her for losing. The Ala had merely bandaged her bloodied knees and sent her back into the world with a handful of chocolate chip cookies and a promise that she would always love her, no matter what the other Avicen said.
The light flared bright and coalesced into another shape, another scene. A tableau of laughing faces, Ivy’s chief among them. The feel of Rowan’s hand in Echo’s own, his thumb pressing into the fleshy part of her palm at the base of her thumb. They’d snuck into the movie theater at Union Square—Echo had forgotten the movie, but she remembered everything else that mattered. The way Rowan had waited for the lights to dim before reaching out to take Echo’s hand. The way Ivy had staunchly pretended not to notice.
Another shift of light. Jasper, his feathers so bright against the blinding whiteness, surrounding his head like a Technicolor halo. His lips moving, making fun of her, probably. It was his favorite pastime. Echo hadn’t minded. She gave as good as she got, and there was a certain comfort in the way he treated her. Not like a human. Not like an Avicen. But just as herself. He didn’t care about alliances or tribal delineations. All that mattered to Jasper was one’s abilities. Prove yourself to him and you had a friend for life—or for as long as he felt like it. But Echo had known, even before his loyalty had been tested and Dorian had given him a reason to stay, that she’d found a friend in him. A true one.
And then there was Caius.
Oh. Rose’s voice breezed through Echo’s mind like a gentle wind.
Caius, sitting on the beach, watching the waves lap at the shore. His shirt was off, lying on the sand next to him beside his discarded boots. Sunlight glinted off the scales running down the column of his spine, disappearing at the waistband of his breeches. His hair looked like chocolate in the sun, shot through with strands of gold. He was smiling, a soft, reverent smile that had died along with Rose.
Remember, cha’laen. Let them be your anchor.
I remember, Echo thought. And nothing was going to make her forget.
She let the light envelop her in its warmth. Her eyes drifted closed. It seeped into her pores, sinking deeper and deeper, all the way through to her bones. It drove out the darkness that had tried to drown her, and in its screaming brightness, she let herself burn.
CHAPTER FIFTY
When Echo opened her eyes, it was to stare into Tanith’s wide ones. Red eyes, not black. A frown creased Tanith’s aristocratic brow, marring the features that still managed to be beautiful, even with the network of black veins cutting across her pale skin.
“How?” The word escaped Tanith’s lips more as breath than sound. Her hands fell away from the hilt of the dagger still embedded in her sternum. Echo hadn’t the foggiest idea how much time had passed in the real world; the prison in which she’d found herself hadn’t a notion of time as she understood it. It could have been minutes. It could have been seconds.
Echo didn’t offer a response. She barely understood what had transpired. Her entire body trembled with exertion, as if she had just completed a marathon in record time. The hilt of the dagger was slick with the oily black substance that had poured from Tanith’s wounds. Echo tightened her grip on it and pulled it free. It came loose with a sickening squelch.
She pushed herself back, away from Tanith, who was still staring at her, her expression a mix of disbelief and calculation. Echo could very nearly hear the gears in Tanith’s head turning, trying to puzzle out how she’d broken free of the ku?edra’s shackles. If Tanith attacked her now, it wouldn’t be much of a fight. Echo felt drained, like a well run dry.
The barrier of shadows had fallen, but two things had changed in Echo’s surroundings, fundamentally altering the landscape of Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street.
Just feet away, a rift had opened up in the middle of the avenue, neatly bisecting the road. It separated Echo from the library like a canyon. She peered into it; the chasm had no bottom, only endless black sliced deep into the fabric of the earth itself. It wasn’t as wide as the tear across the sky, but as Echo watched, the rift expanded. In centimeters and slowly, but it expanded nonetheless. It was growing, eating away at the asphalt like a black hole.
“Is this it?” Tanith’s voice had gone soft with wonder. Echo glanced back at her; she looked like a completely different person than she had mere minutes before. Her eyes were scarlet, with only the slightest tinges of black at the edges of her irises.
The “it” to which she referred was actually more of a them. Motes of light danced in the air, casting a white shimmer over the devastated street.
Echo reached out and let one of the luminescent motes land on her fingertip like a snowflake. It clung to her skin, then seeped into it, flooding her with a sense of recognition. Instantly she knew that it was the thing that had been inside her. The being of energy and light that had rushed into her when she’d plunged that dagger into her own heart in the Oracle’s cave in the heart of the Black Forest.
This was the firebird, in its purest, wildest form. Untethered from a vessel and left to float free, aimless as a child. It had been inside Echo, but Tanith had tried to unmoor it, to steal it for herself. She had managed the former but not the latter. Now it was simply there.
The firebird was neither good nor bad, the Ala had told Echo all those months earlier. Its nature was determined by the one who harnessed it. There was a quality to the floating luminescence that Echo had tasted before; it was hungry, just as the ku?edra was hungry. It wanted to have a home, a purpose. It needed it.
A surprisingly girlish giggle burst from Tanith’s lips. She too had touched the light, and it had been absorbed into her skin. The tips of her fingers glowed with it, sending the blackened veins in her hands into grotesque relief.
“It feels like champagne,” Tanith muttered, mostly to herself. “Like flying.”
The dusting of light—like glitter, Echo thought, half giddy with wonder—drifted down toward the rift in the street. Where it touched, the blackness writhed, growing and shrinking in undulations of movement. They were drawn to each other, the Light and the Dark, but they were not enemies. They complemented each other. They completed each other. Two sides of the same coin.
A sudden movement caught Echo’s attention. Tanith rose to her feet, her hands swirling in the radiant mist. She twirled, her cloak winding around her legs, her face upturned in something akin to ecstasy.
“Yes,” she was saying over and over. “This is what I needed. This is all I needed. So close. We are so close now.”