Echo North(48)

“What?”

At last, at last, he jerked his face to mine. His eyes were hard as flint. “I’m going to hurt you, Echo. That’s what I remembered. I was always going to hurt you. You have to leave while you still can.”

His gaze burned.

I didn’t move. Smoke drifted toward us, the air grew thick with it. My thoughts were tangled threads, an impossible knot. “The books are enchantments. The only way they could change is if an enchanter changed them.” My eyes teared as the smoke came closer. I teased one of the threads loose. “Why is it that people who are … who are enchanted, can never talk about it?”

“I’m not enchanted, Echo.” He practically spat the words.

“How else could you be trapped in the books?”

Danger lingered in his eyes. He caught my hand, and drew me so close I could feel his breath on my lips, see the specks of silver in his irises. Awareness of him trembled through me. I couldn’t stop staring at the curve of his mouth, and I wanted badly, badly, to trace it with my own.

He put one palm on my heart. “You have to stay away from me.”

“Hal.”

“You have to stay away.”

And then he turned, and vanished.

Something rumbled through the earth; heat pulsed toward me. A craaaaaaaaack fractured the stillness, fissures opening in the ground. Within them, fire raged.

A shape curled up from the fire, the outline of a woman sketched in smoke.

“He isn’t honest with you.” Her voice was like crackling flame tangled with the screech of an out-of-tune violin. “He hides things from you. He does not trust you.” She circled me, brushing fiery fingers across my shoulders. My dress smoked but I felt no pain.

“Are you a fire demon?” I asked her.

She laughed. “That is not the right question.”

“What is the right question?”

“You are wasting time. He will die without you. You know he will.”

The heat grew worse, and away in the distance I heard steel ringing on steel, the clash and cries of battle. “How do I help him?” My lips cracked, the words coming out brittle and dry.

She smiled, a thin curl of smoky lips. “Find me, and I will tell you how.”

“You’re right there,” I said crossly.

“May I give you a piece of advice, Echo Alkaev?”

“How do you know my name?”

The smoke-woman ignored me. “Everyone is searching for their true selves. But everyone hides their true selves from each other. Look for the truth. If you find it, you will see through the enchantment.”

“But I don’t—”

“Ask the right questions,” the smoke-woman interrupted. “Come find me in the place you do not wish to look.” She smiled and uncoiled back into a wisp of white, melting away into the wind.

The fissure she had risen from shuddered and cracked wider. I tried to leap over it but my foot caught in a crevice and I fell and fell and fell, down into the fire.

Flame seethed all around me, scorching my hair, licking all the moisture from my skin. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t breathe in the bone-scorched air, couldn’t speak the words that would bring me safely back to the library.

I was burning and burning. Pain seared white behind my sightless eyes.

And then.

Release.



I GREW AWARE, SLOWLY, OF icy cold, sharp as a knife, harsh as deep winter. I forced my eyes open.

I was kneeling in a shadowy corridor that stretched forever both ahead and behind. I could breathe again. The sensation of heat was gone. I touched my arms, my hair. I was once more whole.

“You died,” came a voice behind me. “In a manner of speaking.”

I jerked around to see Hal, his hands in his pockets, his brows drawn tight together.

“Where are we?”

He shrugged. “The place I am when I am nowhere else. It’s how I find you—light pulses around a book-mirror when you’re reading it.”

I rose slowly to my feet and went over to him, hesitant from our last encounter, but desperate to be near him, all the same.

Without a word, he folded me into his arms, and I lay my head on his shoulder, listening to the quiet beat of his heart until I’d grown calm again.

And then he took my hand and we paced forward.

The corridor was lined with shifting dark mirrors, shadow versions of the ones in the library. If they had description plates, I couldn’t read them.

“I’ve been remembering.” Hal’s words floated to me as if from a great distance. “More and more. And there is—there is one story here that I think is mine.”

I looked at him quizzically.

“Just a little further.”

It felt like we walked for an eternity. The cold gnawed down to bone, and I thought longingly of my winter furs.

“Here,” came Hal’s faraway voice.

We had come to the very end of the corridor, where a tall mirror hung. It was less shadowy than the others. The frame was silver, engraved with trees, a metal forest marching around the glass.

We stepped into the mirror. I felt the weight of magic, heavy as a waterfall, pounding on my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe.

And then I blinked and I stood with Hal in a sunny room. Windows stretched up to the ceiling. Bookshelves lined the walls. A blond-haired man with graying temples sat behind a desk, a pair of silver spectacles perched on his nose. He was alternately sipping wine and writing in a thick ledger book.